An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Facebook executives in recent years appeared to discuss giving access to their valuable user data to some companies that bought advertising when it was struggling to launch its mobile-ad business, according to internal emails quoted in newly unredacted court filings. In an ongoing federal court case against Facebook, the plaintiffs claim that the social media giant doled out people's data secretly and selectively in exchange for advertising purchases or other concessions, even as others were cut off, ruining their businesses. The case was brought by one such company, Six4Three, which claims its business was destroyed in 2015 by Facebook's actions. In one of the exchanges from the filings, Facebook employees discussed shutting down access "in one-go to all apps that don't spend at least $250k a year to maintain access to the data," according to the trove. The documents reference email exchanges regarding Facebook's relations with several large commercial partners, including Lyft, Tinder, Amazon.com, Airbnb and the Royal Bank of Canada. Facebook denies that it exchanged access to people's data for commercial benefit. Thousands of pages of court filings, which Facebook is fighting to keep sealed -- including in an emergency hearing scheduled for Friday afternoon -- illustrate the shrewd strategies the social network employed as it built its advertising empire. The disclosure sheds light on allegations of anti-competitive behavior that could play into efforts by U.S. and European lawmakers to curb the power of technology giants. "The documents Six4Three gathered for this baseless case are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context," Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's director of developer platforms and programs, said in a statement. "We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends' data with developers. Any short-term extensions granted during this platform transition were to prevent the changes from breaking user experience."

According to 9to5Google, Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020. The news shouldn't come as too much of a surprise since Google essentially stopped development on the app more than a year ago. Thankfully, there are plenty of other Google messaging apps available, such as Allo, Duo, and Android Messages. From the report: Last spring, Google announced its pivot for the Hangouts brand to enterprise use cases with Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, so the writing has been on the wall for quite some time regarding the Hangouts consumer app's demise. Meanwhile, Google has transitioned its consumer-facing messaging efforts to RCS 'Chat' and Android Messages following Allo's misadventures. As mentioned, Hangouts as a brand will live on with G Suite's Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, the former intended to be a team communication app comparable to Slack, and the latter a video meetings platform. Meanwhile, Google Voice calling, which was at first independent and then long integrated into Hangouts, was moved back out to its own redesigned app earlier this year. Interestingly, despite its forthcoming axing, Hangouts was one of a few apps to get early support for Android Auto's new MMS and RCS functionality, alongside Android Messages and WhatsApp.

Prosecutors in South Korea say that Samsung's latest bendable screen technology has been stolen and sold to two Chinese companies. "The prosecutors allege that a Samsung supplier leaked blueprints of Samsung's 'flexible OLED edge panel 3D lamination' to a company that it had set up," reports CNN. "That company then sold the tech secrets to the Chinese firms for nearly $14 million, according to the prosecutors." CNN reports: The Suwon District Prosecutor's Office charged 11 people on Thursday with stealing tech secrets from Samsung, the office said in a statement. They did not name the people or companies involved in the theft. Samsung Display, a subsidiary of the South Korean conglomerate, said in a statement Friday that it was "surprised and appalled at the results of the investigation by prosecutors." Prosecutors said Samsung invested six years and some 150 billion won ($130 million) to develop the bendable screen. Investigators have not been able to track down and question two Chinese individuals believed to be involved in the case, and have asked Interpol to help find and detain them. Of the 11 people indicted, three have been detained.

Airbnb is reportedly planning to distribute prototype buildings next year. Yesterday, Samara, a futures division of Airbnb meant to develop new products and services for the company, announced a new initiative called Backyard. The initiative is described in a press release as "an endeavor to design and prototype new ways of building and sharing homes," with the first wave of test units going public in 2019. Fast Company reports: The name "Backyard" might imply that Airbnb just wants to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), those small cottages that sit behind large suburban houses and are often rented on Airbnb. [Airbnb chief product officer and cofounder Joe Gebbia] clarifies that is not the case. "The project was born in a studio near Airbnb headquarters," he says in an interview over email. "We always felt as if we were in Airbnb's backyard -- physically and conceptually -- and started referring to the project as such." Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia's telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in. "Backyard investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and gains vast insight from the Airbnb community to thoughtfully respond to changing owner or occupant needs over time," Gebbia says. "Backyard isn't a house, it's an initiative to rethink the home. Homes are complex, and we're taking a broad approach -- not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things."

It’s been a rough few months for Magic Leap. The augmented-reality company, valued at over $6 billion, finally released its first product in August, after years of secrecy and hype, to generally meh reviews. (CEO and founder Rony Abovitz abandoned his quirky plan to reveal his invention by issuing golden tickets to a few lucky winners, Willy Wonka style.) And on Nov. 28, the company lost out on a $480 million contract to build headsets for the US army. Pushing for a military contract was a surprising move from a company that has built its carefully burnished image around whimsy and wonder. Scroll through Magic Leap’s homepage, for example, and you’ll be invited to “free your mind” and “enter the magicverse.” The Army, meanwhile, invited bidders to build a headset to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy.” To add insult to injury, the contract went to one of Magic Leap’s main competitors: Microsoft’s HoloLens. The US and Israeli militaries already use the HoloLens for training, but this marks the first time the technology will be used in live combat. The military headsets will be upgraded with night and thermal vision, as well as monitors that can measure vital signs and check for concussions. But Magic Leap might have lucked out. Microsoft is already dealing with internal resistance over its $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon, and this deal to build actual combat equipment is sure to raise eyebrows. Besides, it’s not like Magic Leap should be strapped for cash. In its seven years of existence, the company has raised $2.3 billion in venture capital, making it the most well-heeled startup in AR—and one of the highest-funded startups in any market for that matter. As Microsoft gets to work on the military gear, Magic Leap can focus on finally bringing life-sized whales to school gyms to the delight of screaming children.

The internet is a dangerous place for data. On Friday (Nov. 30), hotel chain Marriott disclosed that hackers stole personal information from 500 million guests. Sadly, the Marriott hack only managed to tie for the second largest data heist ever uncovered. As this list of history’s biggest hacks illustrates, no matter what you’re doing online—booking a hotel, looking for love, shopping, or checking your credit score—every time you put your information on the internet, you risk it going up for sale on the dark web. Company Accounts Hacked Date of Hack Yahoo 3 billion Aug. 2013 Marriott 500 million 2014-2018 Yahoo 500 million Late 2014 Adult FriendFinder 412 million Oct. 2016 MySpace 360 million May 2016 Under Armor 150 million Feb. 2018 Equifax 145.5 million July 2017 EBay 145 million May 2014 Target 110 million Nov. 2013 Heartland Payment Systems 100+ million May 2008 LinkedIn 100 million June 2012 Rambler.ru 98 million Feb. 2012 TJX 94 million 2003-2004 AOL 92 million 2004 MyHeritage 92 million Oct. 2017 Sony PlayStation Network 77 million April 2011 JP Morgan Chase 83 million July 2014 Tumblr 65 million Feb. 2013 Uber 57 million Late 2016 Home Depot 53 million April 2014 Facebook 50 million July 2017

AT&T is thinking of getting out of the Hulu business. After spending $85 billion to acquire Time Warner in June, AT&T is one of the most indebted companies (paywall) in the world with more than $180 billion in debt as of Sept. 30, including nearly $15 billion due in the next year. And so it’s looking for ways to boost free cash flow to pay down that debt. As part of that effort, the company is reviewing some minority investments that are “not essential” to its strategies for transforming its wireless, broadband, TV, and media businesses, said John Stephens, chief financial officer, in a meeting with analysts on Nov. 29. WarnerMedia’s 10% stake in Hulu is one of the non-essentials the company may be looking to unload. If it does put the stake on the block, The Walt Disney Co. is ready to pounce. Along with WarnerMedia, Hulu is owned by Disney, 21st Century Fox, and Comcast, which each have a 30% stake. Disney is set to take 60% control of Hulu early next year, when it completes its $71 billion acquisition of most of Fox’s assets. Both Disney and Fox are also prepared to put up $400 million in capital contributions apiece to buy out WarnerMedia’s shares, if the company sells, according to a Nov. 21 filing. For WarnerMedia, now would be the time to get out. When the company bought 10% of Hulu in August 2016 for $600 million (it has since invested another $200 million), WarnerMedia had the option to sell the shares back to Hulu, or for Hulu to call them back, under certain circumstances, for 36 months following the deal, the Disney filing said. That period would end in August 2019. Disney last valued Hulu at $9.3 billion, including a premium of $1.25 billion just for Disney gaining control, as of June 30, 2018. That values WarnerMedia’s stake around $930 million.

Global anxiety about the future efficacy of basic antibiotics is palpable. The conversation is even playing out in space, where scientists have discovered at least five strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria lurking on the International Space Station. The World Health Organization has cautioned governments to set stricter policies about how doctors prescribe these drugs and how farmers use them to manage their herds. This week, Canada will answer that call, implementing new rules for how farmers access the antibiotics. Starting Dec. 1, farmers in Canada will have access to about 300 drugs only if they obtain a prescription from a veterinarian. Before this week, the drugs could be bought directly from farming stores. The change is meant to create a more scrutinizing oversight system, where professionals in the medical field can closely monitor farm use of antibiotics. Antibiotics are supposed to be used to treat illnesses. But in recent years some infectious bacterial strains have evolved to be harder and harder to kill, putting essential modern medicines—including penicillin and tetracyclines—at risk of becoming ineffective. Health officials have said farmers have, in many cases, overused antibiotics on their animals to make them grow bigger faster, and to prevent them from getting sick, instead of just to treat infections. And that creates a major issue, especially in countries with large livestock industries. Canada is a big global producer, ranking twelfth among beef producers of animal-based food products. In 2017, the country’s agricultural sector was comprised of 11.5 million cattle, 14.3 million hogs, and more than 800,000 sheep and lambs. The beef industry was worth $8.7 billion, hogs made up $4.1 billion, and sheep and lambs $179 million. Canada ranks among the top 10 meat exporting countries, including eighth for beef. The new rules have been met with a mixed response from Canadian farmers, according to the CBC. While some support the measure, others have complained that there are not enough veterinarians in Canada to handle the industry’s needs, and so the new rules will slow the process of getting antibiotics when they are needed to treat animals. Still, the Canadian rules could become a future template for other governments around the world, including the United States, which oversees another of the world’s biggest livestock industries.

It’s becoming an all-too-common commute horror story in big cities: an unknown man on the train uses the iPhone’s AirDrop function to send a woman an unsolicited photo of his penis. On Nov. 28, four New York city council lawmakers introduced a bill that would criminalize this kind of harassment, known as “cyberflashing,” and punish it with a $1,000 fine or even a year in jail. Not only is it a horrible experience, it can be triggering, traumatizing people who’ve experienced sexual violence. “In the old days, you had to have a long trench coat and good running shoes,” councilman Joseph Borelli told the New York Times (paywall). “Technology has made it significantly easier to be a creep.” It seems that it would be very hard to enforce the law, which is framed to ban any sort of unwanted electronic messages of a sexual nature. To AirDrop an image, you must be within 30 ft (9.1 m) of the recipient, since the feature uses Bluetooth technology. But as a Verge writer showed several years ago in a prank, you can very easily hide your identity by changing the name of your phone. UK police told NBC News that taking a screenshot of the image could help in a subsequent investigation, but it also said people rarely report “cyberflashing.”

One part movies; one part original programming; one part bundle. WarnerMedia’s recipe to take on Netflix is starting to come together. The AT&T-owned media company revealed more details about its upcoming on-demand subscription video service that will compete with streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon, during a meeting with analysts on Nov. 29. The company also gave a glimpse of what AT&T’s streaming platforms may look like beyond next year, when the new service is expected to launch. The WarnerMedia subscription service, set to be released as a beta test during the fourth quarter of 2019, will have three tiers, John Stankey, CEO of WarnerMedia, said at the meeting. The first, and cheapest, will have movies. The second will have original series and movies, as well as some big theatrical releases. (Which sounds rather like WarnerMedia’s existing HBO Now service.) The third will bundle the first two offerings, and have a library of other WarnerMedia stuff, like classics, comedies, kids and family programming, and a larger collection of films. The company plans to license content from other studios for all three tiers, as well. But Stankey said he thinks the robust collection of rights that WarnerMedia already controls, like HBO’s Game of Thrones, Warner Bros. films like Wonder Woman and the Harry Potter movies, and TV shows like Friends, will give it an edge over the big streaming players like Netflix that still rely on licensing some content from other studios. Media companies like Disney are starting to pull content from outside platforms as the existing rights deals expire, and the companies prepare to launch rival streaming video services. WarnerMedia might, too. “Some of the incumbents that are in that space today should expect that their libraries are going to get a lot thinner as we get out 18 to 24 months in the number of hours that they have available for their consumers,” Stankey said, whose Warner Bros. TV division currently licenses Friends and other TV shows to Netflix. “Their pressure is they’ve got to make this pivot… to get people off of viewing the license content that maybe sits in our library or sits in a Disney-Fox library and get it onto their own.” Netflix has been preparing for this by producing and releasing more originals that are exclusive to its platform. WarnerMedia is also toying with the idea of an ad-supported streaming service, Stankey said, although he didn’t reveal many details. “It’s not just subscription, it’s going to be subscription and advertising,” he said, adding that advertising would allow the company to offer more content at a better price. It would also take advantage of what Xandr, WarnerMedia’s sister company, is doing with its ad platform. The advertising and technology company is trying to use the full breadth of AT&T’s data and distribution services, from its wireless, broadband, TV, and entertainment businesses, to better target people with ads across all of their screens. Eventually, Stankey expects all of AT&T’s streaming services, including live TV packages, like DirecTV Now, to converge into one platform. Stankey said that a lot of the fragmentation in streaming video right now—with different platforms for live TV, on-demand video, niche, genre programming, and ad-supported video—stems from companies trying to figure out what people want and are willing to pay for as they move away from traditional TV. In the next three years or so, he predicts that a lot of the big streaming companies will start to offer multiple services within the same platform. Stankey said AT&T is building the technology for its separate platforms—for live TV services, on-demand video, and ad-supported video—to be able to come together down the line. “A customer may choose to buy some or all of what you put on that platform, but I think that’s where things are going,” Stankey said.

Apple will argue a case about antitrust laws and its App Store in front of the Supreme Court on Monday. Apple is accused of monopolizing the market for iPhone apps and causing consumers to pay more than they would if it did not take a 30% cut of the sales price for apps. But questions remain whether consumers can sue in an antitrust case like this. The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals last year revived the lawsuit, deciding that Apple was a distributor that sold iPhone apps directly to consumers. Apple is expected to argue that lots of companies have distribution platforms similar to the App Store, including StubHub, Amazon's Marketplace, and eBay. Apple executives are increasingly pointing to services revenue, including the fees it collects from the App Store, as a major engine of growth. When iPhone users want to edit blemishes out of their selfies, identify stars and constellations, or simply join the latest video game craze, they turn to Apple's App Store, where any software application they buy also includes a 30% cut for Apple. That commission is a key issue in a closely watched antitrust case that will reach the US Supreme Court on Monday. The nine justices will hear arguments in Apple's bid to escape damages in a lawsuit accusing it of breaking federal antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for iPhone apps and causing consumers to pay more than they should. The justices will ultimately decide a broader question: Can consumers even sue for damages in an antitrust case like this one? Apple, which is appealing a lower court decision that revived the proposed consumer class-action lawsuit, says no, citing a decades-old Supreme Court precedent. The Cupertino, California-based technology company said that siding with the iPhone users who filed the lawsuit would threaten the burgeoning field of e-commerce, which generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually in US retail sales. The plaintiffs, as well as antitrust watchdog groups, said that if the justices closed courthouse doors to those who buy consumer products, monopolistic conduct could expand unchecked. "A lot of tech platforms will start making the argument that consumers don't have standing to bring antitrust suits against us," said Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director for the Open Markets Institute, a Washington-based antitrust advocacy group. "Uber could say, we're just providing communication services to ride-sharing drivers," Vaheesan said, referring to the popular ride-sharing company. "If there's an antitrust issue, the drivers can bring a claim but passengers do not have standing." The iPhone users accused Apple of violating federal antitrust law by monopolizing the sale of paid apps, leading to inflated prices compared to if apps were available from other sources. Though developers set the prices of their apps, Apple collects the payments from iPhone users, keeping a 30% commission on each purchase. One area of dispute in the case is whether app developers recoup the cost of that commission by passing it on to consumers. Developers earned more than $26 billion in 2017, a 30% increase over 2016, according to Apple. The company sought to have the antitrust claims dismissed, saying the plaintiffs lacked the required legal standing to bring the lawsuit. Apple has seized upon a 1977 Supreme Court ruling that limited damages for anticompetitive conduct to those directly overcharged instead of indirect victims who paid an overcharge passed on by others. Part of the concern, the court said in that case, was to free judges from having to make complex calculations of damages. Apple said it was acting only as the agent for app developers who sell the apps to consumers through the App Store. The company said allowing the lawsuit to proceed would be dangerous for the e-commerce industry, which increasingly relies on agent-based sales models. Apple cited companies like ticket site StubHub, Amazon's Marketplace, and eBay. Lawsuits against companies like these would multiply "and lead to the quagmire this court sought to avoid," Apple told the justices in a legal brief. E-commerce reached $452 billion in US retail sales in 2017, according to US government estimates. Apple is supported by President Donald Trump's administration. The plaintiffs are backed by the attorneys general of 30 states including California, Texas, Florida, and New York. The US Chamber of Commerce business group, backing Apple, said in a brief to the justices, "The increased risk and cost of litigation will chill innovation, discourage commerce, and hurt developers, retailers and consumers alike." The plaintiffs and some anti-monopoly groups disagree. They said app developers would be unlikely to sue because they would not want to bite the hand that feeds them, leaving no one to challenge anticompetitive conduct. Developers "cannot risk the possibility of Apple removing them from the App Store if they bring suit," the American Antitrust Institute advocacy group said in a brief. Apple is "trying to make it harder for injured parties to assert their rights under federal antitrust law," said Mark Rifkin, an attorney for the plaintiffs. The claims against Apple date to 2011, when several iPhone buyers including the lead plaintiff Robert Pepper of Chicago filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple in federal court in Oakland, California. A judge initially threw out the suit, ruling that the consumers were not direct purchasers because the higher fees they paid were passed on to them by the developers. The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals last year revived the lawsuit, deciding that Apple was a distributor that sold iPhone apps directly to consumers.

A group of scientists in China claim that they have helped bring two genetically edited twin babies to life. The goal in doing so was to bestow the twin girls with the ability to prevent HIV infection and avoid AIDS. The scientists claim they were successful, according to reports in Associated Press and MIT Tech Review. The claims haven’t been independently verified, but if they are true, then both science and ethics have entered deeply unchartered territories. More than 100 Chinese scientists have co-signed a letter, released on China’s social media site Weibo, condemning the experiment for using gene-editing technology on humans. The signatories include scientists from some of China’s most prominent universities and from overseas institutes like MIT. Quartz has translated the letter into English. Regarding the recent news from domestic and foreign media on human embryo gene-editing and two babies born using CRISPR technology, as rational human beings, with respect for scientific theories and concerns regarding the future scientific developments in China, our statement is as follows: The bioethics approval for this so-called “study” was insufficient. We can only use the word “crazy” to describe the experiment conducted directly on human beings. We have much to debate inside the scientific community about the accuracy and off-target-effects brought by CRISPR. Any attempts to alter human embryos and make babies carry huge risks without strict examination beforehand. It is scientifically possible, but scientists and medical experts have chosen not to use the technology on human beings because of uncertainties, risks, and most importantly, the ethical problems that follow. Such irreversible alterations on human genes will inevitably go into the human gene pool. We should have a thorough and in-depth discussion with scientists and people across the world about these potential effects. We cannot rule out the possibility that the babies, born using this technology, can be healthy for a period of time. But the potential risks and dangers brought along by the unjustified procedure, especially if such experiments carry on, are hard to measure. At the same time, this is a strike at the reputation and development of China’s science, especially in biomedical research. It’s extremely unfair to most of the scientists and scholars who work hard to innovate and adhere to ethical guidelines. We urge related regulatory departments and affiliated research institutes to establish laws and regulations on [gene-editing], and conduct a full investigation. They should also reveal the findings to the public. The Pandora’s Box has been opened. We need to close it before we lose our last chance. We as biomedical researchers strongly oppose and condemn any attempts on editing human embryo genes without scrutiny on ethics and safety!

There’s perhaps no more telling metric for our time than the number of robots in a country per every 10,000 manufacturing workers. With the threat of automation looming, it’s commonly understood that manufacturing jobs will be some of the first to go. But researchers believe the metric may not be the best way to measure countries’ openness to a bot-filled future. As a new report from the Information, Technology, and Innovation Foundation notes, there is a naturally stronger economic case for adopting robots in higher-wage economies than in lower-wage economies, meaning the popularity of robots is skewed to favor countries that can afford to pay for them. This makes sense, given that industrial robots can cost well over $100,000 each. The report suggests that instead, we should factor in countries’ average wages in order to get a real sense of how willing they are to embrace industrial robots. Compare these two charts. In the first, countries are listed in descending order based on the number of industrial robots in circulation in 2017. Not surprisingly, rich countries—like South Korea, Germany, and the United States—have some of the highest rates of adoption. But adjust for each countries’ wages, and the data tell a very different story. In the second chart, the researchers adjusted for the expected robot adoption rate given the countries’ relative wealth. You’ll see that many European and American countries have lower-than-expected adoption rates. The upshot of all of this is relatively straightforward. When taking wages into account, Asian countries far outpace their western counterparts. If robots are the future of manufacturing, American and European countries have some catching up to do to stay competitive.

A major artificial intelligence (AI) conference will be held in Africa in 2020—because the organizers admit it will be more difficult for African researchers to get foreign visas to attend it elsewhere. Organizers of the International Conference on Learning Representations will host it in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2020 as part of a bid to ensure more collaboration with scientists on the continent. Stringent visa processes and requirements often mean it’s difficult for African scientists to travel abroad and collaborate with their peers on projects or at conferences. It’s a problem that many Africans face when traveling globally: only three African countries rank above average on the 2018 index of the world’s strongest passports. Yoshua Bengio, often regarded the father of deep learning and one of the conference’s organizers say foreign governments “could make it easier” for African researchers to visit. “It’s a lottery, and very often they will use any excuse to refuse access. This is totally unfair,” Bengio told MIT Technology Review. “It is already hard for them to do research with little resources, but in addition if they can’t have access to the community.” Hosting the conference on the continent, he claims, is “a way to counter” the lack of access for local scientists. Indeed, Africans looking to attend an artificial intelligence event in Canada this year have reported visa difficulties. As the global AI race takes shape, African countries are also trying to make up ground. Google has built an AI lab in Accra, Ghana and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kigali, Rwanda has launched the continent’s first dedicated master’s degree program for machine learning and artificial intelligence with backing from Facebook and Google. Ethiopia is often seen as one of the continent’s leading hubs for artificial intelligence. The lack of access to global events that are important for networking and exchanging ideas is one of a string of challenges scientists and technologists on the continent face. Closer to home, governments simply aren’t paying enough attention—and by extension, resources—to research in general. Indeed, the average sub Saharan Africa government spends less than 0.5% of GDP on backing research—four times less than average for OECD countries. And research still doesn’t rank as a rewarding field for its scientists: a recent paper by the Collaboration for Research Excellence in Africa (CORE), showed that up to 85% of the 400 plus African researchers who answered its survey had worked for free in order to enable research projects.

Once a week, the employees of the HR software company Workday get a two-question survey. On #FeedbackFriday, as Workday’s senior vice president and “people and performance evangelist” Greg Pryor calls it, employees might be asked first about their relationship with their manager, and then to reflect on their own mental and physical health. The specific questions vary week to week. Over time, the surveys create a robust data set from Workday’s 9,600-plus employees, a data set that can be analyzed based on location, gender, department, and a number of other factors. Workday has found, for example, that workers in its San Francisco office have a better employee experience than those 40 miles east in the company’s Pleasanton, California, headquarters. Meanwhile, female employees in Victoria, Canada, consistently rate their culture higher than women in other Workday offices do. According to Pryor, who as the head of people at a people company has perhaps one of the more meta jobs in the world, the survey results have led to real change. After Pryor’s team noticed millennial employees reported they didn’t have visibility into their own career trajectories at the company, Workday launched a series of career development workshops that let workers take time out of their weeks to holistically think through their careers. The questions used in the weekly surveys are backed by research from the Great Place to Work Institute, an organization that studies and consults on office culture. ”The path to having a customer forever runs through your employees,” says Michael Bush, the CEO of the Great Places to Work Institute. “The guy who runs my barbershop surveys his employees… I think every company should.” (Ironically, five years ago, the Great Place to Work Institute was found to not actually be that great of a place to work—at least not versus other companies it measured using a new tool to gauge workplaces based on employee feedback.) Workday, on the other hand, consistently sits atop “best places to work” lists. Pryor credits “a culture of continuous feedback” and “a responsiveness to different generational expectations” as primary drivers of Workday’s popularity among its staff. “Happy employees mean happy customers,” Pryor says. “That’s why it’s so important to have a pulse of what’s going on.”

A belly flop can be a painful and very public failure, but not in this case. Belly Flop won for best animated film at this year’s Africa Movie Academy Awards along with several other international animation awards. The film has already been screened at more than 60 international film festivals, according to producers. Just under five minutes long, the film took nearly three years in production but has been a passion project for over seven years. The short film may not offer the social commentary of the animated short In a Heartbeat by Beth David and Esteban Bravo or more adult themes like Steve Cutt’s viral Rat Race, but it is a delightful picture of girlhood the world rarely ascribes to little African girls. Directed by Jeremy Collins and Kelly Dillon, Belly Flop tells the story of the disarming Penny and her determination to conquer the dive board. With her fluffy hair, freckles and floral armbands, Penny refuses to be intimidated by a more graceful diver who steals the spotlight at the local pool. “The character of Penny was inspired by a girl I au-paired for when I was at university,” said Dillon, who wrote the screenplay in 2011 already. “I remember when she started taking swimming lessons, I admired her persistence in learning to dive properly, oblivious that she kept belly flopping.” Penny’s perseverance pays off in the end and in some ways she echoes the determination of the continent’s small but creative animation industry. Cape Town-based Triggerfish Animation Studios has produced award-winning African children’s films and cartoons with few resources and sheer willpower partly because they wanted African children to see themselves on screen. It’s also why Belly Flop is free on YouTube. “Belly Flop was made as a creative exercise and for fun with a lot of people going above and beyond to volunteer their time to contribute their expertise in between paid projects,” said Anthony Silverston, Triggerfish’s head of development told Quartz. “It was not a commercial project, so we wanted to release it for free so that anyone could watch it, keeping in the spirit of the project.” This “spirit” reflects much of what drives the local animation industry and it’s what makes watching the short film worth it, notwithstanding its wonderful main character of course.

You may have noticed that creativity is all the rage—and not just among artists. American culture, and indeed the world, has become obsessed with manufacturing creative kids, who will turn into inventive workers, who will then become the innovative leaders we need in these rapidly-changing times. All this obsessing over creativity would be fine if we were actually good at fostering inventiveness. But as writer and teacher Diana Senechal points out in her new book Mind Over Memes, many schools and employers are going about it all wrong. By attempting to instill creativity, she argues, we end up killing it. As creativity is increasingly touted as the “premiere skill” of our time, Senechal argues, there’s little interest in just letting this ability develop independently. Instead, it is being quantified, dissected and tested, taught and measured. For example, the Partnership for 21st Century Learning—a collaboration between education, business, community, and government leaders in the US—insists that kids must be educated in the ability to think quick and come up with unusual solutions to respond to future employment in a transforming landscape. Similarly, the International Organization for Cooperation and Development, which generates data and research for policies that promote prosperity worldwide, argues that education today must be focused on cultivating and measuring creativity. Teaching, learning, and assessing creative and critical thinking skills will “help [students] succeed in modern, globalised economies based on knowledge and innovation.” In light of these institutional directives, schools and companies are intent on making creativity something that they can grow and harness. That means measuring it with tests and scoring inventiveness. High test scores may reveal the ability to brainstorm, Senechal says. But they don’t reveal the capacity to innovate, which takes patience. Senechal argues that no one can be creative without first learning about what came before. That involves a lot of study, thought, and practice—mastering the basics ahead of any dazzling innovations. Moreover, a dogmatic approach to creativity in institutions only stifles the very quality everyone claims to want to cultivate, she says. Senechal writes: Creativity cannot be institutionalized; the best way to promote it is to give it room and substance. An inventor creates new things not by “being creative” but by finding new solutions to problems. That requires long, stubborn, springy work: a willingness to test something to the limit, even if no one else deems it relevant. A new slow thinking movement Senechal doesn’t oppose the notion that creativity is important. Instead, she calls for a reframing of our understanding of this quality and how it is cultivated. Invention is the result of a long process. Take making music, for example. Before musicians can write new songs, much less push the boundaries of their craft, they first have to figure out basics—how to play, scales, notes, chords, how other people’s songs go, and how those songs are composed. There is a lot of practice that comes before mastery and only after that can innovation happen. Ideas must germinate in knowledgeable soil. They benefit from deep consideration, and valuable concepts can’t be generated without a profound understanding of underlying principles. In Senechal’s view, creativity is both simpler and more difficult than its most vocal proponents make it out to be. It’s not as easy as just having an open mind or being talented at seeing newness in a vacuum. On the other hand, creativity is neither magical nor elusive. Inventiveness stems from practice and variation, attempts to play with traditions and tweak them bit by bit. Nothing useful is totally new. Rather, invention is a twist on a time-tested method, borne of knowledge. Senechal offers her great uncle, Charles Fischer, as an example. He was a 20th-century inventor who patented a number of handy gadgets, including a speedometer, a coat rack, a hands-free book stand that wraps around the thigh, and a telephone holder, among others. Each of his inventions had different element. But it was his fundamental understanding of how mechanical springs work, stemming from his experience as a toolmaker, that led to each innovation. Senechal proposes that a new approach to creativity in institutions could save inventiveness from obsolescence. Rather than insisting that people demonstrate their aptitude for this skill, we should make room for it to grow. Instead of testing people on their brainstorming abilities, schools and companies should allow students and workers to tinker with ideas in various way that suit them. In her own classes, Senechal has discovered that when she assigns writing, each student has different needs. For example, one student said he couldn’t write a story in the presence of everyone else. By allowing him to complete his assignment at night, at home, while others wrote in the classroom, she gave him the leeway to be creative, and he produced good work. Likewise, when one student told her he couldn’t follow the precise directives of her assignment without ruining the story he was writing, she let him hand it in as he wished and discovered he was right. She didn’t squelch his creativity and insist he follow her rigid rules. By being flexible, she lets the students explore their own ideas. “To accomplish something meaningful, one can dig into the problem at hand and learn about it slowly, sitting still for a while,” Senechal writes. “Such learning though sluggish at first soon starts to wiggle with questions.” If institutions really want to encourage creativity, in other words, they’ll have to develop the requisite patience to wait for it—and the ability to recognize what inventiveness is really made of. Insisting on innovation will never work, according to Senechal. “Perhaps the worst thing for creativity is dogma,” she argues. “Dogma delights in nothing; it insists on its own rigid ways.” In other words, the teacher believes that as a culture, we need to become more creative about our understanding of creativity, and more inventive in our approach to measuring how this skill manifests. It’s not something that teachers or bosses can test and score directly. But it is something they will recognize when a great idea is presented and demonstrated and proves its relevance. There may be no shortcut for this process, Senechal says, but it’s worth the effort and wait.

There’s an upside to disappointment. No, really. According to psychologists, if you learn to harness disappointments and use them to examine expectations, learn from experience, and fuel your determination, loss can be a powerful teacher and motivator. “Major disappointments are often defining moments in people’s lives,” writes Dutch scholar and psychoanalyst Manfred F R Kets de Vries in the Harvard Business Review (paywall). “Constructively dealing with disappointment can be a self-curative process that can contribute to personal growth and make for greater resilience.” An example of the power of disappointment lies in the US midterm elections. After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, American progressives were depressed. But the Trump victory also showed that anything can happen and no one should rest on their laurels; in the ensuing years, many Americans translated their profound disappointment into action and engagement. As a result, voter turnout for the Nov. 6 midterms was unprecedented, and the election resulted in many progressive firsts. Two Native American women, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, won congressional races; New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Iowa’s Abby Finkenauer became the youngest women elected to Congress; Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee, is the first Somali-American headed for Congress; and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American woman going to Congress. Jared Polis, the Democratic candidate for Colorado’s gubernatorial race, became the first openly gay person ever elected governor in the US. Punk rocker Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate run in the traditionally red state of Texas, but came so close that he showed the territory isn’t necessarily a conservative stronghold. And New Hampshire elected an Afghan refugee to its House of Representatives. These things happened because people took action instead of becoming resigned, and their motivation is evidence that loss has alchemical qualities. Disappointment, handled thoughtfully, transforms into resilience. Loss is then the first step to gaining strength. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously put it—and Kelly Clarkson famously belted—”That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” An alchemical process Psychologist Anna Rowley, who counsels executives at Microsoft and other corporations, believes resilience is the most important skill to cultivate. Winning is fun and feeling good is grand, but no one can win everything and the thrill of success is fleeting. Learning to deal with difficulty, she argues, is key to feeling good and succeeding in the long term. Whether your disappointments are personal, political, or both, the dangers and potential they offer are the same. And you can take the same steps to make the most of what is initially a bad feeling. Disappointment, handled thoughtfully, transforms into resilience. The danger of disappointment is that it can lead to rumination and depression. You might get stuck in a negative cycle, going over and over a loss in your mind, blaming yourself or others, feeling doomed to fail forever. Take young Winston Churchill. He had to resign as first lord of the admiralty during the First World War after a failed military campaign that came to be known as “Churchill’s folly” led to the death of tens of thousands of Britons. Initially, he was more than disappointed. Churchill was depressed. But he eventually turned his folly into the material for success. Churchill lost his rank and prominence, but gained wisdom about himself and others, as well as strategy and tactics. Now Churchill is of course remembered as the prime minister of the UK, who led a British victory in World War II. However, if he had let that early experience dissuade him from ever seeking a leadership position again, we would not know his name today and the world might look different. Mastering cognitive reappraisal This process of using disappointment for good is called “cognitive reappraisal.” Basically, after you let yourself feel bad for a little bit, consider the bigger picture and what you truly hope to achieve, and make a plan. This behavior takes practice. You have to train yourself to contextualize and rethink disappointing experiences. Sarah Schnitker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, argues that reframing negative experiences by connecting them to a larger story helps you develop the patience it takes to turn a loss into a win. Your disappointment becomes meaningful, a defining experience that realigns you with your true aims. Back to the midterms. Say, for example, that you’re disappointed by the results. Maybe you would have liked to see a “blue wave” rather than just a “blue ripple.” Instead of descending into depression, consider the big picture. The results reflect a significant portion of Americans who are frustrated by Trump’s rhetoric and actions. Focus on the wins and the near-wins; see these as a sign of progress instead of full losses. Reframed this way, the results are a powerful motivator to continue to engage instead of losing faith in democracy. If success is the best revenge, then disappointment is the bittersweet secret sauce that can help any of us cultivate patience, motivation, skills, and strength. Just as every win leaves us open to future and potentially higher-stakes failure, every disappointing experience holds the potential for eventual success.

Students at select schools in Nigeria’s southwest will soon be taught science in Yoruba, a language that’s native to the region. Taofeeq Adebayo, a PhD student in linguistics, has translated a popular science textbook into Yoruba and will lead a pilot project to teach science to third-year secondary school students (seventh graders) in the local language. The project will see Adebayo teach science in Yoruba across seven schools with the textbook translated in collaboration with graduate students at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s oldest university. Adebayo, also a Mellon fellow at New Orleans’ Tulane University, thinks of the pilot project as a chance to fine-tune how “translation can be improved to meet their [students] classroom needs and how we can design the translation so that it is accessible not only to the students but also to the teachers.” In rural areas across Nigeria, teaching often happens in local languages but those lessons are still based on English textbooks and only happen out of necessity as a consequence of low English language proficiency. And it’s likely tweaking translation and teaching methods will be necessary: as has been increasingly observed in other African countries, written mother-tongue languages often vary and aren’t keeping pace with how they are used in evolving everyday speech. But there’s a long-running argument that local languages should be thought of as a standard medium of instruction for children at a younger age—and, some argue, through to university level. Providing education in a child’s mother-tongue, academics have claimed, will make subjects like science more accessible and easier to understand at an earlier age, especially for children that have to formally learn English at school. And research supports the sentiment: a 2006 UNESCO-backed study showed mother-tongue-based multilingual learning was likely to result in higher retention of knowledge. It’s a strategy that’s also been tried out in southeast Asia where countries including Thailand, Phillipines and Cambodia have adopted education policies that favor offering early education in the mother tongue.

The US Supreme Court is deeply ideologically divided, according to the general consensus about the current bench. But conservative and liberal justices alike were unanimous in their decision in this term’s first signed opinion in Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido (pdf), issued on Nov. 6. Written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and decided by eight justices (the freshman on the bench, Brett Kavanaugh, did not participate in consideration of the case), the opinion is refreshing evidence that not every issue is contentious. It is notable, however, that the matter in question involved the interpretation of a statute on age discrimination and its application to government workers. Given that the justices are mostly rather advanced in years and that they are themselves public employees, it’s perhaps not so surprising that they see eye to eye: They all found the law barring agism applies to all government employers, whatever the size of the organization. The facts of the matter In 2009, firefighter John Guido was 46 years old and his colleague Dennis Rankin was 54. They had been working for the Mount Lemmon Fire District in Arizona since 2000 and were the district’s most senior firefighters in terms of both rank and age. Mount Lemmon, facing a budget shortfall, terminated their employment. The former firefighters filed successful age discrimination claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after their termination. In 2013, they sued the fire district in federal court, claiming their termination violated the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). The fire district filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the case didn’t even need to be heard. From the district’s perspective, it was too small to qualify as an “employer” under the ADEA because the 1967 statute applies only to an “employer…engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has 20 or more employees.” The court agreed with this argument, granting Mount Lemmon’s motion, finding there were no facts in dispute to merit a trial. But the firefighters appealed and won. In 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (pdf) reversed the Arizona district court’s decision and Mount Lemmon sought review in the Supreme Court. Last week, the nation’s most powerful justices affirmed the appeals court, concluding that the ADEA does indeed apply to the fire district. As Ginsburg noted, in 1974, Congress amended the ADEA to include “a state or political subdivision of a state” in the definition of employer. The same 1974 enactment also amended the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—a kind of blueprint for the ADEA—to cover all government employers regardless of their size. As such, Mount Lemmon’s claim that the small fire district cannot be sued for age discrimination under the federal statute fails. Ginsburg relies on extensive experience The fire district warned the court that applying the ADEA to small public entities could lead to fewer vital public services such as fire protection. “Experience suggests otherwise,” Ginsburg replied in the opinion. “For 30 years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has consistently interpreted the ADEA as we do today. And a majority of States forbid age discrimination by political subdivisions of any size…No untoward service shrinkages have been documented.” Perhaps it’s not surprising that Ginsburg disagreed with the Mount Lemmon Fire District’s interpretation of federal law. At 85 years old, she’s been resisting pressure to retire for many years, and has vowed not to cave to the demands. Her age has been on a lot of Americans’ minds recently. On Nov. 7, the day after the high court’s unanimous opinion was issued, Ginsburg fell while working in her chambers at the Supreme Court in the evening. The following morning, she was hospitalized and learned she had broken three ribs. But by Friday (Nov. 9) the justice was working from home, proving that notions of old age are fluid, and that her advanced years are not a reasonable basis to discriminate against a determined and dedicated government worker. According to her nephew Daniel Stiepleman, Ginsburg didn’t neglect her judicial duties even while at the hospital receiving treatment “The last I heard she was up and working, of course, because what else would she be doing? And cracking jokes. I can’t promise they were good jokes but they were jokes.”

Uber is putting a name to different types of sexual harassment. The company on Nov. 12 released a taxonomy of sexual harassment and assault, spanning from “staring or leering” to “non-consensual sexual penetration.” Uber said it developed the list in consultation with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) and the Urban Institute, a social policy-oriented think tank, to help categorize and catalog incidents of sexual misconduct and assault that are reported by riders, drivers, and other people who interact through its platform. The definitions weren’t designed to catalog incidents in a workplace context and won’t be applied to incidents reported by Uber employees, company spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said. She said the taxonomy was created to categorize incidents “at businesses that connect people in the real world,” such as restaurants and the hospitality industry. In a public memo about the new list, Uber chief legal officer Tony West and NSVRC spokeswoman Kristen Houser note that because sexual harassment and sexual assault are widely underreported, any statistics are suspect. But, they write, a lack of common definitions and methodology to talk about sexual misconduct compound the problem. “There is no common definition of criminal sexual assault across the 50 states or in federal crime statistics, and there is no shared understanding of misconduct that may not be criminal in nature,” West and Houser write. “These challenges create a landscape in which the limited information that is reported out provides only an incomplete and fragmented understanding of the true scope and scale of sexual violence.” The taxonomy and accompanying policy paper (pdf) from Uber, NSVRC, and the Urban Institute reflect the influence West and current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have had on Uber. West joined Uber a little over a year ago from PepsiCo and after serving as a high-ranking Justice Department official in the Obama administration. And cleaning up Uber’s record and improving its reputation on safety has been one of Khosrowshahi’s priorities since he assumed the CEO post in August 2017. Allegations of sexism and sexual misconduct engulfed Uber’s workplace in 2017, leading to the ouster of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and an exodus of senior leaders. Sexual misconduct allegations continued to dog Uber this year, after an April CNN investigation of police reports, federal court records, and county court databases for 20 major US cities identified more than 100 Uber drivers accused of sexual abuse or assault. This past May, West said Uber would no longer force US riders, drivers, or employees to arbitrate claims of sexual misconduct or assault, meaning those claims could now be heard in court. It was a bold change in policy that Google and Facebook recently followed. Also in May, Uber committed to publishing a report on safety in 2019 that will include data on “the most severe incidents” of sexual assault and road safety reported by riders and drivers, but not necessarily statistics on all 21 categories of sexual assault, Anderson said. Uber said the taxonomy is designed to help it address any instance of sexual misconduct before the behavior escalates. Any reported incident would be classified under one of the 21 categories; reports with multiple alleged behaviors will be classed under the most severe claim. The full Uber taxonomy of sexual misconduct and sexual assault is below: Sexual misconduct Staring or leering Comments or gestures: asking personal questions Comments or gestures: comments about appearance Comments or gestures: flirting Comments or gestures: explicit gestures Comments or gestures: explicit comments Displaying indecent material Indecent photography without consent Soliciting sexual content Masturbation / indecent exposure Verbal threat of sexual assault Sexual assault Attempted touching: non-sexual body part Attempted kissing: non-sexual body part Attempted touching: sexual body part Attempted kissing: sexual body part Non-consensual touching: non-sexual body part Non-consensual kissing: non-sexual body part Attempted non-consensual sexual penetration Non-consensual touching: sexual body part Non-consensual kissing: sexual body part Non-consensual sexual penetration

The way Americans look at manufacturing might help explain why 2.4 million jobs could go unfilled between this year and 2028. A joint Deloitte-Manufacturing Institute study published today (Nov. 14) finds that more than 4.6 million manufacturing jobs need to be filled in the next 10 years. About 2.7 million vacancies will be left by retirees and almost two million other new jobs will come with expected economic growth. Yet only 2.2 million likely will be filled, the study says, leaving more than half open. In addition, according to the report, an ongoing skills shortage resulting from wider use of advanced technology could also mean that up to $2.5 trillion in manufacturing economic output may be at risk in the next decade. Researchers surveyed 397 executives from US manufacturers on the causes of the projected job vacancies. (The executives were chosen from across a wide range of sectors, business sizes, levels in the supply chain, and geographic regions.) The most popular response, cited by 45% of the respondents: “negative perceptions towards the manufacturing industry.” Seema Pajula, vice chairman and US Industries and Insights Leader for Deloitte, told Quartz that the negative impression of manufacturing stems from younger prospective employees viewing it as boring, outdated, and not creative. “If we don’t fix this image problem, we are really going to have issues in the future,” Pajula said. Significant job vacancies affect companies in various ways. More than half of the executives said they struggled to maintain production levels to meet demand and 43% cited trouble with new product development and innovation. And innovation in manufacturing is ongoing—Forbes’ “30 under 30 Manufacturing 2019” highlights work in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and 3-D metal-printing technology—but many potential employees who don’t see it that way turn to other industries. Millennial or Generation Z employees “would rather take less pay if they feel like they are working for a company that has a social purpose,” Pajula said. She points out that “people don’t think of manufacturing as sexy, creative, or attractive, and in technology, companies are more attractive.” The prospect of higher wages elsewhere is a factor, yet Pajula said “image is the bigger problem.” The report suggests a number of ways companies can combat this image problem and also address skills gaps. These include development programs for knowledge transfer, increasing hiring flexibility (prioritizing potential competency over required years of experience, for example), and increasing wages (83% of surveyed executives said they were willing). Some manufacturers have already begun to market themselves better by “allowing non-production work to be done from remote locations, while others are implementing new technology like automation to supplement the existing workforce,” Chad Moutray, director at the Center for Manufacturing Research, said in a statement. Attracting more workers could also be as simple as diversifying the hiring pool. According to data from the American Community Survey by the US Census Bureau, in 2017, women made up just under a third of the manufacturing workforce. “Companies need to figure out how to get more women engaged and how to retain them,” Pajula said.

The CIA has an imperfect history that makes it far from morally irreproachable. But according to British historian Christopher Andrew, the agency and other western intelligence services are more effective than any of their rivals. And Andrew has a theory about why. In the West, he said “[o]ne of the reasons that we’re bound to carry on being far better than the Russians, far better than the Chinese, far better than the North Koreans…is that it is very frequently possible to tell policymakers that they’re wrong,” Andrew, an emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at Cambridge University, said in a talk at New York’s new Spyscape museum on Nov. 10. Days later, a leaked CIA report on the death last month of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi would prove his point. Specifically, the CIA assessed whether the de facto head of Saudi Arabia, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, was involved in the gruesome murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. If the Saudi royal were to be implicated, it would complicate life for US president Donald Trump, who calls Saudi Arabia a “spectacular ally.” Nevertheless, in its analysis, the CIA reportedly concluded with high confidence that the crown prince ordered the reporter’s death. Sometimes you have to take a slipper to the head In interviews after the CIA report was leaked, Trump claimed he still has no idea whether the Saudi ruler was complicit in Khashoggi’s death. He has suggested that the truth may never surface. “I don’t—I don’t know. You know, who can really know?” he said in a Fox News appearance. “But I can say this, he’s got many people now that say he had no knowledge.” Earlier today (Nov. 20), he issued a statement based on a separate White House evaluation, saying, “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Surely, CIA director Gina Haspel would have seen this dismissal of the CIA’s work coming. Her willingness to support an inconvenient truth is in keeping with what Andrew believes is the perfect definition of the job. That definition, Andrew said, comes courtesy of a chief intelligence officer under former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who once said, “My job is to tell the prime minister what she doesn’t want to know.” Hundreds of years before Thatcher took office in 1979, this same sentiment was expressed by the head of security for queen Elizabeth I, the historian continued. That man, Sir Francis Walsingham, also felt strongly that his job was to tell the queen “what she needed to know, but not necessarily but she wanted to hear.” Anyone who has read or seen depictions of Elizabeth’s disposition would understand, he added, that “she was not someone you would disagree with without some amount of trembling.” Indeed, “[a]fter one disagreement in 1586,” Andrew writes in his new book, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2018), “an exasperated Elizabeth took off one of her slippers and threw it as his head.” No progress without psychological safety Though flinging slippers at employees is now frowned upon, not much else has changed over the centuries for forthright intelligence officers and the leaders they debrief. At the Spyscape talk, former CIA station chief Daniel Hoffman, who was also on the panel, confessed that it’s “not super pleasant” to tell the director of the CIA, the president, or policy makers things that they don’t want to hear, but it’s the role. “You can sleep better at night if you do,” he added, “and I have.” Knowing he probably wasn’t risking his job, or his freedom, or his head, as he might have as an employee of another nation, must have aided that slumber. The ability to share truths without fear of retribution or shaming is the ultimate challenge and source of strength for any organization. If you work under a leader whose ego can take some bruising, it’s easy to forget the powerful connection between psychological safety and survival, let alone the link between psychological safety and progress or innovation. Strong corporate leaders also know that a company’s ability to avoid dangerous pitfalls depends on a basic understanding that sharing information, even when it will only create headaches, is encouraged. Companies like GM have learned this lesson the hardest possible way, after recognizing that its toxic culture of shaming employees led to defective cars and unnecessary deaths. Hopefully, Facebook’s leaders will heed a similar lesson soon. In the meantime, the unfolding drama around Trump’s refusal to criticize Saudi Arabia, or enact sanctions, is a good reminder that even the best leadership efforts—in this case, on the CIA’s part—do not always change outcomes.

China is taking a big step toward expanding a controversial program that judges and punishes individuals based on their social behavior. The government describes (in Chinese) the program, which has been piloted in Hangzhou, a 9.5 million-person city in eastern China, as a “personal integrity” project. Authorities said it will be rolled out next in Beijing, allowing the Chinese Communist Party to more closely monitor the 22 million citizens in the capital based on their actions and reputations, according to Bloomberg. The way it works is relatively straightforward. People who follow the government’s rules and exhibit pro-social behaviors, such as donating blood, will earn a good social credit and be rewarded with so-called “green channel” benefits, such as easier access to job applications and gyms. Those who violate laws—including traffic laws—will “pay a heavy price,” according to the government announcement. That can include being blocked from things that include ordering plane and train tickets. The program will work by pooling information from several different government agencies and transit authorities, using tracking technology linked to citizens who are increasingly part of a technological network comprised of cell phones and social apps such as WeChat and Alipay. It will also incorporate the use of facial recognition technology via the government’s 200 million cameras set up to monitor jaywalkers and activity in open spaces. The Chinese government has closely watched the pilot program in Hangzhou, which launched in late 2017. When it was started, the government told people it was intended to “guide the citizens to be honest and promote the socialist core values.” The new system has drawn criticism from around the world, from policymakers to comedians. An American late-night television show host, Stephen Colbert, derided the program as a creepy step toward Big Brother-style governing. ”If you thought the way Facebook tracks you is scary, it’s got nothing on the Chinese government,” Colbert said. China has said it hopes to incorporate Beijing into the monitoring program by 2021.

A common argument made against climate-change mitigation is that it’s bad for the economy. A new US government report released Friday (Nov. 23) says it will be much worse for America’s economic health to do nothing. The Fourth National Climate Assessment, a 1,600-page, Congress-mandated study, is a detailed tally of the economic devastation climate change has already inflicted on the US, and the billion-dollar losses that Americans can expect in the future if they don’t reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. It predicts the cascading effects could severely impact human health, the environment, and economic growth. The analysis was carried out by scientists that serve in the Trump administration, but their findings are at odds with president’s own environmental policies, which have mostly consisted of deregulating industry and leaving the Paris Climate Agreement. The authors, who hail from 13 federal agencies, looked at the economic consequences sector by sector. Here are some of the costs they identified: Labor losses Climate change could have a big impact on labor, a key pillar of the economy. By the end of the century, productivity losses due to extreme heat in jobs that require being outside, such as agriculture and construction, could result in some $160 billion in lost wages a year, according to the report. Higher energy costs Another big economic blow will come from rising energy costs: up to $87 billion a year by 2100 due to mounting demand on a power system made less reliable by extreme weather. Damaged infrastructure As much as $507 billion’s worth of real estate is at risk of being inundated by rising sea levels by 2100, according to the report. Inland, flooding could destroy thousands of bridges, resulting in damages of $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion a year by 2050. Shrinking environmental capital Americans would also suffer from the losses of natural resources they now bank on. Ocean acidification would take a toll—of up to $230 million—on shellfish harvests. Disappearing coral reefs alone would shave $140 billion off the recreation industry; cold-water fishing and skiing would also be affected. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The study also shows that working to reduce the world’s carbon footprint today would make for a less dire future.