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There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!

The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.

I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.

On the call with reporters, Mr. Vladeck said he had little patience with Google’s explanation, and referred to other privacy violations about which Google has also said it was unaware, like collecting personal data with its Street View cars. “As a regulator, it is hard to know which answer is worse — I didn’t know or I did it deliberately,”

Google and other advertising companies use cookies, which are small files that contain information about Web users, to show personalized ads as Internet users travel around the Web. If an Internet user visits fashion Web sites, for instance, Google might show the person ads for clothing companies on other Web sites that person visits.

Increasingly, they judge our character.

Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements.

ZestFinance, is a former Google executive whose company writes loans to subprime borrowers through nonstandard data signals.

So far, many companies have tried to dispel such fears by noting that the data they gather, store and analyze remains "anonymous." But that, as it turns out, is not entirely accurate, in that it sells the power of data analysis radically short. Take the analysis of anonymous movement profiles, for example. According to a current study by the online journal Scientific Reports, our mobility patterns are so different that that they can be used to "uniquely identify 95 percent of the individuals." The more data is in circulation and available for analysis, the more likely it is that anonymity becomes "algorithmically impossible," says Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan. In his blog, Narayanan writes that only 33 bits of information are sufficient to identify a person.

A study by New York advertising agency Ogilvy One concludes that 75 percent of respondents don't want companies to store their personal data, while almost 90 percent were opposed to companies tracking their surfing behavior on the Internet.

Is it truly desirable for cultural assets like TV series or music albums to be tailored to our predicted tastes by means of data-driven analyses? What happens to creativity, intuition and the element of surprise in this totally calculated world?

Many workers aren’t even getting the pay they’ve been promised for the work they do. Complaints of wage theft, like that experienced by NFL cheerleaders, jumped by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011. It’s rampant in some industries: 89 percent of fast food workers say they’ve been made to work for free off the clock, denied overtime pay, or simply paid less than minimum wage. More is stolen from low-wage workers than is robbed from banks, gas stations, and convenience stores combined. Lawmakers in a handful of cities and two states, Colorado and New York, have passed anti-wage theft ordinances to crack down on companies that steal wages and make it easier for workers to bring claims.

Keeping Your Skill Set Current Can Be Key to Keeping Your Job Small and midsize companies can’t afford to not keep up with technology, and neither can enterprise-level companies. This past fall, IBM notified employees, who it had determined needed additional training, they were required to step up their technological game, and that they would receive only 90% of their salary while embarking upon this additional training. Talk about an incentive to stay on top of changes in technology ! According to the article in the New York Times covering this move, some IBM workers received an email letting them know that an assessment had determined certain members of the team had “not kept pace with acquiring the skills and expertise needed to address changing client needs, technology and market requirements.” While some criticized the move, the reality is that employees can no longer be complacent when it comes to their grasp of technology and how to use it to help their businesses grow. That’s something to keep in mind, for sure, whether you’re just embarking on a career or whether you’re already in the workforce and want to make sure you have the skills you need to stay marketable.

The Modern Worker Needs to Be Constantly Learning

Wainhouse Research, a consulting firm in Duxbury, Mass., estimates that a knowledge worker — one whose job focuses on handling information — in the United States spends an average of 104 minutes each month in conference ca

lls. Such calls have become an orgy of multitasking, serving as a backdrop for a free-for-all of household chores, personal hygiene, online shopping and last-minute income tax filing

Mr. Reece asks his clients to use videoconferencing. He says there are always people who will resist, telling him their Internet connection is too weak, for example. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he asks that they put up a still photo. “Even if you only get a photo, it’s more humanizing,” he said.

To Get a Job in Your 50s, Maintain Friendships in Your 40s

researchers found that older people on average had smaller social networks than younger people, Professor Wanberg said. This is not necessarily bad — as we age, many of us find that the quality of our relationships is more important than the quantity. But in the job search process, the number of connections we maintain in our professional and personal networks is often critical.

Once you hit your early 40s, even if you are not looking for a job, work to learn new skills and stretch yourself, Professor Wanberg said. Also, keep your networks strong by staying in touch with former colleagues and classmates, along with current co-workers and clients whom you don’t see regularly, she said.

About two million people a day now use Slack, mainly to chat with others at work. On Tuesday, the company is unveiling a couple of initiatives that will add new capabilities to the system. The first is an app store that will let developers of business software more easily plug their programs into Slack. Together with its investors, the company is also creating an $80 million fund to invest in apps that can be integrated with Slack.

Atlassian makes HipChat, one of Slack’s chief rivals, which also offers integration with other applications.

In its first incarnation, the directory will feature 150 apps that are compatible with Slack, including programs from Google, Twitter, Dropbox and Box.

HSN (NASDAQ: HSNI), a multichannel retailer in St. Petersburg, is the only company from the Tampa Bay area to hit the 40 percent level, according to a recent report from the advocacy group 2020 Women on Boards. Nationally, women hold 18.8 percent of board seats, while the percentage of board seats held by women at Tampa Bay’s largest public companies is 14.3 percent.