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It's lunchtime at a company called LifeSize in Austin, Texas. A dozen employees are playing beach volleyball on a sand court next to the parking garage behind their offices. Corrine Heery, a 28-year-old financial analyst, says she loves the "midday endorphin rush." And, that it enhances her bragging rights when discussing her work with friends, stating, "it's not just the business side, it's this side too — people getting along and playing fun sports."

Lunchtime volleyball is part of the new image that the company – which sells video conferencing technology — is trying to cultivate to attract millennials like Heery. Her generation is highly sought after in today's technology sector for their dexterity with devices and their ability to adapt to constant change.

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LifeSize CEO and baby boomer Craig Malloy says that two years ago his company's culture and its products were outdated. The clunky big-screen televisions and swiveling cameras it manufactured were being replaced by computer and phone applications. Malloy says he needed millennials to help create smaller and simpler technology.

"People in my generation will never be as comfortable, and as up to speed with what's happening on social media and web applications," he says.

So Malloy instituted a company facelift modeled after Silicon Valley start-up companies. He introduced employee perks that appeal to young people, like group exercise and free food. And Malloy says the changes are paying off.

"We're seeing more interest from a younger generation of software and hardware developer maybe that would consider a company like Nest or Google," he says. "And now we're able to compete for that talent."

Changes Spark Generational Protests

The company now focuses on mobile apps, and software that requires minimal technology to use — like a remote control with one button. But not all of the changes at LifeSize have been embraced. One in particular has been divisive across generations of employees.

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CEO Craig Malloy sits at his work station. One of the transitions he's made at LifeSize includes giving up offices — including his own — in favor of a more open design. Nicole Beemsterboer/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Nicole Beemsterboer/NPR

CEO Craig Malloy sits at his work station. One of the transitions he's made at LifeSize includes giving up offices — including his own — in favor of a more open design.

Nicole Beemsterboer/NPR

By next year, nearly all LifeSize employees will be moved out of their offices, sitting at work stations that have just a few feet of sheer glass separating colleagues, leaving minimal privacy.

Malloy says that kind of office set up fosters collaboration, and he hopes, innovative ideas. But baby boomer employees protested so much, he decided to be the first to make the transition. "I knew that if I moved out of my office into the open area, no one would have a leg to stand on complaining that they can't get their job done," he says.

Larry Danko's dissatisfaction with the new floor plan isn't just about getting work done. "I earned a window. That was important to me," he says.

The 66-year-old manager has accepted that he will lose his office in the transition, but he is not looking forward to it. Like many Baby Boomers, he views a private office as symbolic of a person's level of achievement, and value.

Danko says he has accepted he will lose his office in the transition, but that he is not looking forward to it. Like many baby boomers, he views a private office as symbolic of a person's level of achievement, and value.

Tony Vida, a 31-year-old IT manager, feels differently. "I think change is inevitable," he says.

Vida doesn't see the changes at his office as being about one generation or another. Instead, he says it's part of the natural evolution of how work gets done over time.

“ I knew that if I moved out of my office into the open area, no one would have a leg to stand on complaining that they can't get their job done.

- Craig Malloy, LifeSize CEO

"I'm sure everyone that used to have an in and out folder on their desk waiting for paper notes didn't want to do the whole e-mail thing," he says.

But some experts say evolution that happens too quickly can cause problems.

"What happens is a lot of over correcting. [Employees] try too hard to focus on that young demo. Often I think they not only alienate the older [employees], but sometimes it backfires," says Sharalyn Orr, a management consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates, a firm that advises companies on public relations, marketing and management.

Malloy acknowledges that the changes at his company have been too much for some older staff members.

"We have lost baby boomer employees. No one has said to me 'there's no way I'm going to move into an open floor plan environment, I'm out of here.' But we have had some push back. On the other hand most businesses are not a democracy. I like to say they're a benevolent dictatorship."

And Malloy — the benevolent dictator — says his company needs to change with the industry. Even if that means leaving some people behind.

As the CIA and Senate Intelligence Committee clash over whether so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are considered torture, another question arises: Have depictions of torture on TV and film helped convince us that it works?

Consider this warning that recently greeted viewers of ABC's political soap opera, Scandal:

"The following drama contains adult content. Viewer discretion is advised."

That label was slapped on the episode because of scenes like the moment when trained torturer Huck prepared to ply his trade on colleague (and soon-to-be girlfriend) Quinn Perkins.

"Normally, I'd start with the drill or a scalpel," he told Perkins, who was bound and gagged, looking on in terror. "Peeling off the skin can be beautiful. Or removing fingers, toes; I like the feeling of a toe being separated from a foot. ... I'm so sorry, because I'm going to enjoy this."

Scenes like that have become a regular part of some popular TV shows and movies. People may disagree in real life, but in Hollywood, torture works.

From Kiefer Sutherland as hard-nosed government agent Jack Bauer on Fox's 24, growling this threat to a bad guy: "You probably don't think that I can force this towel down your throat. Trust me, I can."

To Liam Neeson's ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills, shocking a man for information in the movie Taken: "You either give me what I need, or this switch stays on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill."

There's just one problem with these scenes, according to former FBI agent and interrogation expert Joe Navarro: "None of it works," he says. "I've done thousands of interviews, and I can tell you, none of [the TV torture stuff] works."

Navarro spent 25 years in the FBI, with much of that time spent training others in interrogation techniques. He says treating terrorists humanely and empathizing with them works better than abusing them.

But those softer tactics often surprise trainees raised on TV police dramas and spy movies. "Some of the younger guys were I think really surprised when we came in and talked about rapport-building, establishing friendships, sharing food," says Navarro, who recalled one fateful meeting where fellow interrogation experts talked about what some people were doing to interrogate terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, only to realize they had seen similar techniques on fictional TV programs. "They were shocked ... because they had seen so many hundreds of hours of television."

TV Torture Changes Real Interrogation Techniques

Torture's Depiction on TV

Navarro joined a group of interrogation professionals in 2006 who asked producers of 24 to tone down their torture scenes. Another expert who talked to them was Tony Camerino, an Air Force veteran who played a key role in tracking down terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"What we want to do is more educate," Camerino says. "[We] tell people, look ... some of the real-life situations we can give you would be even more exciting, but they don't involve your protagonist, the person we're supposed to be rooting for, torturing people, and then telling us that that's heroic."

Camerino now works as a writer and technical consultant on CBS's adventure drama Person of Interest.

"Two years ago, I wrote an episode in which a detective was interrogating one of our main characters, accusing him of having committed a murder," the writer says. "Essentially, the approach he used is one we call 'we know all.' "

The scene, from an episode titled "In Extremis," features an Internal Affairs officer telling corrupt officer Lionel Fusco, "You see, when dirty cops want to eliminate DNA from a scene, they use bleach. But bleach stains things. Like the carpet in the trunk on the vehicle that you signed out on the day Stills disappeared."

Camerino explains: "He presented all the evidence that he had to make the subject feel as if it was worthless to resist, because he already knew everything."

Have these efforts to change TV torture had an effect?

Two producers from 24 who met with Navarro and Camerino in 2006 say those talks affected work on their current series, Showtime's Homeland. That program won an award in 2012 from Human Rights First for its depiction of the so-called war on terror.

"They all told us that even, apart from the moral and legal objections, torture is a not a reliable way to produce intelligence," 24 and Homeland producer Howard Gordon said during his acceptance speech. "And over time, their way of thinking became ours and at the very least, we became more sensitive to the 'we're just doing a television show' defense."

Still, the episode of CBS's Person of Interest with Camerino's interrogation scene also featured a guest character threatening to shoot someone to get information.

And the revival of 24 this summer showed Jack Bauer interrogating a suspect by saying this: "I can assure you, full immunity is not on the table. But your hand is," just before using a gun butt to smash the suspect's left hand multiple times.

Sometimes, it seems, the drama of torture is too great to resist; even when producers know how dangerous and damaging it is in the real world.

When you donate to a food drive, do you ponder the nutritional labels of the can in your hand? Or do you grab a packet of ramen or a bag of marshmallows from the dark corners of your pantry and hope it hasn't expired?

Healthfulness isn't typically a well-intended food donor's top concern, says hunger advocate Ruthi Solari. The ramen and marshmallows, along with a container of Crisco and a few other items, were basically the entire contents of a food box delivered to one of her volunteer's grandmothers who received food aid, Solari says.

"What would she even make with this?" she notes.

Solari's nonprofit, SuperFood Drive, works with food banks and pantries, schools and individuals on food drives that focus on nourishing, nutritionally dense nonperishables. And it offers materials, available for free download on its website, that groups and individuals can use to host their own healthful food drives.

"People think if it's nonperishable, it must be unhealthy," says Solari. "Instead of reaching in the back of the pantry for what's expired or undesired, we're asking people to really think about health."

That means donating items like lentils, canned tuna or canned salmon, peanut butter without added oils or sugars, brown rice, quinoa or kidney beans. With these sorts of pantry staples, she says, "you can have amazingly healthy food as the basis of any meal."

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Peanut butter, canned tuna and canned fruits in natural juices are among the "superfoods" on Feeding America San Diego's list of requested donations. Courtesy Feeding America San Diego hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Feeding America San Diego

Peanut butter, canned tuna and canned fruits in natural juices are among the "superfoods" on Feeding America San Diego's list of requested donations.

Courtesy Feeding America San Diego

Though many people may not realize it, eating this way – with a focus on whole, unprocessed or minimally processed foods – can also be a lot cheaper, when you look at the cost per serving, Solari notes. A cost-comparison chart on Superfood's website shows how swapping in raisins for fruit snacks or rolled oats for instant oatmeal will get you a much better (and healthier) bang for your buck.

Giving food pantry clients this type of price information is key to helping them make better nutritional choices when they're shopping, too, says Jennifer Gilmore, executive director of Feeding America San Diego, a hunger-relief organization that serves some 480,000 people in San Diego County, Calif. She says 67 percent of families who frequent food banks make their food purchases "based on dollars, instead of anything having to do with nutrition."

One in 7 Americans visited a food pantry in 2013, according to a national survey conducted by Feeding America.

"These are the elderly, single parents, they're returning veterans," notes Solari. "They're people just like us, our neighbors who hard times have forced to choose between paying for utilities and food."

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Many of these people are also struggling with diet-related diseases like diabetes. So in recent years, hunger-relief groups have been putting an increasing emphasis on healthful eating, says Gilmore, who worked with Solari to revamp her organization's nutritional policies. That involved changing not only the types of foods that pantries solicited from donors, Gilmore says, but also educating volunteers and staffers about healthier cooking, so they can pass that knowledge on to the people they serve.

"It's one thing to distribute brown rice and quinoa and bok choy," says Gilmore. "It's a whole other thing to get families to taste it and cook it and eat it at home." Her group now hands out recipes with food boxes.

The goal, says Solari, is to make healthful eating approachable and "really debunking the idea that it's an elitist thing."

"It's not enough to fill empty stomachs," she says. "The opposite of being hungry isn't being full – it's being healthy."

Planning to donate to a food drive this holiday season? Here's SuperFood Drive's suggested shopping list. It's also just as efficient to give money to your local bank online.

food pantries

food banks

food insecurity

As the holiday buying season approaches, retailers remain open to the same attack — called a "point of sale" attack — that hit Target and Home Depot, security experts say. Those analysts say that retailers have their fingers crossed, hoping they're not next.

And leading companies are keeping very tight-lipped about what, if anything, they're doing to protect customers.

Is This Store Hackerproof?

It's easy to spot a scratched face on a watch. It's much harder to tell if the checkout machine that you swipe to pay for that watch is defective.

But Davi Ottenheimer knows how. He's a security researcher at EMC, a Hopkinton, Mass.-based data storage company. He's been auditing retail for a decade. And we're looking at how "hackerproof" stores are this holiday shopping season.

We walk into a Rolex Store in San Francisco, and the diamond-studded watches don't catch Ottenheimer's eye. A tablet that's sitting by the counter, with a little square card reader plugged in, does.

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"They're not even looking at us," he says as a sales representative walks away. "We could replace the card reader with our own card reader. I have several of those at home."

Never mind that an armed guard is patrolling the door. This store is ripe for a microscale cyberattack. Sure, it would just get a few dozen customers. But, Ottenheimer says, "they spend a lot of money, so if I want to get high-value cards, this would be a place where I could get them."

Rolex and Tourneau, the company managing the store, did not respond to NPR's request for comment about on-site security.

Over at Macy's, Ottenheimer wanders over to an empty corner and stares at a lonely register. He points to a little green icon that's blinking on the hard drive. "It has a network light on the front," he says.

That means it's speaking to other machines that are grabbing card numbers.

Ottenheimer is concerned that crooks could use this unprotected machine to try to break in. "They came over to help us with the jewelry but not with the fact that we're standing and staring at a PC in the corner," he says.

NPR reached out to Macy's to ask what it's doing to protect the customer information feeding into these machines. Is the retail chain scrambling and encrypting card numbers? Is it cordoning off the financial data, so that people with access to one point of entry can't break into others?

Macy's declined to provide a single detail about the most general security measures it's taking.

'Security By Obscurity'

Orla Cox, a security expert at Symantec, helps retailers behind the scenes. And while she can't name her clients because of nondisclosure agreements, she criticizes companies for acting like they can achieve "security by obscurity."

"A lot of times, a lazy approach to security is just to make information difficult to get," she says. "Just because you're not talking about it isn't actually making you any more protected."

According to a recent Symantec report, hacks have gotten bigger and more frequent. Cox and other security insiders say that just about every retailer remains open to the exact same attack — a point-of-sale attack that lifts information from credit card readers — that got Target and Home Depot.

“ Just because you're not talking about it isn't actually making you any more protected.

- Orla Cox, a security expert at Symantec

It's not clear if or when that'll change. NPR contacted two dozen of America's largest retailers — which include Sears, Kohl's, Best Buy, Dollar General, the TJ Maxx company — and none of them would indicate whether their budget for online security has increased in this last year of megabreaches.

"I would think that it's fairly innocuous information anyway," Cox says. "Giving a number out there shows that you're taking it seriously."

A Lack Of Incentives

Visa and MasterCard are nudging retailers to take on a bit more liability. By October 2015, merchants who don't have the more up-to-date EMV chip card readers could have to pay for certain credit and debit card theft in stores.

"There is no silver bullet," says Ellen Richey, Visa's chief risk officer, who's on a national campaign to get retailers to invest.

But, many say, there aren't enough incentives for retailers to address the issue.

Retailers make tiny margins — say 2 percent. They don't want to spend on IT support. When credit card data are stolen, they don't typically have to pay. Even if the retailers' lax network security is at fault, financial institutions typically pick up the bill.

That includes credit unions, like LGE Community Credit Union in Georgia. Its president, Chris Leggett, says he is tired of paying for replacement cards after a hack. "It sure would be nice if the merchants would be willing to share in the cost of cleaning it up due to their lax security," he says. "The issuers are paying the brunt of the expense."

The Credit Union National Association is asking lawmakers to intervene, so that retailers are held to stricter security and disclosure rules.

Card Thefts Become Routine

Among victims, a kind of fatalism has set in. People have come to expect the theft.

Kate Anderson in Minnesota has had to replace her cards five times in the past year. "It always seems to happen on a Friday or a Saturday. So usually that's kind of when I kind of really get like, 'Well, should I really go shopping or not?' " she says.

Now, she and her husband know the drill: "Reset all of our passwords and our PIN numbers and every place that we do auto debits from."

Texas resident Hunter Hargrave has replaced his cards twice following hacks. "I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again," he says.

The 25-year-old is turning away from the world of plastic and using old-school money a lot more. "Whenever I get paid, I take out the vast majority in cash, and then I put the rest on a debit card. But the debit card's only for emergencies," he says.

Even if people ditch their cards, they're not ditching the stores. While the cost of cleaning up a hack is climbing, according to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute, the cost of doing nothing — and hoping for the best — is not.

Sales at Target and Home Depot have been exceeding expectations. Experts say that as long as we're spending, retailers don't have to spend on protecting us.