7 pros and cons of open workspaces—and how to compensate for them
More and more, work culture gravitates toward openness, collaboration, and transparency. You can see it in the increased number of open-office layouts (despite some recent pushback) and new types of collaborative software designed to bring workers closer together for real-time collaboration. In both cases, we see the buzzword “open workspace,” as in an environment specifically designed to foster more communication and collaboration.
Obviously, there’s something to this idea; 87 percent of employees want to work for an open and transparent company. Accordingly, millions of businesses made efforts to create more open workspaces (both in physical and digital spaces), and it seems to work for many of them. But it’s not a perfect model.
To make the best use of open workspaces, we have to understand and compensate for some of the disadvantages and play to the inherent strengths.
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/7-pros-and-cons-of-open-workspaces-and-how-to-compensate-for-them
5 ways to create transparency at work
Transparency at work, or transparency in business, means communicating openly and honestly with your team members and cultivating a culture where information can flow freely between people and teams. Although transparency is often glossed over in vague terms, its benefits are tangible. Here are five simple ways to create a transparent culture at your work:
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/5-ways-create-transparency-at-work
The science that could revolutionise time measurements in forensic investigations
Forensic science techniques are of incredible benefit in criminal investigations. But while they can help reveal who a piece of evidence came from or how it got there, there is a major capability gap within the forensic sciences – and it’s all to do with time. When did a person die or when was a stain deposited? Answers to such questions are crucial, in particular for defence lawyers trying to establish alibis.
Luckily, research is constantly throwing up new results. Over the last few years, a series of new findings have made great contributions to the area of “temporal forensics”, some of which could vastly improve our understanding of what happens to our bodies after we die.
An unofficial law of forensic investigations is to “always consider at least one alternative hypothesis”. This is when the time aspect comes in to play. If a blood stain belonging to a suspect is found at a murder scene, this appears to be very strong evidence against them. However, if he or she states that they were at the crime scene previously for legitimate reasons and had a nose bleed, then this would effectively negate the evidence.
A key part of such a murder investigation is finding out exactly when the victim died. Unfortunately, “post mortem interval”, otherwise known as time of death estimation, is a field that can be highly subjective. It is currently estimated using traditional techniques, such as measuring body temperature and monitoring rigor mortis (body stiffness). For short intervals, such as hours, these can be reliable, but it gets harder with time. That’s because both internal factors within the body (its size and the presence of medication) and the external environment (hot, cold, wet) affect how the body decomposes.
https://theconversation.com/the-science-that-could-revolutionise-time-measurements-in-forensic-investigations-92319
ABC Four Corners: five articles to get you informed on sugar and Big Sugar’s role in food policy
Tonight’s ABC Four Corners program investigates the influence of the sugar industry on global policy efforts to curtail the rise of obesity. This includes the industry’s involvement in thwarting implementation of a sugar tax, and in watering down Australia’s now largely ineffective health star rating system.
Called Tipping the Scales, the program will highlight some of the tactics the industry employs. The ABC reports companies such as Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Unilever, Nestle and Kelloggs “have a seat at the table setting the policies that shape consumption of their own sugar-laced products”.
A public health advocate is quoted as saying:
The reality is that industry is, by and large, making most of the policy. Public health is brought in so that we can have the least worse solution.
The Conversation’s experts in health policy and economics have weighed into this debate over the years. Here’s our pick of five analysis pieces that will get you informed before tonight’s program.
https://theconversation.com/abc-four-corners-five-articles-to-get-you-informed-on-sugar-and-big-sugars-role-in-food-policy-95775
12 Technological Forces That Will Shape The Future
How Businesses Can Adapt To Digital Transformation
Although Float is dedicated to offering superior enterprise mobility services, we also realize that the mobility of devices, people, and data is just one component of an amazingly complex, multidimensional digital transformation that is taking over business today. Many of these additional dimensions are captured in Kevin Kelly’s new book The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.
But, these 12 dimensions should not be thought of as separate boxes to be dealt with in isolation from each other. Rather they are all mixed together, as we explained in our white paper,Intertwingled Technologies: The Keys To The Emerging Enterprise Landscape. I was especially interested in comparing the 12 technological forces identified by a Kelly with the nine clusters of affordances that we identified in the CHAMPIONS framework in our paper, to see what we missed.
According to Kelly, the 12 technological forces are:
https://gowithfloat.com/2016/07/12-technological-forces-future/
