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Target is facing a 40-day consumer boycott beginning Wednesday after rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The boycott, led by Dr. Jamal Bryant, pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, is framed as a “fast” from the retailer during Lent to show the economic power of Black consumers. “We’re asking people to divest from Target because they have turned their back on our community,” Rev. Bryant told CNN. However, some Black business owners worry that the boycott could have unintended consequences. Many rely on Target’s nearly 2,000 stores and online platform for exposure and sales, reported the New York Post. “If you don’t buy our products in Target, they will cancel us from their shelves and make us buy back the products they already purchased from us,” Black-owned doll brand Beautiful Curly Me said in an Instagram post. Time of struggle The boycott comes at a challenging time for the retailer, which announced Tuesday that it expects flat sales in 2025. On Tuesday, President Trump’s long-threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect, putting markets in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. on edge and sparking retaliatory measures from trade partners, including China. At the same time, U.S. consumers have been cutting back on discretionary spending as grocery prices remain high. Target, which relies heavily on sales of nonessential items like clothing and electronics, is particularly vulnerable to these shifts. Drawing back DEI Target’s decision to end its DEI programs in late January drew backlash from social justice advocates, in addition to Rev. Bryant. The move came just days after the White House called for a federal DEI ban, prompting several companies to reassess their own initiatives.The retailer concluded its Racial Equity Action and Charge initiatives, stopped all external diversity-focused surveys, and changed its “Supplier Diversity” team to “Supplier Engagement.” However, Target has faced particularly intense scrutiny, in part due to its previous high-profile commitments. Months after the murder of George Floyd, Target pledged to increase its Black workforce by 20% throughout the company over three years and take other steps to “advance racial equity,” including establishing an executive Racial Equity Action and Change committee, according to CNN. The following year, Target pledged to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by the end of 2025. Target also gained attention in recent years for its Pride Month promotions and inclusive marketing, signaling a progressive brand stance. “I know that focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said in 2023. “I’m really proud of the work we’ve done in the DEI space. Fast Company reached out to Target for a comment. View the full article

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. Last week we talked about shared space / hot-desking horror stories and here are 10 of my favorites that you shared. 1. The torn-down sign We have a bank of shared desks which aren’t actually general-use hot desks, but hot desks specific to our team. However, as we’re often out and about supporting other colleagues or delivering training out in the field, we’re usually only in one day a week. People realized this and started using our desks as hot desks, and all our equipment gradually failed/vanished, and when we DID come in, there wouldn’t be any desks available. So we put up signs. One of the other people came in when a colleague and I were in a meeting elsewhere on site but set up at our desks, and about half an hour after the signs went up. When we got out of the meeting, he’d torn the sign down that was at the desk where he was sat, put it face down on the desk, then outright denied it when questioned. No one believed his lie, but our manager had a word with him and put up additional signage. He still sits at the desks apart from one day when the signs state are only for our team, but he refuses to speak to any of us. 2. The phone calls I am currently living through a desk sharing situation where we both need to work some of the same hours. This requires us to sit on opposite sides of the same desk with laptops. No one can use the monitors for fear of it being “unfair.” That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. Not my setup luckily, but nearby, multiple times per day a neighboring coworker will make or answer very private personal calls literally sitting at a desk a foot from their desk mate. Topics have been: child support (that wasn’t paid), screaming at people she believes to be stealing from her, and some very NSFW inappropriate comments thrown in (loudly). Meanwhile, her desk mate is attempting to be on work calls. My coworker (her desk mate) has requested a move but is currently stuck there with her two days a week. 3. The tickets I have an assigned desk, but I only work in the office one day a week. The other four days, I work from home. That means my desk is available four days week for use as a hot desk for folks who don’t have an assigned desk. One gentleman (“E”) who knows my schedule uses my desk as a hot desk frequently. And apparently runs into just an unfathomable number of technical issues. I have lost track of the number of help desk tickets E has opened for the equipment at my desk. But since it is my equipment, I am the one who has to field the help desk techs when they attempt to troubleshoot. Help desk techs often drop by on while I’m in the office to troubleshoot the technical issue du jour. We are, strangely, never able to replicate the issues E claims to experience. Often times, when I close the help desk ticket, nothing else ever comes of it. Occasionally, he’ll re-open the ticket. Once, a help desk tech wrote down very detailed instructions on how to resolve the USER-CAUSED issue E was experiencing at my desk. I left them on the keyboard for E to read the next day. E sent me an IM on Friday telling me he’d thrown the instructions in the trash (???). With all the issues he seems to experience using my desk, I’ve often wondered why he doesn’t just hot desk in one of the five other open desks in my cube share. The world may never know. 4. The photos Coworker #1 shared a desk with Coworker #2, who was going through a drawn out break-up with Coworker #3. We were never quite sure if the relationship was officially over. One day Coworker #1 found multiple photos cut up into little pieces in the desk (our building had a photobooth that printed physical photos). Coworker #1 realized they were all photos that included Coworker #3. That wasn’t the official end of their break-up, but it did add to the lore as they continued to go off and on for years. 5. The committed decorator I used to work at a place where there was a morning shift and a night shift, so everyone shared a desk with one other person. I brought in a little 8×10 picture and hung it up on one half of the little area because I needed something to look at (no windows), but didn’t want to overwhelm my desk mate. The night shift guy across from me had no such consideration. The three little walls of his desk area were absolutely COVERED in stuff – photos, a framed Nickelodeon Magazine with Larissa Oleynik on the cover (when she was a child on Alex Mack), the slipcover of an X-Files DVD box set, the sticker they put on the corner of a television set to tell you it’s screen size … just the most bizarre stuff. His deskmate finally complained and he was told he could only decorate one half of the space. So when I came in the next morning, he had meticulously measured the space so he was taking up exactly half. At Christmas, he brought in a family photo album and left it open to a different page every day. Then he brought in one child-size dress-up Cinderella high heel. This plus many, many, MANY other things led to him eventually being fired. 6. The pile When I was hired on at a small social enterprise, my desk was pushed up against my boss’s desk, back-to-back. It meant that we sat directly facing each other all day. I’m a tidy person and never have clutter on my desk, while my boss was a borderline hoarder. She had multiple towers of loose papers, at least 15 tchotchkes, and an extensive nature collection that included feathers, skulls, and a dried bear poop that she liked because it had seeds in it. There was almost no visible desk surface. Within a day, her clutter had crept over the border and onto my desk. I ignored it, but the flow was unstoppable. By day 3, the slow-moving landslide of junk had taken over the back third of my desk. Since she wasn’t in that day to talk to her, I took all her junk off my desk and neatly piled it back on hers. The next morning she profusely apologized and said she would be more mindful, while commenting on how tidy and sterile my desk was. This became a pattern: throughout the workday, a paper stack would be nudged onto my desk, or an animal bone would fall from an overflowing basket onto my printer. I started propping up items to create a fence on the border, à la Dwight Schrute. Several times I politely talked to her about needing my desk to be free of clutter. Nothing worked. Every afternoon after she left, I would remove her items and neatly stack them back on her desk. Every morning she would apologize and continue the pattern. I could see her shame growing. About a year later we moved into a new “office” that she had built which was a log cabin with no indoor plumbing, heating, or cooling. There was an outhouse with no running water. I quit a few months later. 7. The unauthorized plant I was a “rover” at a bank where I was sent to new branches every day to cover for absences — basically a substitute bank teller and banker. One branch had a plant care service where these people would come in and tend to the plants which were, I guess, part of a contracted service. They’d water them, trim leaves, polish leaves, etc. They silently entered offices to avoid bothering the bankers. I was sitting in a lady’s office working when a plant lady stormed in pointing to a plant and demanding to know where it came from and that it wasn’t their plant and they don’t care for unauthorized plants. I shrugged and told her this isn’t my office nor is this my branch. I’m just sitting here for now. She came back at least twice more to actually reprimand me, essentially her company’s client, and demand answers. It was the strangest thing to happen to me up to that point. I left a note for the plant owner that she had better watch her back with these plant ladies. 8. The log-ins Years ago, I worked at an office where most of us were in the field all day, and we shared two desktop computers for data entry, payroll, and other admin tasks. One of my coworkers was zealous about cyber security, so he updated the desktops to set very secure passwords (long strings of letters, numbers, and special characters). Unfortunately that meant that none of us could remember the passwords, so they were written on post-it notes taped to the desks (very secure!). The real trouble began when he transferred to another office and one of the post-its was lost. I don’t know if anyone was ever able to log into the data entry computer again. 9. The desk walk After I finished my masters, I considered moving from SmallState University to Bigwig University for a Ph.D. (my advisor was retiring and there was nobody else in my area to work with) when I visited the campus, the grad student who was showing me around brought me to the grad student office – a room filled with so many desks that he had to walk over one person’s desk to get to his. I changed my research focus and stayed SmallStateU, where I had a three person office and a couch. 10. The Pop Tarts I was an expensive consultant back in the dot.com days, brought into a medium sized company that was creating early internet shopping software. They had the full dot.com culture, including lots of free food. What they did not have was a lot of space. My desk was a laptop sitting on top of a giant case of brown-sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts in the middle of the breakroom. I’m the adaptable sort – at the rate they were paying me, I had to be – so this was fine. The only challenge was that whenever someone wanted a Pop Tart, I had to lift my laptop and let them into the cardboard case so they could grab some. This generally happened about seven times per day. On the other hand, I ended up with a 13% raise from that assignment, and I got all the Pop Tarts I could ever want, so I guess it was worth it. View the full article

Carve-out applies to groups operating through the US-Mexico-Canada trade pact View the full article

Justice department said suspects were involved in extensive ‘hacker-for-hire ecosystem’View the full article

Some accurate medical information was removed from the CDC’s website last month, and we gave you some tips on where to look for archived versions and for sources of similar information. Now, there’s a nearly complete mirror of the CDC website being hosted in Europe, so you can look up information on HIV, health for trans people, and other topics that really shouldn’t be controversial, but for some reason are. Some of the removed information has been reinstated by court order, but it comes with a disclaimer at the top of the page that somehow manages to be insulting, incorrect, sensationalist, and inflammatory. Just what you need when you want to know, say, who is most vulnerable to HIV. Credit: CDC As 404 Media reports, the archive’s creators say it is being hosted in Europe, and the pages were downloaded with the help of the DataHoarder community on Reddit. Unlike many of the other goverment data archiving projects, this one aims to build a fully functional version of the CDC website, including the links between pages, and interactive elements. They haven’t entirely accomplished that goal; a note at the top of the page says that they are working on getting videos added to the archive. Notably, the search function sends you back to www.cdc.gov instead of keeping you on the restoredcdc.org site, so if you want to find a specific page, you’re best off finding an old link, and then typing in “https://restoredcdc.gov/” just before the URL. For example, https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/data-research/facts-stats/transgender-people.html becomes https://restoredcdc.org/www.cdc.gov/hiv/data-research/facts-stats/transgender-people.html . But for most information, the website is still present and functional. Trans health information is still there, without the insulting disclaimer. The page on health equity guiding principles for inclusive communication is up at the archive, even though it’s still missing from cdc.gov. There is still one major gap, though: current information on outbreaks and other developing situations. The CDC is not updating information at restoredcdc.org. It's a static archive of what was available in January. So if you want to check the numbers on the current measles outbreak, or see what's going on with bird flu, the regular CDC website is still the place where that stuff is getting updated. For now, anyway. View the full article

Former bank boss is trying to clear his name over ties to dead sex trafficker Jeffrey EpsteinView the full article

It’s tough enough bringing the first major redesign of a commercial jetliner to fruition—especially when it looks more like something out of The X-Files than a travel brochure. So, to streamline that journey, JetZero—the first commercial blended-wing body (BWB) aircraft—is teaming with Delta as an eventual buyer to troubleshoot operation and design issues from the ground up. “Our biggest challenge is, `How do you bring an aircraft to market as quickly as possible so that you can have the most impact for your customer?’” says CEO Tom O’Leary, who cofounded JetZero with CTO Mark Page. “We don’t want to zig-zag our way to entry into service. We want to take the cleanest, most direct shot. Because, ultimately, saving time means you’re saving money.” Not to mention, the environment. The aircraft’s lighter weight and superior aerodynamics aim to deliver the same speed and range as existing midbody jetliners on half the fuel, potentially saving airlines billions of dollars and bringing them closer to an industry goal of zero-carbon flight by 2050. In contrast to the conventional tube and wing design, the tailless BWB combines the wing structure and passenger area, making it look a bit like a flying manta ray. Its shape reduces drag and increases lift, so the plane can cruise at higher altitudes in thinner air on less fuel. ‘We want to think about a world in 2050’ JetZero is targeting the underserved midbody, 250-seat class of carriers, which it plans to manufacture domestically. Since its 2021 founding, the Southern California startup has raised $300 million from investors including NASA, Airbus, Alaska Air, and EasyJet, plus a $235 million award from the U.S. Air Force for a demonstrator plane in 2027. The partnership with Delta gives JetZero access to its Sustainable Skies Lab, an R&D and testing accelerator for more sustainable air travel, and Delta TechOps, which streamlines fleet maintenance management. There, experts help refine the economics, engineering, and workflow through the operations and passenger experience lens, such as airport and gating constraints, loading and unloading, cabin configuration, and interior design. [Rendering: JetZero] “It’s really expensive and challenging to bring a new aircraft to market,” says Delta CSO Amelia DeLuca. “What we can do is, from the ground up, say, `This is what you need to be the best-in-class from a customer experience, to work for our employees, to maintain this aircraft when it flies. We look at how we would deploy it, and the specs and seat count we would need to put this into market.” Adds O’Leary: “It’s figuring out what’s going to work or not as quickly as possible. We don’t see any other way to do that other than have a deep interaction with the customers. Delta knows its products better than the manufacturers because they’re operating them days, weeks, months, years, decades; they’re the real experts on all the things we need to get the plane to a point where you fundamentally de-risk it.” JetZero and Delta have been collaborating since the startup’s inception in 2021 but opted to publicize their partnership in the wake of Delta’s March 3 Centennial and its message for greater sustainability and customer service during the next hundred years. Jet Zero’s fuel-efficiency also enables greater potential range, opening Delta to more destinations. “We want to think about a world in 2050 where we are flying more sustainably, more efficiently, but also opening up new markets and points of connection,” says DeLuca. Engineering catnip A working commercial BWB would realize a long-held aviation dream that began decades ago but never progressed past prototypes—many involving future JetZero engineers. Page, a chief engineer with NASA’s BWB program in the `90s, is considered one of the fathers of BWBs alongside Robert Liebeck, who developed the first prototype for NASA, and Blaine Rawdon, both JetZero technical advisors. “Delta’s made up of so many aerospace engineers who learned about Mark Page and BWB technology when they went through school,” says DeLuca. “So as soon as you say that we’re talking to Jet Zero—you know, with Mark Page with BWB—they’re like, `Oh my gosh, I’ve always wanted to make this thing fly.’” View the full article

Banosian will work with Victor Ciardelli, who remains as the president and CEO of the Chicago-based parent, Rate Cos., overseeing 15 businesses. View the full article

If your Mac's close to running out of space, don't ignore the problem. These machines can run into issues when their storage is 100% full: Updates may struggle to install; the machine may slow down; apps might not work well; and you may notice that some stop backing up their data to the cloud, too. To avoid all of these issues, free up space. It's not as daunting as it seems. Use built-in tools to free up space on your Mac Credit: Pranay Parab Apple gives you plenty of easy tools to start clearing unwanted files from your computer. To get started, you should identify where the problem lies. Click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your Mac's screen and go to System Settings > General > Storage. Wait until all the loading signs disappear, and you'll see why your Mac is running out of space. The Recommendations section offers an easy way to start the cleanup process. Here, you can quickly offload unused apps, delete local copies of files stored in iCloud, automatically delete old files from Trash with a click, among other useful functions. Once you've followed these steps, you should have some breathing room, but you can take it even further by clicking the i buttons next to each item in the list below the Recommendations section. For instance, you can click the i button next to Applications to see a full list of installed apps sorted by size, and quickly delete apps you don't use. Once you're through with this, you should've reclaimed a lot of space. Use DaisyDisk to clean up your Mac Credit: Pranay Parab Apple's built-in method is usually quite good at getting you started, but if you want to get every last unwanted bit of data out of your Mac, consider using the excellent DaisyDisk ($10). This app has been around for well over a decade and has earned itself a reputation for making it easy to free up space. Once you open the app, you can run a scan to see which apps are taking up storage space. Once that's done, you can easily browse through various folders and drop things in the collector area, which is like a shopping cart for things you want to delete. DaisyDisk lists all of your folders by size, and finds files that the built-in tool misses. In my case, I discovered 80GB of data in WhatsApp—files shared in a large group that I'd muted long ago and forgotten all about. Once all files are collected, you can click the Delete button to erase them quickly. Try Hyperspace to clear out the stragglers Credit: Pranay Parab Hyperspace should be the last stop in your Mac cleanup process. It clears up storage space without deleting any files. Here's how it works. Apple Filesystem (APFS) has a neat space-saving feature that lets multiple files share a single copy of data. For instance, if you duplicate a 1GB file on macOS, you'll notice that a copy is created instantly. Try to copy the same file to an external drive and no matter how fast the drive is, it'll take a while to copy it over. This happens because APFS just creates a new file with fresh metadata and doesn't actually create a second copy of the data underneath. This saves you a lot of space. Hyperspace uses this APFS feature to locate identical files and converts them into clones of each other. This means that you will continue to see the same number of files in the same original locations, but the app will use the APFS feature to free up space. The explanation is slightly complex, but this app does seem to work. Hyperspace is a free download, and you can also scan your folders without paying. If these scans show the app can save you a significant amount of space, you can then pay to clear those files. The app costs $10 per month, $20 per year, or a one-time purchase of $50. View the full article

Mass layoffs struck the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization (NOAA) late last week, throwing into jeopardy the core mission of the agency tasked with observing the skies and seas nationwide—and a key piece of the federal disaster preparedness apparatus. In addition to hampering the day-to-day weather forecasting ability of its National Weather Service, cuts to NOAA will curtail efforts to protect endangered species, manage coastal regions, and prepare for climate change. When combined with the federal hiring freeze, recently terminated staff told Fast Company that the cuts put their organizations on a trajectory to “break.” The moves have drawn outrage from Democratic members of Congress and the general public. Thousands of people showed up to protest on Monday near the Colorado and Maryland NOAA campuses in support of the National Weather Service, which has a higher favorability rating than Taylor Swift. A rally in support of NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, on March 3, 2025. [Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images] Maryland congressman Chris Van Hollen called the cuts “an assault on our public safety.” “They are our eyes and ears, and so when you close your eyes and plug your ears, people will get hurt,” he said at a virtual press conference shortly after the cuts were announced. Because the cuts were tied to federal employees with “probationary” status, the impact was haphazard and largely without regard to their specific job functions. In Miami, multiple hurricane researchers were let go. In Alaska, a member of the 24/7 National Tsunami Warning Center lost her job. Michigan’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory can no longer staff a communications team. More than 10% of the staff of the Maryland-based Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) were fired, dealing a significant blow to the ability of the U.S. to maintain and improve its weather forecasting capabilities. Accurate and timely weather forecast models maintained by the EMC and provided by the NWS not only power virtually all weather apps and television weather forecasts, they also underlie much of the U.S. economy and help it to function efficiently. “The loss of EMC workers will be a slow-rolling catastrophe,” said Larissa Reames, a meteorologist and computer scientist who was one of the EMC staff until last week. “It’s going to be a massive communication breakdown.” Computer weather models are a vastly complex assemblage of physics equations and data processing algorithms that constantly input weather observations from NOAA’s fleet of satellites, radar, and weather stations around the world. Maintaining, improving, and tracking the performance of those models is the main goal of the EMC. By losing key staff members like Reames, who had decades of experience working with NOAA’s weather models, America’s weather predicting abilities will likely suffer. Reames led a team of scientists working to unify and upgrade the core capabilities of a group of NOAA’s primary weather forecasting models. On a day-to-day basis, that meant having lots of conversations with experts who have specific knowledge of the models’ subsystems and working to unify and streamline their input. As she describes it, “getting the people who are actually doing the nitty-gritty part of the model development the right tools to understand what they can do better.” For Reames, losing her job may mean an end to a 20-year career in computer weather modeling. She’s now considering a job doing software development in the private sector, but admits she has no idea what that might entail. “It’s overwhelming to think about what I’m going to have to do,” said Reames. “I don’t know any of the languages they use, but I have the skills to learn them.” The cuts to NOAA appeared to be made without regard to continuity of the services it provides. Hundreds of scientists, technicians, and support staff were given just two hours to vacate their workplaces and didn’t have time to properly transition their roles to other colleagues. By diverting people like Reames to the private sector, institutional knowledge of how NOAA’s weather models function will be lost. Other essential parts of federal disaster management, like FEMA and the agencies that manage public lands have also been hamstrung by staff cuts to probationary employees and strict spending limits. For many fired NOAA employees, the cuts brought a harsh conclusion to a lifelong dream of public service in the earth sciences. Francis Tarasiewicz grew up in southern New England, not far from Boston. He became a storm spotter, then an observer on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and worked in grad school with emergency managers to understand how they use weather information. Tarasiewicz had started work at the Boston NWS office only in January as a shift forecaster, responsible for liaising with emergency management officials during periods of severe weather. “I grew up in foster care and have overcome a lot of obstacles just to live a normal life, let alone deeply serve the people of my community,” Tarasiewicz said. “It was like a one in a million chance there.” The NWS as a whole lost about 10% of its staff last week, but those cuts weren’t made with regard to geography or the population each office serves. Boston was especially hard-hit. (In an email, an NWS spokesperson said they don’t comment on personnel or management issues.) After the departure of Tarasiewicz and three other colleagues, the NWS office in Boston is now down to just seven meteorologists, four fewer than are needed to run it around the clock with even minimal staffing. That means meteorologists in Boston will need to perform the duties of multiple staff members at once. Since the NWS works around the clock, it will also mean performing those duties with fewer hours of rest in between shifts. “The meteorologist in charge of my office had no idea this was coming, said Tarasiewicz. “I’ve never seen a boss of mine break down in tears.” If he can’t get his job back at NWS, Tarasiewicz wants to work in climate—but is reluctant to consider a job in the private sector. He has honed his skill set specifically to assist government and public safety officials during inclement weather and feels discouraged at the thought that he might end up in a role with a narrower focus, as might be the case if he worked as a forecaster for a private company. “The whole reason I decided to work for the weather service was to maximize my impact on the world,” said Tarasiewicz. As severe as the cuts are, they could be just the beginning. Reports say Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” plans to cut NOAA’s staffing by up to 50%, and has already moved to cancel key building leases in Oklahoma and at Maryland’s Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, where Reames worked. View the full article

A team approach to problem-solving, informed by the process of design thinking, can be optimally effective in triggering inspiration, leading to fresh ideas that are highly responsive to stakeholders. Indeed, collaboration can be a force multiplier in an effort to reach an intended objective. However, what seems to be missing is how team members can perform successfully and work as a collaborative entity for the good of the project. Collaborative design thinking suggests a customized framework for team members and stakeholders to work together so that the process is unique and relevant for a particular challenge and the individuals involved. A project leader can adjust the design thinking approach to the required matrix of specialties, personalities, tasks, and circumstances — and determine how and when collaboration occurs — to yield the best possible outcome. The following three summary examples include distinctive challenges. The process for arriving at an optimal solution, however, applies to many types of problems in many types of organizations. In each of these instances, the team was able to use an aspect of collaborative design thinking to ask the questions that needed to be asked and achieve breakthrough outcomes. Example 1: Empathy as a Means to Innovate in a Pharmaceutical Company Empathy — a key component of design thinking — helped this team develop a fresh mindset and a full appreciation for special needs, leading to a new way of thinking and, ultimately, to an innovative product. Developing meaningful empathy for stakeholders is a remarkable tool for problem definition and, ultimately, solutions. The better we can get to know the people who will be using the spaces, solutions, or, in this case, products that we design, the better problem solvers we can become. It’s a simple, commonsense idea that is surprisingly neglected. In this case, one team member assumed the role of stakeholder advocate, serving as a proxy for a typical product user. Armed with primary empathic data, she was then able to propose a wonderful, responsive, economical solution that the user could not have imagined. The project was denture adhesives for small sections, or “partials,” that replaced one or two missing teeth. The biggest problem for consumers was that their appliances didn’t fit properly, and would wobble and put stress on their teeth. Food particles would lodge beneath them, causing irritation. That was the initial problem definition from a consumer-need perspective, and also what the team was focused on solving from R & D and marketing standpoints. At a team meeting, one member held a jerry-rigged gardening glove — a simulation of what the consumers were going through. She said, “I’ve been listening to you talk about the consumers, and I’ve been thinking about their challenges. What you’re missing is that you’re not hearing them say, ‘It’s really hard to apply this!’” When they (accidentally) over-applied the adhesives, it was difficult to clean up; the adhesive was essentially a polymer mixed in oil, so consumers would end up with excess oil in their mouths. She also pointed out that the team was perhaps failing to address the right problem, which was over-applying the product. The adhesives are very viscous products that are squeezed out of a tube. They are much more difficult for this consumer group to squeeze than toothpaste—and she wanted the team to understand that. Back to the gardening glove. The member attached bits of hard plastic to the fingers on the glove to provide resistance, so it required more effort than usual when squeezing or doing any sort of motion — mimicking an arthritic hand and giving the R & D team an empathic sense of the experience of the typical consumer. While using the glove, it was very hard to properly apply the new products the team was trying to develop: they were all too thick. One solution was to rethink the original tube design and develop a novel application device. Similar to a pen clicking, a click would provide a metered dose, which was easier on the arthritic hand and did not require a squeezing force. With the glove on, it was much easier to click on the prototype device than it was to squeeze from a tube. Here, empathy provided the means to transcend a given problem, formulating questions that expand, illuminate, or otherwise open up the problem. Example 2: Improving Outpatient Services in a Health Care Clinic Recently, a team investigated how they might improve outpatient services for the family medicine clinic at a major urban hospital center. This is one of the busiest single-site clinics in the country, with over 80,000 patients per year. The team initiated a design workshop with the clinic’s providers to fully understand their challenges. One issue is the late patient who shows up 15 minutes after a scheduled appointment and the resulting stress on the provider, who still has to see that patient and then be late for other patients for the rest of the day. Business as usual — a slip of paper with the scheduled follow-up appointment and a phone call reminder to the patient — was clearly ineffective. The team thought about ways to assist patients to arrive on time for their appointments. They interviewed patients and providers, then prototyped and mocked up potential solutions. They used a storyboard technique to propose an app that would message patients at different times before their appointments, reminding them to show up on time. The team did not create anything brand new; there are existing platforms that accomplish the same thing. However, from the interviews with patients and from a review and analysis of precedents, they were able to ascertain that there are optimal times for reminder texts to be effective and to not be perceived as an annoyance. The team succeeded in proposing a solution that could be immediately implemented in the family medicine clinic, with a simple messaging app for the 90% of patients who had smartphones that could receive text messages. Example 3: Applying Collaborative Design Thinking to Find New Treatment Pathways for Disease Inspiration can come from just about anywhere — even from unrelated disciplines that enable us to examine problems from a fresh perspective. In this case, it was parents, not researchers, who recognized that cannabidiol (CBD) was effective in treating rare pediatric seizure disorders that were unresponsive to mainstream therapies. Investigators, regulators, and physicians took their cue from parents and brought Epidiolex to market. Reframing the question is another tactic in collaborative design thinking that facilitates new ways of examining a problem. Instead of asking, “Is there another, creative way of effectively destroying or removing cancer cells?” we might ask, “What if there is a different, perhaps better, means to achieve remission in a given case?” Articulating questions can be extremely valuable in determining whether or not they lead in a fruitful direction. Posing the right questions is a component in the design thinking loop that can be weighted heavily in the process to provoke a creative response. The innovative response to the “what if” question above involves a promising approach to transform the cancer cells rather than destroy them. Be mindful to pose questions that may be counterintuitive or completely off the wall to elicit the most potentially innovative responses. Obviously, specific and investigational treatment plans are far more complicated and individualized than suggested here, but the point is to demonstrate how bold new ideas can evolve from a different way of thinking. Closing the Gaps Not just for designers and architects, collaborative design thinking can be applied across many disciplines to solve real-world problems and reconcile dilemmas. Design thinking can infuse collaboration with a disciplined way of working; it can close many of the gaps in typically unfocused, occasional brainstorming sessions and attempts at collaboration that ultimately don’t work. While there is no magic formula, components of both collaboration and design thinking can be studied, systematically characterized, and rationally wedded to a process that yields effective and innovative solutions. * * * Andrew Pressman, FAIA, NCARB, is an architect and leads his own award-winning architectural firm in Washington, DC. He’s an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland and was Professor and Director of the Architecture Program at the University of New Mexico. He’s authored several critically acclaimed books on architectural business practice, collaboration, and design thinking for business and has been extensively published in such publications as Architectural Record, Architecture, and Washingtonian. He holds a master’s degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is the author of Design Thinking: A Guide to Creative Problem Solving for Everyone and Ideas — A Secret Weapon for Business: Think and Collaborate Like a Designer. * * * Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas. View the full article

Avoid SEO penalties from duplicate content. Discover how canonical links can help manage multiple domains without hurting rankings. The post Ask An SEO: How To Handle Duplicate Content Across Multiple Domains appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Mid-aughts news aggregator Digg is making a comeback, thanks to a pairing that would have seemd unlikely when the site debuted in 2004: Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former corporate rival, Reddit cofounder and former CEO Alexis Ohanian. The pair bought Digg from its prior owners Money Group in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The deal was supported by True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, as well as Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six fund. They know this is an unlikely pairing. “I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. “Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had VC funding, was in Silicon Valley . . . This was the birth of the new web 2.0 era. And he was getting the press, he was getting the funding.” The animosity was mutual. “When I first heard about Reddit, I remember somebody was like, oh, there’s this site that does voting like you guys do,” Rose recalled. “And I went to the site, and I was like, oh, those motherfuckers—they just copied our shit. And I was pissed.” Two decades later, Reddit is a publicly traded company with a $28 billion market capitalization and reigns supreme as the true “front page of the internet,” while Digg is a footnote in mid-aughts internet history. Rose has spent much of the time since Digg investing in companies—his fund has poured money into Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, among others. Over the years, however, Rose and Ohanian met and realized they had a lot in common and struck up a friendship. Now, Ohanian, who resigned from the Reddit board in 2020, is ready to help revive a company that he long warred with. He and Rose, along with Digg’s new CEO, web3 entrepreneur Justin Mezzell, want to reimagine social media, creating what they describe as an online ecosystem with better “vibes” than today’s combative platforms. Reviving Digg from obscurity Digg launched in 2004 where users could “digg” or “bury” content—similar to Reddit’s upvote and downvote system—a crowdsourced way to determine what made the site’s homepage. At its peak in 2009, Digg had about 44 million users and was a major driver of traffic to news organizations. After a messy redesign in 2010 alienated users, the site lost users and never really recovered. It was sold to the incubator Betaworks in 2012 for a reported $500,000 despite raising $45 million from venture capital. (Though LinkedIn bought its assets and patents for a rumored $4 million while the Washington Post hired much of its staff.) It was later sold to an adtech firm called BuySellAds in 2018 and then Money Group, which was its final steward before this sale. Despite numerous relaunches, Digg never recaptured its place in internet glory or its cultural relevance. Improving the internet’s vibe Rose and Ohanian share a common critique that today’s social media landscape has become toxic and exhausting. They simply want to bring good vibes back to the social web—if that’s possible. “Dude, it’s the vibes. Nostalgia is so hot right now,” Ohanian told me. “We’re in our early 40s. We’ve got kids. Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. I am nostalgic for the internet— forums, essentially. Forums taught me how to fix my computer. Strangers on the internet when I was a dorky teenager were willing to teach me things with their time because of this very simple software.” The internet he said was smaller and “felt less broken.” Rose wants to use artificial intelligence to handle the “janitorial work” of content moderation, freeing community members and leaders to handle more fulfilling tasks. They didn’t expand on this vision, but content moderation has been a hot topic of late with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, aggressively rolling back its content moderation policies after Twitter, now X under Elon Musk, did the same. “The dream is you can build a viable, healthy, great business with your users in a way that aligns their goals, their outcomes,” Ohanian said. “That is the dream scenario.” An aggregator for a new era The new Digg will depart from social media conventions in several ways, though Rose is hesitant to disclose much of what the team is working on. He does share that the site won’t have follower counts, an intention to move away from what he calls “popularity contests” that are common on social media. He also wants to give community members more ownership over their audiences, but didn’t give specifics how. “It’s insane to me that someone would spend five years of their life building up a community of millions of members and have basically no ownership over that community,” he said. The site will ultimately have what Rose called “good vibes, throwback, fresh coat of paint” that’s familiar to original Digg users but modernized for 2025. Digg will roll out invitations to the platform in the coming weeks and Rose said he wants to grow the site’s user base, which he says currently stands at 600,000 monthly users, to 20 million before committing to a specific revenue model (Twitter competitor Bluesky managed to gain 30 million followers in roughly a year from launch.) Rose says until then, the company is “well capitalized.” Rose says he doesn’t want to replace social media, but give a different experience and new ideas—even if they’re reminiscent of the past. “This is not about you reading a headline three months from now that Digg has replaced Reddit,” he says. “That’s not the goal here. It’s to reimagine what’s possible.” Ohanian adds that the intent is about more than just a nostalgia play. “Even on day one, I hope someone who’s never been to Digg is like, this feels fun. The internet can be fun.” View the full article

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. Remember the letter-writer wondering at what point they could report their inappropriate and inflammatory coworker? Here’s the update. I finally quit so now I can update. One of the details I was obfuscating before was that we’re both student workers in our 20s at a post-secondary institution. Unfortunately, I couldn’t apply too much of your advice because things got CRAZY basically immediately after, but I still greatly appreciated the advice and the sanity check from you and everyone who commented. My question got posted the week before U.S. election day. The first words Kevina said when she walked in the office that Monday were, “I’m preparing for election day by stocking up on ammo!” She then spent the rest of that day and the next giving the impression that she was looking forward to someone “trying something” so she would have the opportunity to use said ammunition. She also said something along the lines of “buying the good kind that destroys flesh” with a weird smile. And said the quickest way to clean up our office decorations would be to “set them on fire and let it spread,” also with a weird smile. So I pulled my boss aside on Wednesday and basically said what I said above, that I’ve taken school shooting and workplace violence prevention training and I’m feeling very uncomfortable and like if I didn’t say anything I’d be potentially culpable. My boss seems appalled and concerned and agrees Kevina isn’t the most stable person so the workplace violence concern isn’t unreasonable. Off we go to HR where she handles the talking but is vague and HR says that they’re a satellite location and just do paperwork but since she’s a student we should go talk to the dean of students. We go to the dean of students’ office and are told that she’s not there today and my boss says she’ll just text her. We go back to the office and get back to work. End of the day, my boss sends me a message basically saying that I (me, the part-time student worker, of course) have three avenues of reporting this and says she can help me with one of them the next day if I really want her to. I say, “Please help me with this tomorrow morning,” and she says, “Of course.” GUESS WHO ISN’T ON CAMPUS THE NEXT DAY! My boss had a meeting on a different campus and then didn’t respond to me asking what was happening until the office was closed that day. Turns out she didn’t text anyone even though she said she would AND she was going on vacation the next day and wouldn’t be back until the Monday after next. So the next day, I call the campus police and they don’t care because it wasn’t specific intent to do harm and I guess repeatedly stating she wants to bring a gun on campus doesn’t mean anything. They didn’t even want her name. but I can call them back if she actually brings a gun. So then I go back to the dean of students’ office and tell all this to someone there and they say they will report it but investigations take months and blah blah blah. So I keep working, ignoring this coworker who is much quieter than normal, probably because my boss said something to her again. And then she starts complaining that a student in one of her classes made a complaint against her to the dean of students’ office because, for a class presentation, she acted out killing herself with a butter knife to stand in for a real one and that made them uncomfortable. According to Kevina, the professor had okayed this demonstration so I kinda get the upset at the complaint, but then Kevina starts talking about how she’s worried the person who made the complaint will attack her and how she and her mom want to get a lawyer so they can find the identity of the person who complained. Because people are so sensitive these days and you never know what they’ll do. So I went back to the dean of students’ office and said that this is concerning to me as someone who has made a complaint since all of Kevina’s gun fantasies she talks about are her “defending herself” and she’s making herself out to be a victim here. Nothing comes from that complaint either that I can see, but I was able to change my schedule so my shifts never overlapped with hers again. After that, she made a huge scene at an all-staff event specifically to embarrass one (full-time, non-student) coworker. That coworker then ALSO made a complaint against her with a different dean. Other coworker says that, as a result, Kevina will have to do some sensitivity training and might have this noted in her file. So Kevina still has her job. The other coworker finally was able to transfer to another department, so I probably won’t be able to get any updates on this situation unless Kevina ends up on the news. Thinking about writing this update kept me sane while continuing to work there and got me to today, moving onto my next opportunity which will hopefully transition into a full-time job after I get my degree. View the full article

No, Mr President, they are not going to make America rich, great or popularView the full article

Brent drops below $70 a barrel following larger-than-expected increase in US crude stocksView the full article

Google enhances search with Gemini 2.0-powered AI Overviews and launches premium "AI Mode" for Google One subscribers. The post Google Upgrades AI Overviews With Gemini 2.0, Launches AI Mode appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Plus tips on how to set your strategy. By Jody Padar Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA Go PRO for members-only access to more Jody Padar. View the full article

Plus tips on how to set your strategy. By Jody Padar Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA Go PRO for members-only access to more Jody Padar. View the full article

March isn't the most exciting time of the year for casual skywatching, though there are two notable events: a total lunar eclipse in the middle of the month and the partial solar eclipse at the end. There are other reasons to head outside and look up too. Here's what you're looking for. March 13–14: Total lunar eclipse (Blood Moon)Late on the night of March 13, the entire moon will fall into the darkest part of Earth's shadow, creating a total lunar eclipse throughout the Western Hemisphere. Because of the alignment of the Sun, Earth, and moon—and the filtering of the Sun's light through Earth's atmosphere in between—the moon will appear red or orange, which is why it is also known as a Blood Moon. The partial eclipse starts just after 1 a.m. ET on March 14 when the moon begins to enter Earth's shadow, with totality expected between 2:26 a.m. and 3:31 a.m. ET. NASA notes that Jupiter and Mars will also be visible in the western sky that night, and constellations may appear brighter as the moon dims throughout the event. For ideal viewing, head somewhere with dark skies. March 29: Partial solar eclipseEclipses come in pairs, and this pair is rounded out with a partial solar eclipse on March 29 that can be seen from northeastern North America, northwestern Africa, and much of Europe. Most viewers in the U.S. will miss this one, as only a small portion of the sun will be obscured in New England, and maximum coverage will occur over the northernmost parts of Canada and Greenland. That said, early risers on the East Coast will be able to see the moon take a bite out of the Sun around sunrise, as the partial eclipse will already be underway. The event is expected to begin around 3:50 a.m. ET and end at 7:43 a.m. ET. Planet visibilityPlanet visibility is pretty good in March following February's impressive planet parade. Venus will be low in the western sky right after sunset for the first two weeks, while Mercury can be seen just below that for about a half hour. Mars will be in the east after sunset until around 3 a.m., and Jupiter can be viewed nightly in the west before 1 a.m. Zodiacal lightFinally, while there aren't any meteors to speak of until the Lyrids arrive in April, early spring is a great time to view zodiacal light. What looks like lingering twilight is actually believed to be sunlight reflecting off dust in the solar system. The phenomenon, which looks like hazy light emanating up from the horizon, is easiest to see around the equinox (March 20) but will be visible all spring whenever the moon is dark. View the full article

Google AI Mode is now here and available within Google Search Labs; it is a new search mode that goes beyond AI Overviews with a more immersive Google Search AI interface that provides “more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities,” Google announced. Google also announced that AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0 and that AI Overviews are now available for teenagers, a login is not required for access to these AI answers anymore. AI Mode AI Mode is a new tab within Google Search, right now only for those accepted into the Google Search Labs experiment, that brings you into a more AI-like interface. Google said AI Mode “is particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or comparisons are needed.” AI Mode lets you explore a topic and get comprehensive AI-based answers without you needing to do those comparisons and analyses yourself. We saw rumors of this news and it is finally officially here, for some of you. AI Mode uses a “query fan-out” technique that issues multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together to provide a response. Google said using this query fan-out method provides searchers with a “more breadth and depth of information than a traditional search on Google.” AI Mode supports searching with text, voice, and images through its multimodal capabilities. Plus, AI Mode offers the conversational follow-up questions like you’ve seen in AI Overviews and Gemini. What AI Mode looks like. Here is a video of AI mode in action on desktop search: Here is a similar example but on mobile search: How to access AI Mode. Google AI Mode again is currently only available with Labs access. In this case, Google will start accepting users who are Google One AI Premium subscribers first and then add more users later. Go to Google Search Labs and sign up for the experiment. Once you again access then you should be able to access AI Mode – here is how: Go to www.google.com, enter a question in the Search bar, and tap the “AI Mode” tab below the Search bar. Go directly to the AI Mode tab on Google Search at: google.com/aimode. In the Google app, tap the AI Mode icon below the Search bar on the home screen. Links in AI mode. Google told us, “like with AI Overviews, AI Mode prominently surfaces relevant links to help people find web pages and content they may not have discovered before.” And often, Google will show a different set of links and responses in AI Mode compared to what you might get in AI Overviews. “You can ask anything on your mind and get a helpful AI-powered response with the ability to go further with follow-up questions and helpful web links,” Google added. Google told us they use training models to “intelligently determine when and how to link and best present information so it’s most useful and actionable.” Then, the “teaching the model to decide when to include hyperlinks in the response if it’s likely that the user may want to take action or finish a task on a website (e.g. booking tickets). Or deciding when to prioritize visual information if the user’s question could benefit from an image or video (e.g. how-to queries).” Search Console. I asked if Google will show this data within Google Search Console or maybe, and we are all praying for it, let us filter these responses in the Search Console performance reports. But I received the typical PR answer from Google. Google said, “We currently don’t have anything to share about the reporting tools for this experiment, but will let you know if that changes.” I wish I had more to share here, and I know I’ve been on this topic since Google launched featured snippets over a decade ago, but hey, I won’t stop asking Google about this. AI Mode safety questions. As you may expect, Google is launching this with a bit of caution and a caveat that his is a new feature, only available in Search Labs, that you have to opt into. “As with any early-stage AI product, AI Mode won’t always get it right,” Google told us. Google also said they have been testing AI Mode “extensively with trusted testers and conducted rigorous internal evaluations using methods we’ve been honing for decades in Search.” Google will learn from real user usage and feedback and quickly respond and adapt AI Mode. This goes across when AI Mode is triggered, any inaccuracies or odd responses it provides, if the responses are opinionated or not, provide false equivalence responses, carry context across follow-up questions, if they offer query variety, satire and humor and more. This is new and I expect a lot of interesting examples share over social media and the mainstream media over the coming months. Video: Here is a quick video I made of Google AI Mode for those who prefer to watch and listen to a video: Gemini 2.0 powered AI Overviews Not to be outdone by the AI Mode announcement, Google AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0. This was being tested back in December, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, announced. But now we are here. Google said “Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with more on the way.” “With Gemini 2.0’s advanced capabilities, we provide faster and higher quality responses and show AI Overviews more often for these types of queries,” Google added. More availability. Plus, AI Overviews are now available to teenagers and no longer require a sign in to access it. View the full article

Training? Inadequate. Best recruitment method? Who knows? By CPA Trendlines Research Go PRO for members-only access to more CPA Trendlines Research. View the full article

Training? Inadequate. Best recruitment method? Who knows? By CPA Trendlines Research Go PRO for members-only access to more CPA Trendlines Research. View the full article

Who needs what? A checklist for making matches. By Ed Mendlowitz Tax Season Opportunity Guide Go PRO for members-only access to more Edward Mendlowitz. View the full article

Who needs what? A checklist for making matches. By Ed Mendlowitz Tax Season Opportunity Guide Go PRO for members-only access to more Edward Mendlowitz. View the full article