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31 Aug 08:25

Could publicly owned energy edge out the big six?

Young man standing at stove in kitchen checking digital tablet
‘Despite more than 69 active domestic energy suppliers in the UK market, millions of people are still overpaying to heat their homes or cook a meal.’ Photograph: Getty Images/Westend61

The UK energy market is changing. After being dominated by the big six since the 1990s, the sector is finally becoming more competitive thanks to renewable tariffs, dynamic pricing and a proliferation of publicly owned and small- and medium-sized providers.

In the past couple of years, a handful of local authorities have entered the fray and established their own energy companies. They may still represent a small proportion of the market, but with promises of cheaper tariffs and greater transparency – and with public distrust in the top six companies on the up – could municipal energy one day edge out the big six?

This will partly depend on whether councils can become fully licensed providers, as Bristol Energy and Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham have done. “It takes a great deal of leadership, and capacity in resourcing and staffing to be able to set up a fully licensed energy company,” says Joshua Emden, research fellow at thinktank IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research. It also requires extensive market knowledge, a long-term investment – and commitment.

But with average cuts to council budgets of 26% since 2010, and growing demands for services such as children’s safeguarding and adult social care, investing in an energy company is out of reach for many local authorities.

“It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation,” says Emden. “If councils had more money they’d be able to spend more time investing in resources, learning, and scaling up these activities. But in the absence of any funding increases from central government, they can’t get more money until they set up the company.”

With some forward thinking and investment, the rewards can be significant. While energy savings will vary household to household, Bristol Energy currently saves residents around £200 a year* on average if they’ve switched from a standard deal with a big six provider. “We think around 111,700 households in Bristol are on a big six standard variable tariff, so that’s a potential saving of more than £22m for the city,” says Bristol Energy’s managing director Peter Haigh.

As well as offering lower tariffs, many local councils are reinvesting profits into the community. Whenever a household switches to Bristol Energy and mentions “fuel good”, up to £30 is donated to the Fuel Good Fund, an initiative that works with families to keep their homes warm through simple home improvements, such as draught proofing and boiler repairs. It also offers debt advice and helps people to switch suppliers.

Some councils have opted for the “halfway house” option of “white-label” energy – where the local council sells the energy, but another fully licensed supplier such as Bristol Energy or Robin Hood provides it and sets the tariffs.

“So much is involved in setting up a fully licensed energy company,” says Bram Kainth, director of public realm at Islington council, which set up Angelic Energy as a white-label product of Robin Hood Energy in October 2017. “We took the view that it would be better to work with another local authority with similar principles and a similar social ethos.”

Setting up a white-label product is the most straightforward option. It’s quick, easy and reduces risks, allowing councils to focus on their main reason for establishing an energy company: tackling fuel poverty.

“Despite more than 69 active domestic energy suppliers in the UK market, millions of people are still overpaying to heat their homes or cook a meal,” says Peter Haigh, managing director of Bristol Energy. In 2015, the latest year for available data, around 2.5m households in England (pdf) were estimated to be living in fuel poverty. Meanwhile, overcharging by the big six – British Gas, EDF Energy, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power and SSE – has been estimated at £1.4bn a year.

“We’re trying to become a fairer Islington – dealing with inequality and helping the vulnerable,” says Kainth. “We were already trying to address fuel poverty through capital projects – such as combined heat and power, solar panels, wall insulations and putting in new boilers – and we were also trying to give people advice about fuel debt. Becoming an energy provider complements the mix of measures we were taking.”

And while Derby’s Ram Energy, which also launched in October, won’t break even for a couple of years, it already plans to reinvest profits back into energy efficiency initiatives. “It will be a case of using the money generated to cover the cost of marketing and staffing … and then seeing where we can best invest to continue to address fuel poverty,” says Karen Brierley, housing development and PFI team leader. “We can offer discounts – have a month where anyone who signs up would get money off their bill – or we might do boiler replacements.”

Unlike the customer relationship with the big six, the public is in a more powerful position to hold municipal suppliers to account thanks to regular local elections.

“The fundamental neoliberal economic assumption that if you don’t like something then you’ll move just doesn’t stack up with energy,” says Emden. “There’s an inertia, an asymmetry of information between consumers and those offering the prices. The difference between that and municipal energy companies is that if bills go up, which they may do, then people can vote with a vote, rather than with their wallet.”

And it seems that customers are already responding to the opportunity to save money on their energy bills while helping to give back. “Between January and February this year, nearly a third of all switches went to small and medium sized suppliers. We also have more customers at this point than we expected, and people are staying with us,” says Haigh. “It will take time to engage people with a new way of doing things [and] we can’t fix the energy system overnight, but we’re confident that publicly owned energy is part of the solution.”

*Calculation correct at 4th May 2018

Find out more about Bristol Energy, and how to make a positive difference with your energy bills

23 Aug 08:34

10 remote team management mistakes to avoid

We already know what effective team management looks like, but is managing a team of geographically dispersed workers any different? Keep reading to find out…

5 clocks representing different time zones

With an increase in popularity over recent years, businesses big and small, across a wide range of industries have embraced remote work in one way or another. Whether it’s a few staff members working out of the office a couple days a week, a whole team offsite, or an amalgamation of both, managing a group of distributed individuals poses new challenges for managers and team leaders.

The purpose of team management is to foster teamwork and collaboration amongst individuals with different personalities and skill sets so that company goals and objectives can be achieved more efficiently and, in most cases, more enjoyably.

Remote team management looks just about the same, except the different personalities and skill sets you are supposed to be managing belong to individuals that you have never met in person and may never actually meet.

Man talking into four different phones

The key to managing your remote team is similar to that of a co-located team, you have to keep them engaged, create and sustain a company culture of trust and transparency, and make sure that everything is aligned with business goals.

How you will go about this, however, may require different approaches. Here are 10 tips on what not to do:

Getting the right people on board will take you one step closer towards team management success, but bear in mind that not everyone is cut out for remote work. It’s a job that requires self-managing, technological competency, and impeccable communication skills.

Candidates to consider are ones with some sort of experience managing their own time. Whether it’s from previous work experience as a manager, team leader, or freelancer, or from a listed hobby such as coaching a sports team, this will highlight someone that knows how to organize and motivate themselves.

Because a lot of communication will be done via email, instant messaging, phone and video calls, you also want someone who is technologically adept.

If you’re not seeing someone face-to-face on a regular basis it can be easy for them to slip from your mind. Avoid this by checking in regularly with your remote employees.

Even if you don’t have anything work-related to discuss, a simple email or instant message to see how they’re doing can go a long way. It will help keep your relationships active, and will make your remote employees not feel forgotten.

…but with that said, make sure you don’t overdo it. One of the biggest detrimental habits a manager or team leader can have is micromanaging—don’t do this. Instead, establish trust with your team members (remember, you did recruit the right people).

Trust will not only enhance working relationships, but it will also make your job a lot easier as it will give you time to complete your own tasks. There is a fine line between absence and micromanaging, and your job is to find the perfect balance.

Spongebob micromanaging GIF

Using team management software to keep everyone in sync is a no brainer, but make sure you’ve invested in the right tools. Managing a team of remote employees may require different tools to that of a co-located team.

You need software that allows you to communicate in real-time, something that will allow multiple users to collaborate, and a centralized tool that will keep all the tasks and resources in one place.

Here is an example of a list of tools you may need to manage your team:

  • Skype or Zoom for video conference calls
  • Slack, Skype, or HipChat for instant messaging
  • Google Drive for document collaboration
  • Zenkit for task and/or project management

As the manager or team leader of a geographically dispersed team, one of the biggest banes of your role will be having to coordinate the different time zones so that meetings and collaboration moments are mutually suitable for all involved. You don’t want an employee having to log on at 1am just because a mid-afternoon meeting works for you.

Don’t forget to also look into different cultural practices that may apply to your team. Different countries have different ways of conducting business, so be sure you and the rest of your team are aware of this.

Not seeing someone on a day-to-day basis can make misunderstandings are more likely occurrence. When setting out tasks and projects, be crystal clear when defining the scope and expectations. Establish grounds rules, set the deadline, and also consider the best way to deliver the information (sometimes emails are better, sometimes a video calls are).

It’s this kind of transparency that is needed to reduce the chances of error or unwanted results.

Speaking of transparency, sharing calendars allows everyone on the team to know each other’s availability, and this kind of transparency is important for effective remote team management to work.

On top of shared calendars, be vigilant with your online/offline status on instant messaging and anywhere else it’s used. Encourage your team to do the same.

A driving factor towards team management success is getting to know your team members and really understanding what they’re about. While this is much easier when done face-to-face, a good alternative for expressing sentiments, mannerisms, and personality when communicating with your remote employees could be implementing the use of GIFs and memes.

The little looped videos and images have become an important visual communication tool as of late. Encouraging the use of these visual tools is not only good for entertainment value, but can help you and your remote teams understand each other on a more personal level—just make sure that the content is SFW (that’s internet lingo for ‘safe for work’ for those who don’t know).

Lady declaring winning personality GIF

One of your priorities as a manager or team leader is to create a culture of inclusion within your team. Not only do you have to know your team members, but they should also know each other.

It may be a little more tricky with a distributed team because they don’t have the chance to bump into each other in the elevator or chat during lunch time. A team management technique you could try is to create these water cooler moments virtually by scheduling video calls between various members of your team. And if possible, encourage remote employees who live near each other to meet up every so often to work together or even go for a coffee.

Just because someone works from home or a cafe, it doesn’t mean they don’t have their own goals to accomplish. Your remote employees are still employees, and they still have a career path to follow and ambitions to fulfill.

Developing your team members’ knowledge and skill sets, and helping them grow within the business is imperative for keeping them engaged and continuing their loyalty. Setting your team up for success is pretty much a given for any team leader or manager, remote or not.

15 Aug 08:34

Potato, potato. Toma6to, I'm going to kill you... How a typo can turn an AI translator against us

Neural-network-based language translators can be tricked into deleting words from sentences or dramatically changing the meaning of a phrase, by strategically inserting typos and numbers.

Just like twiddling pixels in a photo, or placing a specially crafted sticker near an object, can make image-recognition systems mistake bananas for toasters, it is possible to alter the translation of a sentence by tweaking the input.

This isn't like altering "The black cat" to "The black cap", and making an English-to-French translation AI change its output from "Le chat noir" to "Le chapeau noir." That change is to be expected.

No, we're talking about, for example, tweaking "Er ist Geigenbauer und Psychotherapeut" (He is a violin maker and psychotherapist) to "Er ist Geigenbauer und Psy6hothearpeiut", and getting the translation: "He is a brick maker and a psychopath."

The typos are apparent to a human fluent in the language, who can forgive the blunders unaware of the malicious intent behind the errors, whereas software is none the wiser it is being hoodwinked. A well-placed spelling mistake could, in effect, cause a machine-learning program to misunderstand a command or point of information, and do something rather erratic or disastrous.

It's also not hard to imagine a government surveillance agency, or a corporation's human resources department, using an AI to transcribe monitored phone calls into English, and getting the translation completely wrong to the point where alarms are raised over innocuous statements.

This is the work of a group of computer scientists at the University of Oregon in the US, who were able to change letters in sentences to derail machine translators. Their results are presented in this paper, which was emitted over the weekend.

“Machine translation is used to connect people and share information, but when the translation is wrong, the opposite can happen,” Daniel Lowd, coauthor of the paper and an associate professor at the University of Oregon, told The Register.

"This could be used maliciously to arouse suspicion on someone else.

“For example, suppose I used a pseudonym and wrote to an intended victim: 'Good morning, any plans today?' with a few typos added in. To the victim, it looks like I'm saying good morning. To law enforcement using translation software, it might look like I'm saying: 'Any plans to attack them today?' If the victim responds, 'Yes, of course!' then it looks like they're a participant in some malicious activity."

The researchers trained a recurrent neural network to translate between languages using the IWSLT 2016 dataset: this is made up of hundreds of thousands of words between pairs of languages taken from TED talks. It covers three pairs of languages: German to English, Czech to English, and French to English.

It was this neural-network software the team set out to trick. This was a white box attack in that they knew the model and its parameters, as opposed to a black box with completely mysterious inner workings. In the real world, people seeking to attack machine translators will most likely face black boxes – Google doesn't exactly share the blueprints to its translation systems, for example – however, a white box setting is not too an unrealistic scenario, Lowd said.

“In most cases, companies will keep those details secret," he said. "However, many systems, such as Google Translate, are available to the public who can experiment with them as much as they want.”

As such, determined miscreants can perhaps get a good idea of what's happening inside a translator by playing with it externally.

The researchers experimented with replacing characters, swapping them around, deleting them, and inserting new ones. For example, swapping the "h" in the German word "nacht" with a k will change it to "nackt", and the English translation switches from the word night to naked. The aim was to make changes that would affect the output without making it completely incoherent – no alteration to the text should to be too great or too mild.

To avoid wasting time randomly and aimlessly editing strings of text – or vectors of numbers as the software sees them – the team analyzed the effects within the neural network when characters were adjusted, allowing them to home in on worthwhile changes.

“In our attacks, we consider all possible individual changes – inserting, deleting, replacing, or swapping a single character somewhere in the source sentence,” Lowd said.

"However, trying every possibility one at a time could be slow, and a single change might have no noticeable effect on the translation. To get around this, we use the structure of the neural network to estimate the effect of every possible change all at once. This approximation is orders of magnitude faster than the naive approach.

“To come up with a set of changes, we make one change at a time until the translation has been corrupted ‘enough’ for the adversary. To get a slightly better attack, we can consider a few runners-up as well, since they might be even better when combined with other character changes. To get a faster attack to use in our training method, we find the worst character to change in each word and change all of them."

It can be difficult to assess how powerful these attacks are, and how likely they are to succeed in the real world outside of a lab. Unlike image classification systems, where performance can be measured with an accuracy percentage, text is more nuanced.

Instead, the researchers suggest evaluating adversarial examples by seeing if the changes fulfill a specific goal, whether that be removing a name from a sentence or hiding an activity for privacy reasons, or more malicious goals like sending threats that are understood by the recipient but not to the translation model.

machine_translation_attack

Here are some of the results for sentences translated from German to English. The first example is a controlled attack, the second and third examples show a second-most and a 100th-most likely targeted attack, respectively. Image credit: Ebrahimi et al.

It’s not all bad news. The paper also showed that training translation models with adversarial examples can minimize the system’s weaknesses: by showing an AI malicious sentences, it can learn to ignore or workaround them. This takes about three times as long as regular training, we're told, but improves the robustness.

In real models, pairs of languages rarely translated into one another will be more susceptible to attacks, Lowd said.

“If the translation is unreliable to begin with, then an attacker can exploit that," he said. "Machine translation models with less training data, less language expertise, or less engineering and testing effort are more likely to be vulnerable.”

Feeding adversarial examples into neural networks is becoming increasingly trendy. The most common examples are forcing image classifiers to identify objects incorrectly by adding pockets of noise or changing a few pixels, so that a cat is mistaken for guacamole. ®

14 Aug 09:53

Building AI systems that make fair decisions

A growing body of research has demonstrated that algorithms and other types of software can be discriminatory, yet the vague nature of these tools makes it difficult to implement specific regulations. Determining the existing legal, ethical and philosophical implications of these powerful decision-making aides, while still obtaining answers and information, is a complex challenge.

Harini Suresh, a PhD student at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is investigating this multilayered puzzle: how to create fair and accurate machine learning algorithms that let users obtain the data they need. Suresh studies the societal implications of automated systems in MIT Professor John Guttag’s Data-Driven Inference Group, which uses machine learning and computer vision to improve outcomes in medicine, finance, and sports. Here, she discusses her research motivations, how a food allergy led her to MIT, and teaching students about deep learning.

Q: What led you to MIT?

A: When I was in eighth grade, my mom developed an allergy to spicy food, which, coming from India, was truly bewildering to me. I wanted to discover the underlying reason. Luckily, I grew up next to Purdue University in Indiana, and I met with a professor there who eventually let me test my allergy-related hypotheses. I was fascinated with being able to ask and answer my own questions, and continued to explore this realm throughout high school.

When I came to MIT as an undergraduate, I intended to focus solely on biology, until I took my first computer science class. I learned how computational tools could profoundly affect biology and medicine, since humans can’t process massive amounts of data in the way that machines can.

Towards the end of my undergrad, I started doing research with [professor of computer science and engineering] Peter Szolovits, who focuses on utilizing big medical data and machine learning to come up with new insights. I stayed to get my master’s degree in computer science, and now I’m in my first year as a PhD student studying personalized medicine and societal implications of machine learning.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I’m studying how to make machine learning algorithms more understandable and easier to use responsibly. In machine learning, we typically use historical data and train a model to detect patterns in the data and make new predictions.

If the data we use is biased in a particular way, such as “women tend to receive less pain treatment”, then the model will learn that. Even if the data isn’t biased, if we just have way less data on a certain group, predictions for that group will be worse. If that model is then integrated into a hospital (or any other real-world system), it’s not going to perform equally across all groups of people, which is problematic.

I’m working on creating algorithms that utilize data effectively but fairly. This involves both detecting bias or underrepresentation in the data as well as figuring out how to mitigate it at different points in the machine learning pipeline. I’ve also worked on using predictive models to improve patient care.

Q: What effect do you think your area of work will have in the next decade?

A: Machine learning is everywhere. Companies are going to use these algorithms and integrate them into their products, whether they’re fair or not. We need to make it easier for people to use these tools responsibly so that our predictions on data are made in a way that we as a society are okay with.

Q: What is your favorite thing about doing research at CSAIL?

A: When I ask for help, whether it's related to a technical detail, a high-level problem, or general life advice, people are genuinely willing to lend support, discuss problems, and find solutions, even if it takes a long time.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face in your work?

A: When we think about machine learning problems with real-world applications, and the goal of eventually getting our work in the hands of real people, there’s a lot of existing legal, ethical, and philosophical considerations that arise. There’s variability in the definition of “fair,” and it’s important not to reduce our research down to a simple equation, because it’s much more than that. It's definitely challenging to balance thinking about how my work fits in with these broader frameworks while also carving out a doable computer science problem to work on.

Q: What is something most people would be surprised to learn about you?

A: I love creative writing, and for most of my life before I came to MIT I thought I would be an author. I really enjoy art and creativity. Along those lines, I painted a full-wall mural in my room a while ago, I frequently spend hours at MIT's pottery studio, and I love making up recipes and taking photos.

Q: If you could tell your younger self one thing what would it be?

A: If you spend time on something, and it doesn't directly contribute to a paper or thesis, don't think of it as a waste of time. Accept the things that don't work out as a part of the learning process and be honest about when to move on to something new without feeling guilty.

If you’d rather be doing something else, sooner is better to just go do it. Things that seem like huge consequences at the time, like taking an extra class or graduating slightly later, aren't actually an issue when the time rolls around, and a lot of people do it. Honestly, my future self could probably use this advice too!

Q: What else have you been involved with at MIT?

A: During Independent Activity Period 2017, I organized a class called Intro to Deep Learning. I think machine learning gets a reputation of being a very difficult, expert-only endeavor, which scares people away and creates a pretty homogenous group of “experts.”

I wanted to create a low-commitment introduction to an area of machine learning that might help ease the initial barrier to entry. My co-organizer and I tried to keep our goals of accessibility and inclusivity at the forefront when making decisions about the course. Communicating complex ideas in an accessible way was a challenge, but a very fun one.

24 Jul 09:03

Plan your tan: how to organize stress-free summer vacations

Zenkit is a project management tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s designed for business purposes only! A tool that can also be used for personal productivity, its various collection view options make it great for planning personal tasks and projects—like a vacation.

Umbrella and sun chair on the beach
Photo by Marion Michele on Unsplash

Planning a vacation is most definitely a project. Think about it: you have activities to coordinate, resources to organize, a budget to adhere to, and a deadline to work against. Which is why using a project management tool to put everything in order makes sense. You can track the progress of your planning, cross tasks off your checklist as they’ve been completed, and be reminded of important dates and deadlines.

Most project management products also offer free accounts for individual users, so becoming your own travel agent is as easy as ever.

How to plan your summer vacation with Zenkit

Where to go?

First things first, you have to decide where to go. There are many elements to consider when selecting your vacation destination. Do you want to go somewhere hot or somewhere tropical? Somewhere vibrant and lively, or somewhere more chilled and relaxing? A great tool to chart all your decision making and to help you come to a conclusion is a mind map.

Mind maps are ideal to use for exploring ideas as they allow you to utilize brainstorming methods and can offer clear thinking. Here’s how you can use Zenkit’s mind map feature to help you decide on your destination.

Step 1: Create a new collection and select the mind map option. Give your collection a title such as ‘Where to go?’, and then hit the create button.

Zenkit mind map feature

Step 2: Enter ‘Destination ideas’ as your focal point. You can then branch out with each node representing a place suggestion. We started off with two nodes, ‘Local’ and ‘International’, and then expanded from there.

Zenkit mind map

Step 3: Zenkit users will already know that you can use Custom Fields to add extra information for each node. For instance, with every destination idea, we also included the type of holiday it would be and how the place would compare budget wise.

Holiday planning

Once you’ve determined where to go, it’s time to pop out the Kanban view for the real planning to commence. A Kanban board visualizes your process—be it a workflow, schedule, or vacation plan—which is why it’s a great tool for documenting tasks, ideas, and activities.

Step 1: Create a new collection and select the Kanban option. Give your collection a title — the name of your destination is always a good idea — and then hit the create button.

Zenkit Kanban collection

Step 2: Your next step is to think about the things that you need to consider to make your vacation as perfect as it can be—things such as documents to organize, activities to book, sights to see. It’s these factors that will make up the columns on your Kanban board, and within each column, you can list the items accordingly. 

To give you an idea, the things we included in our planner were: ‘things to organize’, ‘beaches to check out’, ‘restaurant recommendations’, and ‘attractions to see’. You can, of course, add as many (or as few) columns as you like. 

Vacation planner using Zenkit's Kanban board

Step 3: Once again, you can utilize the magic of Custom Fields to add extra information to each of your tasks, ideas, and/or activities. Remember that there are 11 Custom Field options to choose from, ranging from hyperlinks to file attachments, so that you can optimize your vacation planning.

Vacation planner on Zenkit Kanban board Custom Field details

Kanban best practice is to include a column titled something along the lines of ‘Done’ or Complete’ so that you can move every Kanban card that represents a task, activity, or idea there once it has been achieved. Alternatively, you could also create another column, title it ‘Scrapped’ or ‘Abandoned’, for the things you’ve decided to forgo. There are no cemented rules on how you go about using Kanban. It’s really just a great method that can be applied to help solve any organization woes.

Vacation plan on Zenkit's online Kanban board

Last minute checks!

Checklists are an invaluable tool when it comes to planning a vacation. Whether it’s for packing or a pre-flight assessment, here are the steps on how to create one:

Step 1: Like with everything you create in Zenkit, start off by creating a new collection—this time select the tasks option. Don’t forget to give it a name!

Zenkit task view Collection

Step 2: Building a checklist is pretty straightforward. You just add all the tasks/items you need, then check them off once they’re done. You’ll notice the cool thing about Zenkit lists is that once you check an item off your list, it moves itself to the bottom, allowing the unchecked ones to be prioritized to the top!

Pre-flight checklist using Zenkit's online task list

A useful thing to note when crafting your checklist is that you can change the default ‘To Do’ and ‘Done’ stage labels to anything you want. Simply click on the Custom Field ‘Stage’, select properties, and enter whatever you see fit. We went for ‘To Pack’ and ‘Packed’ to accommodate our checklist’s purpose.

Zenkit task list Custom Field properties

Planning is the most difficult part of your vacation, and now you’ve got that sorted, you’re ready to enjoy your trip! The beauty of using Zenkit to organize your vacation is that the planning doesn’t have to stop pre-take off. With the app available to use on mobile and tablet devices, you can have it on hand to ensure that you’re always on top of things. And, if you’re off somewhere that has an unreliable internet connection, you also have the option to save your vacation planning collections and then still access them offline.

Now, go and enjoy your time in the sun, and don’t forget to slip, slop, slap!

We always love hearing the different ways Zenkit is used to help you organize daily life! So, don’t forget to drop us a comment to let us know😊

Cheers,

Dinnie and the Zenkit Team

15 Jun 06:44

How to plan your World Cup party with Zenkit

Even if you’re not that into football, there’s something about the World Cup that brings people together. Whether it’s the love of the game, a sense of patriotism, or because party food is your gig, being at a World Cup party with friends and family is really one of the best things about football’s ultimate tournament.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can become the man of the match by hosting the perfect World Cup party using Zenkit.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Planning a World Cup party is a project of its own, which is why using a project management tool makes sense. There are resources to organize, a budget to adhere to, and a deadline to work against — not to mention people to satisfy.

First thing’s first, you have to decide what kind of party you are hosting. Setting a budget will help with your decision as it will determine the course of everything else: what you can buy, who to invite, food to serve, and so on.

There are endless ways you can go about this, but for the purpose of this article, we’re going to go with a private screening at home with family and friends (because that’s always nice, isn’t it?)

Some factors to consider when brainstorming party ideas:

  • Do you have enough space/furniture to accommodate all your guests comfortably throughout the entire game?
  • World Cup matches can get a bit heated, so if the viewing is at night, will your neighbors be OK with the noise?
  • Do you have enough cleaning supplies to take care of everything once the party is over?

Once you confirm all this information, you’ll need a place to store it all.

Zenkit’s Kanban view is the perfect feature for this. Its visualization of a workflow is ideal for coordinating any type of project as it allows you to follow progress and see what needs to be done next at a glance. It can also help with determining the priority of tasks and deadlines, and makes editing and re-organizing a breeze.

To make your World Cup party schedule, simply create a new collection and open the Kanban view. Create the lists or columns and name them whatever you’d like. We’ve gone for ‘To do on the day of the party’, ‘To do’, ‘In Progress’, and ‘Done.’ Then start listing your tasks and move them along the various stages as you progress.

Full Kanban instructions can be found here.

Your next priority is to choose which match to watch. Keep in mind that this is what your whole party will be based on, so it’s a crucial decision.

The obvious route is to select a match that your country is playing in, however, for those football enthusiasts who’s countries did not qualify, going with either the final or semi-finals is always a safe bet. Bear in mind the time differences of the match viewings, no one wants to attend a party at dawn.

Use Zenkit’s bracket template to help with your decision. With team information and match times on display, it’s a handy tool for following the entire tournament.

All-star team award goes to Patrick and Siobahn for creating this masterpiece 🏆
**Please note that the match times are based on local time (GMT+3)**

You can’t have a party without guests! Organize and confirm your invitation list as early as possible as that will not only give your guests enough notice, but it will also you give you enough time to start making arrangements for the party.

To keep track of it all, create an attendance list using Zenkit’s list view. A good tip is to change the label options from the default ‘To-do/Done’ to ‘TBC/Confirmed’ (or whatever else you’d like). To do this, click the Stage Properties, then rename of your choice, and then hit save.

Full list instructions can be found here.

When it comes to hosting a party, it’s essential to have food and drinks. Decide the level of involvement you’d like your guests to have, whether you want it to be potluck style where everyone brings something, or if you’d rather be the hostess with the mostest and provide it all yourself.

Your budget and guests’ dietary requirements will help determine what kind of refreshments you can serve. If you’re feeling creative you can theme the food based on the different nations participating in the tournament. If not, then things like pizzas, chicken wings, chips and dips are always a party favorite as they don’t require so much cutlery.

Image cred: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-throw-world-cup-party

Remember that running out of refreshments is a social faux pas, so make sure you’ve bought enough to cover everyone attending and then some. Use the list view feature to create and keep track of your shopping list.

It’s a World Cup party so decorations are a must. Set aside some of your budget to cover flags, balloons, streamers, and whatever else you think will create a great atmosphere.

Another way to get people into the spirit is to encourage your guests to wear country colors. Face paint at the ready is also always a good idea.

Although it is a World Cup viewing party, it’s always thoughtful to accommodate to the non-football enthusiasts too. Have some board games or a deck of cards on hand in case people start to tire of the game. To keep celebrations going, or to liven the mood in case of a frustrating result, organize a post-match activity that everyone will enjoy.

Zenkit is designed to streamline any project or task management experience and events, including a World Cup viewing party, are no exception! With visual tools and templates to aid your planning, your party is sure to score a massive win (even if your team isn’t).

Cheers,

Dinnie and the Zenkit Team

14 Jun 14:46

Wealth Won't Solve All Your Problems

Photo: Tony Webster

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker’s weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and a guide to using its waters to reflect on and improve your life.

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This week’s selection comes from Seneca in his Cosolation to Helvia, or De Consolatione ad Helviam Matrem, in which Seneca consoles his mother Helvia on his recent exile to Corsica. He writes about the rich and the poor in section 12:

“Consider in the first place how many more poor people there are than rich, and yet you will not find that they are sadder or more anxious than the rich: nay, I am not sure that they are not happier, because they have fewer things to distract their minds. From these poor men, who often are not unhappy at their poverty, let us pass to the rich. How many occasions there are on which they are just like poor men!”

What It Means

Seneca asks us to think about how many non-wealthy people there are in the world, and how many of them are perfectly content. In fact, Seneca goes as far to say that they are probably happier than the wealthy because they have fewer concerns weighing on their mind. The truth is, he says, the rich are a lot like the poor. They have a lot of the same problems as those without wealth, and may have even more problems because of their money.

What to Take From It

Look, money can make many aspects of life easier—there’s no doubt about that. You can afford comfort, security, and health. But for every perk that comes with wealth, several pitfalls make themselves known. You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “more money, more problems,” and there’s a lot of truth to it.

Consider the lottery winner. They go from poor and desperate to wealthy and satisfied in an instant. But does this bring them happiness? Does this sudden injection of cash solve the problems in their life? No. They still have to deal with their family issues, they still might have to fight off depression, and they still must search for a direction in life. Money like that, sheer wealth, is a distraction—and a magnet for the greedy, scheming, and vicious.

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There’s nothing wrong with seeking decent pay and a comfortable life for you and your family. This is the game you were born into and you must play. But think upon Seneca’s words here. Money you may need, but wealth, the excess of money, you do not. Why? Because while money can fix some problems, it cannot fix you. The only problem the wealthy are guaranteed not to have is the need for wealth. And, depending on what truly makes you happy in your life, that may not be a problem you have to worry about at all.

You can read all of Seneca’s Cosolation to Helvia for free here.

13 Jun 09:02

Top 10 Ways to Deal With a Slow Internet Connection

Sometimes, slow internet is the universe’s way of telling you to go play outside. Other times, it’s the universe’s cruel joke to destroy your productivity. Here are 10 ways to troubleshoot, fix, or just survive a slow internet connection.

*This story originally ran in June, 2013, and was updated with new information and additional reporting by Patrick Austin in August, 2017.**

10. Check Your Speeds (and Your Plan)

Sometimes, your internet is slow because you’re only paying for slow internet. Log onto your provider’s web site (or give them a call) and find out what plan you have. Then, head on over to Speedtest.net and run a speed test. If the numbers match up to what you’re paying for, then your network is working fine and you’re just paying for slow internet—and the best way to speed it up will be to upgrade. (Though some of the below tricks will help you eke out a bit more speed). If the numbers don’t match, read on for a few ways to fix that problem.

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9. Troubleshoot Your Hardware

Before you go cursing your internet provider, give your modem and router a quick reset (that is, turn them off and on again) and see if that helps. Check the other computers in your house to see if their internet is slow, too—if the problem only happens on one computer, the problem is that computer, not your router or modem. Run through these troubleshooting steps to see if it’s a hardware problem. Then, once you fix your router or modem (or replace it), you’ll be browsing speedily once again. Check out our complete guide to knowing your network for more router tips, too.

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8. Fix Your Wi-Fi Signal

If you’re using WiFi, you might find that your router and internet are fine, but your wireless signal is weak, causing a slowdown. In that case, you may need to reposition, tweak, and boost your router with a few tricks. There are more than we could share in one paltry paragraph—in fact, we have a whole top 10 list just for fixing WiFi, so check that out if you suspect wireless signal is the problem.

7. Turn Off Bandwidth-Hogging Plugins and Apps

If your hardware seems to be in working order, see if any other programs are hogging the connection. For example, if you’re downloading files with BitTorrent, regular web browsing is going to be slower. You should also try installing extensions like AdBlock Plus or FlashBlock, which will block some of the bandwidth-hogging ads, animations, and videos that can use up your connection.

File-syncing services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive might be moving data in the background, which can eat up your bandwidth and slow down your internet connection. Quit or pause those applications if you find them moving files.

Computers often download necessary updates in the background, while you’re doing something less web-intensive. You can configure your PC to notify you before downloading any updates, and schedule installation when you’re not using your computer, either in the middle of the night or when you’re off at work. These fixes probably won’t solve all your issues, but they can at least help make a slow connection feel more usable.

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Photo by Studio 37 (Shutterstock).

6. Try a New DNS Server

When you type an address into your browser—like lifehacker.com—your computers uses something called DNS to look up and translate that into a computer-friendly IP address. Sometimes, though, the servers your computer uses to look up that information can have issues, or go down entirely. Check out our guide to finding the fastest (and most secure) DNS servers for more information. If your default DNS servers aren’t having problems, then you probably won’t find too much of an improvement with an alternative server—but it might speed up your browsing by a few milliseconds, at least.

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5. Optimize Your Web for a Slow Connection

Troubleshooting slow internet can take awhile, and in the meantime you still need to browse. Or maybe you’re at a coffee shop or on a plane, and there’s nothing you can do about your slow speeds. In that case, it’s time to optimize your web for a slower connection: use mobile or HTML versions of your favorite sites, disable images, and use features like Opera Turbo. In fact, we recommend setting up a secondary browser on your laptop for just such a situation—it can really make a difference when you need to work on a slow connection. Google has its own Data Saver extension, which employs the company’s servers to compress browsing data before it reaches you.

If you’re in a pinch and really need to get online, you can always tether to your smartphone, turning it into an access point for your laptop or other wireless device. While there’s usually no data limit when you’re browsing in your home or at a coffee shop, tethering via your smartphone could eat up your data cap. You should employ the same data-saving tips when using your phone’s tethering service. Optimizing your web browser with mobile or HTML versions of web pages is useful when data is not only hard to come by, but potentially pricey.

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Photo remixed from Kirill__M (Shutterstock)

4. Work Smart

If you need to get work done on your slow connection, you may have to prioritize tasks differently than if your internet were super fast. So, separate your tasks into bandwidth-heavy and bandwidth-light ones. Get the light ones done when you’re on your slow connection, and group all the bandwidth-heavy tasks together so you can do them if and when you get faster access (and if you can’t get it at home, see if you can borrow a neighbor or relative just for those tasks). Similarly, work outside your browser whenever possible—if you’re doing basic writing, do it in your favorite text editor instead of in your browser. If you plan your work ahead of time, you can at least make the best of a bad situation.

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Photo by sergign (Shutterstock).

3. Call Your Internet Provider

If you’ve gone through all the necessary troubleshooting steps and your internet is still slow, then it’s time to call your internet provider and see if the problem is on their end. Remember: don’t just assume they’ve done something wrong, and treat your customer service representative with respect. You’re much more likely to get good results. Don’t forget, they can probably hear you bad-mouthing them while you’re on hold. Check out our guide to getting better customer service for tips on cutting the line and getting your way. You might want to see if you can get a better deal on your internet, while you’re at it—especially if they’ve been giving you the wrong speeds all this time.

Photo remixed from Kim Scarborough and Andreas Gradin.

2. Find a New Provider

If your ISP can’t help you (maybe they don’t provide the speeds you want, or maybe you’re just sick of their horrible customer service), it’s time to find a new ISP. You might have trouble in this endeavor, however, due to the stranglehold ISPs have on the market, stifling competition and giving consumers few options from which to choose. That may mean a switch to a different type of provider might be in order, like cable, DSL, satellite, or fiber. You should do a little research before you pick up the phone. Check out our guide to choosing the best provider in your area, and make sure they provide the type of speeds you want.

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1. Use Your Time Productively

If you’re lucky, you can get your internet speeds back up to snuff quickly and stress-free. But, if not, you can at least try to put a good spin on it: As long as your work isn’t too bandwidth-intensive, slow internet could actually make you more productive. After all, if Facebook takes a minute to load, you’re a lot less likely to pop over for a “quick break” (that turns into an hour-long photo-fest) when you’re supposed to be working on that term paper.

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13 Jun 08:47

How to budget for a GDPR project: A primer

If you have been to any privacy conferences lately, looked at privacy websites or spoken to your trusted privacy advisor, you have probably heard with increasing frequency the following tune: the May 2018 deadline for the GDPR is approaching fast,  and you should be prepared and budgeting accordingly.

But what does this mean in concrete terms? Here are some tips on how to better estimate the costs of a GDPR project, breaking down the problem of budgeting into two clear steps.

First of all, what kind of changes should you expect?

The starting point for all budget planning is to understand the legal changes the GDPR will bring for your business. The GDPR brings a lot of changes for particular industries, for example, a change to the age that children can consent, which will be relevant for companies targeting children with their services or marketing. Other changes concern the definition of profiling and the right of data portability. Those types of changes have been described already in a lot of articles, such as the Bird & Bird Guide to the GDPR.   

Of even more importance from a budgeting point of view is the fact that the GDPR takes a fundamentally different approach to how privacy should be managed in an organization. Instead of relying on notifications of processing to data protection authorities, there will be many more obligations on organizations themselves to document data processing internally and manage risk accordingly. Organizations are accountable for implementing those changes, and many will need to appoint an internal or external data protection officer. The roles of processor and controller will change to some degree, which will necessitate changes to contract templates and potential renegotiation of contracts with vendors. It is advisable to address those changes via a privacy program with a special focus on GDPR. 

What will a typical GDPR project look like?

Typically, launching a GDPR project starts with a quite comprehensive privacy audit. The audit should look at least four areas of compliance: external communications, internal instructions, risk management and privacy processes, such as vendor management. External communications in this context means communications to consumers and customers as well as data protection authorities, commonly made through privacy policies or statements as well as consent forms. External communications need to be supplemented internally with instructions, for example by drafting a data-retention policy or policies regarding standard security measures. A very important part of any GDPR project should be risk management, in particular setting up a process that documents data processing and evaluates privacy risks. Where needed, this process will also lead to privacy impact assessments and subsequently decisions on risk by a competent body within the company. Finally, privacy processes like incident management complement the audit needed to kick-off a privacy project.

After completion of this first stage, it is important to develop a roadmap of how to close any gaps. Implementing risk management within a company takes much longer than, for example, drafting a new external privacy statement. Based on the roadmap, teams consisting of relevant stakeholders should start addressing the issues. At this stage, it is also important to reserve enough time for training measures to roll out the new processes. 

What type of budget would I need?

It is hard to give an exact number here (if you insist: expect anything between 100 euros and a few-million euros), but there are four criteria that will influence budgeting:

The first criterion is the industry you are in and the data you process. Sensitive data, such as data relating to health, are regulated much more strictly under the GDPR than other types of data and will require compliance with additional obligations, such as conducting data protection impact assessments.

Secondly, the size of your company matters. The GDPR generally (with one prominent exception for documentation) has no less stringent requirements for small startups than it does for huge multinationals. Nonetheless, regulators have in the past focused their enforcement activities on companies that hold the data of many individuals and that have a prominent presence in the marketplace. It is also more burdensome to implement a privacy program in a big company as fundamental organizational change impacts so many more individuals, databases and processes.

The third, and maybe the most crucial factor for determining the required budget, is whether you are starting from scratch or whether you can build on an existing privacy program. The bigger and the more data-intensive a company is, the more likely it is that there is already a managed program. In that case, you will have to plan for the running costs of the program and some specific changes to the program, such as the revision of contracts, the management of risk with vendors and other privacy processes. Should you not have a privacy program, you will have to plan for one, including potentially hiring new staff to run such a programme.

Finally, a major cost driver for a GDPR project is the question of whether you need to invest in new IT systems. For example, for any processing which depends on consent, your organization will need to work out the discrete elements of processing and offer separate consents for those elements. This will impact the choices presented to the user — but the system must also be able to reflect these choices in order to honor withdrawal of consent.

All of this can seem overwhelming. Remember that the GDPR is uncharted territory for everyone and that planning an appropriate budget is the first step to ensure that you retain your competitive edge.

12 Jun 07:23

PSA: Yahoo Messenger is shutting down next month

Verizon subsidiary Oath has announced that Yahoo Messenger is officially shutting down next month. Once one of the most popular and most innovative messaging service, Yahoo Messenger has waned in popularity in recent years…

Oath says that Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17th. The company is redirecting users to its new group messaging application, Squirrel. Interestingly, Squirrel is still in private beta, and it’s unclear if the service will open up to the public before Yahoo Messenger’s shutdown next month.

There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger. We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta). You can request an invite at squirrel.yahoo.com.

Users will have six months to download their chat history from Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo explains that the shutdown of Messenger will allow it to focus on creating new communication tools that “better fit consumer needs.”

We know we have many loyal fans who have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning as one of the first chat apps of its kind. As the communications landscape continues to change over, we’re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.

News of Yahoo Messenger’s shutdown comes six months after the shutdown of AIM. Do you have any memories of these two classic chat applications? Let us know down in the comments!

Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:

07 Jun 14:07

How Emotional Labor Affects Women's Careers

You’re always there for other people — clients, customers and co-workers. If you see a way to make things better, you go above and beyond to make it happen no matter what, whether that means staying late or doing the work for everyone else. Maybe you even accept a heavier workload in the name of "being a team player".

Many women’s jobs don’t end when they leave the office. They’re often responsible for care-taking for their children and handling the household chores.

Studies show that women shoulder the majority of responsibility in relationships, both in our careers and at home. Not only are we underpaid across professions, but much of this invisible work, known as "emotional labor" goes uncompensated and unrecognized. In fact, a recent report from the United Nations found that women do 2.6 times the amount of unpaid work that men do, noting that, "vital jobs like taking care of the children and the myriad tasks that come with them, like picking them up from school, caring for elderly parents, managing household expenses and completing chores like cleaning and cooking," become women's responsibilities.

The hidden costs don't stop when women step foot into the office: just think of how much time you have spent re-phrasing emails so you don't offend someone by seeming harsh or the number of times note-taking has fallen to you in a meeting. 

Fed up with her gender discrepancy, writer Gemma Hartley penned a story for Harper's Bazaar last year, titled Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed UpGemma candidly shared her frustration about assuming more emotional labor in her own marriage. The story quickly viral, sparking a national conversation about gender inequality. She's now the author of the forthcoming book, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward which explores the "mental load" women carry. In this interview she opens up about how to spot and manage emotional labor that's affecting your career as well as how the topic has empowered feminist dialogue about how women are socialized.

Melody Wilding: How do you define emotional labor?  

Gemma Hartley: I define emotional labor as the unpaid, often unnoticed labor that goes into keeping everyone around you comfortable and happy. It’s emotion management and life management combined. This definition envelopes many other terms associated with this type of work: the mental load, worry work, invisible labor as well as the emotion work described by sociologists when defining emotional labor. Many women find this concept of emotional labor to be a useful rubric for thinking about all of their undervalued emotional and mental obligations and commitments.

Wilding: How does emotional labor carry over into women's careers?

Hartley: The way in which emotional labor affects women’s careers is twofold, because both at home and at work, women are expected to shoulder the bulk of this labor. Women who are performing all of the “worry work” at home are likely stretching their mental capacity to the limit, which can hold them back from doing their best work. In the workplace, the expectation for women to cushion their responses, manage the emotions of their peers and make their workplace “pleasant” can hold them back from doing the work that will help them get ahead.

Wilding: What are common signs someone is undertaking too much emotional labor at work?

Hartley: If you’re the person who is always expected to put together the office happy hour or organize parties, or you find your time being eaten away by people “bouncing ideas off of you” or asking for advice (without reciprocation), the emotional labor you’re doing at work is probably detracting from your career goals. It’s a difficult place to be, because women who let go of the established expectations for their emotional labor are often negatively labeled for not wanting to shoulder this care-based work. Even when it’s clear that the same expectation does not exist for male colleagues, we assume that women are “just better at this stuff” naturally and should therefore be inclined to do it.  

Wilding: What can be done to navigate the stress of emotional labor both at work and the "third shift" at home?

Hartley: The biggest way to alleviate the stress of emotional labor both at work and at home is to become clear on your priorities and boundaries when it comes to emotional labor. You need to be aware of when emotional labor is positive or necessary, and when it is not. Emotional labor isn’t inherently bad, but it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the demands on your time and mental energy.

07 Jun 09:25

Why don’t data scientists get ethics training?

It is clear that there are moral considerations to the use and collection of data. Vin Vashishta argues that data scientists have an ethical burden akin to a psychologist.

Amid the outrage and backlash about data privacy in the recent months, data scientists have largely stayed out of the conversation. We remain in the background of many applications and social media platforms.

Facebook’s grey areas of user privacy and Cambridge Analytica’s psychographic profiling are airing in public while hundreds of other examples of the same behaviours carry on.

What’s our obligation to the users behind the massive datasets we analyse for insights? What are reasonable levels of security or appropriate uses of personal data?

What insights can we sell, and what ones do we have no right to even pursue? Ask 20 data scientists these questions and you’ll get 20 different answers.

In most organisations making their first strides into data science, the only people who really understand what the data is being used for are the data scientists themselves.

While model outputs flow into several different systems, where the data comes from, how it’s transformed into the raw materials of customer or user profiling and what security measures protect it from theft are typically siloed within the data science team.

Data ethics is firmly in the hands of data scientists, and that won’t change any time soon. Ethics plays a large role in the training of psychologists and sociologists.

However, data scientists, who have access to powerful tools that can dissect how people think with an eye towards influencing their behaviours, don’t get a single hour of ethics training in most programs.

That’s a problem we need to fix if we are to avoid a constant stream of breaches and questionable uses of data or models.

What does ethics mean for data scientists?

Look at the terms and conditions of most applications that collect your data. You’ll see some disclose what kinds of data they collect. You’ll see a high-level description of who they share data with. What’s glaringly absent is what they – and those who they share your data with – will use your data for.

Would you sign up for a loyalty rewards programme at the grocery store if you knew we mined that data to determine your healthcare premiums or make credit decisions?

The people who create the terms of service are lawyers with little guidance from data scientists on the ethical consequences of data gathering and distribution. Most companies aren’t even aware that they need to consult their data science team about potential ethical issues.

That’s just one piece of the ethical tapestry around data science. Customers have more awareness around the ethical sourcing of their coffee than they do around the ethical use of their personal data. However, that’s changing, one breach and scandal at a time.

Ethics for data science answers a few key questions.

Is your data ethically sourced? Do you only collect data with the consent and full knowledge of the person providing the information?

Is the data aggregated and shared ethically? Is personal data secured? Are measures taken to verify that the data provided is complete and accurate? Do those providing personal data understand who that data is shared with and for what purpose?

Are models being developed and deployed ethically? What’s the oversight process for model evaluation with regards to accuracy and fairness? What’s the process for determining fair use of models in critical decision-making?

Why aren’t we teaching AI ethics?

It’s one thing to have an algorithm deciding what ads to show you, and quite another to have one decide if you get a medical procedure or if you’re a criminal.

There are decisions we don’t want algorithms making unilaterally. Right now, the people deciding how data is used and algorithms are deployed spend little to no time discussing the potential ethical implications.

That’s mostly due to training and education. Data scientists aren’t heartless, though we’re often portrayed that way. We want to build amazing things, but we know math and code better than the ethical implications of model development.

Academia, along with the growing number of certifications and boot camps, has a large part to play in solving this problem. The next batch of data scientists needs AI ethics to be a requirement for graduation. Sending them out without a solid foundation in ethics is irresponsible, and we’ve seen where it leads.

Policy discussions start on college campuses. That’s the other role academia plays in the AI ethics puzzle. As universities decide how to shape the curriculum, they also tend to shape policy decisions at the same time.

They won’t just be teaching students, but also lawmakers who are under increasing pressure to regulate the wild west of data science.

Why aren’t we teaching AI ethics? Same reason most emerging technologies don’t: we look at tech as morally agnostic and beyond subjectivity.

While the machine doesn’t play favourites, it isn’t exempt from moral implications. As soon as it learns from or impacts a person, morality enters the equation.

It’s only responsible that we consider the implications of AI on people before we rush headlong into building the new – that’s the challenge facing this and the next batch of data scientists.

By Vin Vashishta

Vin Vashishta is founder and chief data scientist at V-Squared Data Strategy Consulting.

07 Jun 09:07

Use a 'Police Officer' to Keep Business Meetings on Topic

When you’re having a work meeting, the more people that are invited the easier it is for the whole thing to get derailed, which is why every meeting needs a meeting “Police” to keep things on topic.

While everyone is assembled to talk about a big project that’s being finished up this week, inevitably someone is going to decide that “Since we’re all here…” it would be a good idea to bring up another project that’s happening a few weeks from now, and by the way what’s up with the coffee maker? Is it broken? And have you seen John’s new puppy? Let’s take a break in the conversation to look at pictures of it for 10 minutes.

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A meeting “police officer” is exactly what it sounds like. The officer’s job is make sure that the meeting stays on topic, and if it starts to stray speak up. He or she will also watch the clock and ensure that the meeting is moving according to its agenda.

That person shouldn’t be the meeting organizer, and should have a copy of the meeting agenda, with what needs to be discussed and the amount of time that’s allotted to each topic.

For instance, if your meeting is about a new ad campaign and you’ve plotted 15 minutes to talking about graphics and 10 minutes to talking about music, then after graphic’s 15 minutes are up the officer will make sure everyone knows and push the meeting to move on to the next topic. If something off-topic comes up he or she can write it down to be addressed later.

The idea here is that the meeting organizer can sometimes be the one that keeps the discussion on one aspect of a topic going too long, so it’s good to have another source in charge of timing. Also, if you have a lot to get through in a meeting, then allowing one aspect of it to run long (or giving up time for other topics like John’s dog — I mean, have you seen it?!?) means that another has to run short.

The idea might seem (and might be) a bit off-putting at first, but if it’s something your business implements regularly it can revolutionize your meetings. Knowing that you have 15 minutes and only 15 minutes to discuss something forces people to stay on topic and be efficient, and knowing that a meeting is going to both start and end on time makes everyone a little more willing to be a part of it.

An organized meeting that stays on topic will by in large be much more productive and offers the added bonus of you not having to schedule another one because you didn’t have enough time to hit on everything in the first .

07 Jun 09:07

Agile vs Waterfall

Agile and Waterfall methodology offer two different ways to deliver a project. Of course, deciding which is best to use wholly depends on the scope of your project and what it entails. Let’s look further into the Agile vs Waterfall debate shall we?

Image by Nathan Shively on Unsplash

One of the most notable differences between Agile and Waterfall is the level of flexibility involved in each methodology. Where Agile prides itself as being an approach that is flexible and continuously evolving, Waterfall is known to be more rigid and stricter in terms of process structure.

So, which would work best for you and your team when it comes to Agile vs Waterfall?

Agile methodology is a type of project management process that is mainly used for software development, where requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers. It is also gaining traction in other industries due to its flexibility and adaptiveness, as well as its focus on collaboration, continuous improvement, and high quality results.

Emerging from the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, it was created as a response to the shortfalls of the Waterfall method. Developers realized they needed something different to the linear, sequential approach of the traditional methods of Waterfall in order to keep up with the improving and innovative culture of the constantly-developing software industry.

Agile uses six main deliverables to create the product and to track progress. They are the product vision statement, the product roadmap, the product backlog, the release plan, the Sprint backlog, and Increment. It also uses visual tools such as a Kanban board and a burndown chart to help with the progress tracking and to keep within deadlines.

Agile project management uses frameworks to develop and deliver a product. One of the most popular frameworks is Scrum. Scrum is heavily attached to Agile, but it’s important to note that while Scrum is Agile, Agile is not Scrum. The ideas behind Agile methodology are implemented by using Scrum which aims to develop, deliver, and sustain complex products through collaboration, accountability, and iterative progress. Using this framework can influence a higher quality product as it encourages collaborative decision-making and constructive feedback from customers.

Agile is an effective process for teams looking for an adaptable approach to product development. It also provides teams with a solution to handle the common issues of project management such as cost, scope, and schedule.

Now, to aid you with your Agile vs Waterfall decision, here’s a list of pros and cons for you to peruse.

  • The development process is often more user focused, which means if you’re delivering a project where your customer expects to be heavily involved, then Agile may be the methodology for you. It’s a process that requires customer input and feedback not just at the beginning of the project, but throughout the entirety of the delivery.
  • Because testing starts from day one, this could result in a higher quality product. Through testing and the reviews conducted during each iteration, issues and defects can be identified and rectified as early as possible.
  • The iterative and incremental structure of Agile makes it feasible for changes to be made throughout the development process. Items in the product backlog can be refined and rearranged with changes or new ideas planned for the next iteration.
  • The most notable disadvantage of Agile is perhaps that while it is great in theory, it is actually harder to achieve in practice. Agile is a practice that requires full commitment from the right group of people who can work naturally and flawlessly together in order to deliver successfully. It is also a costly and time-consuming venture for companies who want to adopt this process of development for the first time — think about the resources and education required in order to fully train every employee in your company. It’s not unusual to not get it at first go.
  • Close working relationships are needed for Agile to truly work. This means that not only do the development team need to get along, but also everyone who is involved in the project such as stakeholders, senior management need to as well. Having everyone in the same space and trying to harmonize all involved is not an impossible feat, however, will require a lot of time and effort. Using online project management software such as Zenkit can help close the gap.

Waterfall is one of the more traditional project management methodologies. It is a linear, sequential design approach where progress flows downwards in one direction — like a waterfall. The methodology asserts that moving to the next phase of development can only happen after the current phase has been completed, and each phase must occur in the following order:

  1. System and software requirements
  2. Analysis
  3. Design
  4. Coding
  5. Testing
  6. Operations
By Peter Kemp / Paul Smith — Adapted from Paul Smith’s work at wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10633070

Waterfall is a process known for its stringent process structure that leaves little room for design changes in the early stages of development. The reason for this is because, as a methodology that stemmed from the manufacturing and construction industries, any changes made to its structured physical environments would have resulted in exuberant costs.

Another thing it is known for is its emphasis on documentation. Recording information is strongly promoted within Waterfall methodology. That is due to the idea that if a worker was to leave during the development process, their replacement can start where they left off by familiarizing themselves with the information provided on the documents.

Now to add the Waterfall pros and cons to the Agile vs Waterfall debate.

  • Measuring progress can be easier with Waterfall methodology as each stage of the development process has clearly defined start and end point, and also because the full scope of work is known in advance. Requirements and design are defined at the beginning of the project, allowing for minimal resource wastage, and to ensure everyone involved is aware of the expectations.
  • Compared to other project management methodologies, Waterfall is a rather intuitive methodology with a structure that is simple to follow. All projects follow the six aforementioned phases in the subsequent manner which makes it easier for first-timers to adopt. The emphasis on documentation also allows for newcomers to ease into the process.
  • There can be technical risks due to the fact that testing the product’s design or architecture happens towards the end of the development process. On top of that, because most changes don’t occur until the very late stages — if they happen at all — there could also be product risks.
  • Speaking of changes, one of Waterfall’s biggest pitfalls is its rigidness towards changes in the development of the product and the process itself. It makes it almost impossible for new ideas to be included, and could jeopardize customer satisfaction, as well as the quality of the final product.
  • Unlike Agile, Waterfall does not require a huge deal of customer involvement. While this may not seem like a disadvantage to every client, there are certainly industries where customer involvement such as providing feedback and clarifying requirements is an imperative factor of the project.

So, to conclude the end of the Agile vs Waterfall debate, which methodology takes the cake?

The answer, of course, lies within the scope, requirements, and nature of your project. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all methodology, and both include features that are beneficial in their own right. Due to the flexible and adaptive nature of Agile, projects that would benefit from using it are ones that require a level of complexity and uncertainty, such as developing a product or service that hasn’t yet been built by the team. On the other side, projects that require maintaining stringent phases and deadlines, or projects that have been done various times over where chances of surprises during the development process are relatively low, should perhaps consider implementing the Waterfall methodology.

And, if neither Agile nor Waterfall works for your and your team, there are other project management methodologies that could be best suitedthere is more to the project management world than Agile vs Waterfall.

Don’t forget to let us know which methodology works best for you!

Cheers,

Dinnie and the Zenkit team

07 Jun 09:07

The Growing Dangers of the New Nuclear-Arms Race

Less than a decade after President Barack Obama called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, the nine countries that possess them are engaged in a new nuclear-arms race. North Korea has most likely developed a hydrogen bomb, and its Hwasong-15 missiles may be large enough to transport not only a warhead but also decoys, chaff, and other countermeasures that would thwart America’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense anti-ballistic-missile system. India recently commissioned its second ballistic-missile submarine, launched an Agni-5 ballistic missile that can strike targets throughout Pakistan and China, and tested nuclear-capable BrahMos and Nirbhay cruise missiles. Pakistan now has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear stockpile, including low-yield warheads on Hatf-9 missiles for use against Indian troops and armored vehicles. Israel is expanding the range of its Jericho III ballistic missiles and deploying cruise missiles with nuclear weapons on submarines. France and the United Kingdom are developing replacements for their Vanguard and Triomphant ballistic-missile submarines. China is about to introduce Dongfeng-41 ballistic missiles that will be mounted on trucks, loaded with up to ten nuclear warheads, and capable of reaching anywhere in the United States. Russia is building a wide range of new missiles, bombers, and submarines that will carry nuclear weapons. The R-28 Sarmat missile, nicknamed Satan-2, will carry up to sixteen nuclear warheads—more than enough for a single missile to destroy every American city with a population larger than a million people. Russia plans to build forty to fifty of the Satan-2s. Three other countries—Iran, Japan, and South Korea—may soon try to obtain their own nuclear arsenals.

In the preface to the Nuclear Posture Review, released in February by the Trump Administration, Secretary of Defense James Mattis expresses the new American point of view: “We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” That reality, according to the Pentagon, requires a full renovation of the Cold War nuclear triad—new intercontinental ballistic missiles, new long-range bombers, and new ballistic-missile submarines. It also requires new, low-yield “tactical” warheads and bombs, a category of weapons once considered so destabilizing that President George H. W. Bush removed almost all of them from active service, in 1991. The cost of rebuilding America’s nuclear arsenal is projected to be more than a trillion dollars, spent over the course of thirty years.

The growing danger of the nuclear-arms race has failed to inspire much debate. Nuclear policy is no longer widely discussed in the media; the public has been told little about a subject of existential importance; and questions once passionately argued have been largely forgotten. Why do we have nuclear weapons? What they are for? How might they be used? And, at a time when a single American submarine can destroy the capital city of every country in the United Nations, how much is enough?

Instead, these questions are being addressed by a small group of policymakers. Many of the crucial details are top secret, and the mundane terms used in official discussions tend to hide the apocalyptic consequences at stake. “Mutual deterrence,” “flexible response,” “counterforce,” “countervalue,” “buffer distance,” “ladders of escalation,” “circular error probable,” “releasing commander,” “release other than attack,” “nuclear umbrellas,” “nuclear posture,” “force elements,” “yield,” “penetration aids”—none of these sound too alarming. But one term truly evokes its meaning. A “megadeath” is a unit of measurement in nuclear warfare. Ten megadeaths, for example, means that ten million people have been killed.

The targeting strategies of today’s nuclear powers stem from the aerial-bombing campaigns of the Second World War, when the distinction between hitting military assets and killing civilians disappeared. After the German bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica, and the Japanese attack on the Chinese city of Nanking, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the destruction of cities “inhuman barbarism” in a 1939 statement, demanding that combatants “under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations.” The United States Army Air Forces tried to minimize civilian casualties during its attacks on Germany, flying missions in daylight, aiming at military and economic targets, and attempting to carry out “precision bombing.” But the U.K.’s Royal Air Force, under the direction of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Air Marshall Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris, flew at night, aimed at residential areas, and tried to cause maximum devastation. Known as “de-housing,” the British policy sought to break the morale of the German people.

Unfavorable weather patterns over Japan and racism shifted the focus of American bombing there from military and economic targets to the civilian population. As the historian John Dower has noted, the war with Japan was a “war without mercy.” The Japanese used conventional, chemical, and biological weapons to kill as many as ten million to fifteen million people, mainly in China, and the United States did not hesitate to employ practices condemned a few years earlier as barbaric.

A great deal has been written about the ethics of President Harry Truman’s decision to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Much less attention has been given to Roosevelt’s support for the use of firebombs against more than sixty Japanese cities. Those attacks subjected about a third of Japan’s population to aerial bombardment and killed perhaps a million civilians. More people died during the firebombing of Tokyo in March, 1945, than during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. According to a subsequent account by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [other] time in the history of man.”

An aerial view, from 1945, of the devastation in Tokyo after attacks by American B-29 bombers.

Photograph by George Silk / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

The atomic bomb revolutionized modern warfare not by enabling the mass slaughter of civilians but by vastly increasing its efficiency—the ease with which densely populated cities could be annihilated. The destruction of Tokyo had been achieved by about three hundred American planes dropping roughly eight thousand bombs. Hiroshima was destroyed by a single plane carrying one bomb.

After the Second World War, the United States mothballed hundreds of ships, cut the number of military aircraft by more than two-thirds, reduced the size of the U.S. Army by almost ninety per cent, and halted the production of atomic bombs. The Cold War began at a time when American military forces in Europe were outnumbered roughly ten to one by the Soviet Union’s Red Army. Unable to defend Western Europe with soldiers and tanks, the United States chose to deter a Soviet invasion by threatening to drop atomic bombs on Soviet cities. One of the early war plans, called TROJAN, listed seventy cities as targets. They would be struck by a hundred and thirty-three atomic bombs. Moscow would be hit by eight; Leningrad, by seven. Conservative estimates predicted that about seven million Soviet civilians would be killed or wounded. Threatening the mass slaughter of noncombatants had come to be seen as the only means of safeguarding freedom and preventing another world war.

The advent of hydrogen bombs seemed to endanger no less than the future of humanity. The new weapons could be made hundreds, if not thousands, of times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” opposed the development of the H-bomb, and, in 1951, he strongly advocated the development of low-yield, “tactical” nuclear weapons that would be aimed at military targets. He hoped to minimize civilian casualties and limit the scale of a nuclear war. If the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe, Oppenheimer supported using tactical weapons against tanks, troops, and airfields. The idea of bringing “the battle back to the battlefield” was later endorsed by a young Harvard academic, Henry Kissinger, who imagined nuclear wars in which adversaries fired only tactical nuclear weapons at each other, obeyed rules of engagement, paused the fighting to negotiate, and agreed to spare cities from harm.

Confronted with a choice between tactical weapons and more powerful strategic weapons, the United States decided to build both. The Navy got nuclear depth charges, torpedoes, cruise missiles, gravity bombs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The Army got nuclear artillery shells, land mines, anti-aircraft missiles, ground-to-ground missiles, and even the Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle carried by infantrymen that shot a small nuclear projectile. The U.S. Special Forces got “backpack nukes” for sabotage missions behind enemy lines. And the Air Force got the most lethal nuclear weapons of all, mounted on cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and bombers.

American war plans relying on tactical weapons and those relying on strategic weapons were in many ways incompatible. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 specified that the President had the sole authority to order the use of a nuclear weapon. That authority was later embodied in America’s main nuclear-war plan, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)—a highly-centralized scheme that launched nuclear weapons in an all-out attack on the Soviet Union and its allies. But a Soviet invasion of Western Europe might sideline the SIOP: tactical weapons would only be effective on the battlefield if they could be used immediately. The commander of an American infantry division, about to be overrun by the Red Army, might not have time to call the White House and wait for Presidential approval before authorizing the firing of his nuclear artillery shells and Davy Crocketts.

As a result, during the Eisenhower Administration, the authority to use nuclear weapons was secretly delegated to relatively low-level American officers assigned to NATO. They could decide when to go nuclear. Once the first tactical weapon detonated on a battlefield, the escalation of the conflict would be hard to control. Communications could prove impossible amid the nuclear blasts, and a Third World War might begin without the President’s knowledge or approval. By deploying large numbers of both tactical and strategic weapons, the United States embraced a nuclear decision-making process that was simultaneously centralized and decentralized—and bound to be chaotic in a crisis.

Throughout the Cold War, the proper size and composition of America’s nuclear arsenal was a continual source of debate, as each military service championed its own role in any conflict. During the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concluded that the United States should have enough nuclear weapons to fulfill two objectives: deter a Soviet attack and limit the damage of such an attack by destroying Soviet nuclear forces. If deterrence failed, at a bare minimum, regardless of the circumstances, McNamara believed that the United States should always be able to kill at least a quarter of the Soviet population and eliminate at least two-thirds of its industrial capacity. That level of “assured destruction,” he later told President Lyndon B. Johnson, “would certainly represent intolerable punishment to any industrialized nation and thus should serve as an effective deterrent.” But the nuclear-weapon requirements for “damage limitation” could become endless, as the Soviet Union expanded its nuclear arsenal and the number of military targets there multiplied.

The U.S. Air Force initially wanted ten thousand long-range ballistic missiles to attack Soviet nuclear forces, leadership bunkers, and other strategic targets, but later settled for a tenth of that number. The Army wanted a hundred and fifty-one thousand tactical nuclear weapons to hit battlefield targets, but eventually obtained about a twentieth of that number. The Navy argued that a few hundred nuclear warheads, mounted atop missiles in its submarines and aimed at Soviet cities, would keep the peace, guarantee deterrence, and render all those Army and Air Force weapons unnecessary. Although the Navy’s strategy of “minimum deterrence” would limit the size of America’s nuclear arsenal, it would focus almost entirely on slaughtering civilians.

The interservice rivalries and competing nuclear strategies led to a remarkable degree of overkill. America’s first nuclear-war plan approved by the joint chiefs, known as Halfmoon, had assumed that dropping fifty atomic bombs on the Soviet Union would devastate the country. By the late nineteen-eighties, the United States had more than twenty thousand nuclear weapons, and planned to use almost four hundred of them just to strike targets in Moscow. The Soviet Union built a similar mix of tactical and strategic forces to deter the United States—and had more than forty thousand nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War.

The world’s other nuclear powers harbored much smaller arsenals and simpler ambitions. In China, Chairman Mao was dismissive of America’s “small stack of atom bombs,” suggesting that his country’s huge population could survive any attack and wouldn’t be “cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail.” China pursued a policy of minimum deterrence, planned only to destroy American cities, and never had more than a few hundred nuclear weapons. The United Kingdom showed little interest in hitting Soviet military targets, and its nuclear-war plans increasingly focussed on “the Moscow criterion,” a threat to destroy the capital of the Soviet Union. France had a nuclear policy known as “deterrence of the strong by the weak,” operating a command structure independent of NATO and targeting Soviet cities. President Charles de Gaulle compared the thinking behind the strategy to that of a man walking in an ammunition dump with a cigarette lighter. “Of course, if he lights up, he’ll be the first to blow,” de Gaulle explained. “But he will also blow all those around.”

The Fourth Geneva Convention extends legal protection to civilians during wartime. The rules against deliberately harming noncombatants were expanded by two additional protocols, in 1977. “The civilian population . . . shall not be the object of attack,” Protocol II states. “Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.” Despite that admonition, today’s nuclear-targeting policies in many ways resemble medieval hostage-taking. The innocent are threatened with murder in order to preserve the peace.

Pakistan is now moving away from that sort of minimum deterrence to a more complex strategy known as “full-spectrum deterrence,” building tactical nuclear weapons to offset India’s superiority in troop strength and conventional weapons. Much like NATO during the Cold War, Pakistan assumes that tactical weapons will deter an invasion or defeat the invading army without endangering cities. But Pakistan now faces many of the same risks and challenges that NATO once encountered.

To be effective on the battlefield, tactical weapons need to be widely dispersed and available for immediate use, making them more vulnerable to theft, sabotage, and unauthorized use. They may also make nuclear war more likely. Because the destructive effects of tactical weapons are smaller, the temptation to use them may be greater. Once the “nuclear taboo” has been broken, nobody can be certain what will happen next. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons were used against a nation that didn’t have them.

Russia and the United States possess about ninety per cent of the world’s approximately fifteen thousand nuclear weapons, maintaining arsenals large and diverse enough to hit a variety of targets. The most recent Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States, issued by the Obama Administration, in 2016, is a veritable jobs program for weapons of mass destruction. It emphasizes the importance of destroying counterforce (military) targets rather than countervalue (civilian) targets, and it vows to “minimize collateral damage to civilian populations,” in keeping with international law. The Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review advocates a strategy that sounds oddly elegant: “tailored deterrence.” Its objectives include preventing a nuclear attack on the United States, protecting American allies from attack, and, if deterrence fails, ending “any conflict at the lowest level of damage possible and on the best achievable terms.”

Russia has also changed its nuclear strategy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union claimed that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons. But Russia is no longer confident that its conventional forces are superior to those of NATO, and so it has embraced an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, raising the possibility of the use of tactical weapons against NATO troops. The strategy is based on a faith that low-yield nuclear blasts will impose “tailored” damage on NATO, de-escalate the conflict, and force a ceasefire. The strategy presumes that NATO won’t retaliate by using nuclear weapons, too. The change in Russian doctrine has prompted the Trump Administration to seek new low-yield, tactical weapons. The Administration believes that its new tactical weapons will deter the Russians from ever using their own—reversing a bipartisan consensus that for the past quarter century has regarded these weapons as gravely and needlessly dangerous.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States kept about seven thousand tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The utility of those weapons was always in doubt. During Carte Blanche, a war game conducted in 1955, three hundred and thirty-five NATO tactical weapons were used against invading Soviet tanks and troops, for the most part on battlefields in Germany. Robert McNamara later outlined the results: “It was estimated that between 1.5 and 1.7 million people would die and another 3.5 million would be wounded—more than five times the German civilian casualties in World War II—in the first two days.” Those estimates did not include deaths from illness, radiation poisoning, or Soviet nuclear weapons. Subsequent war games confirmed the findings of Carte Blanche: if NATO ever used tactical weapons to defend Germany, it would destroy Germany. The mere existence of tactical weapons could destabilize a crisis and make it end badly. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy and his advisers didn’t know that the Soviet forces on the island and in the sea surrounding it not only had tactical weapons but also had the ability to use them without consulting Moscow. An American attack—contemplated for days at the White House and nearly set in motion—would have unwittingly led to a nuclear war.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the United States unilaterally removed all of its tactical weapons from South Korea and almost all of them from Europe. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, General Colin Powell, had trained in the employment of tactical nuclear weapons as a young officer and thought that they “had no place on a battlefield.” With the support of every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell persuaded Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and President George H. W. Bush to get rid of them, and over the years the size of NATO’s tactical nuclear stockpile fell by ninety-seven per cent.

Today, the United States keeps about two hundred tactical weapons at six NATO bases in Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Italy, and the Netherlands. The weapons are B-61 bombs designed to be carried by fighter planes. They have no assigned role in NATO’s war plans, and their military usefulness is “practically nil,” according to General James Cartwright, a former commander of the United States Strategic Command. The B-61 bombs have been retained as symbols of America’s commitment to the defense of NATO, despite concern that the weapons are vulnerable to theft by terrorists, sabotage, and attack, especially in Turkey. A few B-61s could fit in the bed of a pickup truck.

Experts fear that B-61 nuclear bombs, which can fit in the bed of a pickup truck, are vulnerable to theft from U.S. bases abroad. A retired Marine general described their military usefulness as “practically nil.”

Photograph Courtesy Randy Montoya / Sandia National Laboratories

The Trump Administration is moving forward with plans to modernize the B-61 and would like to mount low-yield tactical warheads on submarine-based missiles. The advantage of basing tactical weapons on a submarine is that they will be hidden underwater—and therefore will be less likely to be stolen, attacked, or become the subjects of political protests. The disadvantage is that Russia will have no way of knowing whether a missile launched from a submarine is carrying a tactical warhead meant to destroy a tank battalion on the battlefield or a strategic warhead fired to destroy an underground leadership bunker in Moscow.

The glaring problem of how the President of the United States and the President of Russia might reliably communicate and negotiate during a limited nuclear war has never been resolved. The Moscow-Washington Direct Communications Link, known as the “hotline,” isn’t a voice link with matching red telephones, as portrayed in Hollywood thrillers. It’s a dedicated computer link that transmits encrypted e-mails between the Kremlin and the Pentagon. A recent photograph of the hotline is not reassuring: it looks like a computer terminal you might find in the business center at a Marriott hotel.

The return of tactical weapons is the most controversial aspect of Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review. The new policy assumes that American tactical weapons will deter the use of Russian tactical weapons, raising “the nuclear threshold” and making “nuclear employment less likely.” Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and a co-founder of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, has argued against that sort of thinking for more than forty years. He fears that the chance of accidents, miscalculations, and blunders with tactical weapons—as well as the pressure to “use them or lose them” in battle—greatly increase the risk of an all-out nuclear war. Like so many of the disagreements about nuclear strategy, this one cannot be settled with empirical evidence, and selecting the wrong policy could be catastrophic. As Nunn observed in 1974, after a tour of NATO’s tactical nuclear units, “Nobody has any experience in fighting nuclear wars, and nobody knows what would happen if one were to start.”

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Setsuko Thurlow, then thirteen years old, was preparing to decode messages on the second floor of the Army headquarters in Hiroshima. About twenty girls from her school worked beside her, and thousands of other middle schoolers were employed at patriotic tasks throughout the city as part of the Student Mobilization Program. Thurlow noticed a bright bluish-white flash outside the window at 8:15 A.M. She never saw the mushroom cloud; she was in it. She felt herself fly through the air, blacked out, and awoke pinned in the rubble of the collapsed building, unable to move. Lying there in silence and total darkness, she had a feeling of serenity. And then she heard the cries of classmates trapped nearby: “God, help me!,” “Mother, help me!” Someone touched her, removed the debris on top of her, and told her to crawl toward the light. She somehow made it out safely and realized that what was left of the headquarters was on fire. A half dozen or so other girls survived, but the rest were burned alive.

The smoke and dust in the air made the morning look like twilight. As Thurlow and a few classmates left the city center and walked toward the hills, they witnessed one grotesque scene after another: dead bodies; ghostly figures, naked and burned, wandering the streets; parents desperately searching for lost children. She reached an Army training ground in the foothills, about the size of two football fields. Every inch of ground was covered with wounded people begging for water. There seemed to be no doctors, no nurses, no medical help of any kind. Thurlow tore off strips of her clothing, dipped them in a nearby stream, and spent the day squeezing drops of water from them into the mouths of the sick and dying. At night, she sat on the hillside and watched Hiroshima burn.

Thurlow was reunited with her parents. But her sister and her sister’s four-year-old son died several days later. Her sister’s face had grown so blackened and swollen that she could only be recognized by her voice and her hairpin. Soldiers threw her body and that of her son into a ditch, poured gasoline on them, and set them on fire. Thurlow stood and watched, in a state of shock, without shedding a tear. Her favorite aunt and uncle, who lived in the suburbs outside Hiroshima and appeared completely unharmed, died from radiation poisoning a few weeks after the blast.

More than seven decades later, on the afternoon of December 10, 2017, I watched Thurlow accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). It was a remarkable moment, as she slowly walked to the podium with a cane, and the crowd in Oslo’s City Hall gave a standing ovation. After the bombing, Thurlow attended universities in Hiroshima and Lynchburg, Virginia. Later, she earned a master’s degree in social work at the University of Toronto. She married a historian and settled in Canada. She began her anti-nuclear activism in 1954, and became a leading advocate for survivors of the atomic bombings, known as the hibakusha. A few years ago, I spent time with her in Stockholm, meeting with academics and legislators to discuss the nuclear threat. In her early eighties, she was sharp, passionate, tireless, and free of bitterness. “Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . a great cloud of a quarter of a million souls,” Thurlow said in her Nobel speech. “Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us insure that their deaths were not in vain.”

The movement to abolish nuclear weapons began soon after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In January, 1946, the first resolution of the United Nations General Assembly called for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons,” and during the Cold War every American President supported that goal, with varying degrees of sincerity. On September 25, 1961, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, President Kennedy gave perhaps the most eloquent speech on behalf of abolition. “Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or madness,” he said. “The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race.”

That week, Kennedy also secretly met with military advisers at the White House to discuss the pros and cons of launching a nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union. American and Soviet troops were confronting each other in Berlin, and a war between the superpowers seemed possible. Kennedy wanted to hear the benefits of striking first. The casualties that would result from the Single Integrated Operational Plan seemed excessive to him: an estimated two hundred and twenty million deaths in the Soviet Union and China (not including fatalities caused by fire). A Kennedy aide, Carl Kaysen, had come up with a surprise-attack plan, focussing solely on air bases and missile sites. He predicted that it would kill “less than 1,000,000, and probably not much more than 500,000.” The problem with the plan, he acknowledged, was that it might not eliminate all of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons—which could prove unfortunate for cities like New York and Chicago. If the United States launched a surprise attack on the Soviets, the likely American death toll was somewhere between five million and thirteen million. But, if the Soviets attacked the United States first, perhaps a hundred million Americans would die. “In thermonuclear warfare,” Kaysen observed, “people are easy to kill.” Kennedy wrestled with the dilemma, decided not to launch a surprise attack, and made his feelings clear at the U.N.: “Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.”

A nuclear-disarmament demonstration in Sydney in 1983.

Photograph by Patrick Riviere / Getty

The height of anti-nuclear sentiment in the United States occurred during the Reagan Administration, amid renewed tensions with the Soviet Union. An opinion poll in 1983 found that about half of the American people thought that they’d die in a nuclear war. The Nuclear Freeze Movement and worldwide anti-nuclear protests helped to transform Ronald Reagan from an ardent Cold Warrior into a nuclear abolitionist. At a 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Reagan and the Soviet leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, nearly reached an agreement to get rid of all of their countries’ nuclear weapons. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fear of nuclear war receded, and arms-control agreements between the United States and Russia cut the number of nuclear weapons by about eighty per cent.

Republican Presidents had proved especially effective at reducing the nuclear threat. President Richard Nixon signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, committing the United States to seek “cessation of the nuclear arms rate at an early date and nuclear disarmament.” President George H. W. Bush cut the size of America’s nuclear arsenal by half. And President George W. Bush cut it in half again.

In 2007, the abolition movement was revived by an unlikely group of people: the leadership of the American national-security establishment. Two former Republican Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, joined two influential Democrats, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in writing an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, whose title aptly conveyed their goal clear: “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.”

A new anti-nuclear group, Global Zero, was formed in 2008 by an international assortment of military, diplomatic, and political leaders. Both the Democratic and the Republican candidates for President that year, Barack Obama and John McCain, supported nuclear abolition. The revitalized movement reached its apogee on April 6, 2009, when Obama gave a speech about nuclear weapons in Prague’s Hradčany Square. He said that the United States had a moral responsibility, as the only country that has used nuclear weapons, to lead the international effort to abolish them. “Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked,” Obama said. “Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for, if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”

Nine years later, nuclear weapons have regained their sinister allure. North Korea has repeatedly threatened to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, producing elaborate videos that show the destruction of the White House and the U.S. Capitol. During a speech by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, in March, computer animations projected on a large screen behind him showed Russian nuclear warheads descending over the state of Florida, perhaps aimed at Mar-a-Lago. And President Trump has delivered the sorts of nuclear threats that only Soviet leaders used to make, promising to unleash “fire and fury” and boasting about the size of his “button.” Nuclear weapons are once again being depicted as good, valuable things, the measure of national status and strength. The current arms race between the United States and Russia betrays the same assumptions as the last one: that new weapons will be better, and that technological innovations can overcome the nuclear threat. It’s a familiar delusion.

William Perry, who’s been involved in nuclear matters for more than half a century, believes that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was at any time during the Cold War. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, unfortunately, agrees with him, and in January moved the hand of its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. The Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union has been replaced by a multipolar nuclear competition, with far more volatile dynamics. Russia faces possible nuclear attacks by the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. India must worry about China and Pakistan. China must deter the United States, India, and Russia. North Korea feels threatened by the United States, while some politicians in Japan and South Korea advocate developing their own nuclear weapons to counter those of North Korea. Nuclear terrorism poses a global threat. And everyone, it seems, hates the United States.

Moreover, the aftermath of a nuclear war may be even more dire than anything anticipated during the Cold War. In the nineteen-eighties, the astronomer Carl Sagan brought public attention to the danger of “nuclear winter,” a sudden and extreme form of climate change that would be precipitated by the dust and debris rising into the atmosphere as mushroom clouds from obliterated cities. The latest studies suggest that a relatively small nuclear exchange would have long-term effects across the globe. A war between India and Pakistan, involving a hundred atomic bombs like the kind dropped on Hiroshima, could send five million tons of dust into the atmosphere, shrink the ozone layer by as much as fifty per cent, drop worldwide temperatures to their lowest point in a thousand years, create worldwide famines, and cause more than a billion casualties. An all-out war between the United States and Russia would have atmospheric effects that are vastly worse.

The fact that launching a nuclear attack would be suicidal as well as genocidal hasn’t put an end to nuclear-war planning. Nor does the prospect of Armageddon loom as an effective deterrent. Some religious fanatics celebrate the slaughter of civilians and have no reluctance to die for their gods, while leaders like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have been willing to use banned chemical weapons and bring on the destruction of their own countries rather than surrender power. An eagerness to embrace death undermines the logic of nuclear deterrence, while a determination to kill may perversely uphold it. In a recent documentary, Putin said that his country would only use its nuclear weapons in retaliation—and that he wouldn’t hesitate to use them. “Why do we need a world,” he asked, “if Russia ceases to exist?”

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was formed in 2007. It seeks to reframe public attitudes toward nuclear weapons and gain ratification of an international treaty banning them. ICAN contends that the same rationale used to outlaw chemical weapons, biological weapons, land mines, and cluster munitions—their cruel, indiscriminate harm to civilians—should be applied to the deadliest weapons of all. According to the World Health Organization, no nation has the medical facilities or emergency-response capability to deal with the detonation of a single nuclear weapon in a city, let alone hundreds. After a nuclear blast, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, survivors would have to fend for themselves.

ICAN wants to stigmatize nuclear weapons, portraying them as inherently immoral and in violation of international law, not symbols of power or guarantors of national security. In July, 2017, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, sponsored by ICAN, was endorsed by a hundred and twenty-two of the hundred and ninety-three countries in the United Nations. The treaty will attain legal force after being signed and ratified by fifty. It forbids the testing, development, production, acquisition, manufacture, and possession of nuclear weapons. Last November, Pope Francis backed the treaty, altering the Catholic Church’s position on nuclear weapons; the Vatican had long opposed their use in war and advocated nuclear disarmament, but recognized their value in deterring war. Francis called nuclear weapons “senseless from even a tactical standpoint,” criticized their “catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects,” and “firmly condemned” any possession of them.

A month later, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to ICAN—an impressive achievement for an organization with only three full-time employees and a part-time office temp. ICAN’s success has been driven by thousands of idealistic volunteers who are mainly in their twenties and thirties. During her Nobel lecture, Beatrice Fihn, the group’s executive director, a young and charismatic Swede, challenged the complacency of world leaders. “It is not irrational to think nuclear states can disarm,” she said. “It is a necessity.”

The Trump Administration and the eight other governments that have nuclear weapons vehemently disagree on a wide range of issues, but they are united in opposition to ICAN’s treaty. They argue that it is poorly conceived, unverifiable, unenforceable, unrealistic, and an invitation to nuclear blackmail. “This treaty will not make the world more peaceful, will not result in the elimination of a single nuclear weapon, and will not enhance any state’s security,” the State Department said in a statement after the group won the Nobel Peace Prize. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom declined to send a representative to the award ceremony, as a protest against the winner.

Thirty-five years after President Reagan promised an American missile-defense system that would somehow blast dozens of nuclear-warhead-tipped missiles from the skies, his dream remains unfulfilled. Pursuing it, at a cost of close to two hundred billion dollars, has only pushed other nations to modernize their nuclear arsenals. The exotic weapons recently announced by Putin—long-distance undersea drones with nuclear warheads, nuclear-powered cruise missiles that can circle the globe—aren’t necessary to evade a missile defense system. A hydrogen bomb hidden in a forty-foot sailboat can do that. Nuclear wars remain unwinnable, despite fantasies to the contrary. During the last two tests of American interceptors, the missile-defense system failed to destroy a single missile launched, even when it knew the trajectory.

The many grievances between the United States and Russia are serious. They include the expansion of NATO to the Russian border; American withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty; Russia’s invasion of Georgia, seizure of Crimea, and attack on eastern Ukraine; hostile propaganda; cyberwarfare; and meddling in elections. But they hardly justify killing billions of civilians. During a telephone call between Trump and Putin on March 20th, the two discussed resuming arms-control talks. If the two countries, which possess nine-tenths of the world’s nuclear weapons, can agree to make significant cuts in their arsenals, the other nuclear powers can be pressured to do the same. And if a meeting between Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, ever occurs, Kim should be told that having nuclear weapons, for a wide variety of reasons, makes the destruction of his country more likely.

The abolition of nuclear weapons will require unprecedented trust between nations, a strict inspection regime, and severe punishments against any country that cheats. Until the day when those things are possible, greatly reducing the number of nuclear weapons, taking ballistic missiles off of alert, and abandoning high-risk strategies will make the world a much safer place. None of that will happen until people are willing to confront the threat. “Yet in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much,” Jonathan Schell wrote in “The Fate of the Earth,” which was published in The New Yorker thirty-six years ago. “This peculiar failure of response, in which hundreds of millions of people acknowledge the presence of an immediate, unremitting threat to their existence and to the existence of the world they live in—but do nothing about it . . . has itself been such a striking phenomenon that it has to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament.”

Since the publication of my book “Command and Control,” in 2013, I’ve gotten to know the young leadership of the nascent anti-nuclear movement, spoken at ICAN gatherings, joined the board of the Ploughshares Fund (a foundation dedicated to reducing the nuclear threat), and received financial support for some of my work from the Nuclear Threat Initiative. I have also met with many of the top officials at our nuclear-weapon laboratories, with the leadership of the National Nuclear Security Administration (the civilian agency in charge of our nuclear weapons), and with the commanding officers at the Air Force Global Strike Command, the unit responsible for our intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. What these disparate groups share is a strong and sincere desire to avoid a nuclear war. But they don’t agree about the best way to do that.

I hope the spirit now animating the demonstrations against gun violence will soon offer resistance to the greatest possible form of organized violence. As government officials in Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Beijing, New Delhi, Islamabad, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang discuss how to update and improve their arsenals, the madness at the heart of the whole enterprise must be loudly asserted. How much is enough? The only rational answer: even one nuclear weapon is one too many.

07 Jun 09:07

Hawaii Is Owning the Rest of Us On Climate Change

Photo: AP

Just over a year after President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will jettison the Paris climate deal, Hawaii has set the most ambitious climate goal of any state: carbon neutrality in just 27 years.

That goal was outlined in a bill signed Monday, along with a bill to create a carbon offset program and another requiring environmental impact statements for new building projects to consider sea level rise.

For Hawaiians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. “We’re on the forefront of climate change impacts,” Scott Glenn, who heads up Hawaii’s environmental quality office, told Fast Company. “ People feel the trade wind days becoming less. They notice the changes in rain. They feel it getting hotter. Because we are directly exposed to this, there’s no denying it.”

Hawaii has not shied away from its commitment to climate action. Last year, it was the first state to adopt a law to keep its emissions in line with the Paris agreement. By 2045, the state expects to reach its goal of 100 percent renewable energy, according to Climate Change News.

House bill 2182 aims to achieve carbon neutrality by that same year. It also sets up a “greenhouse gas sequestration task force” that works towards policies that can further curtail carbon emissions. The bill cites an estimated $19 billion in state-wide economic losses due to creeping sea levels brought on by climate change.

House bill 1986, also signed on Monday, creates a carbon offset program to help the task force meet its target. House bill 2106 requires environmental assessments prior to new building projects to include the impacts of sea level rise, a measure which Hawaii’s Governor David Ige refers to as “just plain common sense” given how vulnerable buildings near the coastline are, per Hawaii News Now.

Ige took to Facebook after signing the bills: “Climate change is real and we’re seeing its impacts right now in our island state. Taken together, this suite of bills establishes policies and programs that acknowledge and address this reality.”

At least someone’s acknowledging reality these days.

07 Jun 09:07

How Technology Companies Alienate Women During Recruitment

A job seeker waits to talk to a recruiter. | Reuters/Rick Wilking
New research shows how companies recruit women to tech jobs can be problematic. | Reuters/Rick Wilking

Much of the debate about the paucity of women in technology focuses on the pipeline problem: how to get young schoolgirls interested in science and math. But what happens when girls do elect to study STEM fields? Why aren’t many women with technical qualifications moving into STEM-related careers?

New research suggests that how technology companies recruit candidates during on-campus information sessions might play a role in dissuading women from the jobs.

Researchers Shelley Correll, a professor by courtesy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and head of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Alison Wynn, a postdoctoral researcher at the institute, focused their attention on these job information sessions to see how recruiters engage prospective employees on a West Coast college campus. The researchers sent a team of observers to 84 sessions where 66 companies recruited for technical roles, mainly as entry-level engineers.

While these sessions, common to all elite universities, welcome both men and women, the researchers found that companies missed opportunities to draw women in and often actually pushed them away instead. The result is that women who hold or are about to graduate with computer science, engineering, or other quantitative degrees can be deterred from tech jobs.

Gender Imbalance

In the sessions, the researchers found, presenters often peppered their remarks with references to geek culture favorites like Star Trek and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, focused conversation on only the highly technical aspects of the job, or referred to high school coding experience. These topics often excluded women, who on average join the field after high school and can feel excluded from the images depicted in geek culture. Also, men overwhelmingly led the sessions, and when companies sent female employees, their roles most often consisted of discussing company culture or setting up food in the back of the room.

“Through gender-imbalanced presenter roles, geek culture references, overt use of gender stereotypes, and other gendered speech and actions, representatives may puncture the pipeline, lessening the interest of women at the point of recruitment into technology careers,” the researchers write.

There were other red flags. At some of the recruiting sessions the researchers attended, they were surprised to hear presenters referencing subjects like pornography and prostitution in their remarks, often when joking. Unprepared presenters, particularly men, were more likely to make inappropriate jokes.

“A lot of the worst content came when the presenter was speaking off-the-cuff comments, trying to be relatable to students and funny,” Correll says. “You wouldn’t want to take a very talented woman who’s getting her degree in computer science and is coming to an info session for your company and do things like this. It’s just counterproductive.”

Both large and small companies showed the same patterns of lauding geeky, fraternity-house culture, although big firms’ sessions were less egregious. The researchers also noticed some improvement when company sessions included videos. Videos were more likely to be vetted for questionable content by companies of all sizes.

The overall effects of these patterns were noticeable: Female students tended to ask fewer questions than their male counterparts, and some left the sessions early.

Finding Solutions

There are ways for companies to fight this problem, the researchers say. Among their suggestions:

  • Bring along female engineers as part of the recruiting team. Have them present core technical content during the event, not just set up the refreshments, pass out T-shirts, or speak about company culture.
  • Feature the company’s technical work in a way that emphasizes its real-world impact, rather than describing the engineering staff as a group of people who sit in a darkened room all day. While some consider this the definition of hard-working tech-world glory, female students are less likely to feel this way.
  • Present the technical work in an approachable way, showing that there are multiple successful pathways into a technical career. “Women often come to tech later than men and don’t always have the high school work, but this does not affect their success in the field,” Wynn says.

These tactics pay off. At presentations where companies incorporated these ideas, female attendees asked twice as many questions and showed greater engagement, the researchers found.

For executives, the paper offers a chance to consider whether their recruiting information sessions are having the intended effect or its opposite.

“We’re looking at a place where companies can actually have an impact,” Wynn says.

07 Jun 09:07

Unmasking the importance of effective task delegation

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that no matter how great of an organizer or multitasker you are, if you’re in charge of a team or an entire business, there is no way you can complete all that needs to be completed on your own. That’s why task delegation exists.

As a manager, business owner, or team leader, there will come a time when you will have to forward on task responsibility to your subordinates. Not only is this because it is part of your job to do so, but it is also due to the fact that it is near impossible for a regular human being to keep on top of everything successfully without any help.

The practice of task delegation is sometimes met with a little hesitation. Reasons can be that some people may find it a little intimidating managing a new team, or maybe it’s your inner control freak not wanting to let go. Whatever it is that’s holding you back, you need to learn to let go. Delegating tasks is a skill, like any other skill, that can be learnt once it’s been adapted and consistently practiced. It is a valuable thing to have as part of your managerial repertoire.

Effective delegation does more than reduce your workload, it is one of the signs of successful management. A good manager knows that the process requires more than just palming off tasks to the person with the lightest pile of papers on their desk. It means having to not only tap into your super organization skills, but also your communication skills as well. Task delegation requires you to know which members of your team would be best suited for the task, and who could perform it to the best of their ability.

Assigning further responsibility to people in your team shows you believe in their capability to contribute towards the business’s success. You are highlighting an environment that fosters employee development, and one that encourages a collaborative work culture.

It’s not always an easy thing to do to entrust someone else to do a task that you know you can do yourself (and do a good job of it). However, if you are looking to get things done more effectively, then it is a necessary step to take. Here are three things to include so that the process goes as smoothly as possible:

  1. Explain why: Telling the person you’ve chosen to delegate the task to the reason why you’ve decided to do so helps them to understand their responsibility and what is expected of them. This can also show that you are supporting their skill development, and believe that they can do a good job.
  2. Explain how: Providing instructions is a no brainer, but how you choose to do this should be well thought out. Avoid micromanaging and instead of telling them how to do something, advise them on the outcome you expect. This will enable them to tackle the task on their own accord, and realize certain skills that they may not otherwise realize they had.
  3. Provide tools and training: Whether it’s a company car to get to places quicker, or an upgrade to the latest Zenkit app software for accessibility, making the necessary resources available ensures that they are equipped to execute the task the best way possible. If there is a skill gap, take the time to train someone so that in the future, there won’t be a shortage. Training may appear to be extra work but it is something worth investing in.

When done correctly, task delegation is not without its perks. Here are five of them:

1) It brings your team closer
Task delegation encourages a collaborative working environment, and within this has to be a level of trust. Without a foundation of trust established, you run the risk of micromanaging, which can defeat the overall purpose of delegating in the first place.

2) Things get done more efficiently
The basic idea of delegating tasks is to get more done in less time. When you delegate a task, and its authority, you are dividing the weight of responsibility, as well as the workload, amongst your team. If someone seems a bit more tied down than others, then you can shift things a little so that others can help out.

3) Reduces the risk of burning out
Condensing your workload means that you have more time to use wisely. And using your time more wisely includes taking breaks, and keeping a good work-life balance. An important part of doing your job well requires not being overwhelmed by it, and taking the necessary steps to prevent that.

4) Employee potential is being maximized
When you are sharing the workload with your team, you are not only utilizing their skills and experience, but you are also developing new ones. Delegating tasks creates new challenges and experiences, and lets your team take on board more responsibility. It encourages initiative and creativity.

5) It increases your value as a leader
Good leadership means fostering the development of your employees, and ensuring things are getting done by the right people for the job. Delegating tasks does that. When your staff members see that you have placed your confidence in them, have invested in training, and have given them the opportunity to contribute towards the team or business’s success, this will motivate them to do a good job, and can also strengthen their commitment to the team, and business.

If you’re someone who’s not accustomed to it, effective task delegation can seem a little tricky at first. However, as previously mentioned, it is an important skill to have as it not only rewards you as a manager or business owner, but also benefits your team as well. How has task delegation benefited you and your team?

Cheers,

Dinnie and the Zenkit Team

07 Jun 09:07

10 Ways to Cope with a Lazy Coworker

Lazy coworkers — there’s at least one in every office. They’re the ones who come in late, take a long lunch and leave early. They always have an excuse to explain their behavior and can even be apologetic. But what good is saying sorry if the actions remain the same?

These actions can be annoying, but if the lazy coworker doesn’t impact your work, then simply avoid them. Don’t hold onto resentments. On the other hand, if their laziness starts to affect your work life, then you need to address it.

But first, do a little soul-searching. Are you just being judgmental? Does the lazy coworker trigger you? Before you start tattling and spreading toxic emotions, try speaking to the person. Communications are key. If it’s too embarrassing to speak about in person, reach out via email or other online collaboration tools. It could all amount to a simple misunderstanding.

But if you can’t work out the issue with the lazy coworker, then what? You might have to report the person to your superior. Before you escalate the issue, though, try these 10 tips for coping with a lazy coworker.

Lazy Coworker Tips

1. Don’t Let Your Feelings Fester

Yes, ignore the petty issues. But if there is a real problem, the worst thing you can do is ignore it because then you’re just going to sit and stew. This will pollute your entire person in time.

Naturally, you first need to determine if the problem is small. If it’s not, then be proactive and do something about it. Nothing rash, of course, but the first step is acknowledging that there’s a problem. Then next step is letting the person know. After that, well, it depends on how the lazy coworker responds.

2. Be More Assertive

If the lazy coworker ignoring their own work and asks you to do it instead, don’t. Sometimes you need to just stand up and say, “No!” It’s as simple as that. Now helping once or twice is called teamwork. You’re all in this thing together. But once it becomes habitual, then that’s called enabling. You’re becoming part of the problem and not the solution.

3. Offer Some Guidance

Maybe your lazy coworker isn’t really goofing off; they’re just in over their head. They might need some help. That doesn’t mean you’re going to do their work for them, but it could mean that you’re going to tell them how to manage their tasks and workload so they can be more efficient and productive.

4. Be Dispassionate

When you can’t avoid the problem, and the attempt at guiding them back on track wasn’t fruitful, then you’re going to want to communicate more firmly what the problem is and how it’s impacting you and others. It’s important to try and resolve the issue yourself first, but don’t go into that conversation with a hot head. If you’re upset, then wait, and even if you’re angry, don’t speak from a place of anger. You want to state your case professionally and dispassionately. If this doesn’t work, well, at least you tried.

5. Talk to Someone

If you’ve talked and nothing comes from it, before doing something like lodging a complaint, seek outside counsel. No, you’re not going to need to hire a lawyer (hopefully!), but you can use a friend as a soundboard and maybe get some perspective on the situation. Do you have a mentor, someone who’s been around the block? They might offer insights that can help you resolve the problem.

6. Don’t Gossip

While it’s suggested you talk with someone about the problem, that’s different than gossiping and complaining. Yes, you’re frustrated, and so there is a tendency to get that off your shoulders by sharing it with coworkers.

Gossiping might alleviate your frustration momentarily, but it’s not a long-term fix. Plus, your negative comments are likely to get back to the person, and that will only make the matter worse. If you talk to the lazy coworker directly, you can control the situation better, but if they pick up on office gossip then they’re going to get resentful and the cycle will continue.

7. Don’t Enable Them

You could think that by picking up the slack you’re doing them and yourself a favor. After all, if there’s work to be done, then someone’s got to do it. Why not you?

This isn’t dealing with the problem, though. It’s a passive way of avoiding it, and such inaction will backfire on you. You’ll burn yourself out, or you’ll grow resentful. Either way, what might feel like an easy way to solve the situation is really just prolonging it until it becomes something worse.

8. Keep a Good Attitude

A lazy coworker that impacts your work is also going to influence your attitude. You might feel that if they’re not doing any work, well, then you won’t either! That’ll show’em!

Unfortunately, this little act of rebellion will only put you in the hot seat. Instead, do your work, and try and ignore the laziness of others. But if you do feel that bitterness rising to the point that it affects your personality, then you know that action is required.

9. Talk to Your Manager

While it’s never ideal to bring interpersonal issues to your manager, sometimes it can’t be avoided. Again, you should try to work these problems out by talking with the person, but if they don’t listen or tell you that you don’t have the authority to tell them what to do, then go to that person in the office who does.

This is especially true if their laziness is impacting the business. Then, frankly, it’s no longer an interpersonal matter, but one that could jeopardize the project or the company.

10. Keep Documentation

Once you’re sure that the problem isn’t your thin skin and that it cannot be ignored without detrimental impact on the business, then it’s time to approach the manager. When you do, make sure you have a strong case. That means before going to a superior you start documenting the actions (or inactions) of the coworker, so that their infractions are clear.

Don’t be a snoop, but you should collect any issues as they arise in a file. So, if it comes to it, you’ve got evidence. You might not even have to name the person, but just mention that some people are not carrying their weight. Either way, when it becomes a bottom-line issue, then it’s one that must be brought up to the boss.

Maybe your lazy coworker is just not equipped to handle the work, and they need better tools to get the job done. ProjectManager.com is a cloud-based project management software that supplies real-time data and provides a collaborative platform for teams. Give your team the right tools, and watch them go from lazy to productive. Take this free 30-day trial and see for yourself.

06 Jun 07:10

Hawaii Is Owning the Rest of Us On Climate Change

Photo: AP

Just over a year after President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will jettison the Paris climate deal, Hawaii has set the most ambitious climate goal of any state: carbon neutrality in just 27 years.

That goal was outlined in a bill signed Monday, along with a bill to create a carbon offset program and another requiring environmental impact statements for new building projects to consider sea level rise.

For Hawaiians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. “We’re on the forefront of climate change impacts,” Scott Glenn, who heads up Hawaii’s environmental quality office, told Fast Company. “ People feel the trade wind days becoming less. They notice the changes in rain. They feel it getting hotter. Because we are directly exposed to this, there’s no denying it.”

Hawaii has not shied away from its commitment to climate action. Last year, it was the first state to adopt a law to keep its emissions in line with the Paris agreement. By 2045, the state expects to reach its goal of 100 percent renewable energy, according to Climate Change News.

House bill 2182 aims to achieve carbon neutrality by that same year. It also sets up a “greenhouse gas sequestration task force” that works towards policies that can further curtail carbon emissions. The bill cites an estimated $19 billion in state-wide economic losses due to creeping sea levels brought on by climate change.

House bill 1986, also signed on Monday, creates a carbon offset program to help the task force meet its target. House bill 2106 requires environmental assessments prior to new building projects to include the impacts of sea level rise, a measure which Hawaii’s Governor David Ige refers to as “just plain common sense” given how vulnerable buildings near the coastline are, per Hawaii News Now.

Ige took to Facebook after signing the bills: “Climate change is real and we’re seeing its impacts right now in our island state. Taken together, this suite of bills establishes policies and programs that acknowledge and address this reality.”

At least someone’s acknowledging reality these days.

04 Jun 12:34

How to Keep Your Bed as Cool as Possible This Summer

Illustration: Sam Woolley (GMG)

It’s hard to get a good night’s rest when it’s too hot to sleep—and since we’ve already started seeing “record high temperature” headlines in the news, it’s time to figure out our nighttime cool-down strategies.

Earlier this year, we put together a list of tips and tricks to help you make your bed as warm and snuggly as possible. Now that it’s summer, here are our tips for cooling your bed—and yourself—down before it’s time to turn out the lights.

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If you have air conditioning:

  • If you aren’t already running your air conditioning, turn it on a few hours before bedtime. Some of us run our AC all day (or, at least, keep it running whenever we’re at home) and that’s great! However, if you are the type of person who prefers to sweat it out, do your sleep a favor by turning your AC on a few hours before bed. It’ll cool your home and your body, preparing you for a better bedtime.
  • Instead of turning your AC up a few degrees before going to bed, turn it down. According to the National Sleep Foundation, we sleep best when we’re in a 65-degree room—so if you’re keeping your AC thermostat in the mid/high 70s, try turning it down before bed and see if your sleep improves. Yes, your electric budget might go up, but the extra sleep will probably be worth it.
  • If your air conditioner has “sleep mode,” use it. In sleep mode, you can set your AC at a sleep-inducing cool temperature before bed, and the AC will slowly raise the maximum allowable temperature overnight (or in some cases turn itself off after a few hours). You’ll be asleep, so you won’t even notice!

If you don’t have air conditioning:

  • Your home will stay cooler at night if you keep it as cool as possible during the day. During the mornings and evenings, open windows to let air flow through your home. During the afternoons (or before you leave for work, if you work a 9-5), close the windows and pull down the blinds to keep the cool air in and the hot summer sun out.
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  • Create a makeshift swamp cooler by spraying a sheet with cold water and hanging it in front of an open window. Make sure you’ve picked a window that has a breeze coming through it!
  • Create another makeshift swamp cooler by putting a bowl of ice in front of a box fan or oscillating fan.
  • If you can’t cool your home down, cool your body down instead. A cold shower right before bed can help lower your body temperature just enough for you to fall asleep.
  • If all else fails, wet a bandana in very cold water, wring it out so it doesn’t drip all over your pillows, fold it into a rectangle, and drape it over your neck. Having something cool that close to your major blood vessels will help cool your whole body. (Don’t have a bandana? I’ve made do with a cold, damp sock.)
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Sheets, covers, and pajamas:

  • We’re assuming you’ve put your flannel sheets in the closet, but if you’re still sleeping on silk/satin/T-shirt material, it’s time to swap those sheets out for 100% cotton. Cotton sheets absorb sweat without absorbing body heat—the perfect combination.
  • You’ll also want to wash your sheets regularly (by which we mean every week, if not every few days). They’ll feel cooler against your skin and they’ll smell better!
  • If you sleep under a duvet, you’ll want to get a heavier-weight duvet for winter and a lighter-weight duvet for summer. If that’s out of your price range, you can always buy heavier and lighter duvet covers, and swap them with the seasons.
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  • You might already know this tip, but you can also skip the duvet/quilt/blankets entirely and sleep under a top sheet. (Some people can sleep without anything covering their bodies, but most of us need some kind of cover when we go to bed, first because it “feels like bedtime” and second because our core body temperature drops as we fall asleep, and the cover prevents the temperature drop from waking us up.)
  • In terms of pajamas, you want something light, loose, and preferably cotton. Or... you could always sleep naked!
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Other tips:

  • Memory foam mattresses often “run hot,” which is great in the winter but can prevent quality sleep in the summer. Try buying a mattress cover or mattress topper specially designed to keep your mattress cool.
  • A room that is too humid can be just as stifling as a room that is too warm. It might be time to invest in a dehumidifier.
  • If you have a ceiling fan, make sure you’ve switched it to its “summer” setting. (Yes, many ceiling fans have two settings, and they’re designed to help keep your home either warm or cool depending on the season!) Don’t know whether your fan is set to “summer?” Check the blades—in summer, they should move counter-clockwise.
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If you're a renter with a ceiling fan in your pad, or you just never thought about which way…

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  • Switching from a “curled up” sleeping position to a “starfish” sleeping position can help cool your body down, in part because starfishing allows airflow to the armpits and groin (both of which are notoriously warm, sweaty places).
  • Don’t forget your hydration! One of the best ways to cool down is to drink a glass of cool, refreshing water—and even though you may have to wake up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, it’s way better than waking up headachy and dehydrated.

What other tips do you have for keeping your bed cool during the hottest days of summer?

24 May 15:24

The GDPR explained

Come May this year, the 63rd edition of the annual Eurovision Song Contest won’t be the only thing causing a splash in Europe. Along with welcoming the new king or queen of kitschy European pop music, EU citizens will also be welcoming a new regulation that promises to protect their personal data — the GDPR.

Just think about everything you do online that requires you to exchange personal information. Whether it’s online shopping, using social media, or communicating with your colleagues about project work on Zenkit — you do all this without giving it a second thought. But have you stopped to think about where exactly all your data goes, and whether or not it’s being handled in an ethical manner? The GDPR aims to ensure your data is always protected. In this article, we’ll uncover what it actually means, and delve into its impact on individuals and businesses.

GDPR: harmonizing Europe one regulation at a time

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is the European Union’s new regulation that safeguards the personal data of individuals in the EU, as well as the export of personal data. This means that it doesn’t just affect the European continent, but also businesses around the world that deal with information of European citizens. At the time of writing, the GDPR also includes the United Kingdom (UK), despite recent Brexit changes.

The GDPR defines ‘personal data’ as: “any information related to a natural person or ‘Data Subject’, that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer IP address.”

The purpose of the GDPR is to ensure that the privacy of EU citizens is protected. It is to provide new ‘digital rights’ to consumers, and to secure consequences for the misuse of sensitive information. To summarize:

“The proposed new EU data protection regime extends the scope of the EU data protection law to all foreign companies processing data of EU residents. It provides for a harmonization of the data protection regulations throughout the EU, thereby making it easier for non-European companies to comply with these regulations; however, this comes at the cost of a strict data protection compliance regime with severe penalties of up to 4% of worldwide turnover.”

The GDPR was approved by the EU Parliament on the 14th of April, 2016, and after a two year transition period, will take full effect on the 25th of May, 2018. It replaces the outdated Data Protection Directive, which has been in force since December 1995. Once implemented, it will mean that businesses will have to comply with the new regulations or risk heavy financial penalties.

The current directive has been in place since 1995, which means that it has been 15 years since regulations have changed. Technology has since evolved and impacted our lives massively, to the point where we rely on the internet to achieve everyday tasks. Over 1 billion users actively use social media on the daily, and things like banking, renewing licenses, and even trying to find love is now done online. Imagine all the personal data that’s involved. And now imagine if that got into the wrong hands.

Along with a digital economy, concerns over privacy issues have also developed over the years. This is due to a lack of transparency of where personal information goes, and what businesses do with it once consumer details are processed. Also add target marketing to the mix — consumers don’t want to be inundated with emails, phone calls, and letters about things they didn’t sign up to. They know that they are being targeted due to a newsletter they signed up to eons ago that was slightly related to that subject. Consumers want to avoid this, so much so that a research study of more than 2,400 UK consumers reveals that they are purposely providing false details to brands as a means to protect their privacy and to avoid unwanted marketing.

The GDPR is necessary as an updated and revised regulation that meets the increasing demands of evolving technology and is needed to ensure personal data protection. Consumers have the right to know what their data is being used for, and how it is being processed.

To quote Vera Jourova, Commissioner for Justice, Consumers, and Gender Equality, “In today’s world, the way we handle data will determine to a large extent our economic future and personal safety. We need modern rules to respond to new risks, so we call on EU governments, authorities and businesses to use the remaining time efficiently and fulfil their roles in the preparations for the big day.”

As well as providing an updated amendment on laws and policies, the GDPR is also an attempt to create a stronger and more unified data protection that will bring together all previous and other regulations throughout the EU. This regulation will be consistent throughout all 28 of the EU member states and is designed to simplify the regulatory environment.

There have always been laws protecting the privacy of citizens within the EU, but this proposed new regulation will see privacy as a fundamental right. This means that businesses who fail to comply will face severe penalties.

Every EU-based company, from startups to larger corporate enterprises, that has businesses dealing with EU data will have to prepare for the GDPR. This means revising, updating, and amending their policies, privacy notices, and business protocols to satisfy the requirements addressed in the GDPR. The implementation of the GDPR could also mean that businesses may have recruit a data protection officer (DPO) so that they have someone formally placed to oversee protection strategies and to ensure compliance with the new requirements.

What this also means is that there will be considerable consequences for non-complying companies, as previously mentioned. Those who fail to adhere to the GDPR’s new requirements face fines of up to €20,000,000 or 4% of the business’s annual global turnover.

The GDPR is an updated and revised directive. It has been updated to include standards that are relevant to the nature of personal data processing today. Here’s an overview on the GDPR key changes, including data subject rights:

One of the biggest changes in the GDPR is the extended jurisdiction of regulatory landscape. Prior to the proposed regulation, there was ambiguity surrounding territorial applicability, and it wasn’t clear whether it also applied to companies that weren’t physically located in the EU, however dealt with EU business. The GDPR makes it explicitly clear that it applies to ‘the processing of personal data by controllers and processors in the EU, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the EU or not.’ It also applies to data subjects that have activity relating to, or offer goods and services to EU citizens.

GDPR fines are faced when businesses and organizations breach regulation, which includes infringements such as not having sufficient customer consent for processing data. Fines will be arranged in a tiered structure, and will apply to both controllers and processors. The maximum fine that can be imposed will be the greater of €20,000,000 or up to 4% of annual global turnover.

Circumstances surrounding consent have been strengthened to ensure consumers are not unknowingly allowing businesses to process their data. Companies will now have to provide a request for consent in legible and accessible language. This means no more lengthy, unintelligible terms and conditions that the average consumer will have difficulty understanding. Consent must be apparent, and it also must be easy to give and withdraw it.

In all EU member states, breach notifications will be required, especially where it is inclined to ‘result in a risk for the rights and freedoms of individuals.’ They must be reported within 72 hours of first becoming aware of the breach, and customers and controllers will be notified by data processors.

Under the GDPR, data subjects (consumers) will have the right to request information from data controllers about whether or not their personal data is being processed, its whereabouts, and the purpose for it. Data controllers must also provide a copy of the personal data, free of charge, upon request.

Also known as Data Erasure, the right to be forgotten means data subjects are entitled to have their personal data removed or stopped from being processed by the data controller. Conditions for erasure include the data no longer being relevant to its original intentions, or the data subjects simply wanting to withdraw consent.

Data portability allows the data subjects to receive personal data regarding them, and have the right to send that data to another controller.

Part of a legal requirement under the GDPR, privacy by design entails controllers having to ensure that data protection is considered and included from the very beginning of system design as opposed to being an addition. It also states for data minimization, which refers to controllers only holding and processing data that is absolutely necessary for them to complete their duties, and restricting the access to personal data to only those who do the actual processing.

According to the GDPR, employing a DPO will become mandatory for businesses where the main activities for their controllers and processors require ‘consistent and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale or of special categories of data or data relating to criminal convictions and offences.’

As a consumer, the implementation of the GDPR will mean that you have more control over your personal data. You get to choose what businesses can and cannot do with your information, as well as retract any data if you feel that it is no longer necessary for a particular brand to still hold and process it.

Along with control, transparency of your data will also be a huge effect of the GDPR. Consumers may start to notice how businesses collaborate with them when it comes to their personal information. Gone will be the days of confusing privacy notices that are so long in length that only a superhuman will have the time and effort to finish reading it. From hereon in, any language regarding your personal data will have to be in plain and simple text.

The introduction of GDPR fines signifies that consumer rights must be, and will be, maintained. This means that anyone working with personal data, be it a data controller about to undertake a new processing, or a web developer designing a new system, will have to consider the rights of the consumer, and proceed only if their activities and/or actions satisfy the new requirements.

There may be a few consumers out there that may not want to control or know about their data. But what the GDPR offers is the option to do so, something that was lacking in previous regulations. By having such transparency and control available, even if it is not exercised, consumers may start to regain their trust in businesses and organizations that obtain and process personal data.

Despite what some people may think, preparations for the GDPR is not exclusively for the IT department — it is an issue that will impact the whole business. From the marketing and communications team who will propose new terms and conditions, to the sales team who’ll need to know how their company complies when meeting potential customers. If yours is a business that operates within the EU or with EU individuals, then it is something that you have to keep on top of in order to stay relevant and competitive (as well as operating) in this digital economy.

While there is no single solution to make a business or organization GDPR compliant, there are certain things that it can do (if it hasn’t already) to ensure it’s proactive in handling and protecting consumer data. Here are our tips:

Educating your employees on the ins and outs of the GDPR is an imperative step to take towards company-wide compliance. Encourage your staff and colleagues to understand how GDPR will affect them as an employee of the business, as well as consumers. Make sure they are aware of the consequences and risks involved if the requirements are not followed through, and that compliance is a team effort. Training can be provided through an outsourced expert, or by nominating someone in the team who has read up on their fair share of GDPR articles.

Start by mapping out on a spreadsheet where all the personal data that your business collects comes from. Then record how it is being processed and used. Make sure you also include the people who can access the data and whether or not said data poses any risks. Once you record and analyze all the personal information, you can then start to minimize the data, because there is no point in having it there if it does not benefit your company in any way (as the saying goes, it’s better to be safe than sorry!). Determine what you need to keep, and whether it’s better off erased or encrypted.

Reporting data breaches is part of GDPR policy, which means that your company must have standards in place so that any loss or breach of data can be reported within 72 hours. But, of course, what is more ideal is to prevent any breaches from happening in the first place. Develop and implement security measures throughout your systems to help avoid any data mishaps. Also establish a plan of action that will highlight how to notice a loss or breach of data, and the steps to take to report it.

GDPR states that consumers must explicitly consent to the processing and use of their personal data. This may mean that any pre-checked boxes or automated answers on forms and questionnaires may not be acceptable anymore. Do a major review on all privacy statements and disclosures, and adjust accordingly.

While not a compulsory thing for every business, having a DPO on board will ensure that your business has an expert on hand to provide information, education, and training for anything to do with the data protection laws and its practices. For businesses who don’t have the budget to splash out on a fancy DPO, an alternative solution can be to appoint a staff member to be fully trained in GDPR and for them to impart their wisdom with the rest of the company so that no one misses out on being prepared and well-informed.

The thing to note about the GDPR is that while at first glance it may seem to only benefit consumers, there are benefits in it for businesses as well. Yes, businesses will have to do a lot more once the regulation is implemented, and there may be challenges to overcome in terms of reviewing processes, auditing data, and educating staff members, but the introduction of the GDPR can present opportunity. Businesses who demonstrate that they value their customers’ privacy, and are taking precautions to ensure that their personal data is not being exploited have a higher chance in retaining more loyal customers. As a consumer, you are more likely to proceed with a brand that is transparent about how they utilize your data as opposed to one that keeps it hush hush, right?

The essential aim of the GDPR is to ensure the privacy of EU citizens is protected and that businesses don’t misuse personal data. While we may get off to a tricky start, the consistency of the GDPR throughout the member states intends to create a harmonized data protection regulation — if we succeed at this, then catchy, kitschy pop music will not be the only thing Europe will be known for.

The 25th of May, 2018 is not too far away now, so if your business hasn’t already started taking the steps to prepare themselves for the GDPR, well, you better get a move on! For those who have already started making changes, don’t forget to share your tips on how you got started.

Cheers,

Dinnie and the Zenkit Team

24 May 15:10

How leaders can proactively influence workplace culture

Company culture is a complicated term and often a buzzword in today’s business. Everyone seems to have their own definition of what “company culture” should mean. However, at its core, your culture is how people feel when they work for your organization.

While every employee (including your remote workers) can play a critical part in establishing and maintaining company culture, it’s always going to be the leaders that can make or break your atmosphere. After all, leaders are the people who motivate your staff to success, drive change throughout an organization, and guide specific working styles.

Before we discuss how business leaders can impact workplace culture, it’s worth considering what makes culture so important in the first place. Culture is so much more than an abstract concept. It’s a unique set of shared goals and values that unite the employees in your organization, regardless of their background or departments.

Workplace Culture

A strong company culture doesn’t just make your employees happier – it also makes them more committed, efficient, and productive too. There are plenty of research findings out there that support this idea, including studies that suggest:

So, how can leaders help to shape their company culture into something that positively impacts their bottom line?

Today’s employees don’t just want a job – they want a purpose. When your employees are working hard to create something for your business, serve your customers, or simply make a profit, they begin to wonder why they should be dedicating their life to you. While it’s fair to say that you reward your employees by giving them a regular salary – the chances are that they could get an income from another employer too – so what makes you so special?

Bringing your people together with a shared vision or mission makes it easier for them to see where all the hard work is leading. For instance, maybe you’re not just selling software, you’re selling software that helps to make healthcare companies more efficient so that they can deliver life-saving support to patients?

 Leaders roles in building Workplace Culture

No matter what your goals might be as a company, leaders need to help their teams to understand the “why” behind their work if they want them to be as passionate and committed as possible. By setting transparent goals for the company, you can ensure that everyone in your organization knows what they’re striving to achieve. Plus, transparent goals make it much easier to track performance and offer feedback – something we’ll return to in a minute.

Whether you’re a leader driving a remote team, or a standard product manager, you can contribute to company culture by demonstrating the importance of accountability and consistency. No culture can thrive when people are always sweeping the truth under the rug or trying to avoid owning up to their mistakes. CEOs and other leaders need to set the tone by showing that they’re willing to hold their hands up when something goes wrong.

Remember, as a leader, it’s your actions and the behavior of other important team members that will help to showcase culture. Your employees will notice if you tell them to behave a certain way, but you aren’t “walking the walk” yourself. Think of yourself and the rest of your leadership team as role models for your business. If you consistently present yourself in the right way, your team will start to learn from your example.

how to improve Workplace Culture

Just remember that everyone in your group should be required to follow the same standards. If someone starts behaving in a way that contradicts the cultural vision you’ve tried to establish, it’s important to address that problem as quickly as possible. Avoid any special treatment – regardless of how crucial you think one employee might be.

The more you explore the concept of company culture, the more you’ll learn that it’s a concept that’s constantly evolving. As your business grows in revenue, clients, or staff size, your culture will change and transform to suit new trends. Just as you invest in other resources like office space or IT solutions to support this growth, it’s also important to invest in your culture too.

increasing employee skill set

Your company culture should provide team members with plenty of great opportunities to expand their skill sets and continue giving something back to the business. If you show your team that you’re willing to invest in them, they’ll be more likely to invest their time, effort, and energy into your brand in return. A few development options you can explore include:

  • Skills development: Give employees a chance to learn new skills through training seminars, online courses, and one-to-one lessons. You can focus the training on specific talents that might be relevant to your team’s performance in the business, or you can offer training sessions that are designed to enhance important cultural characteristics – like teamwork seminars.
  • Mentorship: mentorship can be a great way to create a company culture that’s all about learning, sharing, and support. Encourage your senior team members to mentor younger or recently-recruited employees. Additionally, allow people within your business to offer learning opportunities to their peers if they have a specific skill to share, like a knowledge of social media, or a time-management style.
  • Networking: Finally, give your employees plenty of opportunities to expand their personal brand through networking and business conferences. This helps them to see that you’re invested in helping them to grow their career, which can lead to greater feelings of engagement and commitment that enhance your company culture.

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to make sure that your company culture remains strong as it begins to develop is to invest in hiring the right people. Leaders are responsible for bringing new talent into a team, and when you look for ways to fill the gaps in your organization, you should be searching for people who share the same values as you. For instance, if you’re a company that’s dedicated to the environment, you might hire someone who prefers to spend their money on ethically-sourced and sustainable products.

From day one when you start interviewing people who might be able to contribute to your business, make sure that you spend time learning as much about them as you can. This means moving beyond the skills they’ve written on their resume and getting to know what kind of people they are, and how they’ll fit into your current environment.

Why is work culture so important

While it will be difficult to cultivate a team of employees that all get along perfectly together, hiring employees that share the same fundamental values can help to support your culture, and reduce the risk of conflict in the workplace.

Finally, as a leader, you know it’s your responsibility to motivate, inspire, and push your employees when you need to. The only way to make sure that your staff knows what they’re doing right, and what they need to work on, is to manage their performance with regular feedback.

Studies suggest that the most engaged employees are those that receive regular feedback on their work. What’s more, these well-informed individuals can outperform their less-engaged counterparts by up to 22%.

develop your work culture

Establish open channels of communication that you can use to provide your staff with the feedback you need to thrive. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, a few golden rules to keep in mind include:

  • Don’t criticize in public: If your employee does something wrong, take them aside and talk to them in private. Shouting at someone in public can harm your company culture and make it less likely that people will be willing to take risks in the future or speak out about their concerns.
  • Customize your rewards: When you’re rewarding someone for a job well-done, make sure that you customize the benefits you give to suit their preferences. While some people on your team might love a gift like a new coffee grinder, others might prefer to simply finish work an hour early one day.
  • Remember that feedback is a two-way street: Leaders should make sure that their employees have an opportunity to speak openly about their concerns and ideas. Giving feedback is a two-way street.

A powerful company culture is defined by more than just the perks you offer, or the way your team members talk to each other. The culture you create for your company will be something that you build according to your goals as a business, the needs of your employees, and the expectations of customers and shareholders.

As a leader in your organization, it’s up to you to guide the development of a strong, and lucrative company culture for your brand. Remember, your employees will turn to you for an insight into how to act, and what to do each day. Make sure that you’re setting an example that can pave the way for a brighter tomorrow.

About the author:

Raj Jana is the CEO and founder of JavaPress, an environmentally-friendly coffee company that supports fair trade around the world. Raj believes that great people are at the heart of a successful company. When he’s not dedicating himself to leading his brand, Raj can be found reading up on corporate wellness articles and invest in his own vision of economic sustainability. Find Raj on LinkedIn and Twitter.

23 May 14:01

Password Formulas Don’t Fool Hackers

by Nick Douglas

Every time we write about passwords on Lifehacker, a few readers share their secret formula for creating passwords. According to Ryan Merchant, senior manager at the password manager Dashlane, those formulas are easy to hack.

Read more...

23 May 14:01

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23 May 08:27

Move Over Hygge, This Austrian Word Might Be the Real Key to Happy Living in 2018

Move over, hygge. There's a new unpronounceable #lifegoal in town for 2018, and though it does have some roots in Scandinavian tradition it's now the Austrians who are claiming they have the real secret to happy living—with gemütlichkeit.

According to the Oxford Institute, gemütlichkeit is a German-language word that sums up as "quality time" and is used to convey the idea of a state or feeling of warmth, friendliness, cordiality, and good cheer. Other moods encompassed by the Austrian phenomenon include coziness (like hygge), peace of mind, and a sense of belonging and well-being springing from social acceptance.

How exactly does gemütlichkeit differ from hygge? Oxford has an in-depth comparison of the two philosophies in its Happiness Index study, and here's also this more succinct example from the German Language Blog at Transparent:

A soft chair in a coffee shop might be considered 'cozy'. But sit in that chair surrounded by close friends and a hot cup of tea, while soft music plays in the background, and that sort of scene is what you'd call gemütlich.

If you got together with friends to watch the Royal Wedding over tea and scones or coffee and croissants (and mimosas) this past weekend, that would be another excellent example of gemütlichkeit, says this explainer video from Journy:

"Hygge was so 2016. The new key to happy living is Austrian."

And an emphasis on "quality time" as the secret to happiness "through a sense of belonging" couldn't have come at a better time. A study released this week by The Economist shows that heavy users of Instagram feel the most miserable, depressed, and isolated with the most FOMO (fear of missing out), of any other social media channel on the internet.

The link between heavy social media use and decreased wellbeing is being quantified more and more, providing us with even more reasons to put down our phones, close up our laptops, and get out and socialize with friends and family IRL (in real life)—or practice some good old-fashioned Austrian gemutlichkeit.

Another reason to embrace gemütlichkeit, especially in the age of comparison-stealing joy from heavy use of Instagram and Pinterest? Gemutlichkeit can also be a feeling of contentment with what you have, versus being ashamed by or insecure or unhappy because of what you don't.

The German Language Blog at Transparent also says:

Another, less common meaning refers to the comfort of a well-off, middle-class life. In short, it refers to the comfort of an atmosphere or situation more than it does to the comfort of physical objects.

Just one more reason to preserve America's middle class. And also to believe that those digital-native millennials may be on to something, more than just a passing fad: Does the true key to happiness really lay in valuing experiences over things? But how to find friends to hang out with IRL for "quality time" if you're feeling disconnected, or are literally disconnected as a transplant in a new city?

In a dose of irony for this story—or a match made in shared aesthetic heaven—more and more people have found that reaching out to people they admire on Instagram (but don't yet know in real life) and suggesting meeting up for coffee, photo walks, drinks, exercise, etc. can create new close friends in the process.

I can verify firsthand that this can truly work, platonically: My closest friend since moving to Austin in 2013 is someone I knew first through Instagram, and took the leap of faith to ask her out on a "blind girlfriend date" for some gemutlichkeit, talking about our shared love of vintage, greyhound rescue, and good books over tapas one evening. Now, we get together regularly and our husbands are even close friends—the four of us celebrated my birthday this year with wine, pizzas, and a 1,000-piece puzzle at home. It was one of the best birthdays I've ever had.

22 May 09:08

The art of effective team management

Being the manager of a team can be a rewarding gig, but it doesn’t come easy. Imagine being responsible for a group of people you’ve never met before and then being accountable for their development, achievements, and performance — pretty daunting, huh? To make it a less intimidating experience, I’ve put together a few pointers on how you can best achieve effective team management.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

The importance of effective team management comes as no surprise to anyone whose job it is to manage a team. Not only is it crucial for employee engagement, but it can also improve productivity and efficiency, which ultimately contributes towards business growth.

Team management is the art of binding your team closer together so that set goals and objectives can be achieved more efficiently, and in most cases, more enjoyably. It requires a combination of getting to know and managing the different personalities and skill sets of your team members, figuring out the best ways targets can be achieved, while keeping in mind the company’s objectives. Let’s not forget that you still have your own set tasks to complete as well.

It takes good leadership for effective team management to work, and a good leader is only as great as their team. There really needs to be equal input from both sides of the party.

It’s your job as the manager to strengthen the bonds between the individuals in your team. Not only will this take some time and understanding, but it will also take a lot of team building activities. There are an array of activities you can do, from sports tournaments to scavenger hunts to simply having lunch together. Whatever activity you decide to do, best practice would be to ensure that each covers at least one of the following skills which will help with bringing the team closer together:

  • Icebreakers
  • Team bonding
  • Creative problem solving
  • Communication
  • Collaboration

Rounding up your team and then telling them what to do one by one could possibly work (emphasis on the word ‘possibly’), but it isn’t the most practical way to get things done. Effective team management calls for a strategy.

Different teams will require different strategies. If you’re managing a team of 50 individuals in a corporate enterprise, your strategy is going to look a little different to someone who’s managing a small team of five in a startup company. Whatever your end goal is, your role as the manager is to essentially get your team motivated enough to work together to achieve the goal in a timely manner. How you get your team motivated and to work together is where the difference in strategies lie.

A strategy doesn’t have to be convoluted or complex, all it is is a plan of action, tailored to achieving a specific goal or set objectives. When creating the strategy, remember to include your team. Being able to contribute ideas and opinions towards the team’s overall purpose is a good start to achieving effective team management. It will make your team members feel valued and that their position within the team is appreciated.

On top of having a strategy and ensuring that leadership and the team’s attitudes are in check, there are other factors that can assist with achieving effective team management. Here’s a team management skills list of what not to do:

Micromanaging is one of the most detrimental habits a manager can have and big fat no for effective team management. It is best practice to trust your team to do their job. Leaving your team to do their job without you constantly hovering over their shoulder will not only highlight your confidence in them to do a good job, but it will also give you time to complete your own tasks — a win win for everyone really. Also, having that level of trust established will enhance the working relationships between you and your team members.

One of the worst atrocities you could possibly perform as a manager is to not create an open dialogue with your team. Communication is vital for obvious reasons, but to welcome a two-way conversation where feedback is discussed can do wonders for your team’s development and for yours as well as it’s another way to solidify trust. Creating a transparent environment can make your team feel more at ease.

Once the whole getting-to-know-everyone period at the beginning ends, that doesn’t mean the fun activities have to. Remember that team bonding is a constant exercise, and arranging activities for your team to do together from time to time can boost team morale. Having happier employees is something that will benefit everyone, not only will your team members enjoy coming to work, but studies have shown that we are inclined to work harder when we are happy.

Remember you’ll have different personalities in your team, so how you deal with one person may not be the best way to approach another. For example, there will be individuals who may not take constructive criticism as well as others, so adapt your approach when providing feedback. Applying diversity to your managing style is the key to tackling this. You have to be consistent while using different approaches.

No matter the profession, every worker needs the right tools in order to do the best job. Using a tool that enhances team collaboration can result in more effective team management. Apps like Zenkit are designed so that you can easily share work with your colleagues, communicate instantaneously, and track the progress of your tasks. You may be surprised at how much your team can achieve if given the right resources.

No two teams are the same, and so success will look different to every team. Your job as a manager, however, is to ensure your team meet their target within the required criteria and time-frame, while accommodating the needs of the different individuals involved. Achieving this kind of balance looks pretty close to success to me.

Now, here are the steps you should take:

If you’re in a lucky position where you get to recruit your team members, then make sure you hire the best talent. Think about the different personalities, experiences, and skill sets that will work well together, and that will get the job done. You’ll want to hire people who are not only skilled but also enthusiastic to work in a team environment.

While you don’t want to create a stringent hierarchy, establishing leadership is necessary for ensuring things get done efficiently and that everybody is aware of their responsibilities within the team. Having set boundaries, rules and expectations, and making them clear can set your team up for success. Just remember that establishing leadership is more effective with trust and loyalty rather than fear.

Effective team management starts with good leadership

Effective team management relies a lot on collaboration, and collaboration stems from having good relationships with members of your team. The fact that you all have to work with each other closely on a regular basis is reason enough to have to get along, but implementing methods for successful collaboration is important for the team to sustain. Also, getting to know the different characters in your team and how they are wired will greatly assist you in knowing how to motivate them, the things to avoid, and what will bring out the best in them.

When outlining the team’s goals and objectives, make sure you are clear and give enough details so that they understand what is expected of them. It is also a good idea to create a common goal. Focusing your team on a unified goal, on top of their individual ones, will enhance communication and collaboration amongst your team members, and remind them that they belong to a team.

When you’re in a position of authority, your team members will take cues from your behavior. How you interact with people and your attitude in the office is the best way to communicate your expectations. A way for them to realize what the ideal worker is is if you influence it through your actions.

Effective team management is no easy feat, but it is certainly achievable. There are a few things needed to set you on your way, first and foremost is good leadership, closely followed by an equally good team. Then you need to ensure that within your team there are factors such as trust and collaboration, as well as hard work and an enthusiasm to accomplish things as a team, oh and don’t forget the right tools!

If yours is a team that is taking it that one step further and collaborating with another team, here are some tips on how you can make it work.

Cheers,

Dinnie and the Zenkit team

22 May 09:08

Forbes Welcome

15 May 12:39

Forbes Welcome

If I’m going to do something different and if I want it to meet someone’s needs, I really need to go the distance.

Hilary Swank,
Actress

15 May 12:13

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