Author: Andrew Sullivan

A growing body of research suggests it’s time to end the era of open-office plans:

A 2002 longitudinal study of Canadian oil-and-gas-company employees who moved from a traditional office to an open one found that on every aspect measured, from feelings about the work environment to co-worker relationships to self-reported performance, employees were significantly less satisfied in the open office. One explanation for why this might be is that open offices prioritize communication and collaboration but sacrifice privacy.

In 1980, a group of psychology researchers published a study suggesting that this sacrifice might have unintended consequences. They found that “architectural privacy” (the ability to close one’s door, say) went hand in hand with a sense of “psychological privacy” (feeling “control over access to oneself or one’s group”). And a healthy dose of psychological privacy correlated with greater job satisfaction and performance. With a lack of privacy comes noise—the talking, typing, and even chewing of one’s co-workers. A 1998 study found that background noise, whether or not it included speech, impaired both memory and the ability to do mental arithmetic, while another study found that even music hindered performance.

There’s also the question of lighting. Open offices tend to cluster cubicles away from windows, and a forthcoming study shows that on workdays, employees without windows get an average of 47 fewer minutes of sleep than those with windows, and have worse sleep quality overall. Artificial light has its own downsides. One pair of researchers found that bright overhead light intensifies emotions, enhancing perceptions of aggression and sexiness—which could lead to a lack of focus during meetings if arguments get heated, or co-workers get overheated.

New research indicates that three-year-olds can recognize a person they’ve met only once before, at age one:

[Researcher Osman] Kingo and his team first renewed contact with parents and their children who’d taken part in an earlier study when the children were age one. That earlier research involved the infant children interacting with one of two researchers for 45 minutes – either a Scandinavian-Caucasian man or a Scandinavian-African man.

Now two years on, 50 of these parents and children – the latter now aged three – were invited back to the exact same lab (hopefully cueing their earlier memories). Here the children were shown two simultaneous 45-second videos side by side. One video was a recording of the researcher – either the Scandinavian-Caucasian or Scandinavian-African man – interacting with them two years earlier; the other video showed the other researcher (the one they hadn’t met) interacting with a different child in the exact same way. The children themselves were not visible in these videos.

The key test was whether the three-year-olds would show a preference for looking at one video rather than the other. Amazingly, the children spent significantly more time looking at the video that featured the researcher they’d never met. This is not due to the children having a bias for either the white or black man, because for some of these children the previously unseen researcher was Scandinavian-African and for others he was Scandinavian-Caucasian. All background features and behaviours in the videos were identical, so this result provides strong evidence that the children had some recognition of the researcher they’d met, and were drawn more strongly to look at the unfamiliar researcher.

Importantly, this same looking pattern was not observed among a control group of 36 three-year-olds who hadn’t taken part in the original research two years’ earlier. In fact, these children showed a bias toward looking at the black researcher. This is unsurprising because young children often show a bias towards looking at other-race faces. The fact that the three-year-olds in the experimental group didn’t display this pattern shows that the influence of their memory overrode the usual other-race bias.

Nathan Yau mapped “the nearest coffee shop, among popular chains, within a 10-mile radius”:

My expectation was that Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts would dominate, with 10,000-plus and 7,000-plus locations nationwide, respectively. This wasn’t far-fetched when you look at the map above. … Starbucks is all over, whereas Dunkin’ Donuts clearly dominates on the east coast. … The spatial concentration in cities didn’t surprise me so much, but the cumulative coverage of the coffee places did. … [T]here are lots of areas in the country where it is more than ten miles to the nearest chain.

Khoi Vinh, who considers coffee a “scourge,” wouldn’t mind being miles away from a chain:

In the West, and particularly in urban centers of the United States, we’ve turned coffee into not just a daily habit, but a totem of conspicuous consumption. They are “rituals of self-congratulation” (a choice phrase from Frank Bruni) wherein we continually obsess over certain coffee purveyors or certain methods of brewing coffee — each new one more complex, more Rube Goldbergian and more comically self-involved than the previous brewing fad.

Responding to Vinh’s aversion, Kottke draws an analogy:

Coffee, like almost everything else these days, is a sport. Everyone has a favorite team (or coffee making method or political affiliation or design style or TV drama or rapper or comic book), discusses techniques and relives great moments with other likeminded fans, and argues with fans of other teams. The proliferation and diversification of media over the past 35 years created thousands of new sports and billions of new teams. These people turned hard-to-find nail polish into a sport. These people support Apple in their battle against Microsoft and Samsung. This guy scouts fashion phenoms on city streets. Finding the best bowl of ramen in NYC is a sport. Design is a sport. Even hating sports is a sport; people compete for the funniest “what time is the sportsball match today? har har people who like sports are dumb jocks” joke on Twitter.

Let people have their sports, I say. Liking coffee can’t be any worse than liking the Yankees, can it?

In a 1978 profile, Carl Sagan discussed the great physicist’s spiritual beliefs:

In matters of religion, Einstein thought more deeply than many others and was repeatedly misunderstood. On the occasion of Einstein’s first visit to America, Cardinal O’Connell of Boston warned that the relativity theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism.” This alarmed a New York rabbi who cabled Einstein: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein cabled back: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men”—a more subtle religious view embraced by many theologians today.

Einstein’s religious beliefs were very genuine. In the 1920s and 1930s he expressed grave doubts about a basic precept of quantum mechanics: that at the most fundamental level of matter particles behaved in an unpredictable way, as expressed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the cosmos.” And on another occasion he asserted, “God is subtle but he is not malicious.” In fact Einstein was so fond of such aphorisms that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr turned to him on one occasion and with some exasperation said, “Stop telling God what to do.”

Update from a reader:

You quote Einstein selectively. He also expressed contempt for the “childish” belief in a Biblical god. He also called misrepresentations of his religious convictions “a lie which is being systematically repeated.” Einstein’s views in context are here:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Another:

I would very much like to point out that the quotes your reader inserted are, in an interesting way, incorrect:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

The parts in bold simply do not exist in the original letter: they have been made up by the translator and yet this is the translation you will see quoted over one million times on the Internet. (No need to take my word for it: feel free to show a scan of the original German letter, recently sold for just over 3 million dollars, to anyone who speaks German.)

What happened? I can’t claim to know the motives of the translator, but it is clear that virtually no one has bothered to verify the correctness of the translation. You’ll even find the fabrication on (the English version of) wikiquote (but not the German one). I am happy you too fell into this trap because I know that you, unlike many of your colleagues, will gladly update the article and correct the mistake. I am also sure the truth will now reach many people.

P.S.: In case you were wondering: I am an atheist and I try to avoid the Dish on Sundays as much as possible. The other days I follow the Dish almost religiously.