Not to be more of a downer in these already downer times, but the late Stephen Hawking said there is “no possibility” of God in our universe. In other words, we’re on our own, and we only have ourselves to blame for atrocities like this and this and this.
In Hawking’s final book, Brief Answers to Big Questions, published Tuesday, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist, who was smart enough to be played by Eddie Redmayne in the movie of his life, tackled one of life’s oldest and most difficult questions—Is there a God? His answer: A resounding no.
“There is no God. No one directs the universe,” he wrote, per CNN.
While that answer is undoubtedly unsettling for people of faith, they may take some comfort knowing that Hawking doesn’t think we’re entirely alone in the universe. He wrote that there are “forms of intelligent life out there.” They’re just not “God” in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim sense of the word.
The famed author died earlier this year at the age of 76, leaving his final book unfinished. Hawking’s family and colleagues worked, er, religiously to complete the manuscript with help from his archives. The book was intended to collect Hawking’s answers to the questions he received most frequently from answer seekers.
How companies advertise to you says a lot about how they see you.
It was a couple of years ago now that I realized Netflix saw me as a real man’s man. Why else would the company try capturing my attention with a harpoon of dude-bros?
My viewing history decreed these shows the ones I’d be most interested in, and furthermore, that they should be displayed thusly–with nary a woman in sight. (God forbid I be reminded of my ex or, like, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and close out the tab in a blind rage.) This centering of testosterone went beyond recommending new shows; it crept into the display art for shows I’d already seen. Perhaps it was my predilection for Scorsese movies that led to the erasure of Tina Fey.
As one writer pointed out on Twitter this week, though, the personalization of artwork in Netflix’s title recommendations does not merely break down along gender lines. Netflix’s art algorithm may also have a racial component, too.
Stacia L. Brown tweeted on Thursday about the poster art Netflix customized on her behalf for the film, Like Father. On her account, caucasian costars Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammar are nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a pair of POC side-characters who barely figure into the movie at all.
Other Black @netflix users: does your queue do this? Generate posters with the Black cast members on them to try to compel you to watch? This film stars Kristen Bell/Kelsey Grammer and these actors had maaaaybe a 10 cumulative minutes of screen time. 20 lines between them, tops. pic.twitter.com/Sj7rD8wfOS
Brown put the question out to her 11,500 followers to see whether they’d had similar experiences. Several of them wrote back confirming her suspicion.
Further exploration revealed even more instances of relatively marginal black characters in movies and shows sharing the spotlight in order to catch her discerning eye.
None of those are quite as weird as the Like Father one, btw.
Netflix would be the first to admit it does indeed personalize artwork based on user histories. In fact, the company put out an extensive Medium post last December describing its techniques.
“This is yet another way Netflix differs from traditional media offerings: We don’t have one product but over 100 million different products with one for each of our members with personalized recommendations and personalized visuals,” the writer crows at one point. (Emphasis theirs.)
However, the post says nothing about whether race is a determinant factor. The criteria it does offer makes a lot of sense. If your usual fare is straight-up comedy, the artwork for Good Will Hunting will feature legendary funnyman Robin Williams smiling slyly. If your viewing habits skew more toward hopeless romanticism, the same film entices you with Matt Damon and Minnie Driver mid-makeout.
The post goes on to explain in very dry language why and how Netflix personalizes its art, and it all sounds perfectly reasonable. Manipulative, sure, but not in an offensive or misleading way. Good Will Hunting does in fact costar Robin Williams, even though it’s not him at his most hilarious, exactly. Matt Damon and Minnie Driver do share a courtship in the movie, even if it’s a tad overwrought at times. Perhaps fans of movies about South Boston see Ben Affleck in a tracksuit, and fans of inexplicableness get an image of the scene where Casey Affleck jacks off into a baseball glove in his friend’s mom’s room. (Seriously, how did that scene not get edited out? It’s inexplicable.)
All of those options are truth in advertising, even if they’re not 1000% accurate.
What the company did on Brown’s account with Like Father, though, seems like a more malevolent manipulation. Not only does it reduce her entertainment preferences–and by extension, part of her personality–down to “black-people movies” the way it did “dude movies” for me, but it also manufactures the appearance of greater diversity than actually exists. If advertising reveals what companies think of you, Netflix seems to think its users don’t mind being cynically misled based on identity. The more important question is what this all says about Netflix.
UPDATED: Below is a statement from Netflix, addressing personalized title art.
“We don’t ask members for their race, gender or ethnicity so we cannot use this information to personalize their individual Netflix experience. The only information we use is a member’s viewing history. In terms of thumbnails, these do differ and regularly change. This is to ensure that the images we show people are useful in deciding which shows to watch.”
The next time you head outdoors, imagine that the tube of sunscreen in your bag urged you to slap some of it on your skin, or that the pack of pills the doctor prescribed reminded you to take your medication. Or that you could subscribe to your favorite laundry detergent, which would monitor the supply on your shelf and replenish it automatically.
Such prompts will soon become part of the products we purchase via companies like Water.io, which has pioneered a plastic cap with a sensor embedded in it that measures the volume of a liquid, solid or powder in a container. The cap relays the data via Bluetooth technology to an app, which filters it through your preferences and funnels it to the manufacturer.
Software hosted by Water.io allows manufacturers to learn from the data, which displays on a dashboard and flows to their marketing and ordering systems. There it can enable the manufacturer to suggest, for example, a shampoo or skin care, or to offer subscriptions to the products that sit on shelves throughout our homes.
[Photo: courtesy of Water.io]The tightening of ties with consumers that the technology enables holds the potential to reorder relationships between makers of consumer packaged goods and retailers like Amazon or Walmart that also have become rivals who tout brands of their own.
“We are enabling the brands of consumer packaged goods to get data from their products,” Kobi Bentkovski, Water.io’s CEO and co-founder, tells Fast Company. “The moment they know who their customers are, how customers are using a product, and when the product is going to run out is the moment they can compete with Amazon and the private brands of the retailers.”
Bentkovski started Water.io in 2015 with co-founders Yoav Hoshen, an entrepreneur and friend from their service in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s elite intelligence unit, and Nimrod Kaplan, a fellow tech executive and neighbor, after Bentkovski’s daughter, then 7, was plagued by a urinary tract infection that finally cleared as she drank extra water.
Fast forward to last January, when Mey Eden, an Israeli bottler of mineral water, included a connected cap from Water.io in each of several hundred thousand six-packs. The supply sold out in six weeks – less than half the time the companies anticipated – and boosted sales 60 percent compared with packs that did not include a smart bottle, according to Bentkovski.
[Image: courtesy of Water.io](A recent test of a Water.io-capped bottle nudged this reporter to drink 1800 milliliters of water a day, a target the system set after I entered my sex, age, weight and height into the company’s app.)
Though it’s not the first bottle that can remind you to drink, the platform that Water.io is developing foretells a future in which manufacturers help you to plan your meals for the week, protect your family from risks such as allergic reactions, achieve your nutritional goals, and reduce waste via containers built for reuse.
The market for so-called intelligent packaging in the food, personal care, and health care industries is expected to reach $31.7 billion by 2022, nearly double what it was four years ago, according to data compiled last year by Allied Market Research.
The data the packages throw off also promises to speed innovation by lowering the cost of developing, designing and testing products. “We started to meet with companies in consumer packaged goods and realized there’s a much larger problem we can solve,” says Bentkovski.
More broadly, innovations such as those being pioneered by Water.io and others highlight an evolution in packaging from a container to protect the product and medium to communicate what it says on the package, to part of a connected ecosystem of our lives, explains Brian Doyle, managing director of product and service innovation at Accenture.
According to Doyle, the combination of smart sensors that allow manufacturers to learn the behaviors, preferences and emotions of consumers, together with autonomous vehicles and robots for delivery, will demand that manufacturers pay attention to the results that consumers are trying to achieve.
“We are seeing an explosion in new digital touchpoints, where artificial intelligence and machine learning will help consumer brands get even closer to being able to sense, respond to, and even predict changing behavior,” he says. “Most consumer packaged goods companies have been very product centered. The new world is understanding the person and then reimagining and reinventing what we can do for them.”
Bentkovski reports that Water.io, whose investors include the family that founded Teva Pharmaceuticals, has inked agreements with a dozen companies in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical and personal care industries, including the German chemicals giant Bayer.
He analogizes Water.io’s platform to the business built by the customer relationship management software provider Salesforce, which derives the bulk of its revenue from subscriptions and fees for its services. “The world is changing every day,” says Bentkovski. “A few years from now, the passive packaging of today will look like an old Nokia smartphone.”
Bill Gates has coined a new way to think about climate change, and is leading a team of investors to help solve it. The concept is called “the 75% problem”–a nod to the idea many people think investing in clean energy alternatives like solar panels and wind turbines will curb greenhouse gas emissions. In reality, offsetting electricity generation only covers 25% of the issue.
According to a post on his blog GatesNotes, the other main offenders include agriculture (cow burps, deforestation), manufacturing (making plastic, steel, and cement costs energy), transportation (the fuel-intensive way we move stuff), and buildings (air conditioning). So in recent years, Gates and other investors have put more than $1 billion into companies working across all of these categories through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a private fund.
This week BEV expects to sign an agreement with the European Commission to create Breakthrough Energy Europe, which Gates calls “a pilot fund investing in European companies working on the grand challenges” that’s worth about $115 million.
BEV and the EC will split the costs, although Gates points out there’s even more value in how they’ll be able to dole out cash. “We’re creating a new way of putting that money to work,” he adds. “Because energy research can take years–even decades–to come to fruition, companies need patient investors who are willing to work with them over the long term. Governments could in theory provide that kind of investing, but in reality, they aren’t great at identifying promising companies and staying nimble to help those companies grow.”
BEV has experience with what kinds of solutions will gain traction or not. It can boost the European Commission’s learning curve on how to build strong companies, and avoid “some of the bureaucracy” that might otherwise slow that process. “We’ll have the resources to make a meaningful difference, and the flexibility to move quickly,” Gates says. “That’s a rare combination.”
Obviously clean energy research remains crucially important. Governments have been thinking creatively about how to make faster progress in that realm, too. Gates points out that more than 20 countries have joined Mission Innovation, a program to double public investment in such technologies, and has boosted funding by more than $3 billion annually.
To help people learn how various worldwide factors contribute to the problem, he’s also made a surprisingly fun multiple-choice quiz. There are only five questions. One example: “If cattle were a country, where would they rank on emissions?” Gates initially had to guess on two of those five questions, and only got four out of five right. You can test your own knowledge here.
Halloween is coming, and in some offices, that means the office Halloween party is fast approaching, too. While you may think your sexy Handmaid’s costume or Steve Jobs costume is hilarious, you don’t want to be the kind of person who alienates all the women and Apple fans in your office by your insensitive attire. And let’s not forget that, every year, someone seems to go viral after wearing an ill-conceived costume, only to face enormous social media backlash—and sometimes even get fired.
To help avoid that happening to you, here are a few work-appropriate Halloween costume ideas that won’t earn you a scolding from the HR department:
Microsoft’s Clippy
Zombie MySpace
A Herman Miller Aeron Chair
A No. 2 pencil
Facebook’s new community standards
Beige
The Houston Astros left field
A giant rabbit
Ghosts
Non-Twilight vampires
Harry Potter
Elon Musk on a podcast
A carrot
Gary Vaynerchuk
A full office watercooler (JK, that doesn’t exist!)
The ghost of Friendster
A Seamless delivery driver (you’ll be really popular!)
An Instagram influencer
An anonymous corporate drone
A regular drone
A fax machine
Anything that is not “slutty,” misogynistic, racially insensitive, culturally appropriative, or involves mocking the HR department to their faces
The Microsoft cofounder launched the Breakthrough Energy Coalition two years ago, and they just signed a $115 million clean energy investment fund in the EU. Plus, Gates has joined an international coalition determined to figure out how to protect people from heat waves, floods, and storms as the temperatures rise and the climate shifts. The Global Center on Adaptation will advance “bold actions to help societies across the world become more resilient to climate-related threats” and hopefully help the human race survive extreme weather.
“We are at a moment of high risk and great promise,” Gates said in a press release. “We need policies to help vulnerable populations adapt, and we need to ensure that governments and other stakeholders are supporting innovation and helping deliver those breakthroughs to the people and places that need them most.”
For the effort, Gates has teamed up with former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva, and 17 countries, including China, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Canada, and the U.K. (but not the U.S., natch).
So yeah, Gates knows a lot about climate change. But perhaps you know more? If so, Gates is challenging you to test your knowledge and try to beat his score. Take this quiz and find out if you have what it takes.
Bryan Cranston has a job for you. The acclaimed actor is starring in a stage adaptation of the 1976 movie Network, which is moving to Broadway this month after a successful run on the West End. Cranston stars as Howard Beale, the cantankerous fictional news anchor whose famous “mad as hell” speech never seems to go out of fashion.
In a video posted to YouTube today, he asked viewers to film themselves screaming Beale’s timeless tirade. Then he wants them to post it on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter with the hashtag #MadAsHellBway.
“Do it as enthusiastically as possible,” Cranston implores, “even angry!”
What’s the point of this exercise? Well, you will be screaming for your chance to (sort of) appear alongside Cranston in the show. The play, Cranston says, needs “all kinds of videos from all walks of life,” presumably as accompaniment for the immersive, screen-laden set, which won praise from critics in the London version.
Sure, this all sounds a little gimmicky, but having seen Cranston’s amazing performance as LBJ in 2012’s All the Way, I can tell you that appearing on stage with him—even in a video—would be its own reward. Plus, are we not all truly mad as hell in 2018? How hard will it be to channel some of that anger for this once-in-a-lifetime chance?
Forgive me for the mixed ’70s-movie reference, but that’s an offer we can’t refuse.
When you think about it, the history of productivity software is surprisingly short on disruptive moments. Google Sheets, for instance, may be web-based and collaborative, but its conceptual bones are the same as those of Microsoft Excel (established 1985), which itself followed the lead of Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) and VisiCalc (1979). That’s not a knock on Google; it’s just proof that the spreadsheet has remarkable staying power as a workplace tool. The same is true of the word processor, presentation package, database, email client, and a few other eternal verities of business productivity.
Popping out an improved variant on a decades-old software theme isn’t that tough. What’s daunting is building something new that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing category. If people don’t see immediate benefit in adopting it, they won’t try it in the first place. And even if they do give it a shot, they may quickly abandon it if it doesn’t have plenty of headroom for more advanced users.
All of which makes for an intriguing challenge for a startup, with offices in San Francisco and Seattle, called Coda. Launch its web service, and you might mistake it for a word processor: You’ll see a toolbar at the top, a field of empty white space, and a flashing cursor. Like a spreadsheet or database, it’s dedicated to wrangling business data. But instead of just storing it away and then retrieving it, the service provides rich tools for doing stuff with it.
Coda is the brainchild of Shishir Mehrotra and Alex DeNeui, two old friends who met at MIT and then worked together at both Microsoft and YouTube before starting the company. As they were formulating ideas for their startup, they considered the state of productivity tools and then asked themselves, “What if we started from scratch?” explains Mehrotra, now the company’s CEO. “We’re going to build a new type of doc that blends the best parts of all the docs you know: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, applications. The core thesis is that you can build a doc that’s as powerful as an app.” (Though the name “Coda” is “a doc” spelled backward, they only noticed that after they were already considering it.)
Quentin Clark, Dropbox’s senior VP of engineering, product, and design, met Mehrotra and DeNeui years ago when they all worked at Microsoft and is now on Coda’s board. Even at Microsoft, he remembers, they tossed around ideas that are now reflected in the startup’s service. But it would have been difficult to implement them in an existing, familiar product such as Office or Google’s G Suite. “The incumbent tools are really anchored in physical constructs,” he says. “The word processors are anchored in the sheet of paper that could fit in the Gutenberg press. Excel and Google Sheets are really constructs that have been developed out of the ledger books that sat underneath the counter at the very first taverns and inns.” The fact that Coda started out with no users and no fear of discombobulating them was liberating.
[Image: courtesy of Coda]Coda does, however, have a clear vision of the sort of people it wants to please. When the service formally announced itself a year ago, Mehrotra wrote a blog post that referenced one user’s description of the service as “Minecraft for docs.” Like the block-building game phenom, Coda is less about what it does right out of the box than what people can build atop it; it’s a tapestry for ambitious creativity. The company calls its users “makers,” held a “block party” event in September to cultivate the community, and has even commissioned caricatures of some of its biggest superfans as blobby little characters who look like they could have stepped out of a video game.
Describing your product as the Minecraft of anything is setting the bar high. For now, Coda remains a work in progress, widely used by beta testers but not due for general release until 2019. As if to remind itself daily of the enormity of the work ahead, the company has named the conference rooms in its San Francisco office after products it admires: VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics, Apple’s Hypercard, and even Microsoft’s obscure first spreadsheet, Multiplan. All once important; all defunct. Like I said, many of the disruptive moments in productivity software happened a long time ago.
Everything in one place
Coda is not exactly without competition. QuickBase (founded in 1999), Smartsheet (2006), and Airtable (2012), for instance, are all web-based services that allow a company to devise rich, custom app-like experiences based on its own data. But while those offerings feel like extensions of spreadsheets and databases as we’ve known them, a Coda document’s more free-form shell makes for a different environment. You can embed multiple spreadsheet-style tables within a Coda doc, bridge them with explanatory text, insert elements such as calendars and images, and add app-like controls like buttons and sliders. The idea is to let teams keep multiple pieces of data and related functionality in one place that everybody can access all at once–a Coda doc–rather than scatter them through discrete files stored somewhere like Google Drive.
Along with its spreadsheet- and word processor-like elements, Coda even throws in a dash of presentation package: A “present” button flips into a full-screen mode and lets you step through your doc as if it were a PowerPoint.
If all you’re doing is accomplishing tasks that would be equally achievable in a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation app, there isn’t much reason to consider Coda. It starts to get interesting when you use all its features to assemble something that looks like an app—one built precisely for the needs of your business.
“In every company, the secret sauce doesn’t fit in packaged software that the company uses for its workflows,” says Coda board member Hemant Taneja, a managing director at venture firm General Catalyst. “It’s in one or two people that have been there a long time that have a unique way of doing business. What Coda does is to let you institutionalize that secret sauce.”
Box manages its hiring process using Coda. [Image: courtesy of Coda]You’d expect tech-centric companies such as Uber and Box to bond with Coda, but other beta testers, far outside the Silicon Valley bubble, are also finding it useful. Hudson Henry Baking Co., a maker of small-batch granola, is based in a one-stoplight town in Virginia. Founder Hope Lawrence had begun experimenting with Coda when she hired Michele Durst as packing and shipping manager. Durst happened to have a past life as a Wall Street tech executive, which helped her dive into Coda to build useful tools tailored specifically to the business of baking and selling granola.
“We have a bake sheet, we say, ‘Here’s what we’re making today, here’s the ingredients that you’re supposed to use with the associated lot numbers,'” says Lawrence. “It’s a one-pager, and I print that out and give it to the bake team.” Another bit of Coda functionality allows the company to track when it’s time to ping a retailer to solicit a new order based on its past purchases. “We’re in Coda all day long, every day,” Lawrence says.
Turning people into programmers
For all the ways in which Coda attempts to break free of productivity software’s past, some of its overarching ideas have a long history. A quarter-century ago, Microsoft built the Visual Basic for Applications programming language into Office; even before that, it offered automation tools such as WordBASIC. Many companies have leveraged Office’s programmability to create bespoke tools for their particular line of business. But though well over a billion people now use Microsoft’s suite, the percentage that has written code must be tiny. That work is typically undertaken by specialists or even outside consultants.
By contrast, Coda sees the ability to make a doc do almost anything as having a democratizing aspect—and certainly not something that necessitates dependence on IT experts to do the heavy lifting. “We think that the people most equipped to build their own tools are the people that are actually doing the work,” says Mehrotra.
Composing formulas in a spreadsheet is not a particularly exotic skill, and building simple functionality into a Coda document isn’t a dramatically more advanced task. (In at least one respect, it’s easier: You can give cells meaningful names rather than trying to remember rows and columns.) But the more ambitious you get in Coda, the more it starts to feel like coding. The service has copious amounts of documentation, and needs it.
Still, Mehrotra says that he’s confident that learning to make Coda creations is not overly intimidating. Each Thursday, Coda’s team reviews video of interviews with users. “When you ask them, ‘How hard was it to build it?’ ‘Hard’ isn’t quite the way they think about it, because for them it’s kind of fun,” he says.
By talking to services such as Figma, GitHub, and Slack, Coda can leverage a company’s other essential tools rather than competing with them. [Image: courtesy of Coda]As Coda beta testers have explored the service’s possibilities, he adds, they’ve frequently asked questions about integrating it with other services: “I work in all these other tools. How do I make sense of when I should use Coda, when I should use the other tools, how do they work together?” Coda is responding to such queries with Packs, an ambitious new series of features that tie the service together with other web-based tools. For starters, there are more than 15 Packs, including ones for GitHub, Gmail, Google Natural Language, Greenhouse, Intercom, Slack, Twilio, and others, with more on the way.
Packs–which you add from an app store-like installer–dramatically expand Coda’s power without requiring a user to know arcana such as API calls. A Pack can pull in information relating to stocks, weather, or products available from Walmart; grab Instagram images or YouTube videos; or push out emails, text messages, or calendar appointments. And because you can mix and match Pack capabilities with all of Coda’s other features and apply logic to them, you can perform feats such as automatically scheduling a meeting if a project has failed to meet a milestone.
Coda’s Intercom Pack lets you wrangle customer feedback from an app. [Image: courtesy of Coda]By connecting a company’s workaday tools in new ways, Coda has the potential to become a sort of collaborative glue. “We all know that teams rely on a variety of different tools and services,” says Matt Hodges, VP of commercial product strategy at Intercom, whose Pack allows a doc to retrieve customer-feedback conversations and add new messages to them. “For a product team, that might be Coda, it might be GitHub, it might be Slack, it might be Intercom.” With Packs, “Without any coding ability, you can stitch all those tools together and create the workflows that map to how your team operates.”
In it for the long haul
Many startups wear their impatience as a badge of honor. Coda’s history to date, however, has been strikingly unhurried. Mehrotra and DeNeui founded their startup in June 2014. They had a working prototype by December, began asking friends and family to test it in May 2015, and invited a larger group of testers to experiment with an alpha version a year later. The company officially unveiled itself in October 2017 and launched a wider—though closed—beta program. At that time, it also disclosed that it had raised $60 million in funding.
Coda’s testers started employing the service to perform actual useful tasks at their companies early on. But the sheer enormity of what Coda is trying to do explains why it remains in private beta. The company is still rolling out core features such as Packs, as well as its approach to making Coda docs behave properly on mobile devices. (You need a desktop browser to create them, but on a smartphone, they automatically assume a card-style interface that, if anything, is more app-like than on a PC.)
In early 2019, if Mehrotra’s current timetable holds up, Coda will reach general availability. Even then, the company won’t charge for the service while it ponders its eventual business model. “For me, it’s philosophical,” he explains. A startup should “get the basics of the product right first, figure out which parts resonate, then segment your audience to figure out which features to make free versus pay.”
Using the Twilio Pack, you can make sending a text from Coda as easy as pushing a button. [Image: courtesy of Coda]Venture capitalist and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously declared that “if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”—an argument in favor of speed to market. All evidence suggests that the first open-to-all-comers’ version of Coda won’t be embarrassing. It might even feel more like Coda 2.0 or 3.0 than 1.0. Should the company have shipped something more rudimentary more quickly?
At Coda’s Block Party user event, I posed that question to Hoffman, who led the company’s Series A funding as a partner at Greylock and now sits on its board. “Like any heuristic, my little maxim is not 100%,” he told me. It applied to his own LinkedIn in its earliest days, to Airbnb, to Zynga games such as FarmVille. But “when you’re developing a platform for people to develop on top of, you have to give them enough that they can build interesting things, which means you have to be relatively deep.” Speed still matters—but it’s the speed with which users can accomplish productive work with the tools you’ve created.
The fact that Coda has been chipping away at the challenge it set for itself since 2014 may sound slow going by startup standards. Then again, the necessary ingredients for success—approachability, plus depth—are one of software’s most sought-after, least-achieved qualities. Some products that have been around for decades still haven’t nailed it.
“We think that the blinking cursor is pretty critical,” says Mehrotra. “But if you pick up and use Coda, you should be able to use it for anything.”
The upcoming 2019 Mustang Shelby GT500 is one of the most anticipated cars of 2019, and Ford has carefully built up hype around it. But all that might have been for naught as it appears a 20-year-old with the Instagram handle @sinister_lifestyle just leaked the first clear photograph of the car months before its official unveiling at the 2019 North American International Auto Show in Detroit this upcoming January.
@sinister_lifestyle, also known as Kyle, posted a photo he said was sent to him that is allegedly a legit pic of the 2019/2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. But if it is legit (and the consensus says it is), how did Kyle get the snap? Most likely it was sent to him by a car dealer attending a national dealer meeting in Las Vegas. Ford would presumably show off the car there–under tight NDAs–to dealers to whet their appetite for their 2019 flagship, says Road and Track.
In a satellite image of Las Vegas in 1976, the city still looks relatively small. By 2015, after the population had grown more than six times, another image shows the sprawl of streets, houses, and golf courses into the surrounding desert.
In a new book of stunning images of cities shown from above, the picture of Vegas is cropped to include nearby Lake Mead, its primary water source. “You actually see Lake Mead retreat and the city grow,” says Meredith Reba, a postgraduate research associate at the Urbanization and Global Change Laboratory at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who worked on the book, called City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet, with Karen Seto, associate dean of research and professor of geography and urbanization at the school.
Seto and Reba typically publish in scientific journals but wanted to bring the story of urbanization’s impact on sustainability to a broader audience. “Urbanization is literally physically reshaping the planet,” says Seto.
Vegas is still one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S.; by one estimate, over the last year, an average of 4.9 people moved to the city every hour. But it’s dwarfed by Lagos, Nigeria, which doubled in population–to nearly 14 million people–between 2000 and 2016. It’s predicted to be home to 88.3 million people by the end of the century. The book also looks at smaller settlements, like El Salvador, Chile, where the roads were built extra-wide to fit trucks from a neighboring copper mine.
The aerial view, along with colors that illustrate infrared light–vegetation is often shown in red, for example–gives a new perspective on cities and towns. “It’s one thing to drive by these on the ground, but to see it from space gives you a really different sense of the scale, the magnitude, and also just the human ingenuity and human enterprise that’s required to build these landscapes,” Seto says.
The images show how cities have been shaped by the mountains and rivers around them, and how the settlements are changing the environment. In Lagos, coastal wetlands are being covered by development. In Samarinda, Indonesia, sprawling shrimp ponds are replacing mangrove forests. Al-Jawf, Libya, which gets only 0.1 inches of rain a year, is surrounded by irrigated farms. In Jharia, India, thermal images show the heat from a massive coal fire that has been burning since 1916. Before-and-after images (above) show how Shenzhen, China, grew from a fishing village in 1977 to house more than 10 million people by 2016.
The book aims to illustrate the impact that cities have beyond their own borders. “I’m hoping that when people think about the sustainability of, for example, the rainforest, that they think about the sustainability of cities, too, because in order to preserve intact forests, we need to reduce the amount of raw materials going to cities,” says Seto. “There’s no such thing as a sustainable city that doesn’t rely on a larger planetary set of resources.”
If you’ve been waiting for the price of a Tesla to drop before you buy one, now might be the time to plunk down that cash. The company has announced a new midrange version of the Model 3 that starts at $45,000.
Just released lower cost, mid-range Tesla Model 3 & super simple new order page https://t.co/cz0TQn7IOZ
The midrange version has the same battery pack as the long-range model but uses fewer cells. That means the midrange model will get you 260 miles on a charge and has a top speed of 125 mph and goes from 0-60 mph in 5.6 seconds. That compares with the long-range Model 3 that has a top speed of 145 mph and goes from 0-60 mph in 4.5 seconds. Announcing the new version of the Model 3, Tesla said in a statement:
“As Model 3 production and sales continue to grow rapidly, we’ve achieved a steady volume in manufacturing capacity, allowing us to diversify our product offering to even more customers. Our new mid-range battery is being introduced this week in the US and Canada to better meet the varying range needs of the many customers eager to own Model 3, and our delivery estimate for customers who have ordered the Standard Battery is 4-6 months.”
But if you still want to hold out for an even cheaper Tesla, the company has promised a base model that will cost $35,000 sometime in 2019.
Riders typically contact their Uber driver before they arrive for the pickup if they are running late or think they’ll have other problems meeting at the pickup point. Now the company has added the ability to VOIP your driver in addition to texting, using in-app messaging, or a regular phone call, reports Engadget. VOIP is the ability to place a voice call over a data network instead of a cellular one. The tech is already used for services such as Skype, FaceTime, and WhatsApp calls.
The addition of VOIP calling in the Uber app could be a godsend to foreign travelers who often don’t have a cellular connection when touching down in another country’s airport. Now those travelers will be able to place calls to their drivers as long as they are still within range of an airport’s free Wi-Fi, for example. The VOIP calling feature is available in the latest update to the app.
Want to know if the beauty products you’re buying are bad for you? There’s an app for that. Actually, there are many apps for that. Bloomberg today writes about the new trend of apps that tell consumers how bad the ingredients in their cosmetics are.
One app from Canada, Think Dirty, has a home screen that asks “Is your bathroom Kardashian-filthy?” Because, as it turns out, many of the products hawked by the reality TV stars aren’t so great. In fact, according to the app, Estée Lauder’s Drop Dead Red lipstick–which is a known favorite of Kendall Jenner’s–rates quite poorly on Think Dirty. On a scale from 1 to 10–where 1 is good and 10 is the worst–Drop Dead Red rates a 7. Says Bloomberg, this is because it contains an ingredient called polyethylene, which is said to cause allergies. (Estée Lauder tells the news outlet that it is “not a known allergen.”) Of course, many cosmetics are known to have loads of unhealthy ingredients, so this shouldn’t come as a huge shock.
Apps like these are becoming more and more popular, and may become a threatening tool for larger cosmetics companies that use less-than-ideal ingredients. Will the app’s poor rating cause Kendall to change her mind about the lipstick? I suppose that depends on how much Estée Lauder is paying her.
About five years ago, I started looking for a new timer to use in my design workshops for business executives. I’d used a watch up until then and communicated time to participants like, “we’ll stop at 2:35,” or “five minutes starting now . . . one minute . . . okay we’re almost done, so wrap up your current concepts . . . okay, let’s wrap up . . . okay, let’s quiet down and share.” Repeatedly asking enthusiastic CEOs to put down their Sharpies just wasn’t cutting it. I wanted everyone to be on the same page about how much time remained on a given exercise–something with a definitive end and something that would spatially display time to concretely communicate an otherwise squishy concept.
Then I came across the device that would quickly become my most valued design tool: the Time Timer. It was love at first sight. In a life surrounded by feature-packed, overly designed gizmos begging for my attention every moment of every day, the Time Timer was the most earnestly designed object I’d ever seen. It’s one of those objects that is so simple, it’s easy to think that it wasn’t even designed at all, that it just exists because that’s what it was meant to be. It’s even called the Time Timer! It didn’t have some cute monosyllabic meaningless name. It is exactly what it is, a time timer, and it is perfect.
I use an 8-inch timer for my workshops, I have a little one in my kitchen, and I have a 12-inch timer on the wall right next to my monitor in my office. It keeps me on track. Why do these work so well? It all comes down to its physicality.
[Photo: Time Timer]
Externalized understanding
One of the most important aspects of the design process is externalizing abstract thoughts or ideas. We sketch things out, we put them in experience maps and service blueprints, and we build prototypes to make these abstract things concrete. When the abstract is made physical, we can think through the details of how they work, but we also are able to share that understanding with the other people in the room. Everyone is considering the same information, and there’s less room for interpretation. The Time Timer works in the exact same way; it’s physical and external, everyone is getting the exact same information at the same time.
[Photo: Time Timer]
Data to information
In addition to the shared consensus of the timer being external, the spatial representation of time makes shared understanding clearer and more immediate. Generally when you look at a clock, you do some calculations. The clock will tell you what time it is, and then you compare that time to a predefined event. For example, you’ve got a meeting at 10:15. You look at the clock and it’s 9:38–you then subtract 9:38 from 10:15 and you find that you have 37 minutes until your meeting. When time is displayed spatially, there’s no math. You glance over at the timer, and you immediately understand how much time is left; it’s faster, and there’s less cognitive load.
[Photo: Time Timer]
Soft awareness
One of the biggest advantages of a spatial display of time is that it allows you have a peripheral awareness of the time. When you’re working on things that require higher-order thought, such as writing code, or thinking through a complex design process, you’re holding a lot of things in your head. Looking at the clock and doing base-60 subtraction will immediately snap you out of this thought process. I think of the large timer next to my desk as a “big red blob” that I can keep an eye on without having to divert my attention from the task at hand.
Time Timer is catching on in human-centered design circles. It was featured in Jake Knapp’s book Sprint, and subsequently included in Google Ventures’ Sprint Kit. More recently it showed up in Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s great new bookMake Time. For the book, they actually partnered with Time Timer to make a special 120-minute Make Time Edition Time Timer, which is the designer equivalent of getting a shoe deal with Nike. I recommend checking out the new book, and strategically placing time timers in every room of your studio.
Serena Williams says she couldn’t have written a better past year for herself. Addressing a crowd of 10,000 at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women in Philadelphia last Friday, the 23-time Grand Slam champion and working mom radiated optimism. She sported a top from her new fashion line with “BE SEEN” printed across the chest and shared advice like “keep it positive” and “look at the bigger picture.” Among the accomplishments that came up: celebrating her daughter’s first birthday, competing in Wimbledon and the U.S. Open finals, becoming co-chair of the 2019 Met Gala, working with Nike and Survey Monkey, and adding maternal health advocacy to her philanthropic initiatives.
As for the drama that erupted during her face-off with umpire Carlos Ramos at the U.S. Open women’s finals last month, Williams broached the subject with a clear message: “I’ve always stood up for myself, and I will always stand up for myself,” she told attendees of the annual conference, loosely referencing the debate over Ramos’s penalization of her anger on the court. While she was quick to move on, she was not about to apologize.
Fellow speakers, from Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf to international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, also encouraged women to continue unapologetically speaking up and out against injustice. Yet doing so can be a challenge in the workplace, where women are disproportionately penalized for expressing emotions, especially when they are perceived as angry. Here, four other conference speakers share how they navigate the double standard and weigh in on how to create work environments where women don’t need to worry about how their anger is policed any more than men.
Call out microinequities daily
While research shows that civility in the workplace leads to better performance, most psychologists view anger as a perfectly normal and healthy feeling, says Selena Rezvani, vice president at the women’s leadership consultancy Be Leaderly. “It’s just that as women, we’ve long been discouraged from showing it,” she adds. As current events illuminate gender disparities in how anger is policed, Rezvani recommends that employers invest in fostering psychologically safe workplaces, i.e. environments where all employees recognize they are part of a system where they have freedom to express anger without being unfairly judged for it, and are expected to maintain civility and productivity.
She advises allies to be aware of everyday disruptions they can make against microinequities disproportionately chipping away at women’s reputations,e.g. instances in which assertiveness from men is rewarded, while the same behavior from women is interpreted as aggressive and/or angry. As an employee on the receiving end of certain biases, help colleagues recognize biased tendencies.
For example, preface a statement or action that may be unfairly perceived as angry with language like, “This is not stereotypically feminine, but I’m about to [insert stereotypically masculine behavior…].” On top of recognizing how the double standard manifests itself, Rezvani believes that a major part of achieving equity is helping everyone understand that being unfairly perceived as angry feels bad.
Don’t: Get defensive. Do: Listen to those you’re advocating for
Actress, comedian, and disability advocate Maysoon Zayid is exhausted just thinking about how often women and minorities are told they should tone down their emotionality to be taken seriously. As a senior at Arizona State University, she remembers getting passed over for a role in a school play that she felt she deserved and was quite literally born to play (like her, the character had cerebral palsy). She didn’t hesitate to express her anger to the decision makers at the time, and today she continues to speak out against sexism, racism, and ableism.
Women and minorities, she says, are frequently taught they need to shrink themselves in professional settings to succeed. That motivates her to continue spreading the opposite message. As she writes an autobiographical comedy series in development at ABC, she’s advocating for diversity and representation in Hollywood, where TV characters with disabilities are played by able-bodied actors 95% of the time. Her advice to allies not from a particular group? Listen. “When I tell you that a term is offensive to disabled people, don’t tell me, ‘But I use it all the time,’ Zayid says. “Believe the people you are advocating for.'”
Use leadership and communication skills to preempt anger
An African-American literature scholar and Swarthmore’s president since 2015, Valerie Smith is not one to overtly express anger. “I just can not let circumstances or individuals make me lose it,” she says. “I don’t have the luxury to be angry.” While she believes her calm demeanor has served her well in her career, she acknowledges that some people might interpret her level-headed leadership style as a perceived weakness and a projection on women’s strength.
As for addressing double standards like these, Smith believes an organization’s leaders should be responsible for equipping women and those who’ve been marginalized with tools to channel anger effectively. “I never want to tell anyone who is outraged … that they need to quiet themselves down,” she says. “But by the same token, it’s important to recognize that there are a variety of ways to express one’s thoughts and opinions.” She thinks it’s important for men and women alike to be attuned to the way people around them interpret anger.
Meanwhile, everyone can play a role in mitigating gender and racial biases. Smith encourages her faculty to take advantage of teachable moments to foster respectful, fair classroom environments. In her role as an academic institution’s chief executive, she taps the same techniques she picked up as a professor to set an expectation that everyone will have room to express themselves and no one voice will dominate. She also uses meeting culture, where women are more likely than men to be interrupted by both men and women and less likely to take credit for their ideas, as an opportunity to establish a tone of equality and call out inequities.
Stay true to your superpowers
When Jen Welter joined the Arizona Cardinals as a linebackers coach in 2015, she made history as the world’s first female NFL coach. Instead of dwelling on the landmine of gender stereotypes she was walking into or trying to replicate coaching styles that worked for her colleagues, she leaned into her expertise: psychology. This meant knowing who she had to reach and establishing effective ways to reach them. “I may be good at football, but I’m great at people,” says Welter, who realized early on that coming off as angry wasn’t going to get her far with her players.
Fairness aside, she focused on figuring out what did work. Instead of raising her voice to get her players to hear her, she found that getting them to lean down so she could speak to them at eye level worked best. “It was actually a running commentary that Coach Jen doesn’t yell,” she says. When considering how to get through to and earn the respect of coworkers, think of how your unique strengths. How might you use them to establish a commanding and positive presence? “If everybody else is yelling, sometimes you’re most effective with a whisper,” Welter says.
Katie S. Sanders is a freelance journalist whose reporting pursuits have brought her to Norwegian prisons, JDate, and the White House South Lawn. Follow her on Twitter at @katiessanders.
When artificial intelligence has been used to create works of art, a human artist has always exerted a significant element of control over the creative process.
But what if a machine were programmed to create art on its own, with little to no human involvement? What if it were the primary creative force in the process? And if it were to create something novel, engaging, and moving, who should get credit for this work?
At Rutgers’ Art & AI Lab, we created AICAN, a program that could be thought of as a nearly autonomous artist that has learned existing styles and aesthetics and can generate innovative images of its own.
People like AICAN’s work, and can’t distinguish it from that of human artists. Its pieces have been exhibited worldwide, and one even recently sold for $16,000 at an auction.
An emphasis on novelty
When designing the algorithm, we adhered to a theory proposed by psychologist Colin Martindale.
He hypothesized that many artists will seek to make their works appealing by rejecting existing forms, subjects, and styles that the public has become accustomed to. Artists seem to intuitively understand that they’re more likely to arouse viewers and capture their attention by doing something new.
In other words, novelty reigns.
So when programming AICAN, we used an algorithm called the “creative adversarial network,” which compels AICAN to contend with two opposing forces. On one end, it tries to learn the aesthetics of existing works of art. On the other, it will be penalized if, when creating a work of its own, it too closely emulates an established style.
At the same time, AICAN adheres to what Martindale calls the “least effort” principle, in which he argues that too much novelty will turn off viewers.
This ensures that the art generated will be novel but won’t depart too much from what’s considered acceptable. Ideally, it will create something new that builds off what already exists.
Instead, we’ve fed the algorithm 80,000 images that represent the Western art canon over the previous five centuries. It’s somewhat like an artist taking an art history survey course, with no particular focus on a style or genre.
At the click of a button, the machine can create an image that can then be printed. The works will often surprise us in their range, sophistication, and variation.
The Birth of Venus by AICAN. [Image: courtesy of the author]
Using our prior work on quantifying creativity, AICAN can judge how creative its individual pieces are. Since it has also learned the titles used by artists and art historians in the past, the algorithm can even give names to the works it generates. It named one Orgy; it called another The Beach at Pourville.
The Beach at Pourville by AICAN. [Image: courtesy of the author]
The algorithm favors generating more abstract works than figurative ones. Our research on how the machine is able to understand the evolution of art history could offer an explanation. Because it’s tasked with creating something new, AICAN is likely building off more recent trends in art history, like abstract art, which came into vogue in the 20th century.
Can humans tell the difference?
There was still the question of how people would respond to AICAN’s work.
To test this, we showed subjects AICAN images and works created by human artists that were showcased at Art Basel, an annual fair that features cutting-edge contemporary art. We asked the participants whether each was made by a machine or an artist.
They didn’t simply have a tough time distinguishing between the two. They genuinely enjoyed the computer-generated art, using words like “having visual structure,” “inspiring,” and “communicative” when describing AICAN’s work.
Beginning in October 2017, we started exhibiting AICAN’s work at venues in Frankfurt, Los Angles, New York City, and San Francisco, with a different set of images for each show.
At the exhibitions, we heard one question, time and again: Who’s the artist?
As a scientist, I created the algorithm, but I have no control over what the machine will generate.
The machine chooses the style, the subject, the composition, the colors, and the texture. Yes, I set the framework, but the algorithm is fully at the helm when it comes to the elements and the principles of the art it generates.
For this reason, in the all exhibitions where the art was shown, I gave credit solely to the algorithm–“AICAN”–for each artwork. At Miami’s Art Basel this December, eight pieces, also credited to AICAN, will be shown.
Samples of artworks generated by AICAN that will be shown in the SCOPE Art Fair in conjunction with Art Basel Miami in December 2018. [Image: courtesy of the author]
The first artwork that was offered for sale from the AICAN collection, which AICAN titled St. George Killing the Dragon, was sold for $16,000 at an auction in New York in November 2017. (Most of the proceeds went to fund research at Rutgers and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France.)
St. George Killing the Dragon was sold for $16,000. [Image: courtesy of the author]
What the computer can’t do
Still, there’s something missing in AICAN’s artistic process.
The algorithm might create appealing images. But it lives in an isolated creative space that lacks social context.
Human artists, on the other hand, are inspired by people, places, and politics. They make art to tell stories and make sense of the world.
AICAN lacks any of that. It can, however, generate artwork that human curators can then ground in our society and connect to what’s happening around us. That’s just what we did with Alternative Facts: The Multi Faces of Untruth, a title we gave to a series of portraits generated by AICAN that struck us with its timely serendipity.
Alternative Facts: The Multi Faces of Untruth by AICAN was exhibited at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair. [Image: courtesy of the author]
Of course, just because machines can almost autonomously produce art doesn’t mean they will replace artists. It simply means that artists will have an additional creative tool at their disposal, one they could even collaborate with.
I often compare AI art to photography. When photography was first invented in the early 19th century, it wasn’t considered art–after all, a machine was doing much of the work.
The tastemakers resisted, but eventually relented: A century later, photography became an established fine art genre. Today, photographs are exhibited in museums and auctioned off at astronomical prices.
I have no doubt that art produced by artificial intelligence will go down the same path.
Amid growing concern over the power of such behemoths as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other tech giants, in recent months there’s been a bipartisan push for better enforcement of antitrust rules–with even President Trump saying in August that their size and influence could constitute a “very antitrust situation.” The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched its most wide-ranging study of corporate concentration in America in more than 20 years with a series of hearings being held around the country. Chairman Joseph Simons, a practical enforcement-minded leader, launched the hearings by expressing concern over the growing problem of monopoly, which is now found in nearly every sector of the economy. “I approach all of these issues with a very open mind,” said Simons, “very much willing to be influenced by what I see and hear.”
But there’s a problem. The FTC organized these hearings so that Simons and the public would be hearing from many economists who have taken money, directly or indirectly, from giant corporations.
For example, on Monday, the FTC convened a panel titled “The Current Economic Understanding of Multi-Sided Platforms” to look specifically at the most dynamic and dangerous set of concentrated economic actors, the big tech platforms. Every single one of the economists who testified had financial ties to giant corporations.
Another example is Howard Shelanski, a partner at Davis Polk. Shelanski is more enforcement-minded, but he expressed caution, testifying that we don’t know enough for antitrust enforcers to understand whether powerful technology companies hold unassailable market positions. Shelanski pointed to his own children, saying that they’ve stopped using Facebook because it’s uncool. (FF to 35:00). As it turns out, his law firm’s clients include Facebook, as well as Comcast, and Chinese search giant Baidu.
Evans and Shelanski are straightforward about their role; both are principals with clients. To bring in more neutral parties, the FTC also had economics professors from prestigious universities. But these professors, while they do academic research, also have lucrative consulting arrangements with firms representing large corporations.
Wharton Professor Katja Seim testified as well. She has a second job working for Vega Economics, which sells analysis to many of the major law firms in D.C., who in turn sell services to Fortune 500 companies. She stressed that one normal red flag for monopoly–“supra-normal” profit margins–should not necessarily concern regulators when it comes to tech platforms. (FF to 7:15-7:45).
Also testifying was Boston University economist Michael Salinger, who also works at Charles River Associates. Salinger markets his services on the website of the group as leading the economics team that helped Google shut down the FTC antitrust investigation. He told the FTC that American enforcers, as opposed to European enforcers, thought about Google’s “innovation and product design” rather than its monopoly power. (FF to 27:00) His colleague at Boston University, economist Marc Rysman, has a side job at Cornerstone Research, a firm that worked on Google’s acquisition of Admob and ITA. (FF to 4:45)
For instance, the FTC invited University of California, Berkeley economist Joseph Farrell, who offered little, putting forward a classic “on the one hand,on the other hand” set of observations. Economists, he concluded, should “look hard at these issues” and talk to people who are excited about them. Farrell has a side job at the economic consulting firm Bates White Consulting, a firm that has done work for, among others, Comcast and AT&T.
In other words, every single economist testifying on the issue of corporate concentration derived income, directly or indirectly, from large corporations. Beyond that, the hearing itself was held at the Antonin Scalia Law School, which is financed by Google and Amazon.
This is a problem more broadly for the entire set of hearings, which included roughly 40 economists on the payroll of such consulting firms. For example, on a different panel on the state of antitrust law was Dennis Carlton. A professor at the University of Chicago, Carlton has made over $100 million during his career moonlighting as an expert witness for giant corporations through his work with economic consulting firm Compass Lexecon. Carlton told the FTC that we ought to praise large firms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon for technological innovation, and warned, “don’t confuse success with an antitrust violation.” (hour 1:25:40)
Why is a college professor able to make a $100 million testifying on behalf of large corporations? As Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott at ProPublicanoted in their investigation of the industry, “Companies & lawyers that rely on economists as witnesses aren’t looking for neutrality…. [Instead] to be able to be an advocate without seeming to be an advocate.”
This is not to say that taking money from corporations is always wrong. It isn’t. It’s just that a diversity of perspectives matters. If we want to know why corporate monopolies are dominant, just look at who the FTC is listening to. It isn’t you and me.
Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.
Austin Frerick is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at @AustinFrerick.
When someone asks how you’re doing, saying you’re busy is no longer an impressive answer. Once a badge of honor, today it sounds like a precursor to overwhelm and burnout. It also shuts down conversation and isolates you from the asker.
Saying or even bragging that you’re busy, however, is different than keeping busy. According to research, being busy has two benefits that could improve your health.
Busyness can help you make better choices
Should I go to the gym or relax on the sofa? Do I splurge on a treat or save money for a long-term goal? Every day we face decisions that cause us to choose between instant gratification and future well-being. Viewing yourself as a busy person can help you practice better self-control, delaying gratification and making decisions that will benefit you later, according to research from INSEAD, a global graduate business school.
In an experiment, Chattopadhyay and her team activated the “busy mind-set” of a group of participants by exposing them to subtle messages that suggested they were busy, or by asking them to write about activities that had recently kept them busy. A second group didn’t receive the prompts. All of the participants were then asked to make choices that involved self-control, such as decisions about food, exercise, or saving for retirement. Participants who had been reminded of their busy lifestyle were consistently more inclined than control participants to make decisions that would benefit them later.
People who think of themselves as busy also thought of themselves as being important, which gave them a heightened sense of self-control, the researchers concluded. But there is a fine line. Participants who felt busy and under significant time pressure became anxious and made hedonic decisions.
“When we temporarily dampened the sense of self-importance of participants who otherwise felt busy, the self-control effect vanished,” said Chattopadhyay.
Sara Festini, a neuroscientist from the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Vital Longevity, tested cognitive performance in relationship to age and activity level. Participants age 50 to 89 who kept busier than the standard level of activity of others their age tested better on cognitive tasks such as reasoning, vocabulary, and memory. While this study focused on middle to late adulthood, a similar relationship between busyness and cognition can be found in all adults age 20 and older, said Festini.
A surprising result of this study, however, is that researchers found cognition remained consistent from ages 50 to 89.
“We think it’s informative that we see similar relationships between busyness and cognition throughout middle age and older adulthood,” Festini said in an interview with Smithsonian. “You might expect to see larger differences in old age when there’s more change going on with cognition, but we found that the relationship was consistent across our sample.”
Stress can negatively affect cognition. To reap the rewards of being busy, it’s important to be in control of your activities instead of letting them take control of you.
The country’s government has announced plans to send a fake moon–or even a few fake moons–into the sky over Chengdu, in the southwestern Sichuan province. Officials hope to launch the artificial moon in 2020 so its fake light can brighten the shadows. The so-called “illumination satellites” are not meant to replace the moon, China Daily reports. Instead, the satellites will be designed to complement the light of the real moon, although it’s hard to imagine they won’t outshine the real thing, as their light is expected to be eight times brighter.
The government hopes the illumination satellites will make the “moonlight” a little brighter and lessen the need for street lamps and lower electricity costs, state media reported. The satellites will provide a “dusk-like glow” over the city capable of either spreading their artificial light over a large swath of the city or pinpointing a few feet, which could let the city replace streetlights.
The fake moon was dreamed up by Wu Chunfeng, the chairman of private space contractor Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co (Casc), which is the main contractor of China’s space program. He reportedly has already started testing the satellites and hopes to have them lighting up the night sky in just a few years. The satellite will produce light thanks to a reflective coating that can “deflect sunlight” back to Earth in the same way the moon does, according to China Daily.
This is not the first time someone has tried to improve on nature’s design. Not only did Russian scientists attempt something called Project Znamya in the 1990s, but a Bond villain attempted it as well. It would have worked, too, if not for James Bond.
Now it’s up to China to prove whether illumination satellites will work in practice or if the idea is truly pie in the sky. Assuming it will end up looking like this:
Move over, Mad Men. Watson has just landed an airline advertising campaign.
Lufthansa has teamed up with IBM Watson Advertising to launch an AI-powered ad, a first for the airline industry. The campaign focuses on exploring a world of new possibilities in an effort to get would-be travelers off the couch and into a seat on one of Lufthansa’s planes.
The interactive ads, powered by IBM Watson, let consumers chat in natural language and ask general airline questions about what it’s like to fly Lufthansa. The ads (being ads and all) also try to lure customers into taking a European vacation by showing them photos of Rome, Paris, and Barcelona, as well as offering travel tips and vacation ideas accompanied by a link to a flight reservation page.
[Screenshot via Watson Advertising]“Lufthansa continues to drive value to the consumer through the use of new and innovative technologies such as A.I., both on our aircraft and off,” said Benita Struve, Lufthansa’s head of marketing communications and campaigns, in a statement. “This marketing campaign not only inspires exciting travel, it also utilizes the most innovative methods to provide a personalized experience.”
Currently the AI-powered ad campaign is running on weather.com, The Weather Channel app, and across Lufthansa’s digital advertising ecosystem. You can also give it a try on Watson Advertising’s website.
, and subsequently included in Google Ventures’ Sprint Kit. More recently it showed up in Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s great new book 
. For the book, they actually partnered with Time Timer to make a special 120-minute Make Time Edition Time Timer, which is the designer equivalent of getting a shoe deal with Nike. I recommend checking out the new book, and strategically placing time timers in every room of your studio.
