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Quantifying the value of a great pillow

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Healthy sleep leads to healthy brains. Neuroscientists have gotten that message out. But parents, doctors, and educators alike have struggled to identify what to do to improve sleep. Some have called for delaying school start times or limiting screentime before bed to achieve academic, health, and even economic gains.

Still, recent estimates suggest that roughly half of adolescents in the United States are sleep-deprived. These numbers are alarming because sleep is particularly important during adolescence, a time of significant brain changes that affect learning, self-control, and emotional systems. And sleep deficits are even greater in economically disadvantaged youth compared with more affluent counterparts.

Research from my developmental neuroscience lab shows one solution to the sleep deprivation problem that is deceptively simple: provide teens with a good pillow. Because getting comfortable bedding does not involve technology, expensive interventions, or lots of time, it may be particularly beneficial for improving sleep among underresourced adolescents.

[Source Image: karammiri/iStock]

Consistency over quantity

Studies in my lab have shown that seemingly small differences in the quality and duration of sleep make a difference in how the brain processes information.

Sleep acts like a glue that helps the brain encode recently learned information into long-term knowledge. It also improves focus in school because sleep helps dampen hyperactive behaviorstrong emotional reactions, and squirminess. This means that students who are normally dismissed from the classroom for disruptive behavior are more likely to stay in class if they’re not sleep-deprived. More time in the class leads to more learning.

My colleagues and I originally hypothesized that the number of hours asleep was most important for healthy brain development over time. But when we tested this idea with a study, the findings surprised us. Instead, adolescents whose sleep is inconsistent across the school week, varying by as much as 2.5 hours from one night to the next, exhibited less development of white matter connections in their brains a year later than those who slept a more consistent number of hours per night.

White matter connections help process information efficiently and quickly by connecting different brain regions, similar to how a highway connects two cities. Adolescence is an important time for paving all the brain’s highways, and this research suggests sleep may be vital for this construction.

[Source Image: karammiri/iStock]

Better sleep comes with better bedding

So what are the primary sleep ingredients that contribute to healthy brain development? My lab designed a study to investigate.

We equipped 55 14- to 18-year-old high school students across Los Angeles from different socioeconomic backgrounds with actigraphs, wristwatch-like monitors that track sleep quality. Higher sleep quality is defined by fewer awakenings per night. Those are times in the night when sleep rhythms are disrupted and the person is briefly awake or moves into a lighter stage of sleep, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. In our study, adolescents had an average of five awakenings per night that ranged in duration between less than a minute and over an hour.

After two weeks, they came into the lab to have their brains scanned. We were interested in measuring the connections among pathways in the brain involved in self-control, emotion, and reward processing–the same ones that are important for reducing impulsivity and staying focused in class. Unsurprisingly, adolescents with better sleep quality had better “brain connectivity.” That is, connections among key brain regions were stronger.

But the more important, and surprising, discovery was what we found when we dug deeper into identifying the reasons some adolescents got better sleep than others. Was it less technology in the bedroom? Darker rooms? Less noise? Higher socioeconomic status? Not in our study.

Adolescents who reported greater satisfaction with their bedding and pillows were the ones who had greater sleep quality, and greater sleep quality was associated with greater brain connectivity, an effect that cut across socioeconomic lines. Conversely, adolescents in our study with low brain connectivity and poor sleep quality exhibited greater impulsivity than those with high connectivity and sleep quality, illustrating the real-world effects on behavior.

So is there a perfect pillow? We found that one size doesn’t fit all. For some people, a flat pancake pillow soothes them into a sound slumber. For others, only a super-puffy cloud will do. And although our findings were strongest for pillow comfort, bedding more generally was important too.

[Source Image: karammiri/iStock]

Sleep interventions to close achievement gap

In every measurable domain, young people reared in poverty experience poor outcomes. Compared to more affluent peers, they show poorer academic and cognitive performance, psychosocial well-being, and physical health. These gaps have been the focus of intense debate and research, but they remain wide and persistent.

The availability and quality of basic needs, including food, health, parental warmth, and shelter, helps explain some of the discrepant outcomes between high- and low-income adolescents. But researchers have sorely underemphasized sleep–an equally important basic need that may be an untapped solution to the achievement gap.

Reducing the achievement gap is the goal of many government-funded programs. One way to achieve it is to create accessible and realistic targets for intervention that improve day-to-day functioning. Sleep may be one such target. It is relatively easy to quantify and track, affected by daily habits that can be changed such as parental monitoring and bedtime routines, and it is directly associated with learning, social, and health outcomes.

In a time of borderline hysteria over the effects of technology on sleep and brain development, little attention goes to the fundamental elements of good sleep in adolescents. Ensuring they have comfortable bedding may help improve sleep in all adolescents, particularly among poorer families. And it’s a lot easier to convince parents and teens to invest in pillows than to bicker over phone privileges.


Adriana Galván is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. This post originally appeared on The Conversation.


Greenpeace unveils a new Oreo flavor: Deforestation

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As classic flavors go, the Oreo cookie may be one of the most original. On paper, it’s just vanilla icing sandwiched between two chocolate wafers. But it’s oh-so-much more than that. Beyond its OG form, the brand has expanded to the outer regions of taste and flavor experimentation. Depending on what country you live in, you could have Birthday Cake-flavored Oreos, Green Tea-flavored Oreos, Banana Split Creme Oreos, or Coconut Delight Oreos, among a laundry list of others.

But today, Greenpeace unveiled its own new Oreo flavor: Deforestation. The environmental activist group delivered a five-foot-wide Oreo to the global headquarters of Oreo parent Mondelēz International in Deerfield, Ill. The giant replica cookie had its top layer twisted off to reveal a filling that was an illustration of a bulldozer clearing a forest with animals fleeing. The truck carrying it had a banner that said, “Tell Oreo to Drop Dirty Palm Oil.”

Greenpeace is accusing Mondelēz International of dragging its corporate heels when it comes to cleaning up its supply chain. According to the organization, despite Mondelēz committing in 2010 to eliminate deforestation and exploitation from its business practices by 2020, the company is far from meeting its deadline. Greenpeace research found that out of 25 of the worst palm oil producer groups in Indonesia, 22 are still in Mondelez’s supply chain data for 2017. And between 2015 and 2017, those 22 palm oil companies destroyed over 70,000 hectares of rainforests in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

In a statement, Greenpeace USA’s senior forests campaigner Diana Ruiz said, “Oreo is the world’s best selling cookie, and is an iconic and beloved brand. But no one bites into an Oreo expecting to drive wildlife like orangutans towards extinction or to cook our climate. Years ago, Mondelēz pledged to keep deforestation out of its supply chain, but hasn’t kept its promise. Time is running out for Indonesia’s forests and entire populations of species that call the forest home. You don’t need to destroy forests to make palm oil. Companies like Mondelēz need to drop dirty palm oil suppliers, starting with Wilmar, until it can prove its palm oil is clean and not destroying forests that are vital to people and the planet.”

In September, Greenpeace published a report called “Final Countdown: Now or Never To Reform The Palm Oil Industry,” an investigation of Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader, and its links to rainforest destruction. Just last week, U.K. company Iceland Foods worked with Greenpeace to repurpose its animated short“Rang-Tan,” about the effects of deforestation on orangutans, as its Xmas ad.

For its part, Mondelēz this week renewed its call for palm oil suppliers to work faster to help it reach its goal of 100% sustainability and 100% transparency of its palm oil supply chain, and announced it had dumped 12 suppliers for not improving fast enough. The company’s global director of sustainability, Jonathan Horrell, said in a statement released yesterday that Mondelēz International remains fully committed to driving change in the palm oil sector and that its actions against those 12 suppliers reflect that commitment. “We will continue to pursue existing and new initiatives that seek to drive effective change across palm oil-growing communities,” he said. “The company understands that this complex challenge can only be solved through collaboration with all actors in the palm oil supply chain, from growers to suppliers and buyers, as well as local and national government and non-governmental organizations.”

Mondelēz International hasn’t yet returned Fast Company requests for comment on Greenpeace’s proposed new Oreo flavor.

The $185 million quest to make people love the ocean enough to protect it

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The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument consists of nearly 5,000 square miles of federally protected Atlantic Ocean habitat. Created during the Obama administration, it’s located roughly 130 miles off the coast of Massachusetts near the continental shelf. The preserve is home to whales and turtles, and one of the few spots around the world with a deep-water coral reef that may prove more resilient than others to the effects of climate change.

That makes the area vitally important to the ocean’s future: Reefs cover less than 1% of the entire are of the ocean, but are home to 25% of all life there. This one might hold lessons in how to help others that are being destroyed, or eventually repopulate them. But not everyone is compelled by that. A Maine lobster group has sued to resume fishing there, and the area made the short list of Trump-targeted spots that could be reopened for industry or development.

Scientists look at underwater imagery in the control room of the MV Alucia. [Photo: Ivan Agerton/OceanX]

So Bloomberg Philanthropies and OceanX, a marine exploration and storytelling initiative from Dalio Philanthropies, recently undertook a unique mission to explore and document life below the surface in that area. That mission has become part of a four-year, $185 million joint effort to increase research, education, and public awareness about the importance of our oceans. “The threat to oceans is huge and there’s a real unmet need in terms of philanthropic investment in oceans,” says Antha Williams, Bloomberg’s head of environmental programs. “They cover 70% of the surface of the earth and they provide half the oxygen that we breathe… They regulate the weather and they’re a major sink for carbon emissions.”

The dive hinged on the capabilities of the Alucia, OceanX’s specially outfitted ocean vessel, which includes two submersibles that can go 1,000 meters deep. As the video below shows, the initial voyage turned up incredibly breathtaking samples and images.

“These are roughly 90 canyons, some of which are as big, if not bigger than the Grand Canyon,” says Gretchen Wagner, the chief operating officer at Dalio Philanthropies. “What we found in some of these canyons was unbelievable biodiversity and corals. And so part of this is bringing back even the knowledge of what exists to people globally so that they can understand the importance of these marine environments.”

The organizations are still figuring out exactly how to share the footage and information about the specimens the mission recovered, but OceanX has turned similar work into popular programming for the BBC and other groups. This time, the Alucia had members of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and National Geographic aboard.

For Bloomberg, this initiative lines up with a growing strategy around ocean protection. The group began its sea-based efforts in 2013 after deciding that ocean protection was crucial to its core mission of ensuring better, longer lives for the greatest number of people possible. “When we came into oceans, we really started our work on overfishing with the idea that we really need to save fish populations so that we have that healthy sources of animal protein and livelihoods for people to eat,” Williams says.

A variety of the underwater life to be found in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. [Photo: Ivan Agerton/OceanX]
After additional research, Bloomberg chose to focus on 10 key areas that provide about 30% of the total fish that are caught around the world. Last year, the group joined forces with other aquatic-minded philanthropists and researchers to develop the 50 Reefs project, a portfolio of places poised to hopefully survive continuing climate change. Theoretically, the Bloomberg and OceanX partnership might explore any number of those spots next, although it’s about to receive more backup. In late 2019, OceanX expects to debut the Alucia 2, a ship that’s twice the size of the original with its own helicopter deck, and room to deploy at least three submersibles alongside other remotely operated vehicles.

To that end, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument is part of a shortlist of places that Bloomberg has identified as in need of protection, and more public support and understanding. “The oceans are big and vast,” Williams says, noting that 95% of the world’s waters remain unexplored. “But we actually don’t need to go everywhere to solve some of the most urgent problems.”

From Zero to sixty: How an electric motorcycle startup is winning over police departments

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Richard Ashcraft grew up strapped to the back of his dad’s off-road motorcycle, sometimes literally lashed to his father in case he nodded off. A 20-year veteran of the Clovis Police Department in California’s Central Valley, Cpl. Ashcraft got his motorcycle license before his driver’s license. He knows how to ride.

But even he was confused by the simplicity and quiet of Zero’s electric motorcycle when he started using it on patrol.

“The Zero doesn’t make a sound and if you forget it’s on, which I have done before, you could grab the throttle and right away you’d take off down the street,” Ashcraft says with a laugh. “They take a little getting used to.”

Once he became accustomed to the cycles–the Clovis PD uses Zero’s DSP model–Ashcraft fell in love with them. The dual-sport models can handle on- and off-road terrain and use a 100-percent-electric powertrain that is whisper quiet, cool to the touch, exhaust free, and virtually maintenance free–no gears, clutch, transmission, or fluids, so no oil changes. They allow officers to accomplish things they can’t do on big, rumbling gas cruisers.

[Photo: courtesy of Zero Motorcyles]
“It makes it easy to jump up on curbs or pass through fields or orchards or whatever we might encounter in our area,” Ashcraft said. “They’re so quiet you can sneak right up on someone in an alley selling drugs or doing anything else illegal… They have really changed how we patrol.”

Five years ago, the Santa Cruz-based Zero, which leads electric motorcycle sales in the United States, began producing a cycle for law enforcement, cutting into the share of the iconic Harley Davidson. Over that time, 125 departments in 25 states and two Canadian provinces have bolstered their fleets with Zeros. Company sales director Kevin Hartman estimates that Zero adds two new departments a month and expects that rate to increase.

[Photo: courtesy of Zero Motorcyles]
“In 2011 and 2012, a couple of departments bought our civilian motorcycles and put their own lights and sirens on them and we suddenly saw a real interest,” Hartman said. “In 2013, we decided to go after the market and developed our own police product. The nice thing is the law enforcement community is pretty tight-knit so it’s a little easier to get recognition in that space compared to in large global civilian market.”

Zero’s move represents a huge success for the small company, whose bikes retail for $8,500 to $16,500. But, despite Harley-Davidson’s double-digit drop in Stateside sales over the third quarter in 2018, the iconic American brand remains far-and-away the industry’s dominant player. Harley estimates it supplies motorcycles to as many as 4,000 law enforcement agencies–around 80% of the U.S. market share.

Harley still dominant, despite Trump’s call for boycott

In August, President Trump called for a Harley boycott after the company’s CEO said White House tariffs could force some production overseas. It could have been an advantage for Zero or other gas-powered brands. Instead, the Secret Service ordered more Harleys. According to the September purchase order, the Service made the call to maintain a “consistency of appearance, performance, training and parts with the currently existing motorcade motorcycle fleet.” Translation: It costs time and money to switch out vehicles that agents and mechanics already know how to use and maintain.

This is a familiar story–new technology can be a hard sell to government agencies. And Zero’s tech and feel offers a radically different experience than that of Harley, or Honda, or BMW. The electric cycles recharge as they break, so stop-and-go city driving mileage estimates for their police bikes run between 150 and 200 miles on a single charge. But flying down the highway at 90 mph, their sustained top speed, will run down the battery in about 60 miles. They are also tiny compared to Harleys–at about 450 pounds, Zero’s popular law enforcement offering, the DSRP, comes in at half the weight of Harley’s police Road King.

[Photo: courtesy of Zero Motorcyles]
Sgt. Robert Schwalm, who tests cycles for the Michigan State Police Precision Driving Unit, says you won’t see highway patrols switching to Zeros anytime soon.

“Other than the fact that you are balancing on two wheels, they are very different motorcycles,” Schwalm says. “We need to go from stop to 110 miles per hour and back to a full stop all day long to do our business every day. The Zero’s not a motorcycle for that.”

So instead of going toe-to-toe against the brand, Zero found its niche between the state troopers on hogs and neighborhood officers on mountain bikes.

[Photo: courtesy of Zero Motorcyles]
“We aren’t going after those frontline motorcycles like the Harleys,” Hartman said. “We have positioned ourselves as another tool for law enforcement.”

Like Clovis, big cities such as Los Angeles like Zeros because they provide a tactical advantage thanks to their silent-running, off-road capabilities. But departments have found all kinds of creative uses for them. Without the roar of a gas bike, they make formerly tricky jobs simple, such as enforcing texting while driving prohibitions or seatbelt laws. They are ideal for policing parks, college campuses, stadium parking lots, or even stadiums themselves–no emission fumes, so officers can cruise around indoors. And in California, where there is a greater scrutiny on emission standards, government grants have aided departments such as that in Clovis in adding Zeros to their fleets.

Building a new generation of riders

But Zero won’t be operating in this virgin space for long. Last week at the Milan Motorcycle Show, Harley introduced its first electric product, LiveWire. Due for release next year, the smaller, sleeker bike is key part of Harley’s strategy to build a new generation of riders–the company’s typical rider is in their 50s.

[Photo: courtesy of Zero Motorcyles]
“We have to breathe life into the sport of motorcycling and this helps us do it,” says Marc McAllister, Harley’s vice president of product planning and portfolio. “LiveWire as it comes to market next year might not be the right way to deliver an electric to law enforcement. But LiveWire is just the first of many electric vehicles that we plan to bring with a portfolio approach.”

“We will look at where we can broaden the use of electric vehicles, and certainly fleet motorcycles for law enforcement and emergency services are one of those spaces,” he added.

Harley has been struggling as ridership in the States continues to decline but has an aggressive strategy to win new customers–the company plans to develop dozens of new products in the next few years. But after 13 years and nearly 200 million dollars spent developing its technology, Zero welcomes Harley and any other company’s electric offerings.

“The entrance of more competitors will force us to get better, but more importantly, it will bring a lot of attention to the electric market that is really hard for us to generate on our own,” Zero CEO Sam Paschel says. “The motorcycle market is large enough that if we captured even one percent of it we would be a wildly successful brand.”

Clovis’s Cpl. Ashcraft doesn’t consider Zero just a novelty–he says his department’s seven bikes have become essential enforcement tools. But their novelty does generate buzz. He says people constantly approach officers wondering who makes the bikes and how they work. Richard Duprey, a former police officer who has written about the motorcycle industry for years, thinks that curiosity will be key to Zero becoming a major player.

“The market wants smaller, simpler products,” Duprey says. “Zero could find that market with people looking for Vespas or small bikes. And having people see officers riding them could give them some traction. There should be a snowball effect that gets them into the mainstream.”

Report: Thousands of veterans left without GI Bill payments after technical glitch

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More than 82,000 U.S. veterans receiving educational benefits under the GI Bill have yet to receive housing stipends for the current semester, leaving them struggling to pay bills, NBC News reports.

When the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) tried to implement legal changes in how housing benefits are calculated, they ran into technology problems as they reconfigured their aging computer systems. That led to a delay in receiving student data from colleges, leaving the VA to struggle with a backlog in student information, according to the report.

In the meantime, student veterans have been left without funds they need to pay rent and other expenses, forcing many to rely on credit cards or help from relatives.

The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is scheduled to hold a hearing on the problems on Thursday, including testimony from VA officials and an executive from IT contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

“It is of utmost importance that we hold this oversight hearing to get to the bottom this problem and ensure that VA is working to swiftly correct these errors,” said committee chairman Phil Roe, a Tennessee Republican, in a statement. “I look forward to hearing VA’s plan to right these wrongs, receiving additional insight into the core of the problem, and learning how VA plans to avoid future errors like this one. I will continue to work to ensure these problems are fixed, and I will not rest until our student veterans receive the full and correct benefits they have rightfully been promised.”

The fight to stop Amazon’s huge new New York office starts now

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Amazon’s months of bread crumbing the reveal of its second headquarters came to an end on November 13: The mega-company officially named Long Island City, Queens, and Arlington, Virginia, as the joint recipients of HQ2. There’s a lot to unpack in this conversation. After the long bidding war that had cities like Newark groveling before Amazon with billion-dollar tax-break offers and mayors offering to rename their jurisdictions after the tech giant, the most powerful company in the U.S. announced it will be headed to two of the most powerful cities in the U.S.: New York and Washington, D.C. (It’s also setting up a much smaller operations outpost in Nashville.)

Most small businesses, when they look to establish themselves in a new place, are shown a number of hoops through which they have to jump. They have to secure licenses (that cost money) from the city and state. They have to go through the often-arduous process of community approval where they want to take root. And they have to pay ongoing taxes to the state and city in which they operate. This is certainly what will happen to the businesses in the ecosystem that the Amazon offices will create around them. But Amazon is getting a special deal, as often happens when big companies–like Foxconn in Wisconsin or Boeing in Chicago–dangle jobs and economic development in front of elected officials. New York State is giving Jeff Bezos’s behemoth a total of $1.525 billion in direct incentives; Arlington will hand over $573 million. Its justification for securing these tax breaks from some of the wealthiest cities in the country: The presence of Amazon will create jobs–it’s saying 25,000 each in New York and D.C.–and attract new investment in the area.

But if Amazon thought it could just waltz into New York City and set up shop unopposed, it was sorely mistaken. Sure, both Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio are saying that Amazon could bypass the city’s notoriously stringent land-review process because, according toPolitico reporter Dana Rubenstein, they are democratically elected officials who can make decisions like this when the stakes are high enough. But local elected officials–many of them just taking up seats after last weeks’ midterm elections–are not having it.

Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim, who represents part of Queens, announced that he will introduce legislation to slash the types of subsidies that Amazon will receive, and funnel the money instead toward alleviating student debt. That, Kim told Splinter, would provide a bigger economic boost to the state than the arrival of Amazon.

Corey Johnson, speaker of the New York City Council, issued a statement the morning of November 13 blasting Amazon–and by proxy Cuomo and de Blasio, who ushered it in–for its lack of engagement with local needs before selecting its perch. “Amazon is one of the richest companies in the world, but you can’t put a price on community input, which has been missing throughout this entire process,” Johnson wrote. “I find that lack of engagement and the fact that negotiations excluded the City Council–which is elected by New Yorkers to guide land use projects with communities in mind–extremely troubling. I also don’t understand why a company as rich as Amazon would need nearly $2 billion in public money for its expansion at a time when New York desperately needs money for affordable housing, transportation, infrastructure, and education.”

Johnson’s colleague, Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, whose district comprises Long Island City, is similarly concerned. Van Bramer and New York State Senator Michael Gianaris, who represents western Queens, issued a joint statement echoing Johnson’s concerns, but adding that Amazon’s promise of jobs in New York is a hollow one: “We are witness to a cynical game in which Amazon duped New York into offering unprecedented amounts of tax dollars to one of the wealthiest companies on earth for a promise of jobs that would represent less than 3% of the jobs typically created in our city over a 10-year period,” they wrote. What’s particularly galling to these politicians: Amazon is receiving a subsidy of $48,000 from the state for each job it creates with a salary of over $150,000, and the average annual income in the nearby Queensbridge Houses, one of the nation’s largest public housing developments, is around $15,000.

Both Van Bramer and Gianaris were initially supportive of Amazon coming to Long Island City and signed a letter to the company indicating support, but the process over the last year changed their minds. “At no time were any of us told that Amazon would receive a billion-dollar package of subsidies and tax breaks,” Van Bramer told the New York Times. “And I never would have signed on to a process that seeks to evade meaningful and binding review by community and elected officials. Everything has changed since we allowed our names on that letter.”

Nothing about this, however, should have surprised Van Bramer and Gianaris. The entire HQ2 search was predicated on Amazon extracting as much as they possibly could from cities and states, before deciding to land in places that would offer them the most. In the discussion around where HQ2 should locate, there was a noticeable dearth of talk, beyond high-paying jobs, of what benefits Amazon would bring to the communities in which it located. That’s on local politicians to interrogate–before deals are inked.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently elected to Congress in a district that touches the Long Island City community, tweeted out that all morning, her office has been fielding calls from Queens residents, outraged that their voices had been eradicated from the planning process. “Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of million of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here,” she wrote. When companies want to expand into communities, Ocasio-Cortez added, they need to establish a partnership with working-class communities that ensures stability. Amazon has not pledged to hire local talent, nor has it pledged to train locals for jobs at the company. It has said nothing of injecting any money into preserving long-term housing affordability.

To be sure, Amazon will face pushback in the coming months as it solidifies its plans. Van Bramer and Gianaris have already organized an opposition rally with two well-established community-based local nonprofits, New York Communities for Change and Make the Road NY, and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, for November 14. As a new and powerful progressive voice in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez will continue to be a player in the opposition fight. The question remains, though: Will any of this have an effect? In keeping the HQ2 search as secret as it did, Amazon effectively silenced the communities and residents who would have been able to mobilize against the arrival of Amazon, or at least to demand more out of the company. Now that Amazon has made its decision, they can begin, but the tech giant (with perhaps, the exception of its recent minimum-wage hike) has not exactly shown itself to be receptive to public pressure.

At the very least: Amazon can expect an earful upon arrival in Queens. Welcome to New York.

We’ve asked Amazon for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

An ad agency made Alexa apologize to all the losing Amazon HQ2 cities

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When Amazon announced that it would be splitting its long-awaited HQ2 between Long Island City in Queens, New York, and Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, it left 17 other “finalists”–who weren’t within throwing distance of Manhattan and Washington, D.C.–joining the chorus that perhaps the race to win HQ2 was less of a “contest” than originally advertised.

What about them? Is this all they get?

Because Amazon is unlikely to utter even the most cursory “It’s not you, it’s me,” Austin, Texas-based agency McGarrah Jessee created custom apologies on Amazon’s behalf. Each apology is accessible through Alexa skills–and they can get oddly specific to each city.

To Toronto, it apologized for having to apologize to the stereotypically sorry Canadians.”How do you make amends to the emperors of apology, the sultans of sorry, the kings of confession, rulers of regrets, the overlords of excuse-me?”

To Austin, Alexa admits being creeped out by the city’s bats. “OK, it’s also your bats. Honestly, bats just really freak us out. You say they’re regular bats, but what if they’re not? For all we know, you’re all secretly vampires. Like a sanctuary city for vampires who love tacos. Sorry, this is coming out all wrong.”

Amazon could receive more than $2 billion in tax incentives in New York and Virginia, the company said in its HQ2 announcement. These third-party apologies may work, but if you think that, say, massive government subsidies should be spent on affordable housing, education, infrastructure, and health care, as opposed to, say, luring one of the most valuable companies on Earth to the neighborhood, maybe the next apology should be for the residents of Queens?

Facebook is no longer selling connected TV ads

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Facebook, in its ever-expanding attempt to take over the entire digital ad world, had been offering publishers on its Audience Network platform the ability to sell ads on their connected TV apps. That, according to Digiday, is no longer happening. The company has decided to halt its OTT television ad offerings.

In a statement to the media news site, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the news, saying: “We worked with a small set of publishers to test monetizing their connected-TV apps with ads from Audience Network and ultimately decided not to move forward with the concept.”

This is essentially Facebook admitting that it does not have the ability or bandwidth to enter into this growing advertising market. Before, publishers were able to use Facebook’s ad network to sell ads on their own connected TV apps using some of Facebook’s inventory. But the providers of these OTT services have begun trying to crack down on new players selling ads on their platforms. Roku, specifically, has reportedly been limiting the types of third-party ads it allows–even allegedly refusing to approve ads that contain Facebook’s code.

Not only that, but it seems that Facebook also had trouble proving to its Audience Network customers that it was able to be a better OTT ad network than the other ones out there–or even the platforms themselves. With this, Facebook has apparently decided to call it quits.

This comes as Facebook’s overall digital advertising marketshare continues to fall. A recent report from Pivotal found that overall digital consumption on every Facebook platform fell by 7% this past September. Now that Facebook isn’t selling inventory on these non-Facebook OTT platforms, it seems it will have to look elsewhere for new ways to boost its ad network offerings.

You can read the full Digidayreport here.


Netflix is testing a mobile-only subscription for around $4 a month

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But the bad news is it appears it’s only being tested in Malaysia and a few other countries that aren’t the U.S. for now,reports TechCrunch. The mobile-only subscription costs RM17 per month (about four bucks). That compares to the company’s next-cheapest subscription tier in Malaysia, the Basic one, which costs RM33 (or about $8) a month.

Not much is known about the mobile-only tier, but presumably, it only allows Netflix subscribers to that tier to stream the service on mobile devices and not on in-home devices like an Apple TV or the Netflix app built into many smart TVs. The rollout of the new trial tier comes less than a week after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings revealed the company will begin testing lower-priced subscription plans in some markets in order to try to boost subscriber numbers.

The depressingly big business of pollution masks

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The Camp fire in Northern California is already the deadliest fire in California history, with 42 dead and 200 missing, and it’s only 30% contained. The fire’s smoke, combined with the Woolsey fire in southern California, has caused dangerous air conditions across much of the state.

The air is particularly bad in the Bay Area, which has led to increased demand for N95 particulate respirator masks, which local officials recommend for protection from wildfire smoke because they filter out at least 95% of very small particles. Some local San Francisco CVS Pharmacies have been sold out of single-use, throwaway pollution masks since last Thursday, with a new shipment coming in this morning. Some hardware stores are still stocked. Vogmask, which typically sells masks online for allergies, asthma, travel, and urban commuting, says its order volume in the Bay Area is 10 times greater than normal.

[Photo: O2Today/Marcel Wanders (design)]

Salt Lake City-based startup 02Today, which makes dual-layer masks for about $30 each, has already sold out of its supply. The company is currently taking pre-orders for its new mask, which was designed to function in both cool and warm environments–including areas near wildfires–but these won’t be available until December.

“Basically the last week has wiped out our version-one mask stock but we plan to be ready for the next major fire event, which as we now know is going to be part of our new reality here in parts of the United States,” says 02Today CEO Bruce Lorange.

The new reality is climate change. A report from the state of California released in May linked last year’s record-breaking fires with climate change, and Los Angeles fire chief Daryl Osby has said that climate change is the reason why this year’s fires are so much worse than in the past–partly because of drought and an extended fire season, which used to be only a few months but now is year-round. As , distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, says, “global warming exacerbates the conditions and raises the risk of wildfire.”

[Photo: Airinum]

Some high-end pollution mask and air purification startups have been giving discounts and free shipping for people living in California. Swedish company Airinum is offering free express shipping on its Urban Air Masks, which cost $79. Molekule, a San Francisco-based company that makes air purifiers for the home, is offering $100 off its $799 purifier for Californians with a code, as well as same-day shipping and pickup options.

3M, which mass-manufactures disposable N95 masks, says that it is challenging to estimate demand in the midst of a crisis. But the company stocks the American Red Cross with masks and has donated 500,000 of them in 2018 so far. Just this week, 3M donated another 22,000 respirators to disaster relief organizers in California.

Pollution mask companies like Airinum, 02Today, and U.K.-based Cambridge Mask Company have been scaling up their operations in the United States and Europe over the past two years in response to worsening air pollution in urban areas–92% of cities fail to meet the World Health Organization’s guidelines for air quality. Today, most demand for such products still comes from Asia, where large cities like New Delhi and Beijing have consistent air-quality problems. But with the increased frequency and severity of wildfires in the western United States, pollution masks may become a staple in every household. TechSci Research estimates that the global market for air purification devices will reach $29 billion by 2021.

The first female product manager at Google built a nonprofit to combat the sexism in tech

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Nancy Wang remembers sitting down in a vendor meeting. “There were 12 middle-aged men of a very similar demographic and me.” Ten minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, she spoke up to ask what the holdup was. “It is because your boss isn’t here,” she recalls one of the men saying.

The thing is, as the first, youngest, and only female product manager at Google Fiber between 2014 and 2016, she was the boss. “I am the person making the decisions,” she said as she reminded him that a multi-million-dollar deal was in the balance. The vendor in question was taken aback by this information.

For Wang, however, this treatment was all too familiar. Over the course of nearly a decade of work experience in infrastructure product management and engineering, Wang has witnessed firsthand how few women there are in tech. In her current role as lead product manager for the startup Rubrik, she was also the first female to be hired into that role.

The lack of women tech mentors

According to the National Center for Women in Technology, women make up only 26% of the tech workforce, and Wang adds that in product management that number drops to 5%. She recalls one female tech leader pointing out that while that number may be growing (albeit slowly), adding three women to a marketing team at a tech company isn’t the same as increasing the number of women in actual technical roles. “We need to find ways to address that,” she asserts.

And she’s seen that companies aren’t stepping up. In fact, thousands of staff at her former employer staged a walkout on November 1 to protest Google’s policies on sexual harassment following reports that male executives accused of sexual misconduct were given multi-million-dollar exit packages for years.

“On one hand Google does well with support groups,” Wang points out, but at the same time, there’s a distinct lack of female. Wang says that holding up Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg as examples of female leadership is great, “but not very accessible to mid-level project managers.”

Wang says accessibility is crucial to mentorship as well as to see evidence of representation in roles you can aspire to reach. “I was fortunate that the director of product and the director of engineering were both very supportive,” she recalls, and they promoted her in her first year. But the fact that she had to rely on male mentors who couldn’t understand a woman’s challenges in the space wasn’t helpful. And her only female mentor was on the business side–not in a tech role. So when Wang had a question about how to best motivate engineers, her female mentor wasn’t equipped to answer. “It’s hard to empathize with someone not in the same career role,” she explains.

Filling in the Gaps

Wang’s had to figure out strategies on her own. Right now at Rubrik, there is less female representation than there was even at Google. As a result of collaborating with so many men who aren’t accustomed to working with women, she’s had to be extremely thorough in preparation for presenting ideas so they don’t get dismissed out of hand. Not only does she come armed with data points, says Wang, but she records testimonials from customers asking for a specific feature. “This is all the supporting facts I present before I even advance my idea,” she says.

Admitting that even with a rock-solid format like that, not all of her ideas have come to fruition, but she does say that through putting some of these tactical strategies in her own proposals at Rubrik, she’s been able to lead a significant portion of the company’s P&L and annual revenue for product lines for this year as well as those coming out in 2019.

Sharing her hard-won knowledge with others was the incentive to start Advancing Women in Product (AWIP), a tech networking and mentoring organization. Wang says that the events the AWIP sponsors are designed to provide the kind of mentorship to women that is lacking in the sector.

For example, there was a workshop on how to get executive buy-in when presenting to a manager or at a board meeting. The goal was not only how to present ideas but how to put them forth in a way that they are advanced and championed. This also tackled how best to respond to pushback as a woman, “because society paints this picture that we are softer and more malleable oftentimes that we can be taken advantage of,” says Wang.

AWIP provides tactical training and advice when encountering those who might discount their ideas out of hand. Another panel dealt with expanding your sphere of influence when vying for promotions at different levels.The need was evident in the fact that membership is now in excess of 3,000 with its largest contingent in the Bay Area, but also across the U.S., North America, Europe, and Asia. And part of their mission statement is equality, so AWIP has a number of male ambassadors and was recently actively recruiting for its Seattle team.

As she told Built in Seattle, “We try to keep an even ratio of 50% women and 50% men because men, in my opinion, are an essential part of the conversation. We’re talking about diversity in boardrooms, and 100% women isn’t the right answer either.”

He told Bozoma Saint John to work for Uber. “Of course, I hung up on him.”

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When we recently asked Adam Platzner, an investor, serial entrepreneur, and cofounder of personalized news app ZIG Media, to name his business icon, he immediately responded: “Boz is not only an icon, she’s a dear friend. Her story is epic.”

“Boz” is Bozoma Saint John, chief marketing officer at talent giant Endeavor. Like Cher, Beyonce, and Madonna (icons in their own right), she’s mononymous–at least in the business world–after high-profile stints at Uber, Apple, and Beats Music. In a series of recent email exchanges, Saint John and Platzner shared with Fast Company the story of their almost-instant friendship and what they’ve learned from each other over the years. Excerpts from our conversation follow, lightly edited for length and clarity:

Platzner recalls trying to set up a lunch with Saint John in 2013, when she was global head of music and entertainment at PepsiCo.

[Photo: courtesy of Adam Platzner]
Platzner: Like, 10 dates [were] calendared and rescheduled later. We had never met. And I was like, “Who the heck is this woman?” I never expected what would happen next.

I decided to look her up and follow her on Facebook. I quickly found out, along with Boz’s other followers, that I was on a riveting, emotional, raw, very personal journey. Boz’s husband, Peter, was battling cancer. They had a little adorable daughter, Lael, and I think as part outlet, part therapy, and just a way to keep all her friends and family in the loop, she shared her experience. I found myself understanding why she had to cancel so many meetings. And not understanding how she could work, take care of her daughter, take care of her husband, and actually take care of herself, all at the same time. I began to become inspired by her courage. And when Peter passed away, it was heartbreaking.

Then I started to see the aftermath in my feed, the tributes, the way she handled things after Peter’s death [at the end of 2013]. I just had to finally meet this woman. Boz had recently left Pepsi to be the CMO of Beats, and I didn’t have her new email. So I took a chance and sent her a DM on Facebook. She replied pretty fast and we arranged to have lunch during SXSW in Austin.

Saint John: I remember looking at my calendar at SXSW and feeling overwhelmed by my emotional exhaustion and deep grief over my husband’s death. I knew that I’d rescheduled Adam a few times already, so I didn’t want to cancel, but I could barely pull myself out of my hotel room. I prayed that I wouldn’t burst into tears at lunch in front of this stranger, but as I approached the table, he stood up and gave me a big hug. I knew instinctively that it wouldn’t matter if I cried or not; somehow I was safe with him, and it would be okay. It turned out to be more than okay, because we talked about work, life, and he mercilessly made fun of me for canceling on him. In that first meeting, I knew I’d made a friend for life. He’s driven, compassionate, funny, obsessive, and caring–all traits he exhibited within the first 20 minutes.

Platzner: Boz is an incredible listener. I don’t think people value this enough. It’s innate in real-deal leaders, and as a friend it means everything. On the personal side, you cannot admire what an amazing leader Boz is, or admire her as a friend, without really appreciating what an incredible mother she is to Lael.

Platzner was an early advocate of Saint John’s move to Uber, which she joined as chief brand officer, in 2017, after heading up global consumer marketing at Apple Music. (Apple acquired Beats in 2014, shortly after Saint John joined.)

Saint John: Adam has incredible vision. It’s instantaneous and infectious. He knows where the cultural conversation is going before most of us have begun to see any changes. He’s the one who saw what had begun to take shape in the public opinion of Uber, and told me that’s where I needed to go. Of course, I hung up on him. But over the course of six months, and many other “serendipitous” events, I knew I had to go to Uber, too. It’s that same knowing that makes him a brilliant entrepreneur and businessman–he can see ahead and make the call even when it seems highly unlikely.

Platzner: So many times I think Boz and I give each other the same-ish advice. But it helps to be able to talk through things and examine all the sides with someone you believe in. As an entrepreneur I always describe myself as “strategically impatient” because you’re constantly up against crazy odds. Boz always tells me to just be patient.

Saint John: I thought I was an aggressive risk taker before I met Adam. Then I realized that I need to be more so. He doesn’t take no for an answer–ever. He’s constantly pushing me to do more, do it faster, and do it now.

Platzner: I’ve always said with a smile that I look forward to being chairman of “Boz for Governor” or “Boz for Senate.” But I’m not joking. Bozoma Saint John will be governor of California one day and/or serve in the U.S. Senate. There is also a really nice house on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., that I could see her settling into quite comfortably. We would be lucky to have someone in there with such an abundance of empathy, discipline, and character.

Saint John: He thinks I should run for office. I believe he should do the same. Maybe we’ll run on the same ticket … a black woman and a Jewish man … sounds like a winning combo to me.

These ambitious headphones are Dolby’s first consumer product ever

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The fact that these new wireless headphones are emblazoned with the Dolby logo does not, at first blush, seem like a big whoop. After all, countless products have incorporated Dolby technologies and promoted that usage, making its name a sort of shorthand for a premium audio—and, more recently, visual—experience.

But if you examine these Dolby Dimension headphones carefully, you’ll see that they carry only the familiar Dolby “double D.” That’s because they’re something new: a consumer product designed and marketed by Dolby itself. For the first time, the brand and the tech it represents are front and center, not just ingredients in some other company’s offering.

[Photo: courtesy of Dolby]
The Dimension headphones—which are optimized for delivering quality sound while you watch video at home on a TV, a tablet, or a phone—are ambitious in multiple ways. Yet it’s also clear that Dolby isn’t trying too hard to shake up the category it’s entering. They’ll sell for $599–a head-snapper of a price in a market where product lines from even higher-end brands such as Bose and Beats top out at $400. And at least at first, they’ll be available only from Dolby itself and (starting on December 1) at B8ta, a small chain of retail gadget showcases. Even if they’re a success, they probably won’t strike fear into the hearts of other manufacturers. Which is just as well for Dolby, since it provides technology to many of those companies and wouldn’t want to turn them into adversaries.

CEO Kevin Yeaman [Photo: courtesy of Dolby]
When I ask Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman why Dolby decided to get into the consumer electronics game on its own, he doesn’t go out of his way to sell it as a landmark moment. Over the company’s history, “we’ve primarily applied our innovation to highly produced content and complex ecosystems,” he says matter-of-factly. “But we believe that this very same innovation can be applied to bring even more value to the world. And in some cases that’s going to mean us bringing something directly to market ourselves. You could imagine it being an app or a service or a product. In this case it’s a product.”

More specifically, it’s a product in a field that already bristles with competition and doesn’t obviously cry out for yet another entrant. Which is why Dolby worked hard to ensure that its headphones aren’t just more of the same.

In the beginning

Founded by audio engineer Ray Dolby in 1965, Dolby Laboratories initially focused on technologies for the professional market but morphed into a consumer brand by the early 1970s. Its noise-reduction technology minimized the hissing sound that was at the time a significant downside of music recorded on cassette tapes. That helped cassettes establish themselves as a credible medium at a time when purists still favored vinyl or even reel-to-reel tape.

In 1970, a Popular Science article explained that cassette decks with Dolby noise reduction cost about $100 more than equivalent decks sans Dolby. The magazine said the extra cost for what it called “the Dolby” was well worth it—if you were a discerning audiophile with a serious hi-fi system. (Its caution was presumably explained in part by the fact that $100 in 1970 dollars was the equivalent of about $650 today.)

Making cassettes sound better was not a business destined to matter forever. But Dolby deftly extended its expertise in audio in ways that helped consumer-electronics manufacturers, Hollywood, and the music industry make entertainment better. For instance, Dolby Stereo debuted in movie theaters with A Star Is Born—the 1976 Streisand version, that is—and got a big boost a year later when it helped make Star Wars an entertainment phenomenon. Its descendant, Dolby Atmos, uses far more sophisticated technology to create immersive audio that doesn’t require an infinite number of speakers to make movie watchers feel like they’re surrounded by sound.

Today, Atmos is available in variants for both theaters and home use. So is Dolby Vision, the company’s technology for high-dynamic range visuals with deep blacks, vivid colors, and lots of contrast. Both Atmos and Vision are part of Dolby Cinema, a turnkey experience currently available on 180 screens around the world, including ones at 100-plus AMC theaters in the U.S.

The company doesn’t just take charge of a Dolby Cinema’s audio/visual system; it even specs elements such as the seating, which provides both cushy comfort and a clear line of sight to the screen. “Historically we had always just sold products into screening rooms,” says Yeaman, who happens to be presenting to me, an audience of one, in the Dolby Cinema at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “With Dolby Cinema, we wanted to ensure a higher quality of experience.” In effect, each Dolby Cinema is a giant Dolby-conceived product. And the new Dimension headphones spring from a similar desire to bear full responsibility for what the venerable brand means.

Though Dolby built its business by licensing intellectual property to others, it’s not an utter newbie when it comes to creating what Steve Jobs used to call “the whole widget.” Since 2010, the company has offered reference monitors—ultra-industrial-strength displays for professional content creators. It also now sells a speaker phone and videoconferencing equipment designed for corporate use.

As Dolby began to think about the headphones that became Dolby Dimension, it surveyed the headphone market as it stood, encompassing everything from dinky earbuds to huge, honking, over-the-ear cans. Most products skewed toward a particular use-case scenario: travel, sports, or music. Dolby, with its long experience providing technology to make entertainment sound and look better at home, gravitated toward a niche that seemed like an opportunity: in-home listening to movies and TV shows.

In the early days of in-home video streaming, consumers were smitten with the ability to call up a movie on demand and didn’t seem to be that fussy about how it looked and sounded. “What I would often hear is, ‘Kevin, the world has chosen convenience over quality,'” says Yeaman. But the experience you can expect when watching a movie over the internet has steadily improved, and Dolby has played its part. Apple TV, for instance, now supports both Atmos and Vision, and Netflix offers an ever-increasing catalog of movies and shows enhanced by Dolby technologies. That gave the company confidence that there might be a market for headphones aimed at people who like to binge-stream and care about the audio aspect of what they’re watching.

[Photo: courtesy of Dolby]
Then there’s the fact that video watching has become increasingly less communal, even when it’s done in the living room. By way of explanation, Dolby VP of new products Ariel Fischer shows me a stock photo of a wholesome family watching TV together from a comfy white sofa.

“They’re all happy and they all agreed that at the very specific time of day they’re going to be sitting together in front of the big screen and agreeing to watch the same piece of content,” he says. “We love it. We just have one major problem with it. It’s not today’s reality.” In the real world, some of those family members might be fixated on their own smartphones or tablets—even if everybody’s hanging out in the living room together. Suddenly, the notion of using headphones for private listening to a movie on a 55-inch flat-screen doesn’t sound like such an improbable scenario.

Dimension’s emphasis on at-home listening starts with the way you keep them charged. The left cup connects magnetically to a charging dock, leaving the right cup suspended in air by the headband and the whole affair looking a bit like a piece of curvy, avant-garde sculpture. The idea is that you’ll stow the headphones on the dock when not in use rather than throwing them in a backpack and forgetting to charge them until the battery is nearly depleted. (In the interest of versatility, the headphones do come with a carrying case, can be charged with a stock Micro USB cable, let you make and take phone calls, and are compatible with Siri and the Google Assistant; “home first, mobile second,” says Fischer.)

As you would expect, the Dimension headphones use active noice-cancellation technology to block out external distractions. More intriguingly, they acknowledge the fact that at home, you might not want to seal yourself off from your surroundings—especially if someone like a spouse or offspring wants your attention. A technology called LifeMix lets you choose to pump both the audio you’re consuming and ambient room noise into your ears simultaneously, allowing you to hear other folks clearly without tugging a headphone off one of your ears. You invoke LifeMix mode by double-tapping a touch surface on the right cup—which also lets you tap to pause playback and swipe to adjust volume—and can use Dolby’s smartphone app to adjust the blend of recorded and real-world sound to your taste.

[Photo: courtesy of Dolby]
Buttons on the edge of the right cup let you switch the headphones between three different Bluetooth-compatible devices—maybe a TV set-top box, tablet, and phone—and the app allows you to manage up to eight devices in total. Another feature, head tracking, is turned off by default. It detects when you’ve turned your head away from the screen and uses virtualization to keep the audio from feeling like it’s drifting with you—making the experience a bit more like you’d get from speakers, which stay put even if your ears don’t.

Yes, but how do they sound?

Full disclosure: I am in no way an audiophile. But I enjoyed auditioning Dolby’s headphones over a week and a half with several devices and a variety of content, at home and aboard a plane flight. The name “Dimension” nicely conveys the 3D-like quality of the sound they deliver. Their industrial design, crafted by an in-house Dolby team, is slick and comfortable, with soft surfaces rather than hard plastics; the touch controls work well.

In all, Dolby seems to have built exactly the headphones it set out to create. “It’s about . . . driving a new experience that’s staying core to what they do, which is great sound and great immersive experiences when it comes to content,” says analyst Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies.

Still, Dimension’s very uniqueness means it’s no sure thing. Less sophisticated wireless headphones designed for use with TVs have been around for a long time—I remember buying a pair circa the early 1990s—but remain something of an oddity. Dimension will only take off if consumers get their head around the concept of a pair of headphones designed to be enveloping, but—thanks to LifeMix—not necessarily isolating.

“It’s one of the challenges that we know we have to overcome,” acknowledges Fischer. Putting on a pair of headphones has long amounted to a signal that “I don’t want to talk to you or I need to focus on what I’m doing,” he says. “And we want to break the boundaries. Because at home, people don’t want life canceling.”

So is Dimension an experiment, or the first in a line of Dolby consumer-electronics products? “We’ll see where this takes us,” says Yeaman. For now, he adds, “our true north is the quality of the experience. And this is a proof point of our innovation.”

Lego’s latest set targets stressed adults

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Lego is one of the most popular brands in the world, known and loved by children and nostalgic adults alike. But few grown-ups buy Lego for themselves. The Danish company wants to change that with a new type of construction toy that is half Lego, half coloring book. Its name is Lego Forma, and it’s designed to de-stress adults and get their creative juices flowing.

[Image: Lego]
Right now, there are three types of adult Lego users. First, you have the AFOLs (as the Adult Fans of Lego call themselves). These are people who love to build sets, particularly the big, complex ones like the 7,500-brick Millennium Falcon, the 3-foot tall NASA Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket, or the 4,287-piece London Tower Bridge. They also build pieces in bulk to create insane models like this 23-foot-long USS Intrepid with fighter planes to scale. Then there are adult buyers who occasionally buy those sets or smaller ones, perhaps for nostalgic reasons. Or they buy models designed for adult audiences, like the company’s architectural series. The third group, much smaller, is made up of professionals, like famous Danish architect Barjke Ingels, who use Lego to build prototypes. In fact, Ingels and his team designed the Lego House in Billund, Denmark, using Lego bricks.

Beyond that, there are lot of adults who aren’t buying Lego. Those are the people Lego wants to lure in with Forma. Lego sees an untapped market in adults who are looking for a casual creative outlet but may not feel comfortable picking up a paintbrush. It’s solid business logic. According to a 2017 study, creativity is an estimated $44 billion industry, up 45% from 2011. Endeavors, like drawing, coloring, and crafting, have become 21st-century tranquilizers for over-subscribed, unfulfilled adults.

The Forma line combines Lego elements–of a variety called Technic, which is more complex than the regular ones–and paper skins that can be colored in whatever way the builder wants. The Lego pieces form a skeleton for the paper, which acts as an organic shell. Then you operate a crankshaft to move a series of gears that make the fish wiggle as it would in real life. And yes, the first models are all centered on fish (more on this later).

[Image: Lego]

Forma’s objective, according to Lego, is to tap into the creativity all adults have and help them relax. Sure, you can do that with any bunch of Lego bricks, but the company believes that combining organic forms and mechanical complexity might appeal to the type of users that would have never considered buying a Lego set. Selling for $46 each on Indiegogo (with a $66 market price), they aren’t as expensive as traditional Lego sets. The base set comes with a Koi fish skin, but Lego will sell other skins–like a shark or a splash Koi fish for $15 each.

[Image: Lego]

I spoke with Tom Donaldson, the chief of the Creative PlayLab at the Lego Group, to find out more about the new line.

FAST COMPANY: What was the process that led to this idea?

TOM DONALDSON: This was more a creative process than a logical process. But underlying it all was a desire to come up with a completely new aesthetic with much softer and organic forms. We felt that while many in the adult audience love our existing range, perhaps there was an aesthetic that might appeal to a different audience, and we felt that fluid, organic forms were something very different that was worth testing the appeal of.

FC: Walk us through the development process.

TD: This was the fastest product ever to get to market from the Lego Group. It started with a serendipitous connection between an individual designer and a marketeer. We give our designers 10% of their time to use as they see fit, and this designer was playing with kinetic sculptures and organic forms. The marketeer was looking at how to evolve one of our product lines and the connection was set. The process was very iterative–every two weeks exploring new designs, new market opportunities and testing with consumers wherever possible.

FC: The project raised $1.4 million on Indiegogo, 1,334% of the original target. Why did you decide to crowdfund it rather than just release it like other sets?

TD: We see this very much in the spirit of open innovation as pioneered by Lego Ideas (a site that lets users share ideas for new products). But that mostly appeals to those who already know us and are already building regularly. We wanted to appeal to those who aren’t yet regular adult Lego builders. Crowdfunding lets us find ways to invite new users to help co-create the future of our products.

9 CEOs share their favorite productivity hacks

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We all have the same number of hours in a week, but for some of us the demands on our time are greater. This is true with CEOs. A study published in Harvard Business Review found that each week CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours and attend 37 meetings. Getting the most out of their hours is critical.

Here are nine tricks successful CEOs use to squeeze more productivity out of themselves and their employees:

Keep one day a week free from meetings

Thirty-seven meetings a week is a lot, and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz makes sure at least one day a week is meeting-free, implementing a company-wide “No Meeting Wednesdays” (NMW) rule.

“The high-level goal of NMW is to ensure that everyone gets a large block of time each week to do focused, heads-down work,” he writes on the company blog. “The justification is well articulated in a now famous Paul Graham article: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The gist is that makers suffer greatly from interruptions in their flow time. Managers are generally used to having a schedule-driven day, so it’s easy for them to throw a disruption into somebody else’s calendar. Makers also do this to each other.”

Moskovitz wants managers to be makers some of the time, so NMW ensures they get some flow time, too, he said.

Make time for a nap

One of the best ways to recharge during the day is with a nap, and StockX CEO Josh Luber isn’t afraid to admit that he sleeps on the job.

“I find that one of the best ways to maintain productivity is to incorporate power naps into your day,” he says. “At the rate at which StockX is growing, it’s a 24-hour job and I spend 70% to 80% of my time on the road across varying time zones, which can be hard on your body. I take 11-minute naps once or twice per day and find that it makes for increased energy and efficiency.”

Use downtime to think

Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx, knows that she does her best thinking in the car. The problem is that she lives very close to her office.

“I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me,” she told LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman on his podcast Masters of Scale.

Blakely also said she brings a notebook with her to take advantage of lulls. “There’s a number of events where the content on stage is super boring, but I’m locked in my chair because I can’t walk out,” she told Hoffman. “That’s the reason I always bring a notepad with me, because what I’ll do is I’ll start working. I have the focus of the fact that I can’t leave, I can’t get distracted, I can’t go work on something and I can’t do email, and I’m just sitting there with my pad of paper. I’m sitting there going, ‘Okay, this is really fucking boring,’ and I pull out my notepad and I start working.”

Be specific with email

Katia Beauchamp, cofounder of Birchbox, says one of her best productivity tricks is something simple: She insists that her team includes a deadline in their email.

“It makes prioritization so much faster,” she told Lifehacker.

Say “no” more often

Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, says it’s hard to be productive when you say “yes” to too many things. So he is very selective about what he does.

“All the techniques and hacks in the world never add up to the power of ‘no,'” he told Lifehacker. “Having fewer things to do is the best way to get things done. I’m very careful with my time and attention–it’s my most precious resource. If you don’t have that, you can’t do what you want to do. And if you can’t do what you want to do, what’s the point?”

Skip hierarchical structures and be direct

Following the chain of command can slow down a process, says Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In an email to his staff published on Inc.com, he tells employees “communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done.”

“A major source of issues is poor communication between departments,” he writes. “The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

Make quicker decisions

When it’s time to make a decision, stop wasting time, former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Meg Whitman said in an interview with Forbes. “I take in all the data,” she said. “A fast ‘no’ is better than a long extended ‘no’ or long extended ‘yes.’ It helps knowing that when you make mistakes, you can always fix mistakes.”

You have to be prudent, she said. “People can get frozen,” she said. “If you think about every bad thing that will happen, you freeze. This is where pattern recognition is really helpful. I’ve been doing this for so long; I’ve seen the movie before.”

Send fewer emails

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sends fewer emails to receive fewer emails. In a post on LinkedIn, he said that at a previous company he noticed that his inbox got lighter after two email-happy colleagues left the organization.

“Turns out, it wasn’t just their emails that were generating all of that inbox activity–it was my responses to their emails, the responses of the people who were added to those threads, the responses of the people those people subsequently copied, and so on,” he writes.

He decided to conduct an experiment, only writing emails when absolutely necessary. “End result: Materially fewer emails and a far more navigable inbox. I’ve tried to stick to the same rule ever since,” he writes.

Create better lists

Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, starts each morning with his twist on the standard to-do list.

“Make a list of everything you want to accomplish that day. Be as exhaustive as possible,” he told Hoffman during an episode of Masters of Scale. “Group a few similar tasks together. Ask yourself for each group: What one action takes care of all of these? “It’s like a game of leverage.”

Repeat the grouping and refining process until you have just a few big tasks.

“If you have a list of 20 things to do, you end up realizing, ‘I don’t need to do 20 things,'” Chesky said. “If I do these three big things, the other 20 things will kind of happen as outcomes, or outputs, of it.”


Wait, is this a date? Horror stories from female investors working with a male founder

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When people talk about the sometimes knotty relationship between entrepreneurs and VCs, they usually point to female founders and male investors. But being a female VC presents challenges on both ends—from their male investor peers and the pool of (largely) male entrepreneurs they may work with.

Some female investors we talked to said they hadn’t faced much explicit harassment or discrimination, or that it usually came from investors, not entrepreneurs. But for others, cultivating relationships with male founders sometimes meant taking business meetings that turn into unwanted dates, or weathering pointed questions about their role and experience.

Founders may doubt your experience

Sheila*, a VC based in Chicago, finds that male entrepreneurs don’t necessarily underestimate her or treat her differently solely because of her gender. The bigger issue can be her experience, especially as someone whose tenure in venture capital is only about three years. Of course, that also has to do with the venture capital boys’ club. “Generally, the bias from the hotshot [founders] that I’ve noticed is not gender-related,” she said. “It’s more tenure related . . . A lot of the best deals are still passed between the mostly male general partners at coastal funds.”

But thanks to the leadership at her fund, she rarely feels coerced or cornered into inking deals with entrepreneurs that rub her the wrong way. “The good news is that our fund has a ‘no assholes’ rule,'” she said. “If I ever feel like someone’s not a good person, the advice I’ve gotten from my partners is, ‘Life is too short—just don’t do the deal.'”

Another VC in the Midwest felt like she was able to establish good working relationships with male founders where her “gender wasn’t an issue.” Sometimes, she said, her gender was seen as a benefit if the company was trying to reach female consumers. But she noted that her background also helped legitimize her to founders. “I was from the coasts investing in the Midwest,” she said. “I had connections to Stanford and Harvard alumni networks . . . I feel like the expertise and access that I brought outweighed the fact that I was a woman.”

You may field inappropriate texts

“I text with a lot of founders,” said New York-based VC Caitlin. “I noticed all the guys on my team do it.” When she was working on a deal a few months into her current job, a founder claimed he was interested in the fund because he wanted to work with Caitlin. Following a drinks meeting, at which Caitlin’s boss was also present, the founder—who runs a 3-D printing company—said there was something he “really wanted” to ask her.

“I want to ask what your ring size is,” he texted, as per Caitlin’s recollection. “Why don’t you think about what I want? Why don’t you try to decode what I’m trying to say?” Later that night, he texted again, to remind her not to forget what he had asked. Caitlin immediately knew something was off, but she struggled to label it as outright harassment until she told her boss about the incident.

“The subtle [comments] are almost worse than the overt ones because you feel like you’re insane,” Caitlin said. “I started to feel this shame and feel like, ‘Is he even doing anything wrong? Is this okay? . . . You create doubt in yourself, and that’s what was so infuriating to me—because it feels like they’re taking away some sort of power.”

Caitlin’s firm ended up passing on the founder, though she claims it was for a different reason. “In a male-dominated industry, you don’t want to be the reason that they pass on an amazing deal,” she said.

Founders don’t know why you’re in the room

For another Chicago-based VC, some of the frustrations she felt earlier in her career are less pronounced now.”There’s definitely a lot of stuff that just continues to wear you down,” she said. “In the beginning of my career it was much more frustrating. Everyone just automatically thought I was the admin in meetings.” Still, she still finds that founders make assumptions about women in the room. “Even today, I can be with a colleague or even a group of people at the same level as me, and we’ll introduce ourselves, and the entrepreneur will be like, ‘Oh, so what is your role?’ They assume the men are investors, but they have to ask me.”

In those instances, she often thinks about whether the founder’s behavior is an indicator of how they might treat a female employee. “The worst part about it is you don’t want to bash people like that,” she said. “But then you have to force yourself to think objectively and say, ‘Okay, does this trickle down to how they treat people on their team? Or is this just because they don’t understand, or they have a bias?’ You get into such a mind manipulation trying to work yourself out of those scenarios.”

You may end up on a date

A number of the women I spoke to argued the power dynamic was still tipped in their favor as the people holding the money, but San Francisco-based VC Victoria felt that wasn’t necessarily true with founders who had no trouble attracting investors. “In some cases, when it’s a successful male founder, the power imbalance is on his side,” she said. “He already has a lot of capital—so it’s kind of case-by-case, depending on how hot the round is.”

When Victoria launched her own fund in 2014, she had multiple encounters with male founders that were intended as business meetings but did not end up that way. “I hustled to get deals, and I think you need to have that personality to succeed in venture,” she said. One time, she reached out to an ex-Google founder and asked to grab coffee. “He immediately suggested drinks,” she said. “And he ended up pushing out [the meeting] even later, past 7:30 p.m. It was immediately obvious he wasn’t interested in [my fund]. It was very clear he was treating it as a date.” She said the founder even tried to kiss her. “It was very clear he felt the power dynamic on his side, and the meeting was not a business meeting,” she said. “I made it a policy not to meet with male founders after 6 p.m., unless I know them extremely well.”

Like other women I spoke to, she said things improved once she was a bit older and got married. “When you’re younger, you think, I guess this is normal?” But the fact that networking and meetings frequently took place over drinks meant some men could capitalize on the social context of those events. “I didn’t drink in college, and when I moved to the Valley, I realized that alcohol is such a big part of the ecosystem,” she said. “A lot of these social events revolve around drinking, which definitely introduces that ambiguity . . . It’s not necessarily a business context. It’s a gray area.”

Jennifer, a New York-based VC, said that gray area means some men steer clear of female investors at a happy hour or networking event. “You’re inherently unapproachable at these things because there’s sexual tension,” she said. Like Victoria, Jennifer has also worried about how an entrepreneur may perceive a one-on-one meeting. “I’ve been offered, ‘Come by our studio, i’ll give you a private tour of this thing,'” she said. “And it’s really hard to discern intention sometimes.”

She has had to ask herself similar questions at networking events, where it seemed like men were hitting on her or treating her like a date. And when she talks to founders at those types of events, it can sometimes feel like they would rather be talking to her male colleagues. “For an industry that prides itself on innovation, people are not trying to meet founders in creative ways,” she said. “I can’t say remove alcohol from it entirely, but women are at an inherent disadvantage in that setting.”

*To maintain anonymity, we used pseudonyms.

Here are some dread-inducing statistics on open plan offices

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Do people really care about working in offices with social events and perks like cold brew taps and ping-pong tables? Or do people simply want a quiet, comfortable place to do their work in peace before heading home to their actual lives? According to an online survey of American office workers conducted by the public opinion survey company YouGov, it’s–surprise!–the latter.

The survey was commissioned by the company Room, which  makes modular workspaces and obviously has a strong motive to paint open-plan offices in a negative light. But the results are still interesting, for the picture they paint of life in American offices today.

Overall, the survey polled more than 4,000 workers, and more than 400 open plan workers specifically. A few notes on how this design paradigm makes people feel: 31% of people have “held back their true thoughts and opinions while on calls in the office because they don’t want coworkers to hear and judge them.” 16% people feel their “overall quality of health has declined” in open plan offices. 13% say they’ve considered leaving their jobs because of their office layout.

Bleak! But not compared to the survey’s other conceit, which was to ask these workers what they’d give up for private workspaces.

  • 13% said they’d give up their end-of-year bonuses.
  • 13% said they’d give up five vacation days, and 16% said they’d do away with summer Fridays.
  • 17% said they’d give up access to a window or natural light.
  • 27% said they’d give up their office’s coffee machine.

And then there’s the concession that will surprise no one: Of these hundreds of workers, one in four would give up their office’s holiday party for access to a more private workspace.

It would be easy to pin the blame purely on design trends here, but the fact of the matter is that the open plan office is one of many solutions companies have used for decades to do two things: Keep overhead as low as possible, and keep an eye on employees.

New at the Apple store: A skincare product

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Now when you’re toodling around the Apple store or website looking for a new iPad and keyboard, you can also pick up a skincare product.

Today, Apple starts selling L’Oreal’s newest tool called the My Skin Track UV, made by the La Roche-Posay brand. The company first unveiled this product at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in January 2018 and it is now ready for consumers. This is the first time that Apple is venturing into the world of beauty and skincare in its store.

[Photo: courtesy of LOreal USA]
My Skin Track UV is a tiny $59.99 wearable device that you can attach to your clothing to measures your individual exposure to UVA and UVB rays; a companion app tracks your exposure to pollution, pollen, and humidity. It will provide instant status updates, as well as store up to three months’ worth of data.

The device is cleverly designed to be battery free–its sensor is activated by the sun, and is then powered by the user’s smartphone using near field communication. The product was designed in collaboration with Yves Behar, and relied on research gathered by Northwestern University’s John Rogers, who has developed a range of stretchable electronic devices.

It is designed to motivate wearers to engage in safer outdoor behavior. While most people are aware about the sun’s impact on the skin, this knowledge often doesn’t actually prompt them to change their behavior. L’Oreal’s research found that when consumers had regular, accurate updates about their sun exposure, 34% applied sunscreen more often, and 37% sought shade more frequently.

Google Assistant just made morning alarms smarter

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If you have an Android phone, you’ll soon be able to hear the weather, traffic, news, and music from Google Assistant when you wake up, as Google is adding Google Assistant Routines to Android’s standard clock app. This allows you to automate a series of commands (such as “tell me about the weather” or “turn on the bedroom lights”) after dismissing an alarm.

The Clock integration is one of several new Google Assistant features that the search giant announced this morning. The others include:

  • Suggested recipes on the Google Home Hub and other smart displays;
  • The ability to silence your phone from a Google Home speaker;
  • Themed alarms with characters from Lego and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles;
  • New books and interactive stories for kids–as well as a “Read Along” feature that can complement certain children’s books with music and sound effects;
  • If you use Broadcast to send one-way messages to multiple Google Home speakers, those messages will soon appear on your phone so you can reply back.

None of these are major features, but they do continue the game of feature leapfrog that Google and Amazon have been playing over the last couple of years as they compete to make the best virtual assistant.

Watch out Converse! Allbirds just dropped some high tops

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Allbirds–the tech world’s favorite shoe brand–is expanding its shoe styles beyond its sneaker, loafer, and skipper silhouettes. Today, it drops a new style called Tree Topper. This new pair will go for $115–slightly more expensive than Allbirds’ other shoes, which all cost $95. In keeping with the rest of the the company’s collection, these new shoes are as minimal as possible. The designers stripped out all unnecessary seams and other superfluous elements, focusing on creating clean lines.

[Photo: courtesy of Allbirds]
These new sneakers seem inspired by the traditional Converse high top, but they stand out from other sneakers on the market because they are made as sustainably as possible. They use three natural materials: moisture-wicking wool, eucalyptus fiber sourced from sustainably grown trees, and a foam sole made from sugarcane.


Related:Allbirds wants to fix your sole


As I wrote earlier this year, Allbirds is investing heavily in materials innovation. It previously launched its new sole called SweatFoam, which uses sustainably sourced Brazilian sugarcane, and is significantly more environmentally friendly than the vast majority of EVA foam on the market. Allbirds also made its recipe for SweetFoam open source, to encourage other footwear brands to incorporate a more sustainable foam into their shoes. Tree Topper is the very first sneaker in the Allbirds line that will carry this sugarcane-based sole.

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