Mobile devices keep us connected 24/7, but digital detox retreats offer a way to regain control.

Smartphones are used for much more than just calling or texting. We're using them as alarm clocks, reminders to attend meetings, and as a way to manage a variety of tasks.

According to a 2015 report by Pew Research Center, 62% of those surveyed used their phone to look up information about a health condition, 57% for online banking, and 30% to take a class or get educational content. Eighteen percent even used it to submit a job application.

Due to this increasing dependence on mobile devices, resorts are now offering digital detox retreats where participants give up technology during their stay and discuss ways to manage their daily use. Retreats range from a rustic stay in cabins at Camp Grounded to a luxurious weekend retreat at The Spa at Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas.

Jodi Omear, a communications executive in Washington, D.C., attended Camp Grounded last summer with a friend and is heading back for another four-day retreat at the end of August.

Omear admits that before the retreat, she was very dependent on her devices. They were the last thing she looked at before going to sleep and first thing she looked at when she woke up. In between, she typically checked her smartphone every 10 to 15 minutes.

After work hours, it was not unusual for Omear to text her friend on her phone while using Gchat on her laptop, play Candy Crush on her iPad, and have the television on. In fact, her parents were so concerned that she wouldn't survive four days without a smartphone that they offered to pay for a hotel room if Omear and her friend couldn't make it to the end of the retreat.

Learning To Go Without

"When you check in, they take your phone, your watch, and any sort of fitness band, and you have no idea of anything," Omear says. "We wondered how we would know when to go to yoga, eat, or go to bed." Participants were also not allowed to talk about work.

During the retreat, Omear says she realized how much she uses her smartphone as a distraction. "When you are standing in line at Starbucks, you don't have to pull out your smartphone," she says. "You can actually talk with the person in front of you, or look around and see what's happening," Omear notes. But she observes that "in any awkward moment, we take out our phones so we look like we are doing something."

When Camp Grounded returned their devices to Omear and her friend, they were actually hesitant to use them. "Neither one of us wanted to turn our phones on," she says, "but we realized we needed to call our families." When they stopped at a grocery store and saw everyone looking at their phones, talking on their phones, and paying with their phones, she says they felt overwhelmed. "We got back in the car and turned our phones off," she says.

Changing Habits

Since returning to Washington, D.C., Omear took some steps to ensure she could stick with the shift in behavior. In addition to buying an alarm clock to help her wake up, she's banished the phone from the bedroom while she sleeps. She also purposefully leaves it at home when she does errands. At work, she takes five to 10-minute breaks without it by walking around the block.

One of the struggles, Omear says, is while she can change her own digital routines, she can't change the habits of others. It's not unusual to have dinner with friends who check their phones throughout the meal. One way to change that behavior, she says, is to have everyone put their phones in the center of the table and agree that the first person to touch their phone has to buy dinner for everyone.

Detoxing Just For The Day

Giving up your device for even one day can have a positive impact. That's why some companies are creating their own digital detox retreats by sponsoring an "Unplugged Day."

"The devices we use to produce things are also the devices we use to communicate, and that's a dangerous combination," says Nathan Hendricks, chief creative officer at branding firm LPK. All day long, employees are interrupted by email, texts, meeting notifications, and other pings from their smartphones, he says.

LPK sponsored a voluntary Unplugged Day last year and encouraged employees in its Cincinnati, London, Geneva, Singapore, and Guangzhou, China, offices to give up their smartphones and computers for one day.

To prepare, LPK crafted emails to clients ahead of time and told them the firm would be unplugged for a day. "The logic was, if we had a day off, or it was a holiday, people would deal with not being connected to us," Hendricks says. About half the employees, mostly in Cincinnati, participated, he says.

Ashley Edwards, strategy director of trends and Insights at LPK, was apprehensive about unplugging for a day, but is glad she did it. "We're all a bit too attached to our phones," she says. Edwards says she used to carry her phone to every meeting, looked at a screen for 50% or more of each workday, and heavily used social media at home. "If there was a lull in the conversation or if I was waiting for the elevator or at a red light, I would check email on my phone," she admits.

Learning Connectivity Isn't Always Essential

Initially, she says, giving up her phone was difficult but, as the day went on, it got easier. "Maybe," she says, "because we knew we would get our phones back." Despite not having a phone or a computer, Edwards says she felt the day was productive.

Much of her department's research, she says, is captured in meetings using Post-It notes that are displayed on a wall, so they didn't need a computer or smartphone. An added benefit was that employees were fully engaged at the meeting. "Everyone knows that feeling of 'you're not listening to me, you're on your phone,'" she says. On the device-free day, fewer people were looking down at their phones and paying attention instead.

Unplugged Day helped Edwards realize that mobile phones aren't as essential to her workday as she thought. As a result, Edwards has disabled all notifications on her devices except for voice mail and text. "The phone part is important," she says, "but all this other stuff on the phone doesn't facilitate work. It's more of a distraction than a necessary tool."

Asking these pointed questions will illuminate your choice and its implications in a totally different way.

Everyone hits a crossroad from time to time. We get stuck in a state of indecision on a problem that seems to have no correct answer, and at times, it can be maddening.

The most important decisions, whether in work or in life, never really seem to fall in the black or white. They linger in the gray, where they can remain for a dangerously long time. The journalist Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

Instead of letting circumstance make your next vital decision, Joseph L. Badaracco, the John Shad professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School, believes that the answer will reveal itself after answering five important questions.

As Badaracco writes in the Harvard Business Review:

Where do these questions come from? Over many centuries and across many cultures, they have emerged as men and women with serious responsibilities have struggled with difficult problems. They express the insights of the most penetrating minds and compassionate spirits of human history. I have relied on them for years, in teaching MBA candidates and counseling executives, and I believe that they can help you, your team, and your organization navigate the grayest of gray areas.

1. What Are The Net, Net Consequences Of All My Options?

The first step in making any important decision, suggests Badaracco, is to objectively analyze all of the possibilities, and consider their real-world outcomes. He explains that this process needs to be distinguished from a cost-benefit analysis, and shouldn't be limited to outcomes that can be measured or counted. After all, if numbers and data could solve this query, they wouldn't be in the gray zone in the first place.

"Your job is to put aside your initial assumption about what you should do, gather a group of trusted advisers and experts, and ask yourself and them, 'What could we do? And who will be hurt or helped, short-term and long-term, by each option?" writes Badaracco.

While this task is more difficult than it seems, it's a strategy that chess players learn to master. The game requires players to look at the board and reimagine how it will shift based on theirs and their opponent's decisions.

"You're constantly looking two, three, four moves ahead," entrepreneur and former star of the youth chess circuit Justin Moore once told Fast Company. "If you do this move, what's the countermove? What are all the countermoves? And then for all of those, what are all of my potential countermoves? Chess is constantly teaching you to think about what comes next, and what comes after that, and what the repercussions could be," Moore explained.

2. What Are My Core Obligations?

Whether it's your boss, your shareholders, or your children, the decisions we make in life will often affect those around us, and we must consider our obligations to each stakeholder, says Badaracco. He adds that we will often be tempted to only consider immediate stakeholders, most likely the ones that sign our paychecks, but big decisions require us to consider the deeper responsibility of our actions.

"How can you figure out specifically what these duties oblige you to do in a particular situation?" he writes.

By relying on what philosophers call your 'moral imagination.' That involves stepping out of your comfort zone, recognizing your biases and blind spots, and putting yourself in the shoes of all key stakeholders, especially the most vulnerable ones.

3. What Will Work In The World As It Is?

This question requires us to consider the contextual circumstances of our decisions in a realistic way, the way the world really exists today, rather than the way we would like it to.

"After considering consequences and duties, you need to think about practicalities: Of the possible solutions to your problem, which is most likely to work? Which is most resilient? And how resilient and flexible are you?" writes Badaracco. "To answer those questions, you need to map the force field of power around you: Who wants what and how hard and successfully each person can fight for his aims."

4. Who Are We?

This self-reflective question, explains Badaracco, forces us to consider how our decisions shape the person or organization we really are, and not the one we want or imagine ourselves to be. By acknowledging that such decisions shape our sense of self, he believes that an understanding of the self is vital in the decision-making process.

"This question asks you to step back and think about your decision in terms of relationships, values, and norms," he writes. "What really matters to your team, company, community, culture? How can you act in a way that reflects and expresses those belief systems? If they conflict, which should take precedence?"

To help arrive at this answer, Badaracco suggests thinking about the decision as a chapter in a person or company's history, and how that chapter would fit into the overall narrative. "Of all the paths you might choose in this gray area, which would best express what your organization stands for?" he writes.

5. What Can I Live With?

Good judgment, Badaracco writes, is as much about understanding and analyzing the situation as it is about staying true to our values and ideals. Ultimately, the big decisions force us to determine what matters most and what matters least.

"How will you figure out what you can live with?" asks Badaracco. "End your conversations with others, close the door, mute the electronics, and stop to reflect. Imagine yourself explaining your decision to a close friend or a mentor—someone you trust and respect deeply. Would you feel comfortable? How would that person react?"

via: Harvard Business Review

Hiring two people to split up one set of managerial duties might actually make financial and organizational sense.

Holacracy. Self-management. Distributed leadership. You're probably already aware of the management models that eliminate hierarchy—and with it, managers. The goal is to empower all employees to make decisions and peel away layers of bureaucracy that are thought to hold back innovation. That, in turn, is supposed to help attract more talent, increase productivity, and accelerate growth.

Over the last decade, companies including Zappos, Medium, and Buffer have embraced flat organizational structures. But these experiments don't always work. After adopting a self-management model in 2014, Buffer's team struggled to adapt. Employees felt overwhelmed by their new freedom. They felt lost without expectations, guidance, and accountability. By the following year, CEO Leo Widrich had reported, "Hierarchy has once again become a central part of how we work again at Buffer."

Through this experience, Buffer learned one very important lesson: If you don't impose hierarchy from above, it may emerge naturally.

The truth is, some employees have more experience and expertise than others. That's why their peers intuitively look to them for advice and leadership. But leadership doesn't have to be centralized. If you're considering a shift toward distributed leadership but aren't sure if going completely flat is right for your company, consider embracing joint leadership. Yes, it means you'll have more managers, not fewer—but that could be just what your growing company needs. Here's why.

1. You'll Tap Into A Wider Range Of Skill Sets And Personalities

Joint leadership simply means dividing what's typically one person's managerial duties between multiple people, who put their heads together to make leadership decisions. By adopting this model, you can benefit from two unique skill sets and personality types.

Let's say you hire two people to lead customer success at your SaaS startup instead of one. Over the course of their careers, both of those people have developed a core set of strengths. The first person you hire has 10 years of experience: seven years in technical customer support followed by three years in customer success. He's a seasoned team leader with considerable technical expertise. Plus, his ESFJ personality is likely to help encourage a cooperative team spirit.

The second person you hire has eight years of experience: three years as an account manager, two years as an account strategist, and three years as a marketing consultant. She has a history of working directly with executive-level personnel and a proven ability to drive growth at scale. Plus, her INTJ personality is likely to help foster a culture of achievement.

Despite their strengths, each lacks important skills that could derail their efforts. By hiring (or promoting) two leaders with complementary skills, you significantly reduce their risk of failure while leveraging their individual strengths.

1. You Can Give Younger Talent A Chance To Grow (So They Won't Leave)

Joint leadership doesn't mean paying two C-level salaries instead of one. In fact, it's not always suitable for seasoned professionals. But it's ideal for those with less than five years' experience.

Career progression is a top priority for people early in their careers. By allowing your most promising young employees to take on more responsibility, you can satisfy that hunger without promoting them into roles they're not quite ready for.

Putting your trust in someone who's inexperienced may feel like a risky move, especially in a startup environment. Dividing managerial responsibilities between two high-potential employees will help you lessen the risks while leveraging both of their talents and ambition.

3. You Can Head Off Power Struggles Before The Start

We all want motivated, committed employees. But when they become competitive, it can threaten the harmony of an organization's culture. The truth is, high-growth companies and startups can be very political places to work. From mid-level managers to executives, employees often compete with one another—and not just for sought-after resources.

Because every decision can affect the future of a small company, what one employee does can have a big impact. Savvy employees know this and feel motivated to maximize their own influence. And because it's a person's connections and achievements that push their careers forward, this effect is often amplified when high-profile personalities are involved.

Hiring two people to manage one function can help eliminate these power struggles. In fact, the shift in language that accompanies joint leadership can have a tremendous impact. For example, speaking in terms of "we" instead of "I" can instill a more team-oriented culture. That's just one more reason why adding managers might mean having less conflict to manage.

Jes Kirkwood is an inbound certified marketer and content creator with a passion for B2B SaaS. Follow her work (and her journey) her on Twitter at @jeskirkwood.

Samsung has tweaked its Gear VR headset to make it even better.

At its Note 7 unveiling earlier this month, Samsung unveiled not only the new phone, but also a new version of its virtual reality headset, Gear VR, to go along with it. The $99 headset will be available in stores along with the Note 7 this Thursday, August 19th, and offers a small upgrade from last year's model. Is it worth trading in the old for the new? I spent some time using both devices side by side to decide.

The New Black

Looking at this year's Gear VR you'll immediately notice that there's something a little different. The new model is blueish-black rather than white, something that gives the device a more subtle look, but a change that has a functionality element to it was well.

If you've used the white version a lot, you've likely encountered a situation where the light from your phone has reflected off the white interior of the device. It's not a huge deal, but it does remind you that you're sitting on your couch in your underwear rather than skiing the Swiss Alps (or whatever you were trying to do) and is something Gear VR owners had mentioned to Samsung as a downside of using the device.

With the darker version, you're able to escape reality just a little easier. Think of it like the difference between watching a movie in a room with the lights off, versus one with dark walls and blackout curtains. It's not a huge deal for casual users, but enthusiasts are going to immediately tell a difference. Also, I think the sleek dark version has the added bonus of making you look like a little less of a goofball while you're doing it as well. Because everyone definitely wants to look their best while using VR.

The updated headset is also a bit more comfortable to wear, with plusher padding than the previous version, and a longer head strap to accommodate those of us with really big brains (read: giant heads).

Wider Viewing Angle

This year's version bumps the field of view for the device from 96 degrees to 101. It's a small incremental change and one I had difficulty noticing using the two side by side. Samsung says that the wider angle makes things seem more immersive, and I'll give it that: The combo of the darker interior and wider angle certainly felt a bit better, albeit slightly.

New Controls

One thing that will definitely stand out to existing Gear VR owners are the controls. The new Gear VR has a dedicated Home button, which makes exiting out of things a ton simpler. The device also ditches its etched D-pad for smoother design, which takes a second to get used to, but is overall a pleasant change.

Out of the box, phones are also connected to this year's Gear VR using USB-C (what the Note 7 uses to charge) rather than micro USB. If you have an older phone, don't worry, it comes packaged with an adapter to make it compatible with most of Samsung's recent phones, specifically the Galaxy S7 series, S6 series, and Note 5. Using it with older phones simply involves popping out the USB-C adapter and replacing it with a micro-USB one.

Should You Upgrade?

Samsung plans to phase out the existing third-generation Gear VR for the new version in stores, so if you're shopping for one in the next few months you might not have much of a choice. The device is priced at $99, just like the older version, so it's an even trade.

While there are certainly a handful of notable tweaks with this year's Gear VR, I think the connection bit of the device is honestly the most notable change. For this reason alone, I would suggest buying this model over the old one if you're shopping for one now. Even if you manage to snag the older version at a discount, most phones are on their way to using USB-C, so you're going to want that connection soon enough. Save yourself the hassle of an upgrade down the line.

If you already own a Gear VR, however, I think you're fine hanging on to it. Sure, you're going to want the USB-C version eventually, but the one you have already is going to get the job done fine until that time comes. Caveat: If you're one of the people bothered by the white interior of the previous version (i.e., someone that's using their Gear VR a lot), then you should definitely give the new Gear VR a look.

There are some amazing things available in VR right now. Regardless of which version you're using, there's one thing for certain: It's only going to get better.

As the comedian readies his final episode of The Nightly Show, he reveals what Comedy Central got wrong—and what the show did right.

Larry Wilmore has always "kept it 100." So when I reached out to get his response to Comedy Central's abrupt cancellation of The Nightly Show after only a year and a half on the air (and right before the height of the presidential election), it seemed pretty likely that he'd do the same.

It's true that The Nightly Show struggled with ratings—this year, its numbers dipped to less than half of the 1.7 million viewers that his predecessor, Stephen Colbert, averaged during his last year in the 11:30 p.m. slot. But the sharp-tongued comedian amassed hardcore fans by never relenting on his commitment to keep the thorniest social issues facing the U.S.—police brutality, rape culture, the origins of the War on Drugs—front and center on mainstream, late-night TV when few others would. (And with the type of sardonic exasperation that only he could pull off.)

When I interviewed Wilmore for Fast Company's Most Creative People issue last year, Nightly had just debuted to rave reviews. I asked the entertainer, who's had a prolific career in the business, the lesson he learned when Fox ousted him from the Emmy-winning Bernie Mac Show, which he created and produced. "Not everybody's gonna get your vision," he responded. "Even if you get fired, you left a record of what you wanted to do."

Below, his thoughts on Nightly.

Fast Company: I know you just finished taping the show and are tired, so I'm just gonna jump right in. What happened?

Larry Wilmore: Uh, we got canceled. Maybe you weren't paying attention to what a brotha said last night. But the brotha got canceled.

Yes, I saw. But you said in a statement that you were "surprised." Why were you surprised?

Well, no one had informed me beforehand. I think it's proper to be surprised. [Laughs] It wasn't like they said it and I went, "Guys, look at this. I wrote this down yesterday, I predicted it. You were right, congratulations gentlemen. You have given me the correct answer!"

Look, I thought...absolutely, there was a chance we would not be renewed for a third season. But this season ends at the end of the year, so I thought, at least we'll get the chance to cover the election, no matter what happens. So what I was really surprised about was that we didn't get the chance to cover the election. I mean, it's television, so you always live in the thought that your show might leave at any time. When it leaves is the surprise part. [Laughs]

It's like that great Rod Serling line from The Twilight Zone. He said, "Every man is sentenced to death. Time and date of execution unknown." That's television. Every television show is sentenced to death, time and date of execution unknown.

[Comedy Central president] Kent Alterman said that the timing of the cancellation had something to do with the terms of your contract. Is that not true?

That's what they said, so it must be true.

When Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert left, Comedy Central replaced its two biggest stars, who are white, with two black men, you and Trevor Noah. Your show just got canceled, and this is the first time in 16 years that The Daily Show wasn't nominated for an Emmy. What do you think that says about America's viewing preferences?

I don't know if I could make that general of a statement. We have so many fans from all walks of life and different ages. You never know in TV—sometimes you're on at the wrong time at the wrong place. Sometimes you don't get a chance to catch on. I think this is more of a statement about television.

What do you think it says about television?

That you just never know. A lot of television is luck of the draw. And look, what your show is makes a big difference, too. There was a lot of attention on us, and we were following in the shadow of a different show, as opposed to just being who we were. If we had [launched] on a different place, no one would have been comparing us to The Colbert Report right away. [People were saying,] "Well it's not the Colbert show, it's not the Colbert show." Of course! That's the point. [Laughs] It's. Not. The Colbert show.

So those are tough shoes to fill. Stephen's having a hard time filling them himself, his own shoes.

The last time we talked, we discussed your unique style of finding humor in topics that are tough to talk about. But, to me, if John Oliver goes on a rant about Brexit, it's applauded and promoted. If Samantha Bee goes on a screed about Donald Trump—which was awesome—it goes viral. To quote one of your popular segments, are viewers just not ready to "Keep It 100" about race?

Uh...you said it. Am I disagreeing with you? No.

Well, I didn't say it. I'm asking you.

I don't know. It depends. Sometimes they are. But, are they ready to do that all the time in late-night [TV]? I don't know, it's hard to say. Race is not the easiest subject to make jokes about, and make commentary about, and we really tried our best.

And many times some of those things actually did go viral and really did catch on. We had many examples of that. I remember when we talked about the Walter Scott shooting, and I interviewed the [rival gang members] at a diner in Baltimore [because they had called a truce during the unrest].

Look, we really took a big hit when Jon Stewart left The Daily Show. That was a huge lead-in loss. You know, it takes some time to recover from that and gain viewers.

You thanked Jon in a statement after the news broke...

I did not mean it. [Laughs]

I don't believe that. You credited him with encouraging you to do The Nightly Show. What did he say to you when he found out?

Oh, he was devastated, too. He was angry. He was not a happy camper.

You've gotten an outpouring of support on Twitter. [MSNBC news host] Lawrence O'Donnell tweeted, "Larry Wilmore always teaches me something I didn't know."

Oh that was nice. Lawrence O'Donnell said that?

Yep. How have your Comedy Central colleagues reacted to the news?

Umm...Comedy Central colleagues, meaning...

People you don't work directly with on show—not contributors or regular guests.

Well, I've heard from so many people in the industry, friends and colleagues, who've been very supportive. It's very comforting. It makes you feel like, okay, well you did something worthwhile.

Do you think Comedy Central promoted your show as much as it should have?

No.

What makes you say that?

I think they were interested in the launch of The Daily Show. And rightly so. I don't blame them for that. Jon leaving was a big deal, you know. And I just think they put most of their energies over there. That's my opinion.

What could have been done differently to make sure people watched?

I think we should have had more synergy between the two shows. I even told the network this. Trevor and I should have had on-air connections, the way Jon and Stephen did. It would have been fun to do hand-offs and that type of thing. Just for people to see that there's a distinction—[all] black people just aren't the same. Here's a guy from South Africa, for goodness sake. I grew up in California, you know? I'm an African-American, he's an African-African. We could've really had fun playing on those differences. People would have known why our points of view are different. [Otherwise] it's like, "Oh, another black guy is coming on to tell me this same stuff? Sorry, goodbye."

What was the hesitance to show that synergy?

I don't know; you'll have to ask them. That was just my suggestion, but you know, I don't work at the network.

You had a sort of hard-hitting presentation as host of the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where you referred to President Obama as "my nigga."

Whaaat? I did not. Wait, is that what I said? Because I blacked out as I was saying it. I have no memory of what happened at the White House dinner. I'll take your word for it, but it does not sound like something that I would ever say. To the president? Come on, man.

Do you think that turned off some viewers?

No, we didn't lose any viewers after that.

What was the reaction internally from...

People loved that! Look, no. People who like our show loved that. We didn't lose any fans after I did that dinner. It would be nice to think that something on C-SPAN affected our viewership. I mean, I would love to think that was the case. Or as I said at the dinner, "HDMI—No Input." That's what C-SPAN is competing with. Give me a break.

Have you been asked to do anything else at Comedy Central?

Well, they just fired me, so that's probably unlikely.

I saw the pilot for HBO's Insecure, which you are producing with its star, Issa Rae. Other than that, what else are you working on? What's next after this?

Well, you know, so this just happened. I have a couple of ideas for things I'd like to do, but I'll just kind of take my time with it, enjoy the launch of Issa's show, and see what's next. But I'll definitely get back into storytelling. You know, half-hour, maybe movies.

What do you have planned for your last show on Thursday?

I think it's gonna be pretty simple. I think I'll have a guest come on for a quick interview, have all of the contributors out. I think we're gonna show some of our favorite moments. Just kind of have some fun.

What's your favorite moment?

My favorite moment came on the second episode, the first time we brought up the Cosby thing. And it was in the intro. And I said, "And tonight, we will ask the question, 'Did he do it?'" And then I said: "And the answer will be, 'Yes.' [Laughs]

Because to me it's like, yes! We are not afraid to tell you exactly how we feel about this. We're not holding back, we're not being coy. This is what "Keeping It 100" is all about. We came out of the chute with that, and we never shied away from it.

Does your office have a "cake culture?" If so, all those extra sweet treats could be hazardous to your health.

If there's one thing that's the same across most offices in the U.S. and Europe, it's "cake culture." The term is used to describe the plethora of sweet treats commonly found in workplaces, from a bowl of M&M's on the HR officer's desk, to George from accounting's homemade brownies in the office kitchen, to that box of Krispy Kreme donuts the boss brings to kick off morning meetings in the conference room.

While all well-intentioned, this workplace cake culture is hurting employee health, professor Nigel Hunt, dean of the Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons, has warned.

"Managers want to reward staff for their efforts, colleagues want to celebrate special occasions, and workers want to bring back a gift from their holidays. But for many people the workplace is now the primary site of their sugar intake and is contributing to the current obesity epidemic and poor oral health," Hunt says. "It is particularly dangerous that this is lying around the office all day, for as we know, sugar has a particularly negative effect if it's eaten outside of meal time," he explains.

"Cake culture also poses difficulties for those who are trying their hardest to lose weight or become healthier," says Hunt. "How many of us have begun such diets, only to cave in to the temptation of the doughnuts, cookies, or the triple chocolate biscuits?" he asks.

That's something Kimi Sokhi, a holistic nutritionist and hypnotherapist, and a certified workplace wellness ambassador and wellness officer at Expo 2020 Dubai, agrees with. "There's definitely a sense of comradeship in eating our meals with our teammates or enthusiastically accepting the homemade cookies that a colleague brings in," Sokhi says. "Peer pressure and the need to appear polite and agreeable can't be underestimated," she explains. "After all, what sort of heartless person says no to homemade cookies? Who refuses to eat a slice of cake when a teammate becomes a new dad?"

This social aspect of sharing food has been hardwired into us for centuries. "We break bread together as a way to celebrate, mourn, and bond with one another," says Sokhi. "So when a colleague brings in cookies, there are a lot of factors at play that make us reach for that chocolate chip treat."

But Sokhi also says cake culture is influenced by the habits of our employers, like those who bring the Krispy Kremes to morning meetings. "We tend to subconsciously pick up the habits of those around us," she says. "So if we spend the majority of our time with people that use a lot of swear words, chances are we'll be doing the same after a few weeks or even days." Or those who eat those original glazed the boss brings in.

In other words, a single employee's willpower to say "no" to sweet treats in the office is only part of the equation to defeating cake culture. If other employees regularly munch on the boss's sweet treats, you probably soon will too.

This comes at a time when employers' wellness programs such as reimbursement for weight loss programs or quitting smoking are on the decline, according to a survey by the Society of Human Resource Management. That's why health experts such as Hunt and Sokhi are calling for a more healthy workplace spearheaded by employer policies, consigning cake culture to the same fate as in-office smoking. And getting there only takes small, incremental changes.

1. Make Implementing A Healthy Workforce Your Priority

This is Sokhi's number one piece of advice. While good intentions are appreciated, change takes action, and the only way you can turn your workplace into a truly healthy one is by integrating a healthy workplace culture into the fabric of the company.

"If you want a healthy workforce, you have to make it a priority," says Sokhi. "Have a wellness strategy that's written down and shared with the entire company," she suggests. "Make sure you have buy-in from your C-suite. Get them on board by showing them the ROI of investing in workplace wellness."

Next, says Sokhi, "Tackle the pressing health issues that affect your employees by educating and empowering them, while supporting those positive changes through company policies and the physical environment that they work in."

2. Slowly Phase Out Unhealthy Foods In The Workplace

Whether you're a Fortune 500 company with a cafeteria that feeds your workforce, or a small business where your food contribution only includes providing snacks for meetings, Sokhi says simple changes to the types of foods you provide could have a big impact on employee health. Swap mac and cheese for salmon and avocado salads in the cafeteria or Doritos for a bowl of Brazil nuts in the afternoon meeting, she recommends.

"Slowly phase out the unhealthy options as you gain more support from the staff," Sokhi says. "Offer healthy snacks such as fruits, baby carrots, celery sticks, nuts, and seeds in the office pantry. Replace regular and diet sodas with fruit juices, coconut water, and mineral water." The gradual transition will make it feel like less of a drastic change, which means it makes it easier for people to adjust to and adopt the healthier options.

3. Instead Of Rewarding Employees With Daily Sweet Treats, Reward Them With Gift Cards

Many employers show affection and appreciation for their employees by providing small niceties every day. Usually these include carb and sugar heavy bagels from the cafe down the street, or the oh-so-good-tasting but oh-so-bad-for-you Krispy Kreme doughnuts. While these foods may bring a smile to your employees' faces, in the long run they do more harm than good.

"Definitely don't reward employees with doughnuts and muffins for a job well done!" warns Sokhi. Instead of providing sweet treats to your employees on a daily basis, think about providing them with non-edible signs of affection. "If having a healthy workforce is a priority, reward them with gift cards to healthy eateries, smoothie bars, or non-food related items," she suggests, such as iTunes, Amazon, or cinema vouchers.

While weekly gift cards for your employees may sound costly, most employers will find doing this for five to 10 workers costs no more than providing that weekly supply of doughnuts for the same amount of people.

4. Allow Walking Breaks Every Hour

Being chained to the desk with only an hour's lunch break does no one any good. Sitting all day can kill you. And it doesn't give you any opportunity to work off any calories workplace treats have added to your body, either. Employers should give their employees several 15-minute walking breaks (in addition to their lunch breaks) throughout the day, says Sokhi.

"Studies have shown that taking a break every 30-45 minutes and walking around the office is much healthier that sitting all day and then going to the gym at the end of the day," she notes. But the benefits aren't only limited to our waistline and blood pressure. "Our brains can only focus on a task for a maximum of 45-60 minutes anyways," Sokhi says. "So it not only helps us physically, but also mentally and emotionally, to take a break, step away from the computer, hydrate, and come back with a fresh mind and body."

5. Go High-Tech With Standing Desks And Treadmill Workstations

We live in an increasingly high-tech world, so why not go high tech for health at work? Though not for everyone, standing desks and workstations that allow you to walk and work are a hit in offices that have installed them.

"Treadmill workstations, standing desks, biking chairs, and balance-ball chairs are all great solutions for bringing health and fitness into the work environment," says Sokhi. "Optional treadmill or biking workstations situated in each area of the office allow employees to get up, move their bodies, and have a change of scenery to break up the monotony of the day. The more we move, the more oxygen gets pumped into our bodies and into our brains, and the more energetic we feel throughout the day."

Hiring staff for the Olympics has certain restrictions, but there are tactics that can be applied to any recruiting effort.

Paul Modley was given the challenge of a lifetime when the talent recruiter was asked to help hire 9,000 paid staff on behalf of the London Organizing Committee for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

If the sheer volume and time constraint weren't enough of a challenge, finding staff for the Olympics included some additional requirements, such as local hiring quotas and diversity goals, during a run-up to the games that saw widespread rioting and negative press.

"When I first started at the Olympics, I honestly felt overwhelmed by the scale of what we needed to deliver," he tells Fast Company. "There's always a high level of interest in the Games, and it's not always positive," he says, "so we needed people who were robust enough to deal with external pressures."

Now a global client partner with talent recruiting firm Alexander Mann Solutions, Modley often draws on the lessons he learned in the lead-up to 2012 when advising companies on how to ramp up their recruiting efforts in a short period of time.

Plan And Test

"The way to manage was to develop our plan early on," says Modley, who began working for the Olympics in January of 2007—a full five years before the torch would be lit. Part of that was to have an integrated recruitment and diversity and inclusion strategy from the beginning.

As it is in any business, the Olympics staff had to have the right mix of people. So they developed a customized recruiting program designed to attract students and recent graduates as well as local candidates. Modley says that also meant finding people who had previous event experience in addition to those new to the event world. "We needed people who'd done something similar before," he recalls.

To get there, Modley and his team partnered with third-party suppliers. An industry report by Kelly Outsourcing and Consulting Group says these firms can provide everything from job seekers to administrative hiring and talent management processes for another organization. The third party working with the Olympics was a recruitment process outsourcing specialist that handled recruitment under a commercial sponsorship arrangement, Modley asserts.

The integrated approach, "enabled us to deliver over and above the commitments that we set out at the beginning," Modley says.

Leverage The Employer Brand

While the Olympics has a well-established and highly recognizable brand, that brand association isn't always positive. In London, for example, critics called foul on everything from the enormous public cost of the event to the potential chaos if public transportation was disrupted. It was a challenge Modley had to confront early on.

"It's important to be clear about the employer value proposition—both positives and negatives. That was critical in building our workforce," he says. "People need to know why you're a great place to work."

Be Upfront About Limitations

While the Olympic rings look good on any resume, Modley also had to confront some of the negative attributes of the position. For example, he had to address the challenge of recruiting a large pool of candidates for a temporary position at a time when people were looking for stable employment.

"We had to ensure our employment proposition was understood, and that people knew there would be an end date to their employment," he says. "People had to be comfortable with that uncertainty."

Modley adds that it was important to be transparent about the fact that many of the positions didn't provide access to any of the actual competitions, and that recruits would likely face some backlash for their involvement in a then-controversial event.

"When we launched our London 2012 brand it was and this was a difficult period for our workforce," he says. "It lowered morale." In addition, he admits, "there was constant noise and feedback around the costs of delivering the Games." Modley says this was not always easy to deal with, particularly after the financial crash in 2008. "That's a high-stress work environment."

Assess The Candidates Efficiently

To determine the best candidates for such a high-stakes and potentially volatile work environment, potential hires were tested in several ways. For senior, specialist, and middle management roles, Modley says competency-based interviews revealed technical experience as well as the individual's fit in the organization's culture. "We were also looking to see their passion for getting involved in the Games and understanding the positive impact it would have in London," he says.

As the games approached, says Modley, the objective pivoted toward finding larger volumes of candidates for lower-level positions.

"The assessment criteria for these roles were more focused around our behaviors and less around prior technical experience," he says. Assessment centers were used for these interviews and group exercises. "We moved some of our assessment centers out to remote spots within the communities for ease of access and convenience for our candidates," he explains.

Help Staff Even As They Transition Away

Modley and the Olympic Organizing Committee created additional support structures for employees following the conclusion of the Games. Not only did this help employees transition into more permanent work, says Modely, but it also helped retain those staff members through the duration of the events. "In previous events where there was minimal end of Games support, people started to leave as they found new jobs before the Games had been delivered," he points out. "That could potentially be disastrous."

An outplacement provider was appointed to help the workforce feel secure in their ability to find employment following the Games. This support included coaching around resume writing, interview prep, and how to go about searching for new roles after the Games concluded. Modley says that helped ensure people felt more comfortable staying on.

Overall, Modley says the attrition levels remained relatively low, at least until the final months before the Games, when a few staffers found permanent employment elsewhere. Modley adds that many of the London Olympics staff were recommended to sponsors and future Games Organizing Committees, including those in Sochi and Rio.

"Working on an event like the Olympics and Paralympics is a highly emotional journey; there are highs are lows along the journey, you deliver the Games on a massive high and then most people leave the organization within a few days of the Games finishing," he says. "It was important that we prepared our people for this journey, particularly at the end."

From Taipei to Yerevan, Armenia, these hubs are gaining in popularity with self-employed travelers.

From pristine beaches in Indonesia to picturesque mountains in Armenia, more freelancers and entrepreneurs are escaping fluorescent-lit cubicle life for less traditional "offices" overseas. I've met them—and I am one myself.

You don't need to be 22 and living off a trust fund to make this happen, either. Actually, it's the opposite: Money considerations are a key reason for ditching North America. For me, living and working abroad was the right financial decision to build and grow my marketing agency.

That choice actually began when I took a hard look at my finances. There I was, staring bleakly at a pitiful savings account and a bottomless pit of student loans. Living the big-city dream hadn't just sapped my energy and stressed me out, it had also undercut my financial stability. I remember blubbering to a friend on Skype as we looked through my Mint account to figure out where my salary had dissipated.

"Wow." She looked a bit stunned. "Living in New York City is outrageous."

"I remember when I lived in Spain," I sighed, recalling a temporary stint in the country. "My rent was only $150. Not to mention a glass of sangria was less than $2."

With that, I started crunching numbers. I quickly realized I could live in Spain for eight months at the price of one month's rent in my tiny New York City shoebox.

During the next six months while I worked and played around Europe, I paid off all my student loan debt, and my business started generating a positive cash flow. You can do the same thing. Here are 10 international cities that NomadList recommends as affordable home bases for digital nomads, each with a cost of living falling below $1,250 a month.

1. Bangkok, Thailand

Brush up on your Thai and head to Bangkok for a culture and experience you'll never forget. As you grab a Coke for 17.77 Thai baht (51¢) and lunch for 60 Baht ($1.73) you'll get a feel for why Bangkok is stealing the hearts of the tight-budgeting expats who work remotely.

Bart Claeys, a UX designer and entrepreneur, chose Bangkok as his main hub because of its low­-cost direct flights to Singapore and Hong Kong:

Bangkok is great for a digital nomad because it has everything from fancy rooftop bars to inexpensive places to crash. Here you'll find affordable Michelin-star restaurants and excellent $1 street food. Wi-Fi is widely available, and trendy coffee shops and coworking spaces are abundant.

2. Chiang Mai, Thailand

Arriving in northern Thailand's largest city, you'll immediately find yourself surrounded by vibrant architecture and history as well as droves of rickshaws and tuk tuks, Chiang Mai's main form of transportation. A ride in the city ranges between 20 and 50 baht, or roughly the equivalent of 58­¢–$1.44.

"Chiang Mai is a great option for digital nomads because it has a laid-back atmosphere, a great built-­in community, it's inexpensive, and of course [there's] amazing Thai food," says Alyne Tamir, a digital media manager. "You won't be the only nomad around and will find like­-minded people to exchange ideas [with]."

3. Taipei, Taiwan

Taipei is a cosmopolitan city known for generating technological advances and for its unique night markets. Wander the streets and you'll find a $3 lunchbox that's significantly better than its $15 Manhattan equivalent.

"Taipei is an excellent place to expand your business without having to worry about breaking the bank," says Jason Wuerch, a digital nomad and founder of Frugal for Less. "The food is excellent, the people are friendly, and the public transportation makes it incredibly easy to travel within the city."

It's a bustling city with plenty of coworking options, where you're sure to encounter a number of expats from around the world. LinkedIn suggests that there's been a recent upsurge in American expats heading to Taiwan for technology and professional-services jobs.

4. Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

"Ubud is an amazing city to live in. I rented an entire house in the rice fields for less than $400 a month," says Lee Constantine of the crowdfunding platform Publishizer. "It allowed me to explore beautiful new places and meet tons of people, all while working 10-hour days at a coworking space called Outpost Asia, conveniently centered in this tropical hub." (Here are seven others.)

In fact, Bali has been a popular hub for digital nomads for years. With its affordable apartment prices, scenic beaches, and stable Wi-Fi connections, it's no wonder the city is drawing a crowd of global independent workers. Here's how one of them, Katelyn Smith, who runs a two-week retreat program in Bali geared toward solopreneurial expats, explains her choice to set up shop there:

I heard great things about Bali and thought I would check it out. That's when a weekend trip turned into a month. If I could create a perfect world in my mind, Bali checks all of the boxes. There's this inexplicable vibe to Bali—it's instantaneously calming, and you feel centered and connected. It's affordable, warm, [and] full of interesting people. It's easy to eat healthy, many people speak English, and it's fun scootering around everywhere.

5. Phuket, Thailand

Run a quick Google image search for "Phuket" and you'll scroll past beautiful clear blue water and sandy beaches.

With great Wi-Fi and affordable rent, I'll be heading to Phuket next year for a month of client projects—and also for its mountains, beaches, and temperate climate. Referring to Numbeo for cost­-of-­living calculations, I quickly found that my monthly expenses could come out to 51.5% lower than if I were still living in New York City. With that extra pocket change, I could visit locales from films like The Man With the Golden Gun and The Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

6. Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Johor Bahru, Malaysia's financial hub, tops the list of best spots for digital workers. After you've taken a walk through the Johor Zoo and strolled Danga Bay, you'll find that the price of a dozen eggs is $1.

Many digital nomads choose Johor Bahru because of the , an easy access point for entrepreneurs doing business in Singapore. With 58¢ cappuccinos and 87¢ pints of beer, you'll come for the prices but stay for the friendly locals and great weather.

7. Yerevan, Armenia

Located in western Asia, Armenia is one of the world's oldest inhabited places. Due to a recent economic upturn in Yerevan, the streets are now filled with restaurants and cafes that are perfect for working remotely.

Pour yourself a bottle of $4 Armenian pomegranate wine and snack on Ararat Valley apricots as you discover a stunning city brimming with UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

"Armenia is on the map for our work­-abroad plans," says Derek Merdinyan of Video Igniter. "The low cost of travel and living expenses helps our bottom line, and I get an excuse to visit the place my great­-grandparents came from."

8. Belgrade, Serbia

Serbia's capital city boasts 1.23 million inhabitants, stunning architecture, and an unrivaled nightlife. Located at the meeting of the Sava and Danube rivers, Belgrade has become an affordable and picturesque center for digital nomads and independent workers in Eastern Europe.

Michael Young, a designer and animator currently on a world tour, explains what the city has to offer:

Belgrade exceeded my expectations as a digital-nomad destination. As well as the inexpensive cost of living, the people were incredibly friendly, and the city itself had an interesting creative vibe. [It's] clean and full of fascinating architecture, the people are incredibly friendly, and there are plenty of amazing little cafes.

9. Quito, Ecuador

If you're looking for someplace that shares similar time zones as the U.S., Quito could be the place to go.

Brush up on your Spanish and head to this South American city that offers a friendly community, affordable rent, and $1 cerveza. While there are many reasons to check out Quito, many expats like that Ecuador operates on the American dollar—adopted by the country in 2014 after years of monetary instability—so you won't lose your hard-earned funds on fluctuating exchange rates.

10. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City (also known as Saigon), the largest city in Vietnam, has long held a special place in the hearts of globetrotting solopreneurs. Loud, busy, and chaotic, Ho Chi Minh City is filled with motorbikes and the smells of fresh street food. Part of the popular southeastern Asian backpacker circle, the metropolis is attracting more full-time remote workers as well.

"The standout for me in Ho Chi Minh has to be two things: the awesome Internet speed and the delicious cheap street food," says Beck Power, who runs a flight hacking website nomadfly.me. "Those are a perfect combination for digital nomads. Once you learn to ride a motorcycle here, you'll be hooked. There's such a buzz in this town paired with laid-back charm. To me, this city's atmosphere lies somewhere between underdeveloped Cambodia and Westernized Bangkok."

Whether you're looking to save money or just need a change of scenery, these international cities guarantee fascinating cultures and vibrant entrepreneurial communities. Best of all, they may even put a bit of cash back into your pocket after pinching pennies in San Francisco.

Arianna O'Dell is the founder of Airlink Marketing, a digital agency that helps hotels, restaurants, and travel destinations attract and retain clientele.

There is a dark underbelly to the global cotton industry—and the organic, fair-trade bedsheets company Boll & Branch wants to change that.

In July, when the U.S. hit peak heat and humidity levels, Cotton Incorporated, the national trade association for cotton importers and producers, launched a campaign called #CoolerInCotton with a video about how the textile can alleviate sweaty summer woes. A young woman prances around on an old-fashioned Hollywood-style set singing: "It's 95 degrees and in your pants it ain't pretty" and "We should be able to go for dinner without sweating through that gown."

The ad is meant to be good fun, but it also points to a truth about modern life, which is that we depend on this absorbent, durable, and inexpensive material to get us through the day. We wake up in cotton sheets, dry off with cotton towels after showering, and layer cotton clothing over ourselves. Cotton is ubiquitous, but most of us have no idea where it comes from.

In Search Of Sheets

Scott and Misty Tannen, a New Jersey couple, discovered this reality firsthand several years ago, when they upgraded to a king-size bed and needed new sheets. It was around the time that the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh had collapsed, killing 1,129 workers in a catastrophe that sent ripples throughout the world. As the Tannens searched for high-quality bedding in department stores, they considered brands like Frette and Sferra, but wanted just a few simple details about how the sheets were manufactured: Where did the cotton come from? Were pesticides used in the farming process? Where did the fabric get milled?

So they dug around and discovered that it was almost impossible to get straight answers. When a label says that the product was made in Portugal, Italy, or the United States, it generally means that the fabric is sewn or finished in these countries, not that the cotton itself was picked or processed there. The Tannens went from being mildly curious to being totally consumed.

As a serial entrepreneur and investor, Scott saw a business opportunity as he waded through this avalanche of questions. He thought it might be a good idea to create a direct-to-consumer luxury bedsheets brand that offered insight into the cotton supply chain. "We were frustrated that there is no one single person in the supply chain you can get answers from," Scott says. "That's why we felt compelled to go right to the ground level and build an entire business from the ground up." In 2014, the couple started Boll & Branch, which sells an array of bed linens, from classic cotton sheet sets that cost between $200 and $260 to $125 cable knit blankets and $50 baby blankets. The company discloses where the cotton for all its products is farmed and milled, and last year, after a rigorous certification process, Boll & Branch became the first Fair Trade bedsheets brand on the market.

The Tannens bet big on their new venture and used their own savings as startup capital because they believed that there had to be others who cared as much about the origin of their cotton as they do. It appears their instincts were right: Two years in and they're already profitable, on track to sell $40 million worth of sheets this year. To launch the company, they delved deep into the murkiest corners of the global cotton trade, and now hope to share what they learned with consumers who almost certainly aren't aware of the ethically dubious practices on which the industry relies.

Infinite Links In The Cotton Supply Chain

When Scott and Misty started to build Boll & Branch, they began to piece together why nobody in the industry seems to understand where the cotton comes from.

The U.S. is the world's third-largest cotton-producing country. Many of our country's farmers are represented by Cotton Incorporated and well-regulated by the FDA. But the rest of the world's cotton comes from developing countries, including India, China, Pakistan, Brazil, and Uzbekistan, where the crop is harvested by small farmers who only own a few acres of land. Since this is such a fragmented production process, middlemen pop up all over the supply chain. For instance, one entity purchases the raw cotton from individual farmers and sells it in bulk to factories where workers extract seeds, clean bolls, and spin fibers into thread. Another entity buys the spools of thread and sells it to mills where it is turned into fabric and dyed. And yet another entity sells the textiles to other manufacturers who turn it into products for retail. The process often takes place across many countries, combining cotton from various regions, which adds even more layers of confusion.

"We were surprised by how little a lot of the folks in the industry that we talked to actually knew about the products," Scott says. "What they knew was from the time their link in the chain started until their link finished."

By the time textiles arrive at manufacturing centers, they are far removed from the farms where the cotton was first produced. Each time the Tannens asked factory or mill owners about the cotton's origin, they kept running into dead ends. To find out what actually happens at ground zero of cotton production, Scott visited India, the largest cotton-producing country in the world. He was shocked to discover the working conditions of farmers who are regularly exposed to toxic chemicals.

The World's Dirtiest Crop

Cotton is a fragile crop, susceptible to being devastated by a wide range of pests including boll weevils, aphids, and army worms. As a result, although cotton only covers 2.5% of the world's cultivated land, cotton farmers use 16% of the world's pesticides. In the 1950s, scientists invented chemicals that allowed cotton farmers to keep pests at bay. By the 1990s, the company Monsanto developed a genetically modified cotton that produces pesticides in its tissues and can be used in conjunction with other chemicals that target the remaining harmful insects. These genetically altered plants account for over 90% of the cotton produced in India and China, which supply half of the world's cotton.

The cotton trade in the U.S. is founded on a brutal, tragic history of slavery. Two hundred years later, the global business is still entangled with fundamental human-rights violations, as cotton workers around the world are being harmed by the crop. When Scott visited farms in India, he watched farmers go out into the fields spraying their plants, carrying backpacks or buckets full of pesticides. "They're literally drenched in chemicals," Scott says. "If you go to a farm in North Carolina that is farming with chemicals, there are regulations and mechanized equipment. In rural India, it is some guy walking around with a bucket of pesticides that has skull and crossbones labels on it."

Because many farming communities in the developing world don't have sophisticated irrigation systems, the chemicals often end up in the groundwater and wells. Pesticide poisoning is now a common occurrence in India, with many documented incidences of people dying or becoming sick because of the toxins they are ingesting. Three years ago, there was a well-reported story of 23 children who died in northern India because their school lunch was contaminated with pesticide. The tragic reality is that deaths like this happen fairly regularly throughout cotton-farming regions. While practices vary from country to country, National Institutes of Health studies have shown that farmers in China are equally prone to pesticide poisoning.

The economics of producing cotton can also be devastating to small farmers. Because it holds a patent on the genetically modified seeds that dominate global cotton yields, Monsanto maintains an iron grip on the sale of seeds throughout the developing world. Farmers must often take out loans to buy seeds and pesticides. And it only takes one stroke of bad luck—a particularly arid month or an exceptionally soggy monsoon—for these individuals to fall into debt. In India, this scenario has led to an epidemic of suicides in cotton farming communities. The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold, a documentary about the deplorable practices in the industry, estimated that 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves over the last few years out of desperation.

The Tannens would not have discovered the conditions in cotton farms had they simply sought out a textile merchant to buy fabric for sheets. It's not that people in the cotton trade are deliberately hiding the truth about where the products come from. They're just in the dark. "Transparency is only as good as what you know," Scott says. "If you don't know a whole lot, but you tell me everything you know, it doesn't get me that far."

The Organic Needle In A Haystack

So what's a well-intentioned bedsheets entrepreneur to do with the knowledge he does manage to acquire?

In 2013, Scott burrowed down into an Internet rabbit hole, looking at thousands of webpages of cotton textile suppliers and mills around the world. His goal was to locate a cotton farm that did not use pesticides. At the end of his weeks-long search, he discovered the website of a co-op made up of 105 cotton farms in northeastern India called Chetna Organic. "They had a super-rudimentary website [in Hindi] that I had to use Google Translate with at the time to help me understand," Scott says. (They've since updated the site with English copy.)

It's worth noting that the Tannens looked into using American cotton, but found that most of the finishing equipment required to turn the raw cotton into fabric wide enough for bedsheets was located overseas. This meant they would have had to ship the cotton overseas and back again to manufacture their sheets, which was an expensive proposition.

The Tannens reached out to the Fair Trade Association and to the Global Organic Textile Standard to verify that Chetna was the real deal. Once they got the seals of approval, Scott flew to India to visit the co-op in person. What he found convinced him that Chetna was the perfect match for Boll & Brand.

Chetna helps 836 farmers and their families procure organic, non-genetically modified seeds that do not require pesticides. To keep damaging insects at bay, they plant pest-repelling herbs and flowers—such as marigolds—around the crops. Chetna also supports 250 mill workers who turn the raw cotton into textiles and helps educate the local communities about how to manage their finances effectively, advising them, for instance, on whether it would be better to spend money on more land or more workers. The co-op also encourages the building of schools, hospitals, and clean water supply, making the case that a healthier, more educated population will yield more sustained economic growth. Chetna works with the Fair Trade Association to set the price of cotton annually, aligning it with the local living wage.

Of course, this means that the cost of Chetna cotton is higher than the market price, which scares away many companies. In the end, though, that's not such a bad thing: The co-op ends up working with brands that share its values. Whole Foods and Prana, for instance, tap Chetna for certain products. Over the past two years, the Tannens have built a strong relationship with the organization, visiting the site and placing increasingly substantial orders as Boll & Branch has grown. They are now Chetna's biggest customer.

The Luxury Bedsheets Boom

The Tannens attribute their success to two factors. First, there's been a surge in the luxury bedsheets market over the last three years, with a spate of new direct-to-consumer businesses, such as Brooklinen and Parachute, entering the market. Boll & Branch launched just as this trend was taking off—and distinguished itself as the sole company in this category to use organic cotton and ensure an ethical supply chain from start to finish.

And that's part two of the equation. Over the last few years, consumer demand for ethical and ecological products has increased significantly. Recent research from Mintel shows that 56% of U.S. consumers will stop buying from companies that they believe are unethical. And more than a third of consumers will tell their friends when they believe that a company is operating in an honest, fair, and responsible fashion. It's no wonder, then, that Boll & Branch goes to great lengths in its marketing to make sure customers understand the brand's ethos. In a video on the company's website, a woman declares, "Everyone deserves a good night's sleep, from customers to farmers to factory workers."

"What we've tried to do is create beautiful products that will stand their ground against any other luxury sheets on the market," Misty says. "We are working hard to make our sheets better in every way, from how we source the cotton to ensuring the colors are dyed to perfection so customers get rich blues and bright whites."

In other words, the comfort of a clear conscience.

"They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!" the Republican presidential nominee tweeted this morning. Here are the best responses.

Answering the question, "How can something be both unnervingly cryptic yet also hilariously cartoonish?" Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning with a real humdinger. Just one day after a highly publicized campaign shakeup, the Republican presidential nominee put this out into the world:

What does it mean? Well, almost certainly not what he intended it to mean. Unless he intended it to mean that everybody would have another patented kooky Trump-gaffe to get trending. Because that is indeed what happened. Immediately following this dispatch by a man who once had a TV show where he fired people with his children, the joke-tweets began to flood in. Some of them took the form of song lyrics, some a philosophical route; many of them were very funny. Here are some of Co.Create's favorites.

Women in Machine Learning has been a vital network for a sorely underrepresented group of computer scientists for the past 10 years.

The idea was born in a hotel room.

In 2005, Hanna Wallach, a machine-learning researcher, found herself bunking with colleagues to attend the Neural Information Systems Processing (NIPS) conference. Wallach had been working in the field since 2001 and had attended numerous conferences, but this was the first time she had roomed with other women who specialized in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that researches how computer programs can learn and grow. As a discipline, it is overwhelmingly male: Wallach estimates that only 13.5% of the entire machine learning field is female.

At the conference, Wallach and her roommates, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Lisa Wainer, and Angela Yu, began discussing their experiences and commiserating about the lack of female allies. "We couldn't believe that there were four of us [at the conference]," Wallach says. She, Vaughan, and Wainer made a list of 10 others in the field and fantasized about a meetup.

The next year, in October 2006, Wallach, Vaughn, and Wainer organized the first Women in Machine Learning Conference. Attendance reached almost 100. "It was incredible to see so many machine-learning women all there in the same space," Wallach says. "None of us had experienced something like that before." (Yu attended the conference but did not cofound it.)

Over the past decade, the program has grown substantially, with attendance ballooning to more than 300. (Men are welcome at WiML, though they cannot present.) This year, the organizers had to close registration because they'd reached capacity for the venue. What began as a pie-in-the-sky dream at the NIPS conference has become an important, respected organization and support system for women in AI.

The Big Idea

When the founders first conceived of WiML, they figured it would be a one-off, standalone session at the Grace Hopper Conference, which is an annual celebration of women in the computing industry. But as they dug into the planning and scheduling of speakers and presentations, they realized one session wouldn't be enough. WiML would have to be a full-fledged conference that brought together as many women in the field as the founders could find. When the inaugural gathering turned out to be such a success, transforming WiML into an annual event was the next logical step.

The concept for the WiML conferences is simple: Experts from all over the world get together to learn what their colleagues are doing. Participants give presentations about their most recent work and discuss plans for future projects. There are other parts too, including mentoring opportunities and career roundtables. But as Wallach, who now works at Microsoft as a senior researcher, explains, the focus is on "the amazing research that people are doing."

And of course, WiML is a way for female machine-learning experts to support each other.

Two years after the 2006 conference, the cofounders decided to time WiML to coincide with NIPS, where the idea for their group began. The goal was to turn the WiML gathering into a one-of-a-kind networking event: Attendees would go to WiML, meet female colleagues, and then move on to the bigger conference, ideally feeling a sense of inclusiveness as they interfaced with the industry at large. "The attendees would end up recognizing each other at the main NIPS conference," Wallach says.

That spirit of support and community has become WiML's core ethos. "I joke that we call it nice people in machine learning," says Finale Doshi-Velez, a Harvard computer science professor and WiML executive board member. As an underrepresented group, women in AI can sometimes feel isolated; WiML offers them a forum in which they can feel comfortable sharing their work. "It can be very daunting for someone—male or female—who doesn't know anyone," Doshi-Velez says, adding that the group strives to foster an exchange of ideas among attendees and communicate to them that it's "totally okay to talk to the person next to you."

Rebalancing The Scales

The need for WiML is obvious. Science has historically been a male-dominated discipline. Statistics from the National Science Foundation show that in 2006, only 21.3% of doctorates earned in computer science were by women; for engineering, that statistic dropped to 20.2%. A recent Bloombergarticle noted that only 17% of today's computer science graduates are women, which indicates a marked decrease from a few years before.

It's a systemic problem, and culture has a lot to do with it. As the Bloomberg piece noted, one of the big issues within machine learning and artificial intelligence is rooted in the data sets. Computers learn when they are fed data that reflects the world around them. Given the preponderance of men in the industry, they are the ones determining the information in the datasets that the computers are analyzing. This could give rise to intelligent machines that are inherently biased toward the questions prepared by male researchers.

Which makes it all the more crucial that the 13.5% of women in the field help rebalance the research with their work. Wallach has tackled this herself. Much of her research focuses on what's called "fairness, accountability, and transparency" in machine learning, which is a way of taking into account minority occurrences that can get overlooked in big data processing. "I would advocate prioritizing vital social questions over data availability," she wrote in an essay explaining this very issue.

A Better Future?

The big question is, what sort of impact is WiML making? Though the organization has existed for a decade, it's only been recently that the industry has begun acknowledging its diversity problem. "I wouldn't be having a conversation like this three years ago," Wallach says. "When I started out in machine learning as a PhD student, I didn't know any other women. Most of the people I knew were men."

That's no longer the case. Both Wallach and Doshi-Velez say gender representation has improved, even if parity is a long way away. "Any situation where you have an unbalanced population—it's going to be an uphill battle," says Wallach. "We've taken the stance that it's better to do something even if we don't know it's the optimal thing. That's absolutely paid off."

The challenge going forward is not only to create programs that support women, but also ensure that they're gaining visibility throughout the industry. With that in mind, WiML recently created a formalized online database of women in machine learning. Readily available, the document is meant to offer proof that there are women who can speak at any conference, join a study, or offer their expertise in any capacity. Organizers for machine-learning events can no longer claim that they didn't know where to find experienced women.

In December, the 11th annual conference for Women in Machine Learning will take place in Barcelona. As in the previous 10 years, there will undoubtedly be some game-changing presentations that push the industry forward. For her part, Doshi-Velez says it's time the greater computer science community acknowledged these accomplishments so that the dialogue can finally move past focusing on the challenges that women and other minorities in these advanced disciplines face. Many people, she says, "talk about the problem, which is important. But I don't see as much about the solutions. We need to start publicizing that work."

Thanks to advances in AI, smartphones are revolutionizing care for the visually impaired, providing everything from diagnoses to "sight."

"Seven hundred years after glasses were invented there are still 2.5 billion people in the world with poor vision and no access to vision correction," says Hong Kong philanthropist James Chen. Chairman of his family's Nigeria-based manufacturing company, Wahum Group, Chen is funding a contest called the Clearly Vision Prize that will award a total of $250,000 to projects that improve eyesight, especially in poor countries. Thirty-six semifinalists were announced this week (the five winners will be awarded September 15). Among the contenders: 3D printed eyeglass frames, drones that deliver medical supplies, and several smartphone-based technologies. Some of the smartphones help nonexperts test vision, and one uses artificial intelligence to "see" for blind people.

The Clearly Vision semifinalists represent just a sampling of the smartphone projects fighting vision loss, a growing field that is bringing critical care to remote regions far from hospitals and doctors offices. The more people I spoke to for this story, the more apps and mobile gadgets I discovered. Vision-care projects can use smartphone screens to display eye-test images, cameras to spot damage, computing power to process images, and wireless connections to link fieldworkers and remote specialists.

A Seeing-Eye Phone

The most ambitious technology is from the Melbourne, Australia-based Aipoly, whose app recognizes objects and verbalizes descriptions in seven languages. Cofounders Alberto Rizzoli and Marita Cheng were inspired by their own experiences with blind friends who lost sight midlife. "They still remember the physical world very well. They still remember the colors of the plants and trees around them, and they've been deprived of this," Rizzoli says. He particularly remembers an older friend. "When I was a kid, I would walk with this person, and he would ask me to tell him what was around in Tuscany, where we spent our summers."

Other vision apps, such as TapTapSee, use cloud-based servers to process images, which requires a wireless connection and results in a several-second delay. Aipoly runs on the phone, using AI called a "convolutional neural network." It doesn't need a Wi-Fi connection and works much faster than cloud-based apps; it's able to identify up to seven images per second. Aipoly utilizes both the phone's CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform many tasks simultaneously. "Technology will just get better and better, so eventually these AI-type applications will be ubiquitous," says Nardo Manaloto, an AI engineer and consultant focused on health care (who is not affiliated with Aipoly).

When I tried it, Aipoly correctly recognized things like a microwave oven and a champagne glass—well, actually it just said "glass." It identified an apple as "fruit." I was impressed when several times it correctly identified my friend's cat as "tabby," although it did once call it "elephant."

The next version of the app, expected by the end of the year, will boost recognition abilities from 1,000 objects to 5,000. It will also cut power use and expand support beyond the iPhone 6 and 6s, to older iPhones and a broad range of Android phones. Already, users can teach the app new objects, with the data uploaded and distributed in updates. Aipoly is also testing smartphone-connected glasses fitted with a camera so people don't have to hold up their phones.

An Rx Over Text

Aipoly helps people with severe and incurable vision loss. But most blindness is curable with a very simple device: Glasses. Ninety percent of blind and visually impaired people live in poor countries, and 43% of them have a refractive error: They are nearsighted or farsighted. Prices are dropping to around $2.50 or less for a basic pair of glasses in developing countries. A bigger problem is getting professionals and their equipment out to evaluate people in those places.

Another of Chen's semifinalists is Vula Mobile, a diagnostic app that links nurses and aid workers in the field to doctors. Holding the phone about 6 feet away from the patient, the user activates the app, which displays a letter "E" facing different directions. It moves to ever-smaller versions of the letter until the patient can no longer determine the direction. I got results of 20/20 in my left eye and 20/40 in my right. I also answered questions, like if I had any pain. I filled in a comments section and took a photo of each eye.

Pressing a button sends results to a doctor—in my case, to Will Mapham, the app's creator, in Cape Town, South Africa. He conceived of the app while volunteering at a clinic in Swaziland called Vula Emehlo—meaning "open your eyes" in the Siswati, Zulu, and Xhosa languages. Mapham texted me through the app in a few minutes, and we discussed some dark flecks and blurry spots in my vision. Such dialog allows doctors to guide remote nurses or volunteers through tests and treatments. "This is a way of having local health workers providing specialist care wherever their patient is," Mapham says during a follow-up Skype call. He estimates that up to 30% of patients can get treatment without making the long journey to the nearest hospital.

Mapham and his cofounder Debré Barrett (who funded the project) hired programmers and launched Vula Mobile in 2014. Since then, they have further developed the app so that it can evaluate eight other health problems (and counting), including cardiology, HIV, dermatology, and oncology. They also plan to expand beyond South Africa, to Namibia, Rwanda, and elsewhere.

Doctor In An App

A third semifinalist, the Israeli startup 6over6 (i.e., the metric version of 20/20), uses a trick of physics to let users measure their prescription. Its app, GlassesOn, hasn't launched yet, but CEO Dr. Ofer Limon walked me through how it works. (He also showed a simulation, on the condition we not publish it.) GlassesOn displays a pattern of red and green lines that blur together to form yellow for people who are nearsighted. But held at a specific distance from each eye, which varies by patient, the lines become sharp, and true colors emerge. Users move the phone back and forth to find the right distance for each eye, which the app uses to calculate the lens prescription. The user holds up a credit card, student ID, or any card with a magnetic strip (since they are the same size everywhere) so the app can determine distance by how big the card appears.

A prescription, even from an app, is all opticians in some countries require to make a pair of glasses. In the U.S., 6over6 is applying to the Food and Drug Administration to certify the accuracy of the program. If it gets FDA approval, GlassesOn could actually perform some work that currently requires a doctor. "GlassesOn does not aim to replace the ophthalmologist or optometrist, as we limit our services only for refraction purposes and for healthy users only," Limon tells me in an email.

Tackling Serious Eye Diseases

More complex vision problems like cataracts—the clouding of the eye's lens—can't be diagnosed by an eye chart. This is where the cell phone's camera comes in, to photograph damage of the cornea at the front of the eye or of the lens. Getting to the retina—the nerve tissue at the back of the eye that captures images—is more difficult and requires special lenses. Retina ailments such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration are a growing concern as the population ages and diabetes cases soar. Retinas can also break down due to rare genetic conditions like Stargardt Disease (which causes the flecks and blurry spots in my vision).

British ophthalmologist Andrew Bastawrous leads an organization named Peek Vision Foundation that's developed a smartphone app and lens attachment, Peek Retina, to capture sharp images of the back of the eye. Peek isn't among the Clearly Vision semifinalists, but James Chen has donated 50,000 pounds (about $65,000) in seed funding. (Peek raised over twice as much on Indiegogo to manufacture the device.) Deliveries have been delayed, but prototypes have been extensively tested with tens of thousands of people in Africa; tests are beginning in India in a few months.

"We had to do a complete redesign to make it something that can work on almost every smartphone," says Bastawrous. Prototypes he showed at his 2014 TED talk were 3D printed for specific phone models. The final version will be traditionally manufactured. Bastawrous expects it to sell for "well under" $500 when it arrives in early 2017.

"Peek Retina is only a small part of what we do," says Bastawrous. The main task is coordinating care. While we were talking on Skype, Bastawrous sent me screen shots from his computer that showed real-time progress in screening students in Botswana and referring them to specialists. And while Peek is the best-known project of its kind, devices by for-profit companies (also not part of the Clearly Vision awards) are already available. They include the $435 D-Eye and $399 Paxos Scope. Another company, oDocs Eye Care, is launching a $299 product, called visoScope, in the fall.) "We're not going to say that people have to use Peek Retina to use this," he says, noting that the other devices work in Peek's system.

Future plans for Peek include image recognition, but Bastawrous thinks that will be limited to pre-screening the eye photos that human experts will still have to view. "[AI] is one of those things—because it's doable, people are doing it," he says. "It does have value, but in context." There are bigger challenges, he says, like preventing conditions that cause blindness. "I would love to see the great brains that go into AI investing in preventing people from becoming diabetic in the first place," he says. "The impact would be a thousand-fold more."

Colleagues who can't stop complaining can (and should) be dealt with. Here's how to do that effectively.

It may be a dismal coworker or complaining boss, but into most professional lives a few negative people will fall. Those who veer from negative to toxic could actually be costing an organization money and productivity.

Businesses also run the risk of complaints becoming contagious. "People see it and they're brought down by it too, or they're saying, 'Gee, this is an organization that tolerates this kind of thing, I may as well start complaining, too,'" says Robert M. Galford, managing partner of the Center for Leading Organizations and coauthor of Simple Sabotage: A Modern Field Manual for Detecting and Rooting Out Everyday Behaviors That Undermine Your Workplace.

Sick of listening to the negative spew? If you can't avoid them altogether, there are several ways to deal with a chronic complainer. Here's how to change the conversation.

1. Listen For The Need

Some people turn into chronic complainers because they feel they're not being heard. They repeat the negative commentary until someone validates what they have to say, says empowerment speaker and coach Erica Latrice. "Complainers may want you to try to talk them out of their woe-is-me complaining. If you are in an environment where you have to be around complainers a lot, just use the phrase, 'If I were you, I would feel the same way,'" she suggests. That allows them to feel heard and may short-circuit the need to repeat a negative message.

2. Reframe The Situation

Sometimes, negative people just need a bit of perspective adjustment, Galford says. Try helping them reframe the situation. You might offer a different perspective on the situation or action that is being criticized. For example, if a coworker is criticizing a company policy, you might offer insight into why the policy was instituted in the first place and the good that it does. "When you say, 'Let's think about this in a different way,' or, 'If we start first by understanding the reason things are this way,' you can change the nature of the dialogue," Galford says.

3. Change Your Response

Complainers are energy drains for their audiences. Often, their negative talk can energize them because it places blame on others and boosts their self-esteem, says David M. Long, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the College of William & Mary. So, like other communication styles, accepting that this is the individual's way of communicating without taking it personally can be an effective coping technique.

One thing you don't want to do is encourage the person to pretend to be more positive. Long says:

Research on the topic of emotional labor shows that asking people to be positive when they are not is resource-draining for them. People need to be real and authentic, so forced positivity is not the best approach. A better approach might be for the chronic complainers to offer their own solutions to problems, and come up with a plan for reaching that solution.

4. Ask For Solutions

Sometimes, the complainer actually has suggestions to make the situation better, Latrice says. Ask questions such as: "How would you solve this?" or "What would you do differently?" If the person is serious about change, they may have some good ideas, she says.

5. Call It Out

If other tactics don't work, sometimes you just need to call out the behavior, Galford says. By noting that the individual has a habit of being negative, you risk alienating them. But it's possible they've gotten into a habit or don't realize how they're coming across, he says. By noting that the coworker tends to take a negative view, you might offer them food for thought about behavior change.

Latrice suggests highlighting your own feelings instead of being accusatory. For example, try: "I feel uncomfortable when I hear that kind of criticism," instead of, "You're always so negative." Using humor can also be an effective way to defuse a confrontation.

6. Redirect The Conversation

When someone is simply a chronic complainer who doesn't want solutions or acknowledgement, there's still hope. The tactic that media trainers have been teaching corporate executives and politicians for decades is called the bridge. Media trainer Trish McDermott, cofounder of Panic Media Training, a firm that helps organizations have difficult conversations with the media, explains that bridging subtly changes the subject by acknowledging what was said, then moving on to another topic.

"Good bridging is, 'Hey, I'm glad you asked that question. I don't really have an answer, but I have some thoughts. Let me share them with you,'" she demonstrates. "It's not a giant leap for mankind away from the negativity," she says. "It's a small step." Then, continue on to discuss the new topic until you can extricate yourself from the conversation.

Of course, if you're not getting anywhere with these tactics and the coworker is negatively affecting your workplace, you may need to enlist the help of someone higher on the organizational chart. But, Latrice says, depending on the complainer's motivations, you may find that simply responding appropriately makes the situation better.

As Nokia launches its $45,000 VR camera in China, the market for virtual reality there is exploding, and may surpass that of the U.S.

If you think you've been hearing a lot about virtual reality these days, it's nothing compared to what's going on in China.

Here in the U.S., VR is very much in the news as hardware like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung's Gear VR, and others have become mainstream products. But to people who know what's going on in China, the VR ecosystem there has probably already surpassed that of the U.S. and Europe. And that's to say nothing of the potential for further explosive growth that's expected to come soon.

"VR is huge in China," said Minal Hasan, the general partner and managing partner of K2 Global, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that is making substantial investments in Asia. "I think China will adopt VR way faster than the U.S. because of how the country is structured, and how involved the government is."

Many recent data points back up that prediction. Earlier this month, California's NextVR, a leading producer and distributor of live-streamed pro sports and music events in VR, announced tens of millions of dollars in new funding from Chinese investors. Jaunt VR, a maker of a high-end VR camera and the developer of an end-to-end VR production and distribution system, set up a joint venture this spring aiming to bring cinematic virtual reality to China. Also this month, Bloomberg wrote that Chinese investors are hot on numerous types of VR apps.

Today brings the latest evidence of China's appeal to VR companies there and abroad: Nokia's announcement that it is going to begin selling its $45,000 professional-quality Ozo camera in the Asian country.

"It's big news for us," Guido Voltolina, Nokia's head of presence capture told Fast Company. "I think it's really the sign of the maturity of the product that started in North America, but had the ambition to scale to be a global product."

In the months since the Ozo's launch in North America and Europe, Nokia has lowered the camera's cost from $60,000 to $45,000 and all buyers, including those in China, will get the latest version of Ozo Creator, which offers content creators the choice of either fast or high-quality stitching technology.

To Voltolina, bringing the Ozo to China is reflective of the Chinese VR market being "crazy, like really crazy, in a positive way."

Added Voltolina, "It's growing at a speed I've not experienced, either in North America or Europe, to the point that will make [VR in] China surpass the other, more traditional markets, like North America or Europe."

Hasan said she "completely agrees," noting that she's seen estimates that there will be $860 million in VR investment in China this year alone, and as much as $8 billion to $10 billion by 2020.

Both Hasan and Voltolina pointed to a strong appetite in China for entertainment, especially for trying out new experiences and technologies. That means there is an ample and growing market for places like Internet cafes, arcades, and other public places that offer the opportunity to play with VR.

For example, Hasan noted that there are "tons and tons of arcades, cafes, and amusement parks dedicated to VR in China, as well as stores in malls where people can play around with virtual reality products. She also said HTC, maker of the Vive, is opening up 10,000 outlets in China where people can come and try out the high-end VR gear—and, HTC hopes, buy it.

At the same time, Chinese manufacturers are flooding the market with well over 100 different VR headsets, Hasan said, from low-end, Google Cardboard-quality systems to higher quality head-mounted displays. These are coming from small outfits and giant companies alike. Xiaomi, for example, just announced its first VR headset, the Mi VR Play—which it's selling for next to nothing.

"Looking at the overall investment in VR, not just in VR cameras, in VR infrastructure," said Voltolina, "all the major [Chinese] companies ... are not just testing the environment, they're really betting on it. They're making multimillion-dollar investments to be part of it, and accelerate the infrastructure for deployment."

Hardware Saturation

The problem, in China as in the U.S., is that while there is no shortage these days of VR hardware, there is very much a shortage of content. That's why, Hasan said, big Chinese companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and others are putting money into early-stage VR companies developing content.

That content will be aimed both at individual consumers who own VR headsets and at the public VR stores and cafes where consumers can pay to play.

"I think that's the direction things are going in," Hasan said. "Hardware's becoming saturated."

And that's very much the rationale for companies like Jaunt and Nokia bringing their professional-quality cameras to China—to give creators the tools they need to produce all that content.

"Everything that is related to both computer-generated content, or shoot-and-capture VR content, is growing tremendously," Voltolina said. "And all the production companies are adapting different solutions. That's why we want to be there with the Ozo, because it is really scaling rapidly."

Beyond Entertainment

In the meantime, there appear to be several areas beyond entertainment of potential growth for virtual reality in China.

Among them, according to Bloomberg, are VR tours of real estate, presumably along the lines of what is currently offered in the U.S. by Matterport; and "planned enhanced product functions from e-commerce providers such as Alibaba."

Hasan also pointed to education as a major growth area for VR in China. She said she thinks the Chinese government may begin requiring schools to use VR headsets as a teaching tool. "If the government gets behind it," she said, "it'll be in every school in the country. The rate of adoption is just going to be insane."

She also said she thinks if anyone can figure out how to integrate VR with WeChat, which has 800 million active users in China, that will be yet another major growth opportunity for the technology.

For his part, Nokia's Voltolina thinks people should expect to see VR content being created in China not just for that market, but for the rest of the world. He said Nokia, for example, had tested the Ozo on a project about the life of pandas, one of China's most recognizable symbols.

"That's the kind of content, of course, that if you can afford to visit China, you want to go and see in person," Voltolina said. But for everyone else, VR is "how you go to China without flying there."

We were sad.

As platforms such as Facebook and Apple News slowlystrangle the media industry, the NYT Now app for a moment provided a glimmer of hope. The app curated the best of the New York Times' stories, as well as stories from other publications. Maybe a news outlet could create its own highly entertaining news feed! Maybe it didn't have to depend on a third-party platform to distribute its content!

On Thursday, what was left of that small dream died when the New York Times announced that it would shut down the project, saying that it had incorporated its best features into the main New York Times app.

Here at Fast Company this is how a chatroom full of editors reacted to the news as we added the app to our list of failed news experiments.

1. "NYT Now is shutting down??? WTF"
2. "Wait NYT Now is sitting down? I am truly heartbroken and shocked. It's one of the few apps I open every day."
3. "Excuse me while i go make sure my friends still have jobs"
4. "This is in many ways a sign of the problem with apps and discoverability right now. Apple has not done a good job of solving the problem at all."
5. "figuring out an innovative way to deliver news doesn't solve the problem that every consumes content differently if it's not forcefed to you on Facebook."
6. "NO! i love nyt now!!!!"
7. "there are so few other good [news apps]"
8. "because there's clearly not a business model to support one at this time"
9. "the business model is go work for apple news"
10. "the moral of this story is that if you aren't barfing up a stream of hot garbage all the time, you might be totally effed. but also, if you are barfing up a stream of hot garbage all the time, you are equally effed. please excuse me while i go lie down in some hot garbage and wail like a banshee before the impending death of our profession. #dailyeditorialmotivationaltalk"

Okay. Now that we got that out of our systems, may we suggest some fine alternatives to NYT Now:

TheNew York Times mobile app has incorporated some aspects of NYT Now for New York Times subscribers. While the NYT Now business model obviously didn't work out, some of its product design ideas will theoretically make the main app a better experience.

Nuzzel combs through your social media feeds to point out stories that your network has talked about most.

BuzzFeed's Sunday email is an excellent compendium of the week's best longform journalism.

And, of course, Fast Company has a wonderful newsfeed for business and technology news. Add the website to your phone's home screen! Sign up for its daily email digest! (Disclosure: I and everyone else involved in creating this article works for Fast Company).

As popular as Instagram and Twitter, musical.ly is the biggest app you may never have heard of. And it's not just for lip-synching teens.

If you have a teenager, have been near a teen lately, or are just young at heart, chances are you've heard of musical.ly. The almost 2-year-old app that encourages users to lip-sync to 15-second clips of songs has exploded in popularity, especially among millennials. Every day, users upload more than 10 million videos to the platform, which has held firm in the App Store's top 40 since last summer, right beside the likes of Snapchat and YouTube.

But it started out as something very different: an educational app called Cicada.

CEO Louis Yang and his partner, Alex Zhu, originally launched Cicada as a way for people to learn new things on their mobile phone. With it, they encouraged users to upload three- to five-minute videos explaining how to, say, cook a new dish or speak a foreign language. The idea was that if you spent five minutes of your commute each day educating yourself on a topic, after a while, you would become an expert. They built a platform for creating and sharing the videos, but there was just one problem: finding the experts.

"We found out that the challenge isn't really about the tool. The challenge is that there are not too many people who are able to explain knowledge in such a short period of time," Yang says. "The five minutes was very challenging for most people."

Faced with a potential failure and running out of cash, Yang and Zhu started brainstorming how they could use the platform they had already built. They thought about what they'd learned from the Cicada failure: One, if you're going to build a product that relies on user-generated content, it needs to be lightweight and capable of uploading content in minutes rather than hours; and two, if you want that product to go viral, it needs to be related to pop culture in some way—music, for instance.

"We didn't have any money to spend on marketing it or promoting it, so we had to think, What is the best way to create a product, which allows a massive amount of users to create content in an easy way in a short amount of time?" Yang says. "Then we brainstormed and came up with this musical.ly idea."

Using what was left of the $250,000 investment they had secured for Cicada as well as a big part of the technology built for that app, Yang and Zhu launched musical.ly in 2014, first in the United States. They got lucky: It went viral, landing in the App Store's top 40 in less than a year. It hasn't budged since.

Musical.ly is now used by over 100 million people around the world, including Europe, Asia, and South America. More than 30% of users post something every single day; some users post more than 10 videos publicly each day, while others choose to share videos privately with their friends.

While more than 60% of musical.ly's user base falls between the ages of 13 and 20, people of all ages are now getting hooked. "More and more elderly people are using the app to communicate with family," says Yang. "We see brothers, parents, even grandparents coming in."

One of musical.ly's most popular acts is a woman who refers to herself as Gangsta Grandma. She's 87 years young and has over 1.5 million followers who watch her lip-sync and perform comedy routines. Now, lots of people use music on the platform as a soundtrack to their dance and comedy videos.

Musical.ly has even secured deals with major labels to feature the work of several big-name artists. Alicia Keys and Wiz Khalifa have accounts on the service, and others, such as Jason DeRulo, have committed to releasing new music videos on musical.ly before posting them elsewhere. According to Yang, the labels are coming to them, not the other way around. "We've gotten a very positive response from the music industry," he says. "Not only labels, but publishers. They are seeing that musical.ly is a platform that gives them extra benefits for releasing new music and promoting new artists."

Yang says that as the app has grown, more and more artists are seeing it as a platform they want to be a part of, one that can help them reach a wider swath of fans. Earlier this summer, musical.ly partnered with Good Morning America on a contest that likely brought the brand to the attention of a whole new audience.

So, what's next for musical.ly? Monetizing it.

According to Yang, the company has enough cash in the bank to experiment with different ways of making money, while still keeping the user experience positive. Current ideas include running ads in feeds or sponsored content.

"User experience is more important, and is prioritized over making money," Yang says. He adds that the company won't do anything that will harm user experience in the name of making a dollar. Currently, there are no plans to sell music within the app, an approach that similar services have tried.

"It's really about community," he says. "People are sharing their lives."

The Olympics brought a moment of equality to women in sports, but don't expect it to last.

During the 2016 Olympics, the U.S. enjoyed a brief, imperfect glimpse of a rare phenomenon in sports: gender equality.

Notable gaffes in sexist Olympics coverage aside, high-profile women athletes like swimmers, gymnasts, and runners were front and center during prime-time viewing hours, and women in sports like rugby, field hockey, and shot put also got airtime. A team of researchers even found that NBC's primetime telecast of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics showed female athletes 58.5% of the time and male athletes 41.5% of the time during the first half of the Rio telecast.

That's unusual. A 2015 study from the University of Southern California found that coverage of women's sports hasn't expanded in 25 years, despite dramatic increases in the number of girls and women playing sports, from youth through professional teams. Researchers found that Los Angeles broadcast affiliates only devote 3.2% of airtime to women's sports—down from 5% in 1989, while ESPN's SportsCenter has remained flat at 2% of airtime.

When women's sports are covered, 81.6% of the coverage is focused on women's basketball. And even when they do get on the air, the production value and commentary is often less entertaining and less professional, the study found, when compared with men's teams.

More Than Money Issues

It's well-known that women athletes are often paid far less than their male counterparts. Earlier this year, five members of the U.S. women's national soccer team filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the U.S. Soccer Federation for wage discrimination. To put it into perspective, even with their 2015 World Cup win, the women earned roughly a quarter of what the men earned, according to corporate gender strategist Jeffrey Tobias Halter, author of Why Women: The Leadership Imperative to Advancing Women and Engaging Men.

Marketer and talent representative Leonard Armato says the lack of high-quality media coverage, as well as everything from societal attitudes about women in sports to event attendance figures, stack the deck against women athletes. Armato is CEO and founder of Management Plus Enterprises (MPE), which represents sports figures like Oscar De La Hoya, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kerri Walsh Jennings, among others, and is the former CEO and commissioner of the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour which, under his direction, offered equal purses for men's and women's competitions.

Over the years, Armato says he's seen the bias against women athletes firsthand. He points to one exchange with a major sneaker manufacturer regarding former WNBA star Lisa Leslie. The company wasn't willing to negotiate her sponsorship because of doubts about her potential influence on sales.

"[They were] honest to say at one point, 'Look, we can't pay her a lot of money because girls are buying shoes because Michael Jordan's wearing them, not because she's wearing them,'" he recalls. Armato notes that in recent years, sports companies like Under Armor and Puma have penned endorsement deals with celebrities like Rihanna and Gisele Bundchen rather than opting for women athletes.

Sarah Shephard, features editor of Sport magazine in the U.K. and author of Kicking Off: How Women in Sport Are Changing the Game, agrees that cultural conditioning regarding women's sports and lack of coverage make it difficult for women athletes to build the followings that men's teams often command. Because women are paid so much less, they may not have the money to invest in promoting themselves and their sports. That means fewer fans in the stands and less revenue to pay athletes, as well as less representation by brands, agents, and public relations professionals.

"I know how often I am approached by PR for sportsmen, and I know how often am approached by PR for sportswomen, and there is a big difference," she says.

In addition, paltry salaries and scarcer endorsement dollars mean that women may need to hold other jobs in addition to their sport to make ends meet. The inability to be full-time athletes can affect the level of play, Shephard says.

Moving Toward Equality

Changing the game is going to require resolving a perfect storm of factors that keep women's teams from reaching higher profiles, earnings, and even athletic potential, Halter says. The potential market among women alone is rich: He points to the National Football League's fast-growing audience of women and the number of women playing fantasy sports (34% of all players) as indicative of the potential fan base. But if sports organizations want to attract more female fans, Halter says, they'll need to hire more women—on and off the field—as coaches, managers, referees, and in other posts.

"Those actions are going to demonstrate their commitment," he says.

Brands and leagues also need to invest more in their women's teams and athletes to build their followings, Shephard adds, in order to create a virtuous circle. By raising the profiles of women athletes, more people will become aware of them and watch them compete, which drives event attendance and sponsorship dollars.

"Sports fans will watch sports," she says. "I am a sports fan. It does not really make any difference to me who is competing. Whether it is a men's cycling race or women's cycling race, you cannot tell when they have got their helmets on, anyway."

To actually get that airtime, however, might require "radical ideas," Armato says—perhaps even going so far as to include legislation mandating more airtime for women's sports. He likens the idea to Congress's 1990 enactment of the Children's Television Act to increase the amount of educational and informational TV programming for children.

"More promotion, more companies supporting [women athletes], better time slots. You can do those little things, but I think ultimately, you've got to mandate that we make certain important changes like we mandated things in labor law; like we mandated things like Title IX. You've got to change the way people are conditioned," Armato says. Shephard adds that sports governing bodies can also do more to advocate for more attention, media coverage, and investment on behalf of their female athletes.

Leveling the playing field in women's sports is going to require a heavy overhaul of current conditions. But as more women get in the game, there's never been a better time to break ground.

The star of Imperium and director Daniel Ragussis discuss "How To Make Friends and Terrorize People."

Several actors have donned the squiggly tattoos and shorn scalps of neo-Nazis in order to play against type at a key career moment. (Think Ryan Gosling in 2001's The Believer, rather than Patrick Stewart in last spring's Green Room.) Daniel Radcliffe is not one of them.

For one thing, the former child star has been defying typecasting since his provocative turn on the Broadway stage in Equus back in 2007. More importantly, though, he isn't playing a white supremacist in Imperium, but rather an undercover FBI agent posing as one. It's a role both Radcliffe and his character slide into with unnerving ease, and there's a simple explanation for why that is.

Imperium, which is in theaters August 19, owes its existence to the book Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent. Author Michael German wrote it after 16 years in the field, including 12 months spent infiltrating a white supremacist circle. When director Daniel Ragussis got in touch with the former agent to find a movie within his book—German ended up with a "story by" credit—what he was most impressed to discover is that apparently what it takes to succeed in undercover counterterrorism is people skills.

"As I talked to Michael more about the nature of his work and what it is that he had to do," Ragussis says, "the point he made is that being an undercover agent is really about social relationships, being well liked, gaining trust, and being a master of social situation."

German is not the superheroic undercover FBI agent depicted in most films. Instead, he is a well-read, soft-spoken former philosophy major. This is where Radcliffe comes in. It's not that he doesn't look like a typical action hero—dude is fit, lean, and a credible puncher of faces—it's that he has the right blend of charisma and sensitivity to pull off someone who is inwardly scared while outwardly menacing. Also, the fact that this is not the typical undercover role is what drew him to it.

"Often in these kinds of scripts you'll have a character that's set up as being smart and that's how he overcomes obstacles in the first two-thirds of the film, but then in the last act, it's just, 'Ah fuck it, give him a gun,'" Radcliffe says. "And it's nice to see a script that has the balls to keep him unarmed and using his brain until the end."

Radcliffe's character, Nate Foster, is a quiet, intelligent young war vet who finds himself coaxed into infiltration duty by Toni Collette's case agent, Angela Zamparo. Foster is given a wire to wear and a plausible cover story and then he's sent in to root out a putative domestic terrorist attack by white supremacists. He's also given a book to read, however, the same one Michael German's case officer once gave him in real life: Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People. Rather than inventing a character like an actor might, Foster has to become even more himself.

"You have to sustain whatever you're doing and be it all the time and you can't do that if you're not still you," Radcliffe says. "You're just a version of yourself who happens to have these horrible opinions and views."

The character in Imperium simulates holding these views by reading and absorbing as much of the world and its vocabulary as he can. In real-life, that task fell to Ragussis, who went through whole shelves of books to learn about the difference between Klansmen, punk skinheads, and neo-Nazis. He read biographies of people in the white supremacist movement, memoirs of people who left the movement, and tomes by social scientists who'd studied them all. What emerged from all this research is what makes the movie most jarring: a portrait of a splintered community that contains both Hitler-mustached pariahs and suburban, pre-Heisenberg Walter White types. This fringe group may be less fringe than most people would like to think.

"Every one of these characters was inspired by and composed of pieces from all of these real things. I wouldn't have the capacity to make it up," Ragussis says. "When you come at it from the outside, anyone would naturally see it as this monolithic group, and if somebody has that level of anti-Semitism and racism, they seem like they're all alike. But they're wildly different as people, and even their beliefs are wildly different."

As far as Radcliffe's research went, it mostly consisted of long conversations with Michael German. However, he also spent a lot of time examining certain, let's say radical message boards, to get an idea of how these people talk to each other and function as a community. Aiming for authenticity may have led both star and director to end up on some clandestine NSA lists. (Ragussis had to look up what goes into making a dirty bomb.) In fact, after a while, it became an inside joke that whenever the production designer or costume designer would come on board, they would inevitably ask whether it was safe to be Googling the kind of things they were Googling.

The other main challenge, beyond not getting a team of Kevlar-vested feds battering down dressing room doors, was revealing the version of Nate who didn't hold appalling views while out in the field.

"Something I deferred to Dan [Ragussis] on all the time was working out how good Nate is at hiding his feelings," Radcliffe says. "Because you want to show the audience stuff that you don't want to show the character you're in the scene with, so it's sort of trying to find that line of showing I'm shit-scared in a way that they can see it without the guy I'm with being like, 'Hey, you're obviously shit-scared—presumably you're FBI.' It was hard to make sure you know where he is emotionally at all times but make it believable that the people he's with wouldn't."

Ragussis and Radcliffe addressed this issue by filming reams of different takes for each scene in which Nate is in a tight spot. (There are roughly 6,000 such scenes.) In certain takes, Nate would be Mr. Cool Breeze, and in another he was shaky as a leaf. The idea was to gather enough variance to calibrate the performance in the editing bay for maximum cohesion, tension, and believability.

Overall, the performance Ragussis ended up with is one that mirrors Michael German's stone-cold commitment to the lie. When Radcliffe is cornered in the film, his face contracts into a sinister, razor-thin smile, one that throws down a challenging thunderclap of a rebuke to anyone who dares question him. Similarly, when German was asked to be patted down in his undercover days, he would never relent. He just said no repeatedly and stuck with it, and he was convincing enough that the groups he was infiltrating relented instead.

It's this kind of conviction in one's words, rather than the words themselves, that wins friends and influences people, according to Dale Carnegie. Some of the particular words in this case, though, made Radcliffe ultimately wary of just how convincing he could be when he applied himself.

"No swear words can offend me but when you get to the racial stuff, it's like, oh yeah, this is the last bastion of what is really truly horrible and offensive. There's a reason those words are powerful," the actor says. "Even though you know that everybody knows and understands that you're acting and this in no way reflects on you, it's still just horrible to say some of this stuff, so I found myself going up to some of the actors between takes and apologizing: 'I know you know, and I know I don't have to, but I just feel like I need to.'"

Spoken like someone with the social skills of an undercover FBI agent.

A new feature puts proof front and center that a campaign has a functional prototype.

"There's absolutely no question that the health of the Kickstarter platform is founded on trust and transparency," says CEO Yancey Strickler.

Without that trust—specifically, the trust that the service provides a modicum of protection preventing scammers from bilking crowdfunders—there'd be no Kickstarter at all. Yet high-profile hardware failures, like the infamous Zano drone and the nonfunctional Scribble Pen, have piled up. Now, Kickstarter is making some changes to its platform and UI to help ensure would-be funders that a hot new piece of hardware isn't too good to be true.

It's called the Prototype Gallery, a new slide-show panel located at the top of hardware Kickstarters, right below the pitch video. It's not flashy, but the gallery gives Kickstarter creators a standardized, high-profile locale to present their backers photographic evidence that the project they are funding is where it says it is in the design process. It's split up between four different phases: proof of concept (explorations that test ideas and functionality), functional prototype (a prototype that proves the final product will work), appearance prototype (a nonfunctional device that shows off the finished product's industrial design), and design prototype (a prototype that matches the function and appearance of the final product, but is made in a different way—i.e., not mass-produced).

Kickstarter's rules have always required hardware projects to have a functional prototype before their projects were approved. But in practice, that rule was academic. "It's not like we ask creators to physically mail us their prototypes to check out," says Strickler, who says Kickstarter's review team looks for evidence in the video to make sure a new hardware project isn't a scam. But even if a hardware creator does have a functional prototype, that's still not the biggest challenge getting to market. There's simply no shortage of Kickstarters that have failed because creators underestimated the difficulty of getting a product to market—past the initial prototype phase.

Strickler hopes the new Prototype Gallery will help solve these problems in a couple of concrete ways. First of all, it provides guidance to creators of the kind of milestones they need to hit to get a product to market, and the kind of updates they should be giving their backers as they go along.

But it also makes proof of prototype highly visible on Kickstarter hardware pages, in a way they weren't before. Strickler says that up until now, the only requirement on creators to show off their prototypes was that they put that proof somewhere in their video. That meant creators, who were further behind on their path to market than their marketing might have suggested, could bury a glimpse of their wonky prototype in a random part of their video. With the Prototype Gallery, backers will be able to see at a glance which hardware products are transparent about their prototypes, and which ones aren't. A campaign without a prototype gallery will automatically seem suspicious.

Debuting today in beta on a handful of opt-in Kickstarters, Strickler tells me he's not sure if the Prototype Gallery will be a mandatory part of the Kickstarter template for hardware projects going forward. "We want to see how people start using it first before we decide if we require it from everyone," he says. That's because the Prototype Gallery alone isn't a universal cure to Kickstarters going off the rails. Working prototypes are just one part of a successful Kickstarter, which still require a lot of invisible skills—like supply chain management, budgeting experience, and manufacturing—to get off the ground.

So the absence of a well-curated prototype gallery will only be a tip-off to the most obvious Kickstarter vaporware. You'll still need to trust that creators can deliver what they promise. Even so, the Prototype Gallery should provide some level of assurance for those wary of being burned on Kickstarter vaporware. Why not be transparent about your prototypes—unless you have something to hide?

[Cover Photo: peangdao/iStock]

The Facebook billionaire is rumored to be looking at housing as an issue to address with his new charitable organization. What could he be thinking?

Last year, when Mark Zuckerberg launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company that he and his wife, Pricilla Chan, founded, they announced that their goal was to solve social issues with a startup-like mentality. The company, which will be funded by the bulk of Zuckerberg's own Facebook shares, an estimated $45 billion, said it would focus on long-term bets to reshape the world. Their motto is "Advancing Human Potential and Promoting Equality." They kicked off by leading a $24 million funding round for Andela, a group that trains elite software developers in Africa to match with top companies around the world.

That's why it came as some surprise when The Informationreported that Zuckerberg had met with several housing experts to learn more about the country's affordable housing crisis. It does make some sense as it's an issue that—in the Bay Area at least—Silicon Valley tech companies have helped create, so much so that Facebook recently set aside a section of their latest corporate housing development in Menlo Park to absorb residents being displaced by tech workers with hearty salaries.

But it's also far broader. Most Americans are worried about being able to pay for decent housing, according to a recent MacArthur Foundation report. While the exact point at which shelter cost becomes a life burden has been debated—it's generally accepted that if you're shelling out more than 30% of your income on rent or mortgage you're going to have trouble affording things like food, clothes, and medicine. But an estimated 12 million Americans now spend at least half of what they make on that.

Zuckerberg and Chan haven't announced a plan to solve this. So we spoke to several housing experts to see what a tech-savvy billionaire might consider to attack the housing problem.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

According to Mariam Axel-Lute, the associate director of the National Housing Institute and editor of Shelterforce, the group's community development trade publication, those facing housing issues fall into two camps: low-income workers priced out of safe, sanitary spaces, and those with higher wages, who can still get hammered by price surges in hot markets like San Francisco. They may not end up out on the street, but probably still feel insecure and face soul-sucking commutes. If you're low income and live in one of those places, you're in double trouble.

In order to create healthier cities, the foundation should address the neediest first. These people generally do the jobs that are required to make metros work. Addressing their needs could snap a cycle of generational poverty. Initial findings from dozens of MacArthur Foundation studies show that improved housing correlates with families experiencing less sickness and stress, and their kids doing better in school. Students who move out of extreme poverty zones when young earn 31% more in later life, a Harvard study shows.

The problem is supply and demand. If there aren't enough good units available, those that do pop up will be expensive. The government tries to subsidize against this, but only a quarter of the 19 million households eligible for federal housing assistance receive it. Those left out end up being price gouged, forced to live in squalor, or both.

Figuring out how those folks can gain access to good homes in ways that allow them maintain their jobs and build strong communities should be his top priority.

BUILD SMART, BUY SMARTER

Just building more units in high-demand zones isn't the answer. First, it's expensive. Zuckerberg could spend his entire fortune and still not have made enough units for everyone who needs them in California alone, estimates Aimee Inglis, the director at Tenants Trust, a housing rights group. Short term, new units going in can cause a bubble; they may be overvalued as wealthy buyers flock.

If he wants to play developer, Zuckerberg would be better off backing mixed-income developments with deed restrictions, says Axel-Lute. These don't need to be in the middle of cities; it might be cheaper to locate them near transportation hubs like BART has advocated for its commuter trains system.

For the price of a few billion, CZI could provide cheaper living space in the hardest hit areas by buying buildings that they just manage as mixed- or low-income oases themselves. The goal wouldn't be to turn a profit, but to break even and maybe receive tax breaks. After housing failures similar to what's happened in the U.S., the French are reportedly using a similar model effectively.

Rather than spend all his own money on problems, Zuckerberg could use Facebook itself to campaign for mortgage interest deduction (MID) reform. The MID is a federal tax break that allows homeowners to deduct home loan interest from their taxable income. (Vacation homes are fair game, too.) Not surprisingly, most MIDs tend to be used by the six-figure set. This year alone, the U.S. Treasury will forgo a projected $62.4 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition wants to cut the deduction limit of $1 million overall in half, and convert the bonus into a partial tax credit to put against whatever the homeowner might owe Uncle Sam. Most middle- and low-income homeowners would get a break. Part of the revenue that the rich can't write off—an estimated couple billon over the next decade—could be used to fill the coffers of the newly formed National Housing Trust Fund for building and rehabbing more affordable places for those in need.

BUT WAIT, THIS IS MARK ZUCKERBERG

As Vox has pointed out, there's a brute force fix for this: Tokyo, which has experienced substantial growth over the last two decades, has only seen a modest increase in home prices because NIMBY neighbors can't micromanage their neighborhoods—zoning decisions for who can build what and where are made nationally. Tokyo may have one-third the population of the entire state of California, but they've issued nearly twice the housing permits.

The result has been impressive skyscrapers. And smog. And congestion. "If a city has limits on density and you say, let's get rid of limits on density, planners are going to roll their eyes at you because you can't do that without overwhelming your local systems," says Rolf Pendall, the director of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. To that end, Pendall hopes that Zuckerberg might just rethink the entire problem. "I think philanthropy in this space will probably have a bigger impact by investing in lateral areas, thinking one step ahead about spurring innovation," Pendall says.

His theory is that if you address the underlying factors causing fear of urban density first—say, construction costs, eyesores, or congestion—then the public may embrace ambitious projects instead of oppose them. That's the kind of pitch that Silicon Valley makes best: After all, joining a social network to overshare everything could have seemed weird. Instead, the clear pathways to find friends, block trolls, and maintain privacy made it approachable.

In this case, "more" and "affordable" doesn't need to mean block housing. You could distribute a fair amount of people pretty evenly across a city if each single family homeowner was allowed to build a secondary rental unit or put a micro-home in their backyard, suggests Pendall. For homeowners, the revenue from those rentals could assuage their own financial insecurities. (Or at least provide some distance if your kid graduates and moves back in, joined by your aging mother-in-law.)

Extra occupancies could stress utilities, traffic flows, and parking. We have a lot of decent fixes for those things—congestion pricing, ride sharing—but Pendall thinks the more elegant solution could be a set of civic apps, and that CZI should organize and perhaps fund the competitions to make them. He won't speculate on exact contest format, but the guy who instituted Hackathons at Facebook may already have some ideas.

What might come out of those tournaments? Bloomberg Philanthropies is trying to find out with its own city Innovation Team program, which offers up to $1 million annually for three years for cities to test pilot ideas for making places more livable and socially cohesive. In Boston, that's included a "density bonus" program allowing developers to build taller if they include more guaranteed affordable units, an "urban housing unit" that could be placed or stacked almost anywhere, and to plan to modify some homes in a way that would create a second apartment inside them. The resulting rentals may be tracked with an app called Sumu, that matches renters to the right style surplus while making sure no landlord is charging hidden fees.

The Los Angeles Innovation Team has created a GIS-based mapping program that tracks various indicators of how neighborhoods are changing to predict displacement pressure, and hone things like small business support or renter-rights awareness to stop it. Zuckerberg is already the king of social data sifting. His competitions could be far less structured, pushing people instead of governments to think up solutions like the contest Rockefeller just backed.

Having other philanthropies venture into this space is good. It leaves CZI the chance to employ his other successful Facebook strategy. If someone makes the Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus Rift of housing aide, CZI could just buy it to release more widely.

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