From having to pee to dimming the lights, researchers say a surprising range of stimuli can impact how we make choices.
Most of us make bad decisions every day. We eat too much despite being full, we spend too much when we should be budgeting, we drive when we should walk, and we choose not to resign from jobs we hate.
There's probably no way to avoid making poor choices altogether, but we might be able to make better ones a bit more often—even with some unexpected methods. Here's a look at three scientific findings that suggest offbeat but potentially effective ways to improve your decision making.
Emotion is one of the biggest enemies of effective decision making. When we feel strong emotions, our choices tend to be overly influenced by what feels important right now, even if they wind up creating poorer outcomes over the longer term.
To see if they could reduce the impact of emotion when making decisions, researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough investigated the impact of a simple trick: dimming the lights. Alison Jing Xu and her colleagues from the Rotman School of Management set up several experiments in which people had to rate their perceptions and decisions in relation to a variety of objects and people, ranging from the spiciness of chicken-wing sauce to the aggressiveness of a fictional character.
Participants' emotional reactions to these things were significantly more intense while under bright lights than they were under dim lighting conditions. For example, those seated in a brightly lit room opted for spicier chicken-wing sauce than those sitting in a dimly lit room. Xu hypothesised that bright lights are associated with heat, and this perception of heat may trigger more intense emotions. When we're making decisions under those lights, the intensity of our emotion increases.
So when you need to make a decision and don't want to let your emotions lead you to make irrational choices, try dimming the lights. And on the flipside, if you sell a product that's associated with emotional intensity (like engagement rings), turning up the lights may lead people to experience more intense emotions—and boost the likelihood of making a purchase.
When it comes to making choices about innovation, like deciding which idea to move forward with, you can't afford to let cognitive biases—such as "status quo bias," which leads us to prefer the way things currently are—get in the way of choosing wisely.
Here's a weird but potentially effective method to prime yourself to be more open to novel ideas: watch something move in a clockwise direction. A team of German researchers found that after simply observing an object move clockwise, test subjects became more likely to prefer creative ideas—in other words, overriding status quo bias. What's more, they found that watching objects move clockwise, as opposed to counterclockwise, led to people feel more open to having new experiences, a personality trait that psychologists have previously thought to be relatively fixed.
Lead researcher Sascha Topolinski suggested that clockwise movement may induce a mental state of future orientation, whereas counterclockwise movement is likelier to orient us toward the past—in other words, progression or change versus regression or stasis. By priming our brain for this shift in focus, we may start to prefer more novel ideas and stimuli we otherwise wouldn't.
So before making a decision where it would help to eliminate your bias for the familiar, try simply keeping an eye on the hands of an analog clock before you get down to analyzing your options.
You read that correctly: Research from the Netherlands investigated the impact of having a full bladder on decision-making quality.
In one study, participants either drank five full glasses of water in a short space of time, while others took just a few sips. After waiting a while for the water to reach participants' bladders, they were asked to choose between receiving $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days. Those with full bladders were more likely to opt for waiting longer to receive more cash.
The researcher behind the study, Mirjam Tuk, found these results surprising. Previous research suggests that having to restrain yourself from doing something actually wears down our decision-making abilities, so Tuk might have expected the reverse affecting the test subjects who had to pee. However, Tuk suggested that these results may actually override that principle because bladder function is largely automatic and unconscious.
As is true for each of these experiments (including those on lighting and directional movement), more research is needed to confirm these findings and explore their possible implications. But in the meantime, they're easy to put to the test yourself—unscientifically—to see if they boost your own decision making. Before you've got to make your next big decision, drink a few glasses of water, wait about 40 minutes, and then decide your course of action.
Dr. Amantha Imber is the founder of Inventium, an innovation consultancy that only uses tools that have been scientifically proven to work. Her latest book, The Innovation Formula, tackles the topic of how organizations can create a culture where innovation thrives.
Corporate retreats can be a snooze or a smash hit. Here are some tips to get yours right.
It wasn't until Allesandra de Santillana was covered in mud, at the bottom of a grave, that she realized the importance of corporate retreats.
In July, she and 19 of her colleagues at Internet Society, a nonprofit focused on Internet policy, went on a retreat in the English countryside. Following a morning of meetings, the team was broken into three groups and tasked with solving a murder mystery. De Santillana was in the "forensic" group. Trained actors came in to facilitate.
"They put us in white investigator suits with hoods—straight out of CSI—and pointed us to a garden that had been cordoned off with caution tape," she says. "We spent the next two hours digging into a grave, finding bones and photographing them," she recalls. "It was backbreaking work."
While she and her team looked for buried bones, the other two groups interviewed suspects and distilled case-related information in a pseudo "central command" station. The activity ended with the three teams working collaboratively to identify the perpetrator. A 15-minute time limit proved difficult when dissenting opinions were voiced, but eventually they arrived on a ruling.
"We ended up getting it wrong, but that wasn't the point," De Santillana says. She adds:
It was amazing to see how we all worked together. When we were digging the grave, there were people pulling their weight and others standing around; some people were shy and others were vocal. Our group felt really isolated from the rest because we were in the garden, which made us think of feelings of isolation in our real lives, and we ended up discussing the importance of constantly keeping everyone in the loop at work.
Corporate retreats have been a mainstay throughout De Santillana's career, but most haven't come close to the impact of the murder mystery exercise. The majority have lacked meaning for attendees. She was once forced to complete an obstacle course dressed in a Sumo suit. "Ridiculous," she says. Or they have focused on socializing without concrete takeaways. While it was nice to learn about colleagues' personal lives on a sailing trip, De Santillana points out, "I didn't learn anything about their skills and what they brought to the team."
The conversation around corporate retreats has changed in past years, due in part to the increase of millennial workers—a cohort that will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025. According to the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey, this age group is focused on meeting targets and making an impact with clients. That would indicate that retreats that include trust falls and golf and spa activities without any business takeaways are out, while murder mysteries and other experiential activities that can help foster employee growth are in.
It's important not to tie company retreats to performance, especially when you want everyone to attend. It can be easy to confuse retreats with incentive trips (net five new customers and win a trip to Hawaii!), but the contrast is an important one.
Sean Collins learned this distinction the hard way. As CEO of Costa Vida Fresh Mexican Grill, a fast-casual restaurant chain based in Salt Lake City, he spent his first three years at the company sending employees on a cruise as long as they hit their numbers. But in year four, the team came up short, putting Collins in a tight spot.
"I wanted us all to be together, so I changed the qualifications, which made some people angry," he remembers. "Now we do profit sharing based on numbers," says Collins. "We don't tie our trips to performance if team building is the objective."
There should be a takeaway or benefit communicated to the team. "To go away for the sake of going away is really annoying for a lot of people," says Julie Smith, chief administrative officer at The Bozzuto Group, a Greenbelt, Maryland-based real estate firm. "If it isn't worth it, your employees may ask why you aren't spending that money on things like raises, or better coffee in the office," she says.
Corporate retreats don't have to take place in Tahiti and cost a fortune. If your company can't afford something lavish, head to the local park and get crafty. "We once did a dinner around a campfire where we gave out 'paper plate awards' celebrating individual contributions," says Smith.
"We gave the housekeeping award to our accounting guy who cleans up everyone's financial messes, a positivity award to a person who always pumps everyone up, and so on." The cost was nominal, says Smith, because she made them with her daughter. "Our employees loved them so much that many have them hanging in their cubes," she says.
Not everyone will want to go on a 15-mile bike ride, participate in a yoga class, or go white-water rafting. Smith recommends scheduling in multiple activity options so everyone feels comfortable. For example, cooking classes are a good option for those who'd prefer to be indoors.
Corporate retreats are most effective when an entire team is present and participating. If a team member isn't hot on the idea, reevaluate the format of the event, the location, and the communication.
"It is important to communicate the purpose of the event so people get excited about it," says Smith. Events need to be collaborative. "Each person attending should be responsible for delivering a piece of the meeting. Everyone should be doing a little homework and preparation before the big day."
What works for a team of 10 will not be as much fun or meaningful when you grow to 100. Collins realized this when reflecting on past snowmobiling retreats. He and his then team of 15 would ride to the top of a mountain to discuss challenges and come up with solutions. This relaxed format was perfect with such a small group, but proved more difficult when 70-plus people would try to squeeze in for a listen.
A corporate retreat should make employees think deeply and strategically, so steer clear of everyday topics.
"Make it personalized and different than what people hear all the time," says De Santillana. "Don't talk about your quarterly update or show me a PowerPoint presentation," she says. "I could get that over the phone." Remember that attendees are being asked to travel to the retreat, so "you want to be discussing something you can't finish with a conference call."
In the last three years, Gliimpse has built a secure platform where consumers can manage and share their own medical records and info.
Apple's ambitions in the health sector continue to expand, with its digital health team making its first known acquisition—personal health data startup Gliimpse, Fast Company has learned.
Silicon Valley-based Gliimpse has built a personal health data platform that enables any American to collect, personalize, and share a picture of their health data. The company was started in 2013, and funded by serial entrepreneur Anil Sethi, who has spent the past decade working with health startups, after taking his company Sequoia Software public in 2000. He got his start as a systems engineer at Apple in the late 1980s.
The acquisition happened earlier this year, but Apple has been characteristically quiet about it. The company has now confirmed the purchase, saying: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."
According to Sethi's LinkedIn page, Gliimpse—like many startups—was born of a personal need. Sethi says that he's followed his sister through her battle with breast cancer and discovered firsthand how challenging it is to acquire and manage your personal health data. Sethi writes:
As a consumer of healthcare, I leave behind a bread-crumb-trail of medical info wherever I've been seen. But, I'm unable to easily access or share my own data. Obamacare is one of several forcing functions federally mandating physicians and hospitals give us our data: meds, labs, allergies . . .you get the idea. However, there's no single Electronic Health Record that all physicians use, sigh. Worse, there isn't even a common file format across a 1000+ systems.
The acquisition will bolster Apple's efforts in digital health. In recent years, Apple has delved into the sector with a range of services (HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit) that allow patients, clinicians, and researchers to access important health and wellness data via a range of mobile devices. That's in line with Gliimpse's mission of uniting disparate streams of health information.
What stands out about the deal is that Gliimpse is intended for patients with diseases like cancer and diabetes. Apple recently hired a top pediatric endocrinologist who developed a HealthKit app for teens with Type 1 diabetes, signaling an increased interest in applications for chronically ill users.
It's unlikely that this acquisition will bring Apple's health technologies under the purview of federal regulators. CEO Tim Cook recently told Fast Company in an interview that he sees a major business opportunity for the company in the non-regulated side of health care: "So if you don't care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small."
It's hard to tell how Apple will use the technology—in previous cases, the technology it has acquired from another company often ends up looking very different when it finally makes it into a product.
So far, the acquisition has not been announced on LinkedIn, or on the company's website.
Smarter technology could make farms more efficient and food tastier, though environmentalists argue none of it is guilt-free.
During the 20th century, advances in fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanized farming technology helped make it possible to feed a dramatically growing world population.
Now, advocates say, the next big advance in agricultural technology may come from the digital world, as modern computer vision, precision sensors, and machine-learning technology help farmers use last century's advances more efficiently and precisely to grow healthier and tastier food.
"We're at the cusp of this next wave of innovation in agriculture, which we call digital agriculture," says Mike Stern, the president of The Climate Corporation. "It has to do with, over the past five to seven years, the farm really digitizing, not unlike how our society has changed in terms of the tools and types of things we can do."
The Climate Corp., which was purchased by agriculture giant Monsanto for roughly $1 billion in 2013, is one of several companies working to build a digital analytics hub for farmers, merging images from satellites, drones, and cameras, as well as readings for everything from soil thermometers to tractors' on-board computers. That can help growers better understand what's happening on their farms and let predictive algorithms guide more precise applications of seeds, water, pesticides, and fertilizers.
"In the Midwest, when corn is growing, we have a fair amount of cloud cover, and satellites have trouble seeing through clouds, so that's a problem because all of a sudden, a grower can only see a part of the field from one image to the next," says Sam Eathington, Climate Corp.'s chief scientist. "We've developed, using some machine-learning techniques, a way to bring together multiple images and remove the clouds and cloud shadows that a grower would be seeing in the data in the specific field."
Just this week, the company announced that it's opening its platform to allow other sensor manufacturers to contribute data more easily, starting with high-resolution soil sensor data from Kansas-based Veris Technologies.
The market for digital "precision agriculture" services is expected to grow to $4.55 billion by 2020, according to figures from research firm Markets and Markets, though the push to bring the Internet of Things onto the world's farms hasn't been without its critics. According to a 2013 report in the New Yorker, Climate Corp.'s founders came under heavy criticism for the decision to sell to Monsanto, a company that's long been controversial for its intellectual property policies and involvement with genetically modified crops.
And the American Farm Bureau Federation, a farming industry group, has cautioned farmers to make sure they understand how their data is stored by digital providers. The Farm Bureau has recently worked with tech providers, including Climate Corp., to formulate rules and industry data-sharing arrangements designed to make sure farmers can control how their information is used and potentially migrate it to new providers.
"Tractors, tilling equipment, planters, sprayers, harvesters, and agricultural drones are increasingly connected to the Internet," the group said in March. "Farmers don't always have the ability to precisely control where that data goes, nor transfer it from one data processor to another."
But agriculture tech companies generally say their goal isn't just to make money, or even help farmers boost their own profits. They're also trying to help feed a still-growing world population as climate change disrupts farms and populations, and expanding middle-class societies around the world purchase more food. That could require doubling world food production by 2050, experts told the United Nations in 2009, something advocates of digital agriculture say may only be possible through data-driven efficiency.
"Basically, the production we're getting out of our food crop today is actually not keeping pace with the pace we need to double prediction by 2050," says Lance Donny, the CEO of Fresno, California-based OnFarm.
Like Climate Corp., OnFarm aims to process and combine data from a variety of sources: Donny says the company serves several hundred farms, with an average of 160 incoming data streams each. Farmers traditionally ran processes like irrigation based on the calendar, watering a certain amount at certain times, or based on their own observations—"I look out and I drive the field, and the crop looks like it's going to need some water, so I add some water at this time," he says—but Donny says OnFarm's technology can first bring farmers unified figures they can easily understand and trust, then predictions and guidance they can rely upon.
"Not only can we tell you what's going to happen, we can help you make a better decision—to maximize the decision you're going to make," he says. "This is really bringing that machine learning down to the grower to make a decision going forth this week, next week."
Ultimately, farmers will rely less on intuition and more on number-driven predictions, says Daniel Koppel, the CEO and cofounder of Tel Aviv-based digital agriculture company Prospera.
"I think at the end of the day, growers are going to be data scientists," he says. "The actual operations side, in the very far future, that's going to be done with robots, or a lot of it is going to be automated."
But in the meantime, his company's tools have used sensor data and machine-learning techniques like neural networks to detect issues like plants stressed by improper irrigation and diseases that could put crops in jeopardy. And while he unabashedly speaks in terms that might make foodie purists wince—"We're trying to treat agriculture as any other industrial manufacturing facility," he says—Koppel says digital technology can mean fresher food and a cleaner environment, too.
Data scientists will be able to crunch the numbers to find ways to use pesticides and water more efficiently, meaning less runoff and fewer pest-killing chemicals on food, he says. The same will be true of fertilizers, Donny predicts, meaning less nitrogen runoff in soil and groundwater.
Still, some environmental advocates are skeptical, warning that tools primarily designed to boost crop yields and farm profits won't automatically undo all the environmental harm wrought by large-scale, industrial farming.
"Hopefully, in most cases, they will result in less use of farm chemicals, and less farm chemicals leaking into people's drinking water or whatever, but that's not really what they're designed to do," says Craig Cox, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the Environmental Working Group. "They're designed to help farmers determine what the economically optimal rate is to apply these farm chemicals, and sometimes the economically optimal rate is to use more farm chemicals."
Donny says better data won't just mean bigger production of commodity crops like corn and soybeans—it'll mean optimizing the quality of specialty produce from wine grapes to almonds. In some cases already, farmers have been able to switch from producing old standbys like corn to more diverse collections of vegetables, he says.
That can also bring environmental gains, particularly if diversification means fields spend less time outside of growing seasons lying fallow and allowing chemicals to leach into surrounding water, according to Cox, though he emphasizes the details will make a tremendous difference.
Of course, it will also mean more income for farmers and more variety for an increasingly food-conscious society. "The ability to grow closer to the customer is important. More diversity in crops is important," Donny says. "Restaurants are driving that. Consumers are driving those needs."
The "Ivy Lee Method" is stupidly simple—and that's partly why it's so effective.
By 1918, Charles M. Schwab was one of the richest men in the world.
Schwab (oddly enough, no relation to Charles R. Schwab, founder of the Charles Schwab Corporation) was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the largest shipbuilder and the second-largest steel producer in the U.S. at the time. The famous inventor Thomas Edison once referred to Schwab as the "master hustler." He was constantly seeking an edge over the competition.
Accounts differ as to the date, but according to historian Scott M. Cutlip, it was one day in 1918 that Schwab—in his quest to increase the efficiency of his team and discover better ways to get things done—arranged a meeting with a highly respected productivity consultant named Ivy Lee.
Portrait of Ivy Ledbetter Lee from the early 1900s.[Photographer unknown, via JamesClear.com]
Lee was a successful businessman in his own right and is widely remembered as a pioneer in the field of public relations. As the story goes, Schwab brought Lee into his office and said, "Show me a way to get more things done."
"Give me 15 minutes with each of your executives," Lee replied.
"How much will it cost me?" Schwab asked.
"Nothing," Lee said. "Unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it's worth to you."
During his 15 minutes with each executive, Lee explained his simple method for achieving peak productivity:
At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
Repeat this process every working day.
The strategy sounded simple, but Schwab and his executive team at Bethlehem Steel gave it a try. After three months, Schwab was so delighted with the progress his company had made that he called Lee into his office and wrote him a check for $25,000.
A $25,000 check written in 1918 is the equivalent of a $400,000 check in 2015.
The Ivy Lee Method of prioritizing your to-do list seems stupidly simple. How could something this simple be worth so much?
Ivy Lee's productivity method utilizes many of the concepts I have written about previously.
Here's what makes it so effective:
It's simple enough to actually work. The primary critique of methods like this one is that they are too basic. They don't account for all of the complexities and nuances of life. What happens if an emergency pops up? What about using the latest technology to our fullest advantage? In my experience, complexity is often a weakness because it makes it harder to get back on track. Yes, emergencies and unexpected distractions will arise. Ignore them as much as possible, deal with them when you must, and get back to your prioritized to-do list as soon as possible. Use simple rules to guide complex behavior.
It forces you to make tough decisions. I don't believe there is anything magical about Lee's number of six important tasks per day. It could just as easily be five tasks per day. However, I do think there is something magical about imposing limits upon yourself. I find that the single best thing to do when you have too many ideas (or when you're overwhelmed by everything you need to get done) is to prune your ideas and trim away everything that isn't absolutely necessary. Constraints can make you better. Lee's method is similar to Warren Buffet's 25-5 Rule, which requires you to focus on just five critical tasks and ignore everything else. Basically, if you commit to nothing, you'll be distracted by everything.
It removes the friction of starting. The biggest hurdle to finishing most tasks is starting them. (Getting off the couch can be tough, but once you actually start running, it is much easier to finish your workout.) Lee's method forces you to decide on your first task the night before you go to work. This strategy has been incredibly useful for me: As a writer, I can waste three or four hours debating what I should write about on a given day. If I decide the night before, however, I can wake up and start writing immediately. It's simple, but it works. In the beginning, getting started is just as important as succeeding at all.
It requires you to single-task. Modern society loves multitasking. The myth of multitasking is that being busy is synonymous with being better. The exact opposite is true. Having fewer priorities leads to better work. Study world-class experts in nearly any field—athletes, artists, scientists, teachers, CEOs—and you'll discover one characteristic that runs through all of them: focus. The reason is simple. You can't be great at one task if you're constantly dividing your time 10 different ways. Mastery requires focus and consistency.
James Clear writes about self-improvement tips based on proven scientific research at JamesClear.com, where this article first appeared. It is adapted with permission.
Related Video: Productivity tips from the world's busiest people
The former Mondelez chief media officer is taking his global brand marketing skills to small business, and going deep on marketing's future in messaging.
On August 24th, CNBC is premiering a new show produced by LeBron James that is like a Shark Tank for Cleveland with a small business twist. Cleveland Hustles brings together local entrepreneurs and investors to open businesses and revitalize neighborhoods, and the host is Mondelez's now-former chief media and e-commerce officer B. Bonin Bough (and member of Fast Company's 2011 Most Creative People). Now, after filming and creating the show's first season, Bough was inspired to make its underlying concept his mission for small businesses across America.
"What I began to realize was how big of an impact big business thinking can have on small business," says Bough, who joined Mondelez from PepsiCo in 2012 as VP of global media and consumer engagement, and was named chief media and e-commerce officer last year. He points to the Cleveland Bagel Company, featured in the show's first episode, as a prime example of what he hopes to do.
"This was two guys who hand-roll bagels in a shared kitchen. They didn't even have a real space, and one guy was sleeping in his car for a while right next to this shared kitchen space," says Bough, who saw an opportunity beyond the show. "But because of their constraints they developed a method to freeze the bagels, and it tastes almost as good as fresh. I saw that product, and we're opening a storefront because it is about helping these neighborhoods. But the frozen bagel market hasn't been reinvented in forever, so I also asked them if we should look at expanding the business. I flew with them to New York and met with Boxed.com CEO Chieh (Huang), and it looks like they have a national distribution deal. They're going to go from making a truckload of bagels once a month, to a truckload of bagels every single day."
Stories like that convinced him to leave the C-suite and take his expertise in a different direction. "Looking at the impact we had on that business, I realized my network and LeBron's network can provide huge access and opportunity to small businesses and transform them," says Bough, who this week launched the Pitch LeBron contest, where brick-and-mortar small businesses pitch a 23-second video for a chance to get a 23-second endorsement from James. "There are a lot of us out there working for the world's biggest businesses and brands, and if we can find a way to bring some of our knowledge down the chain to small businesses, there's a big impact potential. So your readers out there might be getting a phone call from me, and they better answer!"
"There is no ad tech, really, around the messaging space," says Bough. "Everything that exists for social media right now will be invented for messaging. We're seeing a lot of conversation around bots, but that's one-third of the marketplace at best. Why isn't People magazine being delivered through messaging? If you look at it, in 2011 there was only one messaging app in the top 10 downloaded apps, which was Skype. Now, 7 of the top 10 downloaded apps are messaging apps. I believe that it's the next wave. I've taken on advisor roles within four pretty significant plays in the messaging space, and you'll see more from me there."
The designers have built on the successes, and eschewed the mistakes, of earlier phones.
This is the first of a three-part series reviewing Samsung's important new Note 7 smartphone.
Samsung is known for being a step ahead of Apple in introducing new tech features in phones, and for being several steps behind Apple in design. But with the rapid-fire releases of phones using its "edge" motif in the past year, Samsung is closing the design gap.
The new Note 7 is the fruit of that labor. The phone's design seems to borrow the best elements of earlier Samsung phones while leaving many earlier design shortcomings behind. Much of the gloss has been muted, the hard edges softened.
The new $850 Note adopts the curved-glass display element used in the earlier Samsung Galaxy S7 edge and edge+. The glass that constitutes the whole front and back of phone is rounded off at the sides, with just a narrow metal band constituting the side edges of the device. This gives the whole design a soft, rounded motif. Gone are the imposing metal lines around the display (and home button) of the Note 5. The Note 5 used the curved glass on its back, but the glass on its front was completely flat.
The Galaxy Note 7 (top) is 7.9mm thick, while the previous Note, the Note 5 (bottom), is 7.6mm thick.[Photo: Mark Sullivan for Fast Company]
Even though the Note 7 and the Note 5 are roughly the same size, the Note 7—because of its economy of design—gives the impression of being a smaller phone.
Samsung apparently believes those curved-glass edges on its newer phones don't rob the user of any display space. I was skeptical at first, but I think there's some truth to it. When watching video on the Note 7's 5.7-inch QHD Super AMOLED display (and it does look beautiful, with some of the best color saturation I've seen on a smartphone), the image doesn't appear clipped or truncated where the glass curves back. Your eyes still see that part of the image; your brain comprehends it.
Like the S7 line and the earlier Note 5, the top and bottom corners (on back and front) of the Note 7 are rounded, too. But the Note 7 design uses a smaller corner radius, so the rounding-off is tighter and less attention-drawing, while still softening the hard angle.
My only worry about the artfully designed glass panels on both front and back of the Note 7 is that they might be terribly expensive to replace.
The Black Onyx version Samsung sent me for review, because of the dark color scheme, understates some of its design elements. Buttons, ports, and antenna lines blend into the phone, since they're all various shades of gray or black. The phone also comes in Blue Coral and Silver Titanium colors.
Design-wise, the Note 7 still lacks the meticulous symmetry of the iPhone. On the iPhone 6s, for example, the speaker grill, Lightning port, and headphone jack are centered perfectly on the bottom of the device. On the bottom of the Note 7, both the USB-C port and the headphone jack are off center between the bottom edges. Also, the home button on the iPhone 6s recesses, while the home button on the Note 7 protrudes. And we're talking only about the physical designs of the phones; how the iPhone 6s compares with the Note 7 UX-wise depends a lot on how you feel about iOS vs. Android. Android can be a very clean environment, but on the Note 7, at least, it's sadly cluttered with bloatware.
Still, it's hard not to get the impression that while Samsung marketing dishes its corporate-funny ads making fun of Apple, the people over in the design department in Seoul have been eager students of the Industrial Design group in Cupertino. The compact, rounded look of the Note 7 is reminiscent of the design look Apple adopted with its first "large" phones, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. It's a look that has greatly benefited the Samsung device.
Maybe you got fired or left on bad terms, but try to hide that from an interviewer and they'll probably be able to tell.
One of the most common questions hiring managers ask job candidates is a simple one on the surface: "Why do you want to work here?" But it can be tricky to answer—because the real information they're looking for is more complicated than that. What they're really asking is something closer to this:
Do you know what this job is? And—to be a little paranoid—do you have some murky problem that I can't see now? Are you about to get fired? Help me out here.
To get this right, you first need to recognize that—like so much in the interview experience—it isn't just about you and your career goals. It's about how those square with what the company needs.
Here's how you can link the two, no matter what your other motivations might be for looking for a job or for going after this one in particular.
This question is rarely a showstopper—unless you want to leave your job for a negative reason. Sadly, there often is a negative reason for leaving, even if it's not your fault. If that's you, don't let this question cause panic. It is always possible to give a sincere and positive answer regardless of your circumstances.
First, you can never know for certain what the interviewer is thinking, especially if you've just met for the first time. The interviewer might have assumed nothing but good things about you. Maybe they just intend the question to be an innocent warm-up, not a confession-seeker. Try to answer the question put to you rather than the question you fear they're asking—the latter will lead you into trouble almost inevitably.
All the same, falling out with your boss or your colleagues will often be the precise reason you're applying. After all, work is complicated. People are complicated. Falling out is so common that there's even a saying about it: "People don't leave companies; they leave people."
Maybe you're bored and frustrated by what you do all day. You want a change of scene, or some progress. Maybe you need more money.
The point is this: You're probably a perfectly normal human being. Wanting or needing to move on is just part of life, even if it's not always to be welcomed.
So, your starting point is to feel in your heart that you've nothing to hide. If you feel you're the only person in the world who can't stand their current job, you'll be on the back foot, and you will find it hard to sound natural and convincing. You will start to sweat. Your interviewer might pounce on your discomfort and start asking you much harder questions.
To prevent all that, you need to focus outward. Remember that interviews are ultimately not about you. They're not about your terrible boss or your measly salary, or what you want from your next job. All those things come into play but, at heart, interviews are about solving somebody else's problems, not yours.
So your answer should be linked to what's on offer and what's expected of you. Show you're running toward something, not running away. It is at this point that good research will really pay off, for it will allow you to speak with sincerity when drawing distinctions between your current job and the vacancy. If you feel your industry is "Coke and Pepsi," where one company is supposedly much like another, you're not researching hard enough.
It really boils down to one of two answers:
In my current job I do X. You do X here too, but this is a better place to do X. Here's how I would do X for you.
My employer does X, but you do Y, and Y is what I want. Y is also what I'm good at and enjoy. Here's how my resume relates to Y.
In both scenarios, it's possible to give a sincere and useful answer without once mentioning your terrible boss. He was never going to solve your interviewer's problems, so why bring him into the room? Try something like this instead:
You're doing a lot of biotechnology investments here. I think biotechnology is the future, and I find it huge fun, too. I do like what I'm doing now, but it's not quite biotechnology, although it's closely related. On a personal note, I've always thought it best to change roles before reaching a plateau. Switch while I'm still on the way up, you know? I've decided now feels the right time for a move.
Unknown outcomes can make us put in either too much work or not enough. Here's how to avoid both.
Life is full of uncertainty, both good and bad. Maybe you're hopeful that a big meeting with a client will turn into a contract. Or perhaps you're concerned about an upcoming evaluation at work. In either case, you won't know where you stand until it actually happens. And in the meantime, you'll have to deal with that uncertainty—something some people do better than others.
Unfortunately for those who hate not knowing, handling that well is an important part of long-term success. Every time you stretch yourself by trying something new, you're leaving behind the comfort of knowing how things are likely to turn out.
In a now-classic study, Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir told undergraduates to imagine that they had just taken a difficult exam but didn't yet know whether they'd passed; grades would be given out the next day.
They were also asked to imagine they had recently learned about a travel agency offering a heavily discounted vacation package, but the discount would expire that day. However, they could pay a small fee to extend the discount to the following day—when they would know the results of their exam. The majority of participants elected to pay the fee to wait an extra day.
Under other conditions in the same study, though, some participants were told that they took the exam and passed while others were told they'd taken it and failed. With the uncertainty removed, the majority of those that had been told they'd passed and the ones that had been told they failed elected to take the trip. In other words, resolving uncertainty was something many people were willing to pay for—even though it wouldn't affect the choice they made one way or the other.
You may have a hard time keeping calm when outcomes are uncertain, but there are a few things you can do to help navigate uncertainty a little bit better. Here are three.
If you're tempted to defer making a choice in the face of uncertainty, take a lesson from the Tversky-Shafir study. Just imagine that you know the outcome of the situation and ask yourself what you'd do then. You may find that the way an uncertain event turns out actually won't affect your next move.
Often, uncertainty paralyzes people because they want a specific reason for engaging in an action. That reason may be different depending on the outcome of the uncertain event, even if the course of action being taken is the same—our rationales may shift, even if the choices they support don't. It's just that someone taking a trip after a tough exam is either celebrating a success or consoling a failure, and people simply may want to know which they're doing.
When you project yourself into the future, you can better understand the possible reasons for future courses of action based on what might happen. And that may help you move forward with your plans, even when you aren't sure which reason will apply.
There's often pressure to continue working on projects, even if that additional work won't improve the odds of success. Many people understandably dislike that. In cases like these, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's well-known "Serenity Poem" actually has some psychological clout:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
In many cases, uncertainty leads you to keep making an effort long past the point of diminishing returns. Yet successful people learn to evaluate when their additional work on a project doesn't make it better, it only makes it different. And that relies on knowing your limits—the things you can't change—when you don't know the ultimate outcome. At that point, they move on to the next project and await the results to reveal themselves.
To calibrate your efforts, it's helpful to simply find people you trust to evaluate your work. Ask for their periodic assessments and then see how they square with your own judgments. Sounds easy (and it is), but it can help you fend off the fear of uncertainty that's rooted in a shaky sense of your own impact. Over time, you'll begin to get a feel for when a project is done enough.
If you've heard this one before, it's for good reason. Some of the most successful people really are those with a high tolerance for failure—the prospect of which often causes paralysis in others. People tend to avoid engaging in activities whose outcomes are uncertain, for a variety of pretty obvious reasons: the impact on their reputation, wasted effort, etc.
It's important to recognize that one consistent finding from multiple studies of creativity is that the people who have the best ideas are often ones who have the most ideas. Quantity, generally speaking, leads to quality. But that also means that the people who have the most ideas also have the most mediocre ideas—you simply need to let yourself generate them so you can sort the good from the so-so and the bad.
When a situation's outcome is uncertain and it's making you nervous, pay attention to that signal—which means you've moved past the familiar procedures and the predictable results they yield. In those situations, failure rarely has disastrous consequences. Instead, most failures lead to valuable learning opportunities that make our future efforts more likely to succeed. Ultimately keeping that in mind can help you get more comfortable with the uncertainty in between.
There's a happiness gap between wanting the best and accepting good enough. Here are some science-backed ways to close it.
How do you make decisions? Some people want to find the absolute best option ("maximizers"). Others, known as "satisficers," have a set of criteria, and go for the first option that clears the bar.
While wanting the best seems like a good thing, research from Swarthmore College finds that satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers.
This is true for two reasons. First, people who want the best tend to be prone to regret. "If you're out to find the best possible job, no matter how good it is, if you have a bad day, you think there's got to be something better out there," says Barry Schwartz, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Paradox of Choice.
Maximizers are also prone to measuring themselves against others. "If you're looking for the best, social comparison is inevitable," says Schwartz. "There's no other way to know what the best is." Envy quickly makes people miserable.
This happiness gap raises the question: Can maximizers learn to become satisficers? Can you learn to settle for good enough?
Possibly, but it takes some work. "What I believe is that it's changeable and that it's not easy to change," says Schwartz. Here are some ways to make the shift.
Wisdom is realizing that "the idea of the best is preposterous. There is no best anything," says Schwartz. Platonic ideals don't exist in this world. Plus, we all live with limits. The best house, if it were to exist, would not be in your budget. Rather than focusing on best, start approaching decisions with a list of practical criteria. Is the house near your office? Is the yard big enough for your dog? Be honest. Maybe you want a house that looks impressive, and that's fine to put on the list if it matters to you. Anything that satisfies all your important criteria will be fine. "Good enough is virtually always good enough," says Schwartz.
In Schwartz's personality scales, people exist along a continuum. "Nobody is a maximizer about everything," he says. You might be spending months trying to find the best possible car, but you're okay with choosing whatever toilet paper is on sale. Consequently, he says, "Your task is not to learn a new skill, but to transfer a skill you already have to a new domain."
Start with medium-sized decisions. When you feel the maximizing tendency kicking in, and you start looking at all possible sweaters, make a note of it, and just pick one you like. Afterwards, evaluate whether there have been any significant downsides. Spoiler alert: There won't be. "You discover that the world doesn't end with a good enough sweater," he says.
Make sure you see the upsides of satisficing, too. "You can literally cut your time working on something from hours to minutes when you realize that you don't need to complete something perfectly, or even in some cases, realize that you can delegate it," says Elizabeth Grace Saunders, a time management coach and author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money.
The problem with social comparison is that people are more likely to look at those with more (versus those with less), and hence feel miserable. But you can consciously change who you see. There are many reasons to try a social media detox, for example. Learning to be happy with "good enough" is one of them.
If you have trouble making decisions, then "choose when to choose," says Schwartz. Hire a decorator who will show you two options for light fixtures. If you're looking for a new phone plan, call a friend who just chose one and, if she's happy with it, go for what she went for. Chances are, you'll like it too. You can ask the waiter which entree he likes and choose that.
Time is limited, and maximizing means you spend more time on decision making and less time enjoying whatever you've decided. Saunders recommends creating an overall plan for the day or week. Then get clear on what's a high-impact task and what's not.
"For example, a top priority task might be reviewing a contract for a large deal," Saunders explains. "A simple to-do item might be deciding on a restaurant for lunch with a colleague." Then figure out how much time each task should take. "Put in larger amounts of time for the big tasks," she says, "but still limit the time."
And for the lesser tasks? Be merciless. "For example, I can only spend five to 10 minutes looking for a lunch location. Once the 10 minutes is up, I'll go with the best option I've found," she says. Feel free to reward yourself for sticking with this goal. "Give yourself a reason to end on time," says Saunders, such as having time for dessert at that lunch spot you've chosen.
Smartphone screens can't grow any larger. Maybe they should multiply instead.
Back in 2011, an unknown smartphone brand called Imerj began to show off a slick prototype for a dual-screen smartphone.
The device unfolded like a clamshell laptop, allowing users to type on one screen while interacting with apps on another. In portrait mode, users could run two apps side by side, with swipe gestures to pass apps back and forth between the two displays.
Unfortunately, the product never shipped for a variety of reasons, and since then, no one's released a phone with side-by-side screens outside of Japan. But if anything, the idea makes more sense now than it did five years ago. Smartphones continue to cannibalize tablets and laptops, as we spend more time texting, reading, socializing, watching videos, and playing games on the one device that's most readily available. As such, we demand ever-larger smartphone displays, to the point that we can barely fit them in our hands and pockets anymore.
Surely, we'd go even larger if we could. But instead of making a single-screen even larger, perhaps the time is right to add a second one.
Imerj wasn't the first attempt at a dual-screen Android phone. That honor goes to the Kyocera Echo, which sold as a Sprint exclusive in 2011.
The Echo launched with a lot of fanfare, but it had a number of problems. When unfurled, the two screens had a thick bezel between them, tarnishing the tablet-like experience Kyocera was aiming for. The extra display also consumed a lot of power—a point that Kyocera seemed to acknowledge by shipping the Echo with an external battery pack.
The Kyocera Echo
Worst of all, the Echo lacked the software to support its ambitious hardware. Out of the box, only a handful of apps supported side-by-side use, and Kyocera's attempt at an app-developer program went nowhere. Perhaps Kyocera could have established an ecosystem had it committed to the dual-screen concept over the long term, but the Echo ended up being a one-off experiment. (A Kyocera spokesman initially seemed willing to have the company answer questions about the Echo, but then stopped responding to my emails.)
Imerj's take on the dual-screen phone was more refined, but also more ambitious. The prototype was conceived and built by electronics manufacturer Flextronics (now known as Flex), with the original goal being to create a phone that could dock into a desktop workstation, says Sean Burke, who ran Flextronics' computing division at the time. To enable multitasking on the workstation, the Imerj team adapted the Linux kernel to run multiple Android apps side by side, along with a full Linux desktop. The dual-screen phone evolved out of that effort.
"Because we had resolved the whole aspect of doing multitasking and multi-displaying, we could actually do dual screen and have the combination of making it a full-sized screen across two screens, or running multiple apps at the same time and maintaining full Android compatibility," Burke says.
But while Burke maintains that the device was ready for production, Flextronics was unable to drum up interest from electronics brands. Motorola, for instance, was busy with its own laptop docking system on its Atrix smartphones, while Sony didn't want to diverge from its existing three-year product roadmap (which included a dual-screen tablet but no phone). Cisco, which had been dabbling in consumer electronics with its acquisition of Flip camera maker Pure Digital, liked the Imerj idea but decided it was too aggressive a leap into the smartphone business, Burke says. A "big retailer in the U.S." also opted against making its smartphones after initially seeming interested in the project.
Meanwhile, Flextronics itself was reluctant to go directly to market, Burke says. Like many Android phones, its design would likely have infringed on patents from companies like Apple and Microsoft, who at the time were some of Flextronics' largest contract customers.
"Contract manufacturers tend to be risk-averse. We don't want to piss off anybody, because everybody's a potential customer," Burke says. "When it got down to the wire of, do we go or don't we go, the board and CEO just said it's really not worth it."
The Imerj had the equivalent of a 6-inch screen
Still, Burke—who is now a corporate vice president and general manager at AMD—is convinced the idea was a good one. As proof, he sent me a focus group video in which people are marveling over the two screens ("As soon as he opened it up like that, I was like, wow," one participant says), and claims that some of the Imerj team members still use their prototypes.
"I thought it was much more natural to the way I use my computer," Burke says, noting he'd use the second screen to reference a Word or Excel document while writing an email, or use the extra screen as a touch keyboard.
Although no major phone makers have attempted a dual-screen smartphone since Imerj wound down, the pieces are starting to fall into place.
Android, for instance, will support two apps running side by side in the next major version, dubbed Nougat. Burke says while phone makers would still have to define how dual-screen interactions work, native multi-window support should make things easier.
As for hardware, the borders around smartphone screens have gotten much narrower over the last five years. (On Xiaomi's Mi 5, for instance, the bezel is practically nonexistent.) And while a dual-screen phone would still draw extra battery power and require a thicker design, display technology and power efficiency have improved to the point that a doubly thick phone doesn't seem like a big tradeoff. Lenovo's Moto Z, for instance, is a mere 5.2 mm thick. If you stacked two of them together, they'd still be slimmer than an original iPhone. (Hey, maybe one of the phone's Moto Mods attachments could be a slide-out secondary display.)
The Imerj's bottom screen could serve as a keyboard
That's not to say the concept is without its design challenges. The borders around smartphone screens won't go away completely until displays become fully bendable—an advancement that's still many years away—and Burke says he's still not sure how well a dual-screen design would accommodate third-party cases.
Technology analyst Patrick Moorhead points out another issue. Hinges, he says, are notoriously difficult to design when trying to strike a balance between sleekness and sturdiness. As an example, he points to Windows tablet-laptop hybrids from a few years ago, which were either too flimsy or too clunky. It took PC makers a few years to get it right.
"I think that's a mechanical problem we haven't fixed yet," Moorhead says. "I feel like we're probably three years away from being able to fix that, but somebody has to come out with it first in order to iterate off it."
Perhaps that's the biggest challenge of all: To design a dual-screen phone, some hardware maker will have to part with nearly a decade of design conventions and take a big risk. But for Burke, who never envisioned that giant screens would instead become the norm, a second screen makes at least as much sense.
"I do like the bigger screen, because I'm old and my eyes aren't as great," Burke says. "But it's like, how big can you get without being stupid?"
Its latest operating system experiment throws out decades of software history in pursuit of smaller-scale devices.
Last week, a group of Googlers did something strange: They quietly revealed a new operating system that theoretically competes with Google's own Android OS.
Dubbed Fuchsia, the open-source OS-in-progress could run on everything from lightweight, single-purpose devices (think ATMs and GPS units) all the way up to desktop computers. But unlike Android, Fuchsia isn't based on Linux, nor is it derived from any of the other software that underpins nearly all personal computing and communications today. Instead, it's an attempt to start from scratch.
Google has yet to make any big announcements about how it might use Fuchsia, which is still in early development and could be nothing more than an experiment. Still, Google has plenty of reasons to hit reset on decades of software history.
Here's something you might not realize about your phones, tablets, and laptops: For the most part, they're adaptations of software "kernels" that are quite old. Android uses the Linux kernel, which began development in 1991. Mac OS X, iOS, and other Apple platforms are based on Unix, which originated at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969. Windows computers are based on the Windows NT kernel, which dates back to 1993.
The purpose of a kernel is to manage the deepest levels of an operating system. It handles requests from hardware devices such as keyboards, schedules tasks, and manages files and memory. In doing so, it abstracts the intricacies of the operating system, which is helpful, say, for allowing an app to print without its developers having to know anything about specific printer models.
The resilience of old kernels like Unix, Linux, and Windows NT may seem paradoxical for an industry obsessed with the state of the art, but industry analyst Horace Dediu argues that that at its lowest levels, computing is fundamentally the same as it was a few decades ago. For instance, today's Windows computers use chips that are direct descendants of the Intel processor in the first IBM PC. In that sense, the kernel is just a commodity.
"We are still using exactly the same architecture, we're using exactly the same notions of computing—registers, gates, transistors—so for that reason, there's no need to make a better kernel," Dediu says. "Kernels have been figured out."
Or so we thought. These days we're packing sensors and computing power into more things, turning ordinary homes, for instance, into smart ones, and generally making everything more connected (Internet of Things, in industry jargon). The thinking behind Fuchsia may be that aging kernels such as Linux are inadequate for this new wave of devices. As such, its creators are imagining a new one for modern times. (The kernel itself is called Magenta, which is based on another recent Google experiment called LittleKernel.)
Zach Supalla, whose company Particle offers hardware kits and developer tools for the Internet of Things, notes that Linux poses a couple of problems for these small-scale computing devices.
For one thing, Linux is large for this type of application. Even though the Linux kernel is modular, allowing developers to strip away unnecessary parts, it still ends up occupying megabytes' worth of space. That means it's harder to cram the Linux kernel onto cheap microcontrollers, which in turn necessitates processors that are much larger, pricier, and more power-hungry.
"You haven't jumped the gap into this whole other supply chain of stuff that's manufactured at much higher qualities, and for much, much cheaper," Supalla says.
The other problem is that Linux isn't "real-time." Unlike the embedded operating systems found in ATMs, medical products, and other single-purpose devices, Linux uses a schedule to handle a multitude of tasks. While this can maximize performance in general-purpose computers, it causes problems for devices that require precise timing, like 3D printers or the many motorized controls inside automobiles.
"If you want to make sure that this thing fires at exactly the right microsecond, you don't really want to have a process in there deciding what runs when," Supalla says.
A general-purpose operating system like Linux can also be less secure for Internet of Things applications, Supalla says. There's more code, which means more potential security loopholes that need to be addressed or locked down through firewalls and virtual private networks.
"One of the values of running a [real-time operating system] or embedded system is, there's nothing to lock down," Supalla says. "It's not running a bunch of stuff you have to be concerned about. It isn't running anything at all except the software that you write."
Supalla speculates that Fuchsia is an attempt to get the best of both worlds between Linux—which is still better at allowing apps and hardware to communicate through the operating system—and today's embedded systems, such as FreeRTOS and ThreadX.
"They'd probably like to have something that has the level of abstraction of a Linux, but the performance, the small size, and the real-time nature of an RTOS," Supalla says. "That would be a very valuable thing for one to have, and I think in theory it can be done. It's just never been done before."
If Fuschia only targeted small-scale devices, it might not be that noteworthy. But Fuchsia's developers have broader ambitions in mind, claiming that the operating system can scale to smartphones and desktop computers. In theory, that would make Fuchsia a direct alternative to Google's Android and Chrome OS.
What's the motivation? According to Supalla, it's possible that starting from scratch would allow for a more efficient operating system, which in turn could power more efficient servers—something Google is always interested in. He also notes that desktop compatibility could help with simulating a large number of smaller devices running at once, to ensure they work at scale.
"It's much easier to have a thousand servers that you spin up, that are each running a thousand copies of the software application at the same time, than it is to go get a million chips and boot them all up, so it's better for testing," Supalla says.
Dediu has a different theory: A fresh operating system could be free of the intellectual property licensing issues that have hounded Google with Android. "Because it's a clean-sheet design, it doesn't have any IP that anybody else is going to line up for," he says. "That might be a reasonable assumption, because Linux does have some hairy IP issues."
Keep in mind this could all be academic. Fuchsia's developers say they'll fully document and announce the operating system eventually, but that could be a long way off, and it's unclear whether Google will throw any weight behind the effort. The Android ecosystem is already huge (and is starting to merge with Chromebooks). Meanwhile, Google is also scaling a version of Android down to Internet of Things devices with an embedded variant called Brillo—downsides of Linux be damned—and it's shaping up to be a full-blown platform, not just a bare-bones operating system.
Then again, Unix got its start as a volunteer project with no organizational recognition from Bell Labs, and Linus Torvalds started working on Linux as a hobby. Maybe in a few decades we'll be talking about Fuchsia's unlikely origins within the Googleplex.
From having to pee to dimming the lights, researchers say a surprising range of stimuli can impact how we make choices.
Most of us make bad decisions every day. We eat too much despite being full, we spend too much when we should be budgeting, we drive when we should walk, and we choose not to resign from jobs we hate.
There's probably no way to avoid making poor choices altogether, but we might be able to make better ones a bit more often—even with some unexpected methods. Here's a look at three scientific findings that suggest offbeat but potentially effective ways to improve your decision making.
Emotion is one of the biggest enemies of effective decision making. When we feel strong emotions, our choices tend to be overly influenced by what feels important right now, even if they wind up creating poorer outcomes over the longer term.
To see if they could reduce the impact of emotion when making decisions, researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough investigated the impact of a simple trick: dimming the lights. Alison Jing Xu and her colleagues from the Rotman School of Management set up several experiments in which people had to rate their perceptions and decisions in relation to a variety of objects and people, ranging from the spiciness of chicken-wing sauce to the aggressiveness of a fictional character.
Participants' emotional reactions to these things were significantly more intense while under bright lights than they were under dim lighting conditions. For example, those seated in a brightly lit room opted for spicier chicken-wing sauce than those sitting in a dimly lit room. Xu hypothesised that bright lights are associated with heat, and this perception of heat may trigger more intense emotions. When we're making decisions under those lights, the intensity of our emotion increases.
So when you need to make a decision and don't want to let your emotions lead you to make irrational choices, try dimming the lights. And on the flipside, if you sell a product that's associated with emotional intensity (like engagement rings), turning up the lights may lead people to experience more intense emotions—and boost the likelihood of making a purchase.
When it comes to making choices about innovation, like deciding which idea to move forward with, you can't afford to let cognitive biases—such as "status quo bias," which leads us to prefer the way things currently are—get in the way of choosing wisely.
Here's a weird but potentially effective method to prime yourself to be more open to novel ideas: watch something move in a clockwise direction. A team of German researchers found that after simply observing an object move clockwise, test subjects became more likely to prefer creative ideas—in other words, overriding status quo bias. What's more, they found that watching objects move clockwise, as opposed to counterclockwise, led to people feel more open to having new experiences, a personality trait that psychologists have previously thought to be relatively fixed.
Lead researcher Sascha Topolinski suggested that clockwise movement may induce a mental state of future orientation, whereas counterclockwise movement is likelier to orient us toward the past—in other words, progression or change versus regression or stasis. By priming our brain for this shift in focus, we may start to prefer more novel ideas and stimuli we otherwise wouldn't.
So before making a decision where it would help to eliminate your bias for the familiar, try simply keeping an eye on the hands of an analog clock before you get down to analyzing your options.
You read that correctly: Research from the Netherlands investigated the impact of having a full bladder on decision-making quality.
In one study, participants either drank five full glasses of water in a short space of time, while others took just a few sips. After waiting a while for the water to reach participants' bladders, they were asked to choose between receiving $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days. Those with full bladders were more likely to opt for waiting longer to receive more cash.
The researcher behind the study, Mirjam Tuk, found these results surprising. Previous research suggests that having to restrain yourself from doing something actually wears down our decision-making abilities, so Tuk might have expected the reverse affecting the test subjects who had to pee. However, Tuk suggested that these results may actually override that principle because bladder function is largely automatic and unconscious.
As is true for each of these experiments (including those on lighting and directional movement), more research is needed to confirm these findings and explore their possible implications. But in the meantime, they're easy to put to the test yourself—unscientifically—to see if they boost your own decision making. Before you've got to make your next big decision, drink a few glasses of water, wait about 40 minutes, and then decide your course of action.
Dr. Amantha Imber is the founder of Inventium, an innovation consultancy that only uses tools that have been scientifically proven to work. Her latest book, The Innovation Formula, tackles the topic of how organizations can create a culture where innovation thrives.
Maybe you got fired or left on bad terms, but try to hide that from an interviewer and they'll probably be able to tell.
One of the most common questions hiring managers ask job candidates is a simple one on the surface: "Why do you want to work here?" But it can be tricky to answer—because the real information they're looking for is more complicated than that. What they're really asking is something closer to this:
Do you know what this job is? And—to be a little paranoid—do you have some murky problem that I can't see now? Are you about to get fired? Help me out here.
To get this right, you first need to recognize that—like so much in the interview experience—it isn't just about you and your career goals. It's about how those square with what the company needs.
Here's how you can link the two, no matter what your other motivations might be for looking for a job or for going after this one in particular.
This question is rarely a showstopper—unless you want to leave your job for a negative reason. Sadly, there often is a negative reason for leaving, even if it's not your fault. If that's you, don't let this question cause panic. It is always possible to give a sincere and positive answer regardless of your circumstances.
First, you can never know for certain what the interviewer is thinking, especially if you've just met for the first time. The interviewer might have assumed nothing but good things about you. Maybe they just intend the question to be an innocent warm-up, not a confession-seeker. Try to answer the question put to you rather than the question you fear they're asking—the latter will lead you into trouble almost inevitably.
All the same, falling out with your boss or your colleagues will often be the precise reason you're applying. After all, work is complicated. People are complicated. Falling out is so common that there's even a saying about it: "People don't leave companies; they leave people."
Maybe you're bored and frustrated by what you do all day. You want a change of scene, or some progress. Maybe you need more money.
The point is this: You're probably a perfectly normal human being. Wanting or needing to move on is just part of life, even if it's not always to be welcomed.
So, your starting point is to feel in your heart that you've nothing to hide. If you feel you're the only person in the world who can't stand their current job, you'll be on the back foot, and you will find it hard to sound natural and convincing. You will start to sweat. Your interviewer might pounce on your discomfort and start asking you much harder questions.
To prevent all that, you need to focus outward. Remember that interviews are ultimately not about you. They're not about your terrible boss or your measly salary, or what you want from your next job. All those things come into play but, at heart, interviews are about solving somebody else's problems, not yours.
So your answer should be linked to what's on offer and what's expected of you. Show you're running toward something, not running away. It is at this point that good research will really pay off, for it will allow you to speak with sincerity when drawing distinctions between your current job and the vacancy. If you feel your industry is "Coke and Pepsi," where one company is supposedly much like another, you're not researching hard enough.
It really boils down to one of two answers:
In my current job I do X. You do X here too, but this is a better place to do X. Here's how I would do X for you.
My employer does X, but you do Y, and Y is what I want. Y is also what I'm good at and enjoy. Here's how my resume relates to Y.
In both scenarios, it's possible to give a sincere and useful answer without once mentioning your terrible boss. He was never going to solve your interviewer's problems, so why bring him into the room? Try something like this instead:
You're doing a lot of biotechnology investments here. I think biotechnology is the future, and I find it huge fun, too. I do like what I'm doing now, but it's not quite biotechnology, although it's closely related. On a personal note, I've always thought it best to change roles before reaching a plateau. Switch while I'm still on the way up, you know? I've decided now feels the right time for a move.
Unknown outcomes can make us put in either too much work or not enough. Here's how to avoid both.
Life is full of uncertainty, both good and bad. Maybe you're hopeful that a big meeting with a client will turn into a contract. Or perhaps you're concerned about an upcoming evaluation at work. In either case, you won't know where you stand until it actually happens. And in the meantime, you'll have to deal with that uncertainty—something some people do better than others.
Unfortunately for those who hate not knowing, handling that well is an important part of long-term success. Every time you stretch yourself by trying something new, you're leaving behind the comfort of knowing how things are likely to turn out.
In a now-classic study, Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir told undergraduates to imagine that they had just taken a difficult exam but didn't yet know whether they'd passed; grades would be given out the next day.
They were also asked to imagine they had recently learned about a travel agency offering a heavily discounted vacation package, but the discount would expire that day. However, they could pay a small fee to extend the discount to the following day—when they would know the results of their exam. The majority of participants elected to pay the fee to wait an extra day.
Under other conditions in the same study, though, some participants were told that they took the exam and passed while others were told they'd taken it and failed. With the uncertainty removed, the majority of those that had been told they'd passed and the ones that had been told they failed elected to take the trip. In other words, resolving uncertainty was something many people were willing to pay for—even though it wouldn't affect the choice they made one way or the other.
You may have a hard time keeping calm when outcomes are uncertain, but there are a few things you can do to help navigate uncertainty a little bit better. Here are three.
If you're tempted to defer making a choice in the face of uncertainty, take a lesson from the Tversky-Shafir study. Just imagine that you know the outcome of the situation and ask yourself what you'd do then. You may find that the way an uncertain event turns out actually won't affect your next move.
Often, uncertainty paralyzes people because they want a specific reason for engaging in an action. That reason may be different depending on the outcome of the uncertain event, even if the course of action being taken is the same—our rationales may shift, even if the choices they support don't. It's just that someone taking a trip after a tough exam is either celebrating a success or consoling a failure, and people simply may want to know which they're doing.
When you project yourself into the future, you can better understand the possible reasons for future courses of action based on what might happen. And that may help you move forward with your plans, even when you aren't sure which reason will apply.
There's often pressure to continue working on projects, even if that additional work won't improve the odds of success. Many people understandably dislike that. In cases like these, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's well-known "Serenity Poem" actually has some psychological clout:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
In many cases, uncertainty leads you to keep making an effort long past the point of diminishing returns. Yet successful people learn to evaluate when their additional work on a project doesn't make it better, it only makes it different. And that relies on knowing your limits—the things you can't change—when you don't know the ultimate outcome. At that point, they move on to the next project and await the results to reveal themselves.
To calibrate your efforts, it's helpful to simply find people you trust to evaluate your work. Ask for their periodic assessments and then see how they square with your own judgments. Sounds easy (and it is), but it can help you fend off the fear of uncertainty that's rooted in a shaky sense of your own impact. Over time, you'll begin to get a feel for when a project is done enough.
If you've heard this one before, it's for good reason. Some of the most successful people really are those with a high tolerance for failure—the prospect of which often causes paralysis in others. People tend to avoid engaging in activities whose outcomes are uncertain, for a variety of pretty obvious reasons: the impact on their reputation, wasted effort, etc.
It's important to recognize that one consistent finding from multiple studies of creativity is that the people who have the best ideas are often ones who have the most ideas. Quantity, generally speaking, leads to quality. But that also means that the people who have the most ideas also have the most mediocre ideas—you simply need to let yourself generate them so you can sort the good from the so-so and the bad.
When a situation's outcome is uncertain and it's making you nervous, pay attention to that signal—which means you've moved past the familiar procedures and the predictable results they yield. In those situations, failure rarely has disastrous consequences. Instead, most failures lead to valuable learning opportunities that make our future efforts more likely to succeed. Ultimately keeping that in mind can help you get more comfortable with the uncertainty in between.
In the last three years, Gliimpse has built a secure platform where consumers can manage and share their own medical records and info.
Apple's ambitions in the health sector continue to expand, with its digital health team making its first known acquisition—personal health data startup Gliimpse, Fast Company has learned.
Silicon Valley-based Gliimpse has built a personal health data platform that enables any American to collect, personalize, and share a picture of their health data. The company was started in 2013 by Anil Sethi and Karthik Hariharan. Sethi is a serial entrepreneur who has spent the past decade working with health startups, after taking his company Sequoia Software public in 2000. He got his start as a systems engineer at Apple in the late 1980s.
The acquisition happened earlier this year, but Apple has been characteristically quiet about it. The company has now confirmed the purchase, saying: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."
According to Sethi's LinkedIn page, Gliimpse—like many startups—was born of a personal need. Sethi says that he's followed his sister through her battle with breast cancer and discovered firsthand how challenging it is to acquire and manage your personal health data. Sethi writes:
As a consumer of healthcare, I leave behind a bread-crumb-trail of medical info wherever I've been seen. But, I'm unable to easily access or share my own data. Obamacare is one of several forcing functions federally mandating physicians and hospitals give us our data: meds, labs, allergies . . .you get the idea. However, there's no single Electronic Health Record that all physicians use, sigh. Worse, there isn't even a common file format across a 1000+ systems.
The acquisition will bolster Apple's efforts in digital health. In recent years, Apple has delved into the sector with a range of services (HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit) that allow patients, clinicians, and researchers to access important health and wellness data via a range of mobile devices. That's in line with Gliimpse's mission of uniting disparate streams of health information.
What stands out about the deal is that Gliimpse is intended for patients with diseases like cancer and diabetes. Apple recently hired a top pediatric endocrinologist who developed a HealthKit app for teens with Type 1 diabetes, signaling an increased interest in applications for chronically ill users.
It's unlikely that this acquisition will bring Apple's health technologies under the purview of federal regulators. CEO Tim Cook recently told Fast Company in an interview that he sees a major business opportunity for the company in the non-regulated side of health care: "So if you don't care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small."
It's hard to tell how Apple will use the technology—in previous cases, the technology it has acquired from another company often ends up looking very different when it finally makes it into a product.
So far, the acquisition has not been announced on LinkedIn, or on the company's website.
Related Video: The history of Apple in under 3 minutes
Clarification: Gliimpse was co-founded by Sethi and Karthik Hariharan.
SRI wants to produce chatbots with deep knowledge of specific topics like banking and auto repair.
After birthing a virtual assistant that knows a little of everything, SRI International is working on ones that know a lot about just one thing.
The nonprofit research center is arguably best known in the tech world for spinning off Siri, whose virtual assistant tech Apple acquired in 2010. SRI also incubated Tempo, an AI-driven calendar app that Salesforce bought last year.
Now, SRI believes it can infuse AI into even more settings—shopping, banking, travel, business-to-business applications, and so on—allowing for deeply knowledgeable chatbots that know how to carry a conversation. The goal, says William Mark, SRI's president of information and computing services, is to have assistants that are much better at specific tasks than a general-interest assistant like Siri.
"If you were to say to Siri, 'transfer $200 from savings to checking,' or something like that, Siri would just look something up on the web about transfers," Mark says. "That's not a critique of Siri, it's just that Siri doesn't know anything about banking."
William Mark
The specifics of SRI's efforts are still murky, but in 2014 the group spun off a startup called Kasisto, which recently launched personal banking bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, and text messaging. A separate Kasisto bot will soon be able help people keep track of their investments.
Mark says this is just the beginning, as SRI is planning for more spin-offs in the near future. The goal is to establish a platform for companies to build their own highly specialized assistants. SRI's tech will provide the conversational "scaffolding," while each industry provides the knowledge.
As an example, Mark says, imagine you've asked a bank teller to transfer some funds, and the teller asks whether to transfer from checking or savings. You might respond by asking, "How much do I have in savings?" To a human teller, that's an understandable branch of the main conversation. But to a chatbot, it might seem like you've changed the subject. SRI's framework will supposedly be able to handle these kinds of conversational moves.
"We're creating a core set of utilities so that once you have, for example, the concept of banking, the system knows how to have a conversation about banking because it knows how to have a conversation," he says. "And then if you move to a different domain like engine repair, the concepts change, but the rules of conversation are similar from one domain to another."
SRI's interest in new AI tech is noteworthy in part because of the group's pedigree, but keep in mind that there's already a growing number of bots that are good at particular things ("domain-specific" bots, to use the industry jargon). The available tools to build these bots are also increasing, with big companies like Facebook and Microsoft along with smaller startups trying to woo developers.
"Basic language understanding and NLP are commoditizing very fast," says Charles Jolley, whose information-finding assistant Ozlo currently specializes in finding places to eat. "Many people have the datasets they need to build a Siri-level of language understanding now, and they are all sharing it via bot APIs."
The next breakthrough, Jolley says, "will be around understanding the deeper meaning behind the words, which is only possible with a large knowledge base."
Kasisto
It's hard to say whether SRI has a unique angle here without actually seeing what the company is doing. But according to Kasisto CEO Zor Gorelov, SRI is offering something more thorough than what he's seen elsewhere. To build Kasisto, the company licensed all of SRI's AI technology, including speech recognition, natural language understanding, AI reasoning, and interactions that differ based on text versus speech. In his view, it's one of the deepest AI portfolios in the industry, which Kasisto was able to expand upon with training data, analytics, and security features.
"Facebook, and Microsoft, and Kik—a lot of people are throwing bot toolkits out there, but this is not a toolkit or [natural language processing] problem to solve," Gorelov says. "To solve this problem you need to have the entire platform, the entire stack."
That said, SRI won't be alone in trying to enable more domain-specific knowledge in chatbots. The group may even provide a rival, of sorts, in Viv, which made a splash in May with an impressive virtual assistant demo. Although Viv seems to emphasize one bot versus many bots, the broad strokes of allowing developers to easily impart deep subject knowledge are similar. Viv even shares a similar lineage, with the founders having worked at SRI before cofounding the Siri spin-off.
While Viv has shown off a powerful demo, SRI hasn't shown much of anything yet. Still, demos don't matter much in AI, where the real test is what happens when ordinary users are allowed to say whatever they want. That may explain why Mark, when asked about Viv, is reluctant to say much.
"I know it's frustrating, but these comparisons are pretty hard to make," he says. "That's why we like to try, when systems exist, we like to try interactions on one system versus another system."
The last "Unlimited" ad shows the work is never done for Olympians like Simone Biles, Elena Delle Donne, Allyson Felix, and more.
WHAT: In the last ad of Nike's "Unlimited" campaign, Olympians like gymnast Simone Biles, hoops star Elena Delle Donne, sprinter Allyson Felix, and more show that the pursuit doesn't end after the closing ceremonies.
WHO: Nike, Wieden+Kennedy Portland
WHY WE CARE: By now you know what we think of Nike's Rio-ish themed "Unlimited" campaign— yep, we loved the babies, the Iron Nun, Kyle Maynard, and even talked to CMO Greg Hoffman about it all. And this spot is a perfectly suitable bookend to it.
But perhaps more impressive is that along with the spot, Nike has announced a partnership with the City of Rio to revitalize youth programming in 22 Olympic villages—which serve 25,000 kids—in the city over the next five years.
U.S. cities have eagerly embraced the Vision Zero plan for a safety-focused redesign of city streets. But reaching the final goal will require overcoming a host of issues, from NIMBYism and racial tensions to tight city budgets.
In San Francisco, it was two pedestrians—a 6-year-old an an 86-year-old—dying in one day in separate car crashes on New Year's Eve. In New York City, it was an organized group of grieving families who wouldn't leave a promising mayoral candidate alone. In Montgomery County, Maryland, it was after a drunk driver hit and killed a police officer while on DWI enforcement duty.
From 2003 to 2012, more than 47,500 people in the U.S. died while walking on the street, according to the National Complete Streets Coalition. Finally, after enough pressure, politicians have started to say enough is enough, and begun to rethink the planning of their cities so that car crashes don't kill so many of their citizens. But while the planning and rhetoric have been ambitious, in many cities and neighborhoods, the results are often something less.
In the last three years, at least 18 cities have set goals to stop all traffic deaths within the next one or two decades as part of Vision Zero, an ambitious traffic safety movement that has spread quickly across the U.S. Relatively pedestrian-heavy cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco were the earliest adopters. Now others are coming on board, including San Antonio, Fort Lauderdale, and Sacramento. Many more cities are now considering a Vision Zero goal of their own, and advocates of the policy have also set their eyes on policies at the state and national level.
Sweden adopted the first Vision Zero concept in 1997. At its most basic level, it requires that governments set a goal and strategy to do what seems impossible: end all traffic fatalities and serious injuries, within a certain time frame. But the entire premise of Vision Zero is that achieving this goal is actually not impossible. Its philosophy is that traffic deaths are not accidents but, instead, the products of design flaws in the traffic system. Fix the system, and while you may not prevent all crashes due to human error, you can prevent the fatal ones.
In the last 20 years, Vision Zero has been adopted by cities around the world, but, until recently, it hadn't yet penetrated the United States. But since 2012, when it was adopted by Chicago, it has taken hold rapidly, and it's easy to see why. The idea is a political winner that unites frequently warring road-user factions—cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians—behind a common moral goal—saving lives—that is hard to oppose.
Yet setting a Vision Zero goal is the easy part. For Vision Zero to be more than a catchy name, a fundamental shift in how cities plan and design their streets is now required. Safety has to come before convenience, and design and data have to come before reflexively blaming crashes on reckless road users.
Vision Zero cities, courtesy of the Vision Zero Network
Has it? American cities have been encouraging more people to walk and bike for many years, but in most cases the safety of these most vulnerable road users is still not a priority. Despite a lot of excitement about Vision Zero, in many early adopter cities, the answer—due to insufficient funding and political momentum—is no. At least not yet.
"This is really a fundamental cultural shift—and in some respects it hasn't really started," says Gregory Billing, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association.
As its heart, Vision Zero is about cities putting responsibility for safety on the system over the individual—about not accepting that crashes are an inevitable, tragic part of living in a city. (Media and activists have even stopped using the term "accident" to describe a road death, because it implies that no one is at fault.)
Vision Zero policies accept that humans are fallible and will make mistakes on the road—and it is the design of that road that makes all the difference when they do. A pedestrian hit by a car at 20 miles per hour has a 90% chance of surviving a crash. At 40 miles per hour, the studies vary, but there's anywhere from a 50% to 90% chance of death for an average pedestrian. By managing speed through "traffic calming" road features, like speed bumps and fewer driving lanes, and by separating bike and walking lanes when cars go too fast regardless of the speed limit, policy makers and engineers can make sure crashes are less deadly.
Vision Zero has had many early successes in U.S. cities. A key first step has been planners collecting much better data about where and why serious crashes occur and using this data to pinpoint streets and intersections that are trouble spots. Vision Zero programs have also brought together city agencies that might not normally think about road safety. For example, Washington, D.C.'s recent Vision Zero action plan involved 20 departments, from the public schools to the DMV to the Office of Aging. But it will take more education for it to percolate down to the police and planners and drivers doing work everyday, says Billing.
"It's definitely disheartening to go to a public meeting and a traffic engineer doesn't even know what Vision Zero is or can't articulate how it affects his work," he says.
Other cities are struggling to move beyond a splashy goal. Chicago, which in 2012 set a goal of zero deaths by 2022, was an initial Vision Zero leader. But it hasn't yet released an action plan containing short-term objectives and metrics. Nor does it have dedicated funding for safety projects in dangerous corridors, says Kyle Whitehead, government relations director for Chicago's Active Transportation Alliance. Instead, the city is cobbling together funds from existing walking and biking plans.
"A big factor there is the political buy-in from the mayor's office," says Whitehead. "As soon as you move beyond that commitment, the question becomes: 'What does this actually look like and how do we fund it? How are we going to hold people accountable on this?' The answers are always complex."
In San Francisco, the city has been making quiet progress. For example, at an intersection where a senior citizen was killed, it installed a "pedestrian scramble" that stops all cars at once and gives pedestrians free reign to cross in any direction, allowing slower walkers more time to cross. And on Golden Gate Avenue, which was designated a "high injury corridor" after 48 pedestrians were struck by cars there in the last five years, the city plans to add a buffered bike lane and slow traffic by removing one traffic lane and narrowing the remaining two. A ballot initiative in the city up for a vote in November would direct a portion of the city's sales tax to street safety funding.
[Photo: stonena7/iStock]
But Walk San Francisco executive director Nicole Ferrara says the government needs to be bolder. Traffic fatalities have yet to decline in the city, and the average person on the street is unlikely to have heard of the program, symbolizing its relatively low priority.
"The challenges are mostly around doing more, quickly," she says. "The city of SF loves to listen to every voice, which is important, but we also need our city to have the kind of guts to build the projects that will ensure people's safety despite neighborhood opposition."
Most advocates are looking to New York City, the biggest Vision Zero success so far. Partly that's because it was high profile from the start: During the last mayoral race, a group of traffic victims and grieving families, Families for Safe Streets, successfully convinced soon-to-be Mayor Bill de Blasio to make Vision Zero the major transportation platform of his winning 2013 mayoral campaign. As a result, after he assumed office in 2014, his new administration quickly set up a task force and released a 63-point action plan. In its first two years, the administration won a lower speed limit (25 miles per hour) from state lawmakers in Albany as well as 140 automated speed enforcement cameras, which are installed close to schools and send $50 tickets to drivers who go more than 10 miles above the speed limit within school hours. It plastered city neighborhoods with advertising (one slogan: "Your Choices Matter") and on-the-street outreach teams. It completed 137 street safety projects in two years, a faster pace than usual, according to a presentation given by a Transportation Department official.
The result: In 2014 and 2015, the city saw a historic drop in traffic fatalities by 22%, with pedestrian deaths down 27%.
"What's remarkable is that the reduction in traffic fatalities has been achieved without much effort," says Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that has been a major force behind Vision Zero.
Example of New York City PSA for Vision Zero
Making further cuts to fatality rates will be harder, he says. While any year's traffic death statistics are bound to fluctuate, it's not promising that in the first half of 2016, traffic deaths have actually increased, especially for cyclists. At the current rate, the zero fatality goal won't be met until well after 2050, the group says. One reason is there's not enough funding: In 2016, the mayor allocated $115 million to capital projects for Vision Zero, which would be used over four years. But Transportation Alternatives estimated that at least $1 billion over four years would be needed to fix the most dangerous streets and come anywhere close to New York City's 2024 Vision Zero goal of zero deaths.
Another problem is that, too often, the administration won't overrule local opposition to projects from drivers and businesses that tend to oppose the loss of parking spaces and driving speeds that safety design changes bring. Historically, neighborhood opposition has been enough to kill safety projects, including bike lanes and wider sidewalks, because these provide less space for cars to park or may contribute to more car congestion.
Steely White hopes New York's administration is becoming more politically committed. In April, the mayor directly overruled a local community board that rejected a safety improvement project, which included bike lanes, on a major Vision Zero target—Queens Boulevard, a street that has become known as the "Boulevard of Death." (In rejecting the bike lanes, the community board chief had said the street "is not a park, it is a very heavily traveled vehicular roadway," reflecting a cars-first attitude.)
What might be needed is more of a "public works mentality" that makes proven street safety designs the default engineering decision: "We wouldn't allow compromise on safety standards in our water," Steely White says. "We need to take these improvements out of the NIMBY realm."
This points to the problem of basing a U.S. policy on a country like Sweden. Its streets are now the safest in the world. It has overhauled its roads, building 900 miles of streets that allow for more orderly traffic lane switching and creating 12,600 safer crossings with roundabouts and other features, and implemented tough enforcement.
But Sweden is a small homogeneous country about the size of California. Vision Zero was very much a "top down" strategy pushed by the federal government down to the city level. (The country managed to reduce the speed limit to 18 miles per hour in most urban areas.) Its culture is also often focused on safety, morality, and ethics—it is home to the company Volvo, a brand known for auto safety, after all. And even with this, its government struggled to convince economists to throw cost-benefit analysis—the idea that there is an "optimum" number of fatalities that societies should accept—out the window in favor of a zero death goal.
Leah Shahum, director of the Vision Zero Network, an organization recently launched to conduct research, education, and advocacy in the U.S., says the policy has evolved differently in this country. In the U.S., cities more immersed in local politics are the early adopters, making cross-cutting collaboration more important and necessary. "In a lot of communities, we're trying to meet people where they're at," she says.
But if Sweden's experience teaches U.S. traffic planners one lesson, it's the importance of engineering and design. Traditionally, U.S. transportation agencies have thought about "three E's": enforcement (writing more traffic tickets), education (an advertising campaign about, say, drunk driving), and engineering (adding crosswalks and pedestrian islands). But this framing can put a mistaken equivalence on all three being equal. Shahum says the European experience shows that road designs that control for speed and separate protected (drivers) and unprotected (pedestrians and cyclists) road users are by far the most important factor to preventing accidents.
"If you design streets that encourage people to go fast, you're going to go fast. You can't educate or enforce your way out of that problem," she says.
But building new physical infrastructure is often more costly than education and enforcement campaigns, and this also take time. It can take decades to redesign a city's road network—it's not something that happens overnight. And that is the lesson that Sweden is learning, too: Though it has the lowest crash rate in the world, it has not actually decreased its deaths to zero yet and will miss its 2020 goal. Though it has cut fatalities by 50%, in 2013, 263 people nationwide were still killed in traffic incidents. Zero is still aspirational, even in Sweden.
There's also another major way the U.S. isn't Sweden: its history of racist street design and traffic enforcement.
In the U.S. today, only 49% of low-income neighborhoods have sidewalks, and African- and Latino-American pedestrians are 60% and 43%, respectively, more likely than whites to be killed by cars while walking on the street. In many cities, from New York to Chicago, high-speed roads have historically been built through communities of color.
So on the one hand, because of Vision Zero's data-driven focus, the policy promises to improve long-neglected infrastructure in these neighborhoods. Many high-crash corridors designated in Vision Zero cities are, in fact, in neighborhoods dominated by minorities—and they have finally been the focus of transit investments.
But this also raises a concern. The data also guides enforcement efforts. And in the era of Black Lives Matter, promoting more policing in neighborhoods that are already over-policed can be a thorny issue. Consider that in Minnesota recently, Philando Castile paid with this life during a "routine" traffic stop for a busted taillight, after having been pulled over 49 times in 13 years, usually for minor offenses.
Vision Zero is supposed to rely on enforcement, such as speeding tickets, only as a "last resort," not a first, but that's often not the political reality. In New York, police have significantly ramped up traffic safety policing as priority in Mayor de Blasio's administration (though they are still shockingly unlikely to prosecute hit-and-run drivers and often spend time ticketing cyclists). And while the emphasis is supposed to be on dangerous violations, data show that the NYPD still focus on minor offenses. In Chicago, the dangerous streets that would be targets for more traffic safety enforcement are mostly on the South and West sides. In D.C., the government wants to increase speeding fines to $1,000.
"There is a real systemic problem in terms of wanting more traffic enforcement, when in fact we are dealing with a broken windows policing system," says Naomi Doerner, a racial justice advocate at the Alliance for Biking and Walking.
The transportation community, with its mostly white leadership, is now grappling with this issue. Communities in Los Angeles and Oakland have pushed back against Vision Zero because of concerns about enforcement, even as they support the overall goals. Shahum, in an introspective blog post written shortly after Castile's death, questioned the movement's lack of attention to the issue of over-policing: "We need police to be empowered to enforce traffic laws to save lives. But how can we be sure that we're not contributing to a bigger problem?" she wrote.
Advocates say the answer to this challenge isn't easy, but it is important to make sure Vision Zero policies make enforcement targets major violations that kill people, like speeding, rather than minor offenses. Automated speeding and red light enforcement cameras can help make justice "blind" to color, but even then, it matters in what neighborhoods and context the cameras are placed. High fines also hurt low-income people the most, and can ruin a person's life if they can't pay. In many states, automated enforcement cameras are restricted or illegal, due to controversies about their accuracy, privacy issues, or concerns that they are less about safety and more about raising revenues for cities. (California road safety activists are trying to overturn their state's ban.)
"It's a huge equity question," says Billings. "As we do neighborhood safety audits, we need to engage and outreach. The last thing we want to do is increase issues with policing in communities. The ultimate goal of enforcement isn't to be punitive. It should be educational."
Critics of Vision Zero, which have included some transportation engineers, question whether it is a realistic goal to aim for zero traffic deaths, given the investments required. Even Sweden hasn't managed to save all lives yet. Certainly, if they're not done right, these campaigns will be more style than substance.
"Vision Zero is supposed to represent a departure from business as usual on traffic," says Steely White. "The danger is they simply rebrand their existing traffic safety efforts and say, 'Hey, we're doing this great thing.'"
But there are many positives and important early progress as U.S. versions of the policy expands and cities experiment with what works. Under the Vision Zero banner, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is rethinking bus stops that are placed mid-block, encouraging people to jaywalk when they exit. Struggling to cut the pedestrian fatality rate, Portland, Oregon, has tried traffic safety "missions," which are high-visibility enforcement sprees by the police at major intersections, and Boston is working to lower its speed limit. Los Angeles is conducting widespread community outreach as it crafts an action plan, and has installed a pedestrian scramble at Hollywood's most tourist-trafficked intersection.
The Vision Zero Network is also working to sign on states and even the federal government on to similar initiatives and find permanent sources of funding, such as bond and tax measures, for urban efforts.
The broader hope, for many advocates, is that Vision Zero creates more bikeable and walkable cities in the guise of a focus on safety and morality. Says Steely White: "The best way to win a more bike-friendly city is to throw our lot in with everyone."
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The games are over, but their impact on Rio will last for generations—for better or worse.
On Sunday, closing ceremonies marked the end of this year's contentious Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro. But even as athletes and tourists vacate the city, Rio's residents are left to contend with a city that has changed profoundly—both economically and socially—since it was awarded the Olympic bid in 2009.
One group of citizens who won't be able to return to their lives before the games are those who were displaced from their homes in the city's favelas, or shanty towns. Many have been moved to housing built by the state, their former homes demolished to make way for new Olympic venues or, more likely, luxury apartments. Photographer Marc Ohren-Leclef has been documenting the eviction and relocation process since 2012—resulting in a project called Olympic Favela that was recently highlighted by Citylab and is currently on display at New York's Baxter St Gallery.
He says that Rio's poorest citizens have not only seen their homes destroyed—they've also experienced a loss of community that won't be as easy to rebuild.
"I don't think that [the new housing] will resemble anything close to the sense of community that people were taken from," Ohren-Leclef tells Co.Design. In the favelas, residents had set up informal businesses and support systems, such as a neighbor who provided childcare, or a grocery store owner who would deliver food to elderly residents up the hill. The municipal housing that residents were removed to is cheaply made, he says; it enforces a strict curfew and doesn't allow businesses. In the past two years there's been more of an effort to relocate communities together, but in many cases neighborhoods and even families have been broken up to live in housing across the city from each other.
Moving forward, says Ohren-Leclef, there needs to be a better system set in place that holds cities accountable for meeting their Olympic promises. "Between the local communities and the International Olympics Committee, there needs to be a system of checks and balances," he says. "Otherwise, just like the World cup and FIFA, people are losing trust in those organizations."
Ohren-Leclef had been interested in the individuals displaced by the Olympics since 2006, when he read about people being evicted from their homes in preparation for the Beijing Olympics. German-born and based in Brooklyn, Ohren-Leclef was familiar with the city of Rio after doing some commercial work there, but his chance to shed light on the phenomenon in RIo wouldn't come for another five years. When he heard about what was happening to the favelas in 2011, he flew to Rio and began working with CatComm, a Rio-based nongovernmental organization that advocates for people living in the city's favelas.
CatComm introduced Ohren-Leclef to the local leaders within more than a dozen favelas, who helped connect him to his subjects. The resulting photo series, Olympic Favela—which is now also a book and a short film—depicts residents in a pose of defiance: with fists raised in the air clutching emergency flares. Many of them are standing in front of homes that have been marked SMH (short for the housing authority Secretaria Municipal de Habitação) for demolition.
Over the four years he worked on the project, Ohren-Leclef traveled to Brazil nine times, staying for two to four weeks each. He chronicled people in the favelas as they fought their eviction, waited to be removed, then visited them once they were set up in their new homes. He says the municipal housing, often located on the outskirts of the city, look nice from the outside, but from the inside it's clear that they are low quality. That only makes sense, he says, once you "consider the incredible speed that they were built."
"Brazil was awarded the Olympic games based partially on the fact that they were going to revamp these urban structures," Ohren-Leclef says, referring to Brazil's promises for improvement when it put in its Olympic bid. While Ohren-Leclef acknowledged that the Olympics allowed the city to build infrastructure improvements like a new subway line and schools, as The New York Times reported this week, he feels that the costs to the city's poorest citizens outweigh the benefits to the city. "I had this love for the idea of the Olympic games and the unity it represented, but then you see that contradicted by the way they're realized," he says.
The series is on display at Baxter St Gallery in New York City. Prints and signed copies of the Olympic Favela book can be purchased from the artist here.
Correction: An earlier version of this article noted that Ohrem-Leclef worked with iBase on the project. He actually worked with the NGO CatComm. The article has been updated to reflect that.
