Looking for a silver lining in the mess stirred up by the discovery of a major flaw in the software used by many internet sites to encrypt your passwords and other private data?

Good news: The so-called “Heartbleed” bug has delayed tax day.

But only if you are Canadian. US taxpayers still have to file by this coming Tuesday, April 15. And those who use the Turbotax tax-preparation software may want to change their passwords, if they recently visited a Turbotax support website.

The Heartbleed bug affected servers that relied on the OpenSSL encryption software—among them those at Canada’s Revenue Agency. A patch for the problem is now available, but Canadian tax officials shut down their filing site on April 9 and announced that they’ll extend the country’s April 30 tax deadline for at least the number of days that the site remains shuttered. (The site was still down as of April 12 at 3pm.)

The US Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, issued a one-paragraph statement saying its systems weren’t affected by the bug, and took the opportunity to remind taxpayers to “continue filing their tax returns as they normally would in advance of the April 15 deadline.”

Some US taxpayers, however, might not have escaped the bug’s bite entirely. Most major US tax-related online services appear to have used something other than OpenSSL to keep their customer’s data private. At least, they weren’t listed as potentially vulnerable on lists maintained by Mashable.

The United Services Automobile Association (which offers tax-preparation services too) and Intuit, the makers of Turbotax, however, confirmed that some of their servers used OpenSSL. Both companies said they applied the patch intended to solve the problem before the bug’s existence was made public last week. Intuit also said that “the vast majority of our servers do not use the version of SSL that was vulnerable,” and “We’re confident that TurboTax is safe to you [sic].”

If you’re skeptical, however, security experts recommend that you change your passwords on the sites, now that each has applied the relevant code fix. It’s probably a good idea to do it, and file your returns, by Tuesday.

For sports fans, the spectacle of red-faced, screaming coaches—even more than daffodils and chirping birds—is a harbinger of spring. Occasionally, the rage of some of those men (and they are overwhelmingly men) has overflowed into headline-grabbing incidents and viral YouTube clips: former Dodgers coach Tommy LaSorda tackling a mascot, for example, or Newcastle United manager Alan Pardew head-butting a player—not to mention the train wreck of court-side meltdowns at last month’s NCAA college basketball tournament.

Whether all that gesticulating and cursing helps motivate players is unclear, but the apoplectic coaches have served at least one useful purpose—for science. A new study (paywall) uses coaches as examples of perfectionists, and links different perfectionist types to how the coaches handle stress. It suggests that the ones with the noisiest, most colorful displays are reacting just as much to what people are saying outside the game as to what’s happening on the field.

“Lots of coaches display features of perfectionism,” Andrew Hill, a psychologist from the University of Leeds, told Quartz. “It could be that sports can require flawlessness/exceptional performance; they promote perfectionistic tendencies among coaches and athletes.”

Broadly speaking, perfectionists come in two brands: those who set their own high standards, and those who strive to meet other people’s standards of success. The study of  227 young coaches found that those who measure themselves against public opinion have a very hard time controlling their anger, compared with those who rely on strictly internal measures, such as a team’s performance.

Interestingly, it was the coaches with high personal standards and high sensitivity to outside pressure—the mixed perfectionists—that were the most prone to angry outbursts.

Since this study looked at a cross-section of coaches relatively early in their career, it doesn’t prove that these mixed perfectionist traits are present in the coaches that make it to the upper echelons of sport. But it seems possible that such a combustable combination is at play within those irate coaches hopping up and down at the sidelines on television: Presumably, many successful coaches wouldn’t be where they are if not for high personal standards. And, in a world where the web has turned every fan into a potential pundit, it is probably difficult to ignore outside expectations.

Yelling might be a little more accepted in sports than in other workplaces, but a boss’s poor anger management can affect the performance of subordinates—from athletes to Wall Street traders (video). Research suggests that negative emotional displays (including anger) can erode employee trust.

And of course, a coach or manager with a short fuse could risk losing his or her job. On the other hand, since some research shows that angry people might live shorter lives, getting fired could be a boon to a stressed perfectionist’s long-term health.

A select group of members of the press were invited to a preview of the new prototype business class seat which the aviation tech geniuses at Thales have designed in collaboration with B/E Aerospace, one of the two world-dominating aircraft seat manufacturers, and BMW, who make some nice cars.

This completely radical prototype design merges all the features you’d want in a lie-flat comfortable premium aircraft seat, alongside your favorite full-immersion entertainment experience at home.

Then it ramps that blend up with some sci-fi, movie-making future-vision tech.

Here are the top features which made us think twice about the future waiting for us in the aircraft cabin.

1. The seat knows who you are and what you want

It is designed to remember you, based on a direct-connect to your personal electronic device. When you place your device on the side panel, the seat’s voyeur-smart computerized system connects to your social profiles and reads your data footprint to learn what you like when you travel and in every other area of your life.

It uses all that Big Data to determine what content you’re likely to want to watch on the big screen which tilts as you do, as well as what position you’ll like your seat to be in, what color side panel active video display it should play to help you chill out, what kind of massage setting you enjoy, and what your favorite onboard food is.

It probably also knows what you got up to in Vegas, but according to Thales, it won’t tell.

2. It has surround sound

The super-plush headrests will guarantee that any entertainment you hear onboard will sound like it’s happening right next to you.

Which could be good or bad, depending on what movie you’ve chosen to watch.

3. The very large entertainment screen tilts as you do in the seat

The in-flight entertainment system (IFE) is visually controlled … by your eyes. Yes, your eyes. Look at the icon on the screen for a movie you like, and it plays. Look away to ask a flight attendant for a fresh drink, it pauses. Look back, it starts the movie again. Fall asleep, it pauses. Wake up, it starts up again.

There is a way to keep it from doing that, but Thales believes that you’d want it to be this responsive.

4. The vision-control system is so sophisticated that it can read your facial features well enough to run a health-check

It could test your vision for you and recommend glasses. We’re not making that up. Thales assured us it is true. It can even read your Poker Face, and determine whether you’re lying to the person you’re trying to chat up across the aisle. It could then send them a warning message through the interactive communication system onboard.

We are making that up. Maybe.

5. It’s going to fly

In around five years, or possibly sooner, we’ll enjoy this onboard forward-thinking airlines. Thales, B/E, and BMW don’t have a firm customer for the seat yet, but they’re pretty confident one is on the way. Full certification testing for the seat will take a bit, but it’s practically ready to go — thanks to B/E’s expertise in this area.

Their optimistic timeline for delivery, should an airline want it sooner, is three years.

This post originally appeared at Skift. More from our partner:

5 Features of Airbus’ New A350 That Will Make the Passenger Experience Better

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Missing Malaysia Jet Had Room to Land Among Andaman Island Chain

One pizzetta, topped with prosciutto and cut into a few pieces to share. Five charred asparagus stalks underneath a poached egg. A finger of raw sablefish, succumbing in seconds to colliding forks. Toasty breadsticks and sauces for everyone to dip them in.

If this is dinner, where is the main course?

“Small plates dining” has been making noise at American tapas bars and on high-end tasting menus for at least a decade, but it now appears to be entering the mainstream. Ten years ago, all five of the inaugural James Beard Award nominees for Best New Restaurant hewed more or less to America’s traditional menu format dividing starters and mains; of last year’s nominees, you’ll find only one—San Francisco’s 60-seat Rich Table, which cultivates a spontaneous and communal vibe notwithstanding its traditional menu structure. On the other end of the dining spectrum, big chains like Friday’s and Olive Garden are reworking their menus to feature small plates, too. Underlying this trend is the restauranteurs’ belief that small-plates dining encourages consumers to have a more entertaining night out—and also a more expensive one.

Subtly, “small plates” often means two things at once. The first aspect is “dishes for sharing”—which represents a chance for us restauranteurs to push you, our guests, into more conversation and conviviality. We’ll do whatever we can to get you to have a better time, because success for us requires that we move beyond serving delicious food and into the business of creating compelling experiences.

“I want to create a space where people are forced to interact with each other,” says Charlie Hallowell, who opened his third Oakland restaurant, Penrose, earlier this year, featuring a “small plates” style menu. “I’m really interested in throwing a party.” Hallowell’s approach works – his restaurants are full every night they’re open.

A “small plates” menu also usually means that the dishes aren’t timed by the kitchen – instead, they’re cooked as soon as possible and brought to their table in whatever order they are completed. This tends to get food to the table as quickly as possible, which makes for happy guests. And, eschewing coursed meals allows some restaurants to save money by not employing an “expediter” to coordinate the cooks’ timing. That makes for one fewer job on the payroll, in an industry where labor is almost always a business’s highest expense.

More importantly, between fast ticket times, tables that turn more quickly, and the rowdy chaos of guests ordering and eating at a rapid pace, small plates offer crowded venues the promise of increased revenue. One San Francisco small-plates chef I know says his guests spend a lot more money in less time, due to their food arriving so quickly. “They keep ordering more and more because they don’t feel full yet,” he told me, “and then suddenly they’re stuffed, they’re ready to leave, and they have a really big tab.”

Creating big guest checks is important because even successful operators like Hallowell struggle to get revenue high enough to cover the costs of both premium ingredients and livable wages for their employees. “Part of the small plates thing is that we’re all trying to figure out how to get as much food out,” Hallowell says, “how to get people to buy as many cocktails as we can, because we’re all trying to figure out how to make it. The starting rate for cooks hasn’t risen in 20 years, and if you look at menus at Chez Panisse, entrees have gone up only $2 in 20 years. But housing prices here have tripled. We’re serving locally farmed, organic food, but we can’t charge what it costs, because people go to the grocery store and they see prices for crap food that’s all government subsidized.”

As important as revenue is, there’s yet another reason small-plates dining is so popular with restauranteurs: small-plates dining is the kind of dining that many of us in the restaurant industry most enjoy. That’s partly because the small, focused, high-quality dishes evoke the tasting menus of our industry’s most celebrated chefs—Rene Redzepi, Thomas Keller and others. And it’s also because sharing plates with friends is how we express our joy of food and hospitality when we’re not on the job. If you dine out with industry people, you know what I’m talking about—it’s assumed that everybody will share every dish that’s ordered, and if you try to order something just for yourself, your companions may well forget and eat off your plate anyway.

So, yes: small plates dining is a format that is good for our finances. But don’t overlook its emotional impact on those of us who run restaurants. We may at first scheme these kind of menus because they produce more revenue, but in the end we come to love them because they produce more togetherness.

Follow Jay on Twitter @eltakeiteasy. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Like most library students, I learned about the Dewey Decimal System, the Library of Congress, and the father of the American public library, Andrew Carnegie. But I also learned about the necessary transformation of the library in the 21st century.

In order to survive, it was hammered into our brains again and again, a library has to be more than just a “brick and mortar” receptacle of books. It needs to be a technical hub, a community center, a place you might go instead of Starbuck’s.

So I’m happy to see libraries as “more than books” so often in the news today, whether it’s lending out tools and fishing poles, providing recording equipment for aspiring musicians, or offering classes and even a chance for community members to earn their high school diplomas.

However, while these ideas may seem new, they’re long part of a forgotten piece of American history: the settlement house. Namely, Jane Addams’s Hull House of Chicago.

Jane Addams was born the youngest of nine children to a well-to-do family. Her father, John Addams, was a member of the Illinois Senate for 16 years and a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, and while her mother died when Addams was only two, she was forever inspired by memories of her mother’s kindness to the poor.

With her father’s encouragement, Addams first attended college at the Rockford Female Seminary, then at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. Although she didn’t complete her degree due to the health issues, she continued her voracious reading habit, eventually stumbling on the idea of starting a settlement house.

The settlement movement began in the 1880s with the “goal of getting the rich and poor in society to live more closely together in an interdependent community.” The first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, was established in London in 1884. Addams visited Toynbee Hall in the late 1880s and described it as “so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries.”

In 1889—the same year that the first Carnegie library was built—Addams founded Hull House in Chicago, the first settlement house in the U.S.

Hull House offered a variety of services that seem like precursors to the services that libraries are providing today. Like the Arizona libraries that have added public health nurses, Addams and her Hull House co-founder Ellen Gates Starr “volunteered as on-call doctors when the real doctors either didn’t show up or weren’t available.” They also “acted as midwives, saved babies from neglect, prepared the dead for burial, nursed the sick, and sheltered domestic violence victims.”

Volunteers “held classes in literature, history, art, domestic activities (such as sewing),” and practical courses such as bookbinding, “which was timely—given the employment opportunities in the growing printing trade,” which sounds a lot like the free computer classes offered by many public libraries today.

Hull House also provided music lessons (to the likes of a 10-year old Benny Goodman) and helped usher in the Little Theater movement, giving roots to the famed Chicago improvisational theater scene, which would give rise to The Second City.

Of course Carnegie libraries offered an invaluable service—the democratization of knowledge—but where Carnegie libraries provided book knowledge, one could argue that organizations like Hull House provided life knowledge.

Unfortunately in 2012 Hull House was forced to close due to bankruptcy. While settlement houses still exist today, their purpose has changed, focusing instead on “early education, youth guidance and crime intervention, senior programs, and specialized programs for young people who have ‘aged out’ of the foster care system.”

This is where public libraries have stepped in and hopefully can continue to do so. Perhaps as more libraries go digital, this will be free up resources to provide more services and learning opportunities in a different way — in the way of Jane Addams’s Hull House.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

China might not be willing to relocate its capital city, but it can make it bigger. The country’s top economic planner has reportedly drawn up a plan for a Beijing-centered “economic circle” (link in Chinese) that combines the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin and parts of Hebei province into one huge megalopolis.

Officials believe that integrating the three areas will help alleviate traffic, population, and housing pressure in Beijing, which is struggling with air pollution, water scarcity, and a flood of migrant workers. Last month, officials said that some administrative bodies in Beijing would be offloaded to Baoding, a nearby medium-sized city in Hebei. Other initiatives range from a joint plan for improving air quality to expanding transportation links so that more families opt to live outside Beijing, easing demand for housing in the capital.

The effect would be to create one of the country’s largest regions—already colloquially known as “Jing-Jin-Ji” (for (Bei)jing, (Tian)jin and Hebei, which is sometimes referred to by the character ji). Already, Hebei is China’s 12th largest province in terms of area—adding on Beijing and Tianjin would increase its total area to about 216,000 sq. km (83,400 sq. miles)—bigger than the total area of Uruguay. The combined economic output of Jing-Jin-Ji surpassed 6 trillion yuan ($970 billion) last year, accounting for about 10.9% of the country’s total GDP. The area’s total population is over 100 million, more than that of Germany or Vietnam.

However, it’s not clear that this will help conditions in Beijing. Hebei province is a poor steel-making region that isn’t likely to attract workers away from Beijing. Some cities like Yanjia function as suburbs of Beijing, but most of its residents still work in the capital, which doesn’t alleviate traffic.

Moreover, if the new “economic circle” is more or less a larger version of Beijing—which is already built around six concentric and interminably congested “ring roads” (beltways), it may just worsen Beijing’s urban problems. “I’m a great critic of the way Beijing has developed,” Jan Wampler, an architect at MIT, told the Wall Street Journal. Officials are currently building another ring road to connect to Hebei, to help the integration process. Wampler adds, “You can’t continue to build ring roads. It’s got to stop sometime.”

This article has been corrected.

The final rounds of the US Masters golf tournament are played this weekend, but this year’s edition of what is arguably the sport’s most prestigious event is already different. For the first time in 20 years, Tiger Woods isn’t participating, due to injury.

Even in 2009, when Woods began a self-imposed exile from the sport he had dominated so convincingly for years, he still managed to make it back to the circuit in time for the iconic golf tournament.

And this year, the absence of Woods—who has won the contest four times—is being acutely felt. One stark indicator is a sharp drop in the resale prices of tickets (known as badges) for this weekend’s rounds.

Like so much to do with this iconic tournament (including the green jackets), the ticketing process for the Masters is unique. One way to get access is to be a member of the highly secretive Augusta National Golf Club (which, after years of pressure, only recently admitted its first female members). There’s a waiting list for tickets available to the general public, but it has been closed since 2000 (before that, it last opened in 1978). Starting in 2012, a limited number of single-day tickets was also made available through a lottery, but they are also extremely hard to come by.

There is, however, a secondary market for Masters badges being sold by those who were lucky enough to get them. (Officially you aren’t allowed to sell your badge —arrests were even made in 2012—but hundreds of tickets are exchanged on the secondary markets each year.) This year, prices are way down. The average price of a US Master’s badge fell 10% in the two days following Woods’s withdrawal on April 1, according to SeatGeek, which tracks prices on secondary markets for many sports. Since then it has trended steadily downward, in direct contrast to rising prices last year.

“Barring the development of a dramatic storyline over the weekend that drives badge prices back up, this could be the least-expensive Masters we see for quite some time, assuming Tiger is back and healthy for tournaments in the coming years,” SeatGeek analyst Connor Gregoire tells Quartz.

Even the stock price of Nike, Woods’ main sponsor, is down sharply since he dropped out, hitting a one-month low on April 11 (albeit in a falling market). It has been estimated that Woods’s presence in last year’s tournament generated $3.8 million in media value for Nike.

Call it the Tiger effect. We’ll get a better sense for just how large Tiger looms over the sport of golf next week when TV ratings are out. But despite the emergence of some new stars (including defending Masters champ Adam Scott and 24-year-old Northern Irishman Rory McIllroy) golf could face a difficult period commercially when Woods, now 38, retires. Basketball, for example, underwent a period of soul searching when Michael Jordan quit the game.

Woods hasn’t actually emerged victorious at Augusta since 2005, and only recently reclaimed his world number one ranking in March last year. But it seems that in the eyes of the American public at least, it’s still his tournament, and his sport.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this piece identified Nike as the main sponsor of Quartz, rather than of Tiger Woods. Nike has no relationship with Quartz.

On Monday, the makers of the most widely-used security software on the web announced a bug—Heartbleed—that exposed millions of people’s data and passwords, perhaps the worst breach in the relatively young life of the internet as we know it. On Wednesday, Toyota joined GM in recalling millions of its cars. At this pace, more cars will be returned to automakers by Americans this year than ever before.

And have we mentioned bananas are dying out?

The global economy seems to lend itself to these situations. How did your passwords get exposed? A volunteer working to maintain open-source cryptography software made a simple error. For two years, no one noticed, but millions of companies were relying on it (because it was free) to protect customers’ financial transactions and Facebook pictures. Why so many faulty cars? In part, because cheap mass production demands the same parts be used in as many cars as possible: In GM’s case, millions of ignition switches just 1.6 millimeters too short. Why are we losing our bananas? Industrial farmers and poor countries alike have largely relied on just a single species of banana, the Cavendish, that is easy to grow and transport—but quickly succumbing to epidemic disease.

It won’t be the first banana species to have gone virtually extinct, let alone the first monoculture crop to prove vulnerable. But the Heartbleed bug and mass car recalls stem from a similar over-reliance on one variety to maximize efficiency. In the case of cars and bananas, the cost of fixing the problem at first seems too high, but then becomes both enormous and unavoidable; GM’s decision to delay addressing its ignition problem because it cost too much brings to mind Ford’s dallying over the Pinto recalls of the 1970s. With Heartbleed, the cost is still unclear. What is clear is that in a globalized, standardized, monoculture world, one unexpected error can quickly become everyone’s problem.—Tim Fernholz

Five things on Quartz we especially liked

How Angela Merkel is rewriting Germany’s relationship with Russia. The chancellor has quietly shed her predecessors’ chummy closeness with Russian leaders, writes Jason Karaian, and changed a doctrine of “business as usual under almost any circumstances” for a tougher insistence on European unity and international law.

Debunking Narendra Modi’s economic record. The front-runner for prime minister of India worries many with his rightwing politics but is praised for his economic record as chief minister of Gujarat. Heather Timmons and Arshiya Khullar dig into a long list of indicators and find that on most counts Gujarat remains undistinguished, and on some has slipped.

Fitness trackers could bring back the oldest form of birth control. New technology, meet ancient tradition. By allowing women to track when they’re most fertile, apps and electronic bracelets could help them avoid pregnancy by the rhythm method, writes Rachel Feltman—though they and their partners will still need good old-fashioned self-discipline.

Americans’ love of their dogs is getting a little weird. Judging by demographic and pet ownership data, young people are starting to substitute small dogs for babies, Roberto Ferdman finds. And judging by sales of high-end pet food, they think their dogs deserve to eat better than they do.

What life was like in the world of Mad Men. The final season of the hit TV show starts on April 13, and we put together this series of charts comparing the America of 1970 with the country of today. (People drank more booze, more milk, more coffee, but less soda.)

Five things elsewhere that made us smarter

Why futurology is a booming business despite being largely wrong. Bryan Appleyard at the New Statesman looks at some of the most prominent practitioners of techno-utopianism and concludes that their belief systems are “structurally identical” to doomsday preachers, who as it happens also operate at the intersection of money and faith.

What it’s like living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. David Adam is a science writer, but his OCD made him paranoid beyond all rationality about picking up diseases or passing them on himself. In a book extract published in the Guardian, he explains how he came to confront the real problem, and, at least partly, to solve it.

Our biases have extraordinary power to make us stupid. Ezra Klein in Vox on new research showing that not only do people misinterpret data to suit their political views, they’re even more likely to do it if they’re better at math. Worth reading in conjunction with Chris Mooney’s 2011 piece in Mother Jones on why climate-change skeptics aren’t convinced by the evidence. And perhaps Christie Nicholson in Smartplanet about how bad we are even at assessing ourselves accurately.

The hidden destruction that killing in war wreaks on a mind. Some 22 US veterans commit suicide a day. Kevin Sites in Aeon recounts how psychologists discovered that “moral injury,” the guilt born of taking another person’s life, can do more damage than post-traumatic stress order, which it can be masked by or mistaken for.

Samsung’s long war over cancer. Dozens of Koreans have developed acute forms of leukemia after exposure to carcinogens in Samsung’s factories. In Businessweek, Cam Simpson has a fascinating, sad, and important investigation into the long fight between the company and its workers.

Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, Mad Men statistics, and futurology predictions to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.

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It wasn’t pretty this week for American investors. The S&P posted its worst weekly loss since 2012. The Nasdaq Composite notched its worst two-day turn since 2011 as the tech-heavy index slid 1.3% to finish the week down more than 3%.

For many of the previously high-flying stocks bearing the brunt of the recent beating, things were worse. Twitter lost 7.2% during the week and mobile-gaming firm King Digital—which has had a hard run since its recent IPO—fell another 7.5%. Tesla fell 4%. Amazon.com lost 3.5%. (Facebook actually managed a nice gain.)

If the US tech sector wants to feel better, it could look at Japan. With the yen strengthening, the wheels really seem to be coming off the Abenomics trade that made Japanese stocks some of the world’s best performers last year.

How things change. In 2014, Japanese equities are having some of the worst runs globally. And that was certainly the case this week, as the Nikkei 225 fell another 7.3% to bring it down more than 14% this year.

The big winner of the week? China. The mainland benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose 3.5% on the week, its best weekly performance in more than two months. Chinese markets got a lift from an announcement that there would soon be increased linkages allowing equity trading between Hong Kong and mainland China. The rise of Chinese markets—despite less than sizzling economic data this week—suggests investors are betting that the mini-stimulus the government just announced could be the start of a broader push at propping up growth in the People’s Republic.

Last month, a column in the Guardian argued that business schools’s academic traditions present a “fatal barrier to the sustainability agenda” as “social issues count for little in mainstream business education.”

But a number of MBAs might argue otherwise, particularly those competing in the numerous social venture competitions that have become a rite of business school spring.

Take Fresh Coast Capital, a team of students from Kellogg School of Management, who see promise—and profits—in America’s contaminated wastelands.  The group, which won the Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge last week, has a plan to help address the $650-billion problem of the nation’s brownfields—that’s 5 million acres of land in the US blighted by industrial contamination—by planting poplar trees. And they say they can make money doing it: The trees would detoxify the land and increase its value to the tune of 10% returns.

Business pitch competitions have become important launching grounds for social enterprises, as “impact investing”—which seeks to fuse profits and purpose—is increasingly popular among MBAs, tapping into millennials’ aspirations as changemakers in what some call the purpose economy. In addition to Morgan Stanley’s competition, co-sponsored by Kellogg and INSEAD, this season’s social innovation challenges include: Harvard’s Pitch for Change; Wharton and Bridges Ventures’ MBA Impact Investing Network & Training Program competition; Tufts’ New Venture Social Entrepreneurship track; and the Global Social Venture match-up.

These events also suggest that impact investing may start making more headway in commercial capital markets: As well as the competition for MBAs, this year Morgan Stanley created both an Institute for Sustainable Investing and its multi-billion Investing with Impact Platform. Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have also recently upped their commitments to impact investing, through social impact bonds and other kinds of community investment initiatives.  Internationally, the G-8 Social Impact Investing Task Force, formed last June in the UK, met again this week in Paris to prepare recommendations for fostering the market worldwide.

Despite the momentum of impact investing, not every social or environmental problem has a market solution, and many “innovations” do not succeed beyond the business plan. Even if they do, hard-nosed investors seek profit and require data and scale: this is why Morgan Stanley sought proposals for financing instruments rather than operating enterprises—what they call “institutional quality investment vehicles”—that can produce positive social or environmental benefits and “competitive” financial returns.

The “poplars team” outperformed submissions from 230 students across 40 schools and 10 countries, including proposals to securitize timber rights in Costa Rica, lease residential solar lighting in Nepal, and lend to small-scale fisheries in the US. The judges said the winners presented the most compelling thesis: plant poplar trees to decontaminate brownfield sites, and generate financial returns from the remediation service, the appreciation of the value of the land, and sales of timber products.

Next up, the true challenge: moving from the classroom to boardroom, and finding investors.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.