Month: October 2013

Improving Office Productivity via Musical Chairs

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By shifting employees from desk to desk every few months, scattering those who do the same types of jobs and rethinking which departments to place side by side, companies say they can increase productivity and collaboration. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Proponents say such experiments not only come with a low price tag, but they can help a company’s bottom line, even if they leave a few disgruntled workers in their wake.

In recent years, many companies have moved toward open floor plans and unassigned seating, ushering managers out of their offices and clustering workers at communal tables. But some companies—especially small startups and technology businesses—are taking the trend a step further, micromanaging who sits next to whom in an attempt to get more from their employees.

“If I change the [organizational] chart and you stay in the same seat, it doesn’t have very much of an effect,” says Ben Waber , chief executive of Sociometric Solutions, a Boston company that uses sensors to analyze communication patterns in the workplace. “If I keep the org chart the same but change where you sit, it is going to massively change everything.”

Mr. Waber says a worker’s immediate neighbors account for 40% to 60% of every interaction that worker has during the workday, from face-to-face chats to email messages. There is only a 5% to 10% chance employees are interacting with someone two rows away, according to his data, which is culled from companies in the retail, pharmaceutical and finance industries, among others.

Want to befriend someone on another floor? Forget it. “You basically only talk to [those] people if you have meetings,” Mr. Waber says.

Some psychological effect is at play here:

Aspects of a worker’s disposition can, in fact, be contagious, according to Sigal Barsade , a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “People literally catch emotions from one another like a virus,” she says. Her research has found that the least-contagious emotional state is one marked by low-energy and sluggishness. The most contagious is a calm, relaxed state—which she nicknamed “the California condition.”

People with similar emotional temperaments work best together, Ms. Barsade says. But if a manager is trying to get a stressed-out worker to brighten up, the best strategy is to surround her with lots of cheerful, energetic people.

I think all corporations (not just start-ups) should be paying attention to this research.

On the Perils of Absorbed Device Users

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A truly frightening story out of San Francisco, where passengers on a Muni train were so absorbed into their phones/tablets, that they failed to notice a stranger pulling out a gun next to them:

A man standing on a crowded Muni train pulls out a .45-caliber pistol.

He raises the gun, pointing it across the aisle, before tucking it back against his side. He draws it out several more times, once using the hand holding the gun to wipe his nose. Dozens of passengers stand and sit just feet away – but none reacts.

Their eyes, focused on smartphones and tablets, don’t lift until the gunman fires a bullet into the back of a San Francisco State student getting off the train.

Investigators say this scene was captured by a Muni camera on Sept. 23, the night Nikhom Thephakaysone, 30, allegedly killed 20-year-old Justin Valdez in an apparently random encounter.

For police and prosecutors, the details of the case were troubling – they believe the suspect had been out “hunting” for a stranger to kill – but so too was the train passengers’ collective inattention to imminent danger.

The D.A. said: “These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They’re just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They’re completely oblivious of their surroundings.”

I am not saying being more mindful of their surroundings would have stopped this crime, but this kind of absorption is mind-boggling to me. When I am on public transport, I make sure to look up and observe my surroundings every few minutes…

 

On the Wealth Disparity in Russia

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The Wall Street Journal highlights the incredible wealth disparity in Russia:

In the days of the Soviet Union, the country boasted that all its citizens shared the wealth equally, but a new report has found that a mere 20 years after the end of Communism, wealth disparity has soared with 35% of the country’s entire wealth now in the hands of just 110 people.

This is a wild statistic:

The study discovered that in Russia there is one billionaire for every $11 billion in household wealth. In the rest of the world, there is one for every $170 billion.

And so is this comparison with the United States:

Overall, 93.7% of Russia’s adult population has less than $10,000 in wealth, according to the report; 5.6% has between $10,000 and $100,000; 0.6% has between $100,000 and $1 million; and 0.1% — or about 84,000 people — has over $1 million. In the U.S., according to the report, 30.7% of the adult population has less than $10,000; 33% has between $10,000 and $100,000; 30.7% has between $100,000 and $1 million; and 5.5% — or 1.3 million people — has over $1 million.

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(hat tip: Annie Lowrey)

The Story of How Twitter was Founded

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Nick Bilton pens a fascinating piece in The New York Times on the origins of Twitter and the roles Jack Dorsey, Evan WIlliams, and Noah Glass played from the company’s creation to becoming one of the top social media sites in the world.

On Jack Dorsey’s luck in discovering Ev Williams in a coffee shop:

In 2005, Jack Dorsey was a 29-year-old New York University dropout who sometimes wore a T-shirt with his phone number on the front and a nose ring. After a three-month stint writing code for an Alcatraz boat-tour outfit, he was living in a tiny San Francisco apartment. He had recently been turned down for a job at Camper, the shoe store.

His luck changed one morning as he was sitting at Caffe Centro off South Park. As Dorsey looked up from his laptop, punk rock blaring through his earphones, he noticed a man about his age. Evan Williams, then 33, was a minor celebrity on the San Francisco tech scene. A few years earlier, he sold the Web-diary service he co-founded, Blogger, a word he popularized, to Google for several million dollars. Now Williams was using some of his Blogger money to finance a new company, Odeo, that made podcasts. Odeo was co-founded by his neighbor and friend, Noah Glass. Its dingy loft headquarters happened to be located around the corner, a block from South Park. Williams had stopped in and ordered a coffee.

He sent a resume, got hired immediately, and the rest, as they say, is history. The idea for Twitter came a bit later, after the company Dorsey was working for, Odeo, became obsolete when Apple unveiled podcasts on iTunes:

One night in late February 2006, around 2 a.m., Dorsey sat in Glass’s parked car as rain poured down on the windshield. The two were sobering up after a night of drinking vodka and Red Bull, but the conversation, as usual, was about Odeo. Dorsey blurted out that he was planning his exit strategy. “I’m going to quit tech and become a fashion designer,” Glass recalls him saying. He also wanted to sail around the world. Glass pushed back: He couldn’t really want to leave the business entirely, could he? “Tell me what else you’re interested in,” he said. Dorsey mentioned a Web site that people could use to share their current status — the music they were listening to or where they were. Dorsey envisioned that people would use it to broadcast the simplest details about themselves — like “going to park,” “in bed” and so forth.

On how the name Twitter was born:

Soon, the question of a name came up. Williams jokingly suggested calling the project “Friendstalker,” which was ruled out as too creepy. Glass became obsessive, flipping through a physical dictionary, almost word by word, looking for the right name. One late afternoon, alone in his apartment, he reached over to his cellphone and turned it to silent, which caused it to vibrate. He quickly considered the name “Vibrate,” which he nixed, but it led him to the word “twitch.” He dismissed that too, but he continued through the “Tw” section of the dictionary: twist, twit, twitch, twitcher, twitchy . . . and then, there it was. He read the definition aloud. “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” Twitter.

One of Twitter’s early problems was the question of who was leading the company? Williams or Dorsey?

Dorsey raced home to try to figure out a plan for his resignation, but the Twitter board instead offered him a three-month window to fix the site and its issues. Not much changed, however, even as text bills mounted, and the site continued to crash. Before the three months were up, Dorsey recalled, Sabet and Wilson took him to a breakfast at the Clift hotel and told him that they were replacing him as C.E.O. with Williams. Dorsey sat before a bowl of uneaten yogurt and granola as he was offered stock, a $200,000 severance and a face-saving role as the company’s “silent” chairman. No one in the industry had to know that he was fired. (Investors would not want to be seen as pitting one founder against another anyway.) But Dorsey had no voting rights at the company. He was, essentially, out.

On Ev Williams ignoring the advice that it’s bad to hire your friends in a start-up:

He [Williams] saw his success as the result of a lot of hard work and also a fair bit of luck, and he wanted to give the people he knew the opportunity to be a part of it. He hired his sister, to stock the kitchens at Twitter; his wife, Sara, was hired to design the new offices; and he employed numerous friends from Google. Among them was Dick Costolo, who had recently sold his start-up for $100 million. After they bumped into each other at a party in 2009, Williams asked him to be Twitter’s chief operating officer. On his first day, Costolo, a former improv comedian, thumbed his first tweet: “First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow,” he wrote. “Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power.”

In the end, this is a familiar story in Silicon Valley:

In Silicon Valley, most companies have their own Twitter story: a co-founder, always a friend, and often the person with the big idea behind the company, who is pushed out by another, hungrier co-founder. 

Twitter is my favorite social network, so I highly recommended reading this piece in entirety.

Why Not to Invest in Futures Funds

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If you or your family has investments in so-called futures funds, you might want to pull out your money out of them immediately. David Evans, writing in Bloomberg, has a big piece on how these futures funds have been a complete cash drain on those who unwisely chose to invest in them. While traditional hedge funds charge a 2 and 20 fee (2% fees, 20% of profits), these futures funds charge as as much as 9 percent in total fees each year (which is astronomical):

Investors who kept their money in Spectrum Technical for that decade, however, reaped none of those returns — not one penny. Every bit of those profits — and more — was consumed by $498.7 million in commissions, expenses and fees paid to fund managers and Morgan Stanley.

After all of that was deducted, investors ended up losing $8.3 million over 10 years. Had those Morgan Stanley investors placed their money instead in a low-fee index mutual fund, such as Vanguard Group Inc.’s 500 Index Fund, they would have reaped a net cumulative return of 96 percent in the same period.

The “powerful argument” for managed futures turned out to be good for brokers and fund managers but not so good for investors.

In the $337 billion managed-futures market, return-robbing fees like those are common. According to data filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and compiled by Bloomberg, 89 percent of the $11.51 billion of gains in 63 managed-futures funds went to fees, commissions and expenses during the decade from Jan. 1, 2003, to Dec. 31, 2012.

Fees: $1.5 Billion

The funds held $13.65 billion of investor money at the end of last year, according to SEC filings. Twenty-nine of those funds left investors with losses.

What’s more, it seems many of these futures funds escape transparency:

Like hedge funds, managed-futures funds haven’t been required to file with the SEC as a matter of course. However, an SEC rule has mandated that any partnership with more than 500 investors and $10 million in assets — even a hedge fund — must file quarterly and annual reports.

The SEC has no category listing managed-futures funds, as it does for mutual funds or corporate filings. Bloomberg Markets culled through thousands of filings in several categories, including one called “SIC 6221 Unknown,” to identify 63 managed-futures funds that reported to the SEC.

Even sophisticated investors should stay away from these managed funds.

A Brief History of “More Cowbell”

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How did the cowbell go from a herdsman tool to a cultural icon? Modern Farmer has a brief post highlighting its entry into popular culture:

How did the humble cowbell end up on every drum kit of rock, hair and heavy metal band, its rhythmic beat infusing the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” or feigning the tick-tock of a clock in the Chamber Brothers’“Time Has Come”?

Its path from serenity to the cult cry “I gotta have more cowbell!” from the famous Saturday Night Live skit in which Will Ferrell clangs along to Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” begins around 1904, according to David Ludwig, a composer and dean of creative programs at the Curtis Institute. That was the year two German composers got cowbell fever. Gustav Mahler used them to create a sense of the country for pastoral movements in his Symphony No. 6 and Richard Strauss used them in Alpine Symphony (see the percussionist jiggle them at 16:13).

Both men had spent time near country pastures in their youth, where locals celebrated the changing seasons with spring and fall cow parades called “Alpabzug” when herdsmen led the flocks through town to and from the mountain fields, their cowbells clanging in unison.

 

Has a Nuclear Fusion Milestone Been Reached?

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The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has achieved a nuclear fusion milestone, according to BBC. Based at Livermore, CA, NIF used 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place. But the way the article is phrased, it sounds like there is some skepticism here (“The BBC understands”):

The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.

This is a step short of the lab’s stated goal of “ignition”, where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known “inefficiencies” in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel.

But the latest achievement has been described as the single most meaningful step for fusion in recent years, and demonstrates NIF is well on its way towards the coveted target of ignition and self-sustaining fusion.

For half a century, researchers have strived for controlled nuclear fusion and been disappointed. It was hoped that NIF would provide the breakthrough fusion research needed.

In 2009, NIF officials announced an aim to demonstrate nuclear fusion producing net energy by 30 September 2012. But unexpected technical problems ensured the deadline came and went; the fusion output was less than had originally been predicted by mathematical models.

Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research – which was part of the lab’s original mission.

However, the latest experiments agree well with predictions of energy output, which will provide a welcome boost to ignition research at NIF, as well as encouragement to advocates of fusion energy in general.

Waiting for the news release from NIF here.

Why Cashiers Beat Self-Checkout Machines at the Grocery Store

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I agree with Farhad Manjoo’s assessment in this piece for Wall Street Journal: humans are much better at checking you out at the grocery store than machines. He explains:

They [self-checkout machines] work well enough in a pinch—when you want to check out just a handful of items, when you don’t have much produce, when you aren’t loaded down with coupons. But for any standard order, they’re a big pain. Perversely, then, self-checkout machines’ shortcomings are their best feature: because they’re useless for most orders, their lines are shorter, making the machines seem faster than humans.

In most instances where I’m presented with a machine instead of a human, I rejoice. I prefer an ATM to a flesh-and-blood banker, and I find airport check-in machines more efficient than the unsmiling guy at the desk. But both these tasks—along with more routine computerized skills like robotic assembly lines—share a common feature: They’re very narrow, specific, repeatable problems, ones that require little physical labor and not much cognitive flexibility.

At my local Kroger, the few times I have tried using those self-checkout machines have been full of frustration. For instance, one time an item I scanned went through twice, and there was no easy way to select “duplicate scan” on the screen. Cycling among various on-screen buttons for fresh fruit/vegetable selection is a chore. Until a system is built which recognizes the items you’ve placed onto the scanner without human intervention comes along, cashiers will trump self-checkout computers any day. Imagine how complicated it still is if you have in-store and/or newspaper coupons, checking out via a combination credit card/cash, and so on…

Why Knocking on Wood Works

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Regardless of whether you’re superstitious or not, you’ve probably knocked on wood sometime in your life. But why are we ingrained to do so as a culture? Recent research suggests that while knocking on wood won’t necessarily bring a desired result, knocking on wood is effective because it primes our brains via the “avoidant action.” The New York Times has a good summary of the psychological effect behind the wood knocking:

Research finds that people, superstitious or not, tend to believe that negative outcomes are more likely after they “jinx” themselves. Boast that you’ve been driving for 20 years without an accident, and your concern about your drive home that evening rises. The superstitious may tell you that your concern is well founded because the universe is bound to punish your hubris. Psychological research has a less magical explanation: boasting about being accident-free makes the thought of getting into an accident jump to mind and, once there, that thought makes you worry.

That makes sense intuitively. What’s less intuitive is how a simple physical act, like knocking on wood, can alleviate that concern.

In one study, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, one of us, Jane L. Risen, and her colleagues Yan Zhang and Christine Hosey, induced college students to jinx themselves by asking half of them to say out loud that they would definitely not get into a car accident this winter. Compared with those who did not jinx themselves, these students, when asked about it later, thought it was more likely that they would get into an accident.

After the “jinx,” in the guise of clearing their minds, we invited some of these students to knock on the wooden table in front of them. Those who knocked on the table were no more likely to think that they would get into an accident than students who hadn’t jinxed themselves in the first place. They had reversed the effects of the jinx.

Knocking on wood may not be magical, but superstition proved helpful in understanding why the ritual was effective. Across cultures, superstitions intended to reverse bad luck, like throwing salt or spitting, often share a common ingredient. In one way or another, they involve an avoidant action, one that exerts force away from oneself, as if pushing something away.

…

While almost any behavior can be turned into a superstitious ritual, perhaps the ones that are most likely to survive are those that happen to be effective at changing how we feel. We can seek to rid ourselves of superstitions in the name of enlightenment and progress, but we are likely to find that some may be hard to shake because, although they may be superficially irrational, they may not be unreasonable. Superstitious rituals can really work — but it’s not magic, it’s psychology.