June 2009 Archives
Neuroscience and networks, two topics I can't resist.
And here they are all wrapped together in an article about how your brain constantly walks on the edge of chaos. Apparently, the chaotic cascades inside your head are what drives intelligence and people who let chaos take over more often (though not too much) are smarter (at least from an IQ perspective).
The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.
Oh, and apparently your brain has 13 degrees of separation. Who knew?
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Tags: brain, networks, science
A few weeks ago I pointed out a study that explained, "groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members."
Today I ran across some research on how celebrities stay popular for so long that sheds further light on the subject. Essentially people talk about more famous people more because it's a social lubricant to have a shared topic, therefore making the famous more famous.
I've been spending some time thinking about how you break this cycle. Especially at work, it's important to share ideas that everyone doesn't know about yet as they may hold information that could push things forward in new ways. No answers yet, but it's interesting to think about.
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Tags: culture, networks, psychology
Just some random things I've been thinking about lately (and an apology for the lack of long-form posts).
Partly because I haven't written anything of any length in awhile and partly because I've been thinking about a bunch of different stuff lately, I've got an entry chock full of random thoughts.
So, where to begin ...
Paying for Recommendations
I've been turning this idea over in my head lately that all these sites fighting for rights to media are nice and all, but the real play might be to bypass all that stuff and just charge for the recommendations. I would pay a few dollars a month for Netflix access without any movies or anything just to get the recommendations and the queue. Not totally sure what to do with that yet, but it's a thought.
Networks Popping Up
I recently went back and found this quote from a Wired piece Bruce Sterling wrote a few years ago called Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future. In it, Sterling imagines the world in 2017 and writes:
The best thing about being a top-tier geo blogger is that everyone knows where you are. When the buddy list tells folks you're in town, they ping to offer you dinner and invite you to sleep on the couch. They're my homies in a world where the entire planet is home. I love all you guys! (Shout-out to my driver, Leo, who's putting me up tonight. And his wife: You haven't met me yet, Sue, but thanks.)
While he was imagining eight years from now, that's actually pretty close to now. I know many folks who have exactly this experience (including myself): As soon as you land in a place you let the world know, via Twitter or Facebook that you've arrived, which of course many knew since you're connected on Dopplr and then you find yourself sitting in a bar with three folks who you've mostly not ever met before and best of all they've never met either. It's kind of an amazing thing to watch a network coalesce in a new place (as I did in Hong Kong) and even more amazing to feel as though you've left things slightly more connected than when you arrived (I introduced three people in Hong Kong who had never met and I hope will stay in touch). That's a good feeling.
Desire Lines
So I'm still playing around with my desire line idea and I feel like I'm constantly edging closer to a definition and description I really like. Watching things like the naturally forming dance party I posted a few weeks ago, which was essentially an opportunity to see a mass behavior from a scale we seldom see in person, was the basic idea. The big thing that separates the web, and the opportunity for us as people, is the ability to observe this sort of herd behavior constantly from the helicopter view. We can look down and watch how people move and adapt to their environments that was all but impossible before this. I think this accounts for the fascination in data visualization (the desire to chart this newfound angle on the world), behavioral economics (the recognition that when you watch things from this angle everything works a little differently than you might have expected) and ... Well, maybe that last one was a stretch, but I'm still working on this one, so sue me.
That's it for now. Also, I've been thinking about writing a short post about public speaking but must admit that I feel a bit embarrassed about it because it just feels kind of douchey. If you're interested let me know and I'll go ahead with it.
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How do you tell if Iran's election results are fraudulent? Well, if you're a statistician you look at the last two digits of the vote counts from the precincts that report and look for anomalies.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
To put it in perspective, in last year's US presidential election "returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections." So there's that.
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Tags: iran, politics, statistics
An interesting thesis: "The form of the duel - with its pointless deaths, inherent injustice and absurd pride - seems to us against reason and morality. But it did answer a problem that always confronts human society: how can one settle a dispute between essentially equal parties?"
Also from the same article, they compare dueling to modern-day PR battles: "Instead, the modern equivalents of the duellists' "seconds" were the rival armies of spin doctors, and so the contest was carried on, at public expense, through the media."
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Tags: culture, history, politics
Fun. A list of four of the strangest airport runways including Gibralter, where pedestrians actually walk across the runway. As a side note, when I told people I was going to Hong Kong they all mentioned Kai Tak Airport which closed in 1998 but used to be in the center of town (Kowloon) and was known for it's amazing landings.
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Tags: airports, travel
On Twitter's role in Iran:
Sure, Twitter has been a fascinating window for those of us on the outside and at times a critical tool for some of those on the inside. I certainly won't try to deny this, but I have to ask: if - like most start-ups who show only casual interest in generating revenue - Twitter had folded months ago, would the protesters in Iran be somehow muzzled or in any way hindered?
Gotta say I agree with Nathan's answer: "To say so is nothing less than patronizing. Outward and inward communiques would surely have found another path." That's not to say it's a bad thing, just a bit of perspective on the situation.
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Tags: communication, iran, media, twitter
Ah traffic, a never ending source of wonderment by laymen and scientists alike. I really enjoyed this explanation of the critical mass theory of a traffic jam: A team at Nagoya University in Japan ran a bunch of people around a circle and discovered that 22 cars was the critical number. Once you had that many on the track small changes, like a split-second braking, reverberated through the system.
Jonah Lehrer beautifully explains this in terms of phase transition:
This is actually a pretty familiar scenario for particle physicists, who are used to studying phase transitions, such as the transformation of liquid water into solid ice. In this case, the critical threshold is temperature, which triggers clusters of molecules to slow down and form a crystal lattice, which then spreads to nearby molecules. A traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.
Nice visual.
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Tags: networks, science, traffic
I posted this story about unfounded medical truths over at GE Adventure, but it's too good not to post here as well. Taken from How Doctors Think
.
One of the most common congenital abnormalities of the heart is a hole between the two upper chambers, between the right atrium and the left atrium. Since the pressure in the left side of the heart is higher than in the right, blood will flow from the left atrium through the hole into the right atrium. This aberrant blood flow is called a shunt and can overload the right side of the heart, leading to heart failure and other complications. Lock told me that doctors send children for surgery to close these holes if there is a two-to-one shunt, meaning that twice as much blood flows through the right side of the heart than the left.
"Do you know where that two-to-one number came from?" [Dr. James] Lock [chief of cardiology at Boston's Children's Hospital] asked. I imagined it was from careful clinical studies of children with the hold. "You would think so. But you'd be wrong. At a medical meeting in the 1960s, a pediatrician presented the question 'When should the hold be closed?' to a group of cardiologists. There was a heated debate about how much shunting required a surgical fix. So the meeting organizers, out of desperation, took a vote. Some voted for a lower number, some for a higher number. The median ended up being two-to-one. This was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. So now all textbooks have as the truth that you should close a hole when the shunt is two-to-one.
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Tags: health, research
Those wacky economists are at it again. This time by reworking the rules of scrabble to allow for tile bidding:
At the beginning of the game tiles are turned over in sequence and the players bid on them in a fixed order. The high bidder gets the tile and subtracts his bid from his total score. (We started with a score of 100 and ruled out going negative, but this was never binding. An alternative is to start at zero and allow negative scores.) After all players have 7 tiles the game begins. In each round, each player takes a turn but does not draw any tiles at the end of his turn. At the end of the round, tiles are again turned over in sequence and bidding works just as at the beginning until all players have 7 tiles again, and the next round begins. Apart from this, the rules are essentially the standard scrabble rules.
The discoveries from the game are pretty interesting, especially around the scores of tiles. Blanks should actually make you lose points (they commanded 20 points on average in the bidding), 's' scores too high, 'u' and 'v' too low. Interesting.
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Tags: economics, games, scrabble
In case you're playing along at home, looks like Paul Krugman responded to the Duncan Watts article I posted about yesterday. Though he doesn't call out or link to the article, he pretty much shits on Watts' main thesis: "So I think of the pursuit of a world in which everyone is small enough to fail as the pursuit of a golden age that never was. Regulate and supervise, then rescue if necessary; there's no way to make this automatic."
A few things on this unrelated to economics: First, I LOVE how Krugman makes internet jokes. It's so awesome that a nobel-winning economist writing on The New York Times includes FAIL (or all your base, which was a recent headline). Second, it's kind of weird that he doesn't even mention Watts article, which it seems clear he is responding too ... Maybe he's not? Three, have I mentioned the internet is awesome lately? How cool is it that this kind of debate can just spring up.
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Tags: economics, finance
The Economix blog quotes Elliot Spitzer on cabs and the state of the economy:
When you can walk out into the street in the rain in rush hour and get a cab, we're in a very serious recession. And the moment that I can't get a cab anymore, I will feel the economy is picking up. Right now, it's raining this morning, but I have no doubt I can get 10 cabs in 30 seconds. That's a bad sign for the economy.
They also point to a longer list of some uncommon indicators including the rise of mosquitos as a result of foreclosed homes. As a side note, that reminded me of an article I read awhile back about kids in LA skating pools back in the day and how they were actually doing a service to the community by cleaning pools that would otherwise be mosquito breeding grounds. (Also, I wrote about some more indicators back in December and have a few more under my "economicindicators" tag on Delicious.)
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Tags: economicindicators, economics
Last week Fast Company did a little event to celebrate their 100 Most Creative People in Business issue. As part of it, Ed Ulbrich of Digital Domain spoke of his company's work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I knew none of this, but apparently Benjamin's face is all computer animation, a serious triumph and something many in film thought couldn't be done. The way Digital Domain accomplished this was by mapping Brad Pitt's face using something called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS): "The most widely used and versatile method for measuring and describing facial behaviors. Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen developed the original FACS in the 1970s by determining how the contraction of each facial muscle (singly and in combination with other muscles) changes the appearance of the face."
In case your curious, here is a list of facial behaviors and some corresponding photos. Also, if you care to sift through a heavy-duty flash site, here is some more info on how they made Benjamin Button.
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Tags: movies, research, science, specialeffects
All around smart dude Duncan Watts has some interesting stuff to say about networks, complexity and the current banking crisis. I found his explanation of systemic risk especially interesting. He explains that although there were people working to figure out just what was going on and how risky it was, ultimately they couldn't judge the risk associated to the kind of failure cascade that happened after Lehman went down.
Traditionally, banks and other financial institutions have succeeded by managing risk, not avoiding it. But as the world has become increasingly connected, their task has become exponentially more difficult. To see why, it's helpful to think about power grids again: engineers can reliably assess the risk that any single power line or generator will fail under some given set of conditions; but once a cascade starts, it's difficult to know what those conditions will be - because they can change suddenly and dramatically depending on what else happens in the system. Correspondingly, in financial systems, risk managers are able to assess their own institutions' exposure, but only on the assumption that the rest of the world obeys certain conditions. In a crisis it is precisely these conditions that change in unpredictable ways.
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Tags: banking, economics, networks
Man do economists love raining on people's parades. Apparently tennis players (like John McEnroe) believe that getting new balls (which apparently happens every nine games) is an advantage. After running the data, the results aren't exactly in line with players' thinking:
According to Wimbledon data analyzed by a pair of economists with a fondness for tennis arcana, first serve points are no more likely with new tennis balls than old ones. If anything, double-faults are more likely, implying it may be better to serve using older balls than newer ones. Take that Big Mac.
Point: Math.
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Tags: economics, sports, tennis
In response to a post from Matthew Cooper over at The Atlantic about the possibility of the FDA overseeing the tobacco industry, Crooked Timber examines the economics of the world's smoking bans.
While all of that is quite interesting, it was the following quote from The Atlantic that I found fascinating. In response to the incredible popularity of smoking bans after New York City instituted theirs in 2004, Cooper writes, "Consider it part of the beauty of federalism. The small ideas that incubate in laboratories of democracy, as the former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states, have grown wildly." While this may be a well known idea, I had never really thought of states as the incubators for new ideas that may move up to a national level. Very interesting.
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Tags: economics, politics, smoking
Ha! So last night I had a conversation about the Kindle that went the same way most of my conversations on the subject go: We all debated the merits of an e-book reader and explained how we loved the look, feel and smell of physical books. I've been having a debate in my head over whether I should get a Kindle since it came out (my answer is yes, once the small one has native PDF support). While I really love having books around, I really hate illogical nostalgia.
Anyway, this is all a long-winded introduction to an internet joke that (although we hadn't seen it) happened to be the second half of last night's conversation: Smell of Books.
If you've been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you're not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don't compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.
But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.
It comes in New Book Smell, Classic Musty Smell, Scent of Sensibility, Eau You Have Cats and Crunchy Bacon Scent.
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Tags: ebooks, funny, kindle, nostalgia
Since I saw it I've been meaning to link to this crazy video showing a dance party naturally developing. It's a fascinating look at the crowd mind. Today Jonah Lehrer picked it up on his blog, explaining:
This dance worked the same way. At a certain point, the group of awkward dancers becomes undeniable - they can no longer be ignored. And that is when the contagion begins. Once we start to wonder whether the dance is fun - or what that cluster of people is looking at - then it's only a matter of time before we too start to dance. Jane Jacobs, in other words, was right: "Life attracts life".
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Tags: culture, psychology, sociology
Hmmm, interesting post that outlines some of the fallacies of the original Sim City, specifically:
1. the fallacy that transit costs are mostly in construction rather than operations (a false analogy with highways) and
2. the fallacy that residential and commercial development must always be on separate parcels -- no residential towers over retail or even an apartment over the corner shop.
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Tags: cityplanning, videogames
One of the side effects of this our GE Adventure is that I've become fascinated by healthcare (I'm actually quite proud of some of my writing on the topic over at the site). Anyway, during a conversation recently someone at GE recommended I read How Doctors Think
, which I ordered and started last week.
It's an excellent account of the cognitive mistakes doctors make (I'm about 3/4 of the way through). One of the more interesting points thus far to me is about how doctor's begin to believe their own hype. In discussing the kinds of mistakes he had made in his career, Dr. James Lock said, "I learned that I need to be more circumspect about making these predictions. I have to be more clear to myself that even though the reasoning seems extremely tight, I am still making it up. And you absolutely have to recognize that what you think you know can have limitations." [Emphasis mine.]
I've always felt like everyone was making it up as they went along. No matter how buttoned up any person or company seems, they can't possibly know everything. One of the big themes in the book is the difference between the people that recognize that limitation and work with it and those that begin to take their own approach as gospel. That latter is a very dangerous thing.
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Tags: culture, healthcare, psychology
Super interesting article over at LiveScience that outlines the role of population density in innovation:
The researchers ran computer simulations of different population densities, grouping humans into subpopulations that migrated. The model revealed that at a certain subpopulation density there was an accumulation of ideas and skills. To figure out whether this phenomenon of skill-sharing was real, the team used genetic data to estimate population sizes in different regions at different times. Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there was a certain degree of migration between subgroups there was also archaeological evidence of modern human behavior.
It's especially interesting to think about in terms of what drives evolution. Last year I referenced a paper I had read about how humans evolved because of tools, rather than evolved and then were able to use them. Could these large groups actually have driven human brain development?
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Tags: evolution, history, innovation
A few weeks ago I mentioned a Times article about modeling swine flue spread. The two teams modeling it estimated around 2,000 - 3,000 total infections. Turns out they were off: "On May 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were "upwards of 100,000" cases in the country, even though only 7,415 had been confirmed at that point."
Now it doesn't totally discount the main point of that old post, which was to say that people overestimate the likelihood of a small event happening to them, but it's also not exactly the one in 299,998,000 the teams came up with. So there's that.
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Tags: health, swineflu
What's the 21st Century equivelent to the dog ate my homework? A corrupted file emailed to a professor. Corrupted-files.com sells students files of different lengths that are pre-corrupted, letting them buy a few extra days to finish their assignment.
The site's owner answered questions on it's ethics, "I am simply offering a better excuse. It's not cheating in the traditional sense as the student is still doing their own work and not using a roommates' old paper or being foolish enough to purchase one online. If the student is desperate, it is fair to assume he/she has considered these paths. In such a situation, would you rather have a student make up an excuse and hand in their own work a bit late or submit someone else's work on time?"
Personally I just find it fascinating to watch how this type of behavior (lazyness, cheating, pirating) actually drives culture.
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Tags: culture, education
Jonah Lehrer points to some research by Sheena S. Iyengar (who has a book coming out next year called How We Choose: The Subtext of Life
) on the effect of the number of choices on people's final decision (it's been well documented that more is not always better).
Consider her research on 401(k) plans, which looked at employee participation in plans covered by Vanguard, one of the largest mutual fund companies in the country. Iyengar found that, as the number of 401(k) plans increased, people became less likely to opt in. When there were only four different funds to choose from, nearly 75 percent of employees decided to participate. However, when people had to navigate fifty-nine different 401(k) options, only 60 percent of people decided to save for their retirement. In other words, excessive choice was repellent.
This kind of research is endlessly fascinating to me. I really need to read more behavioral economics stuff (speaking of which, the Nudge guys have a blog).
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Tags: behavioraleconomics, psychology
Hey everyone, so I'm going to be in Hong Kong for a few days starting next week and I'm looking for recommendations of good things to do and good people to see. If you wouldn't mind leaving tips in the comments or dropping me a line I would be super appreciative.
Thanks. :)
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Tags: hongkong, me, travel
rc3.org quotes from a conversation between Malcolm Gladwel and Bill Simmons (which I haven't read). This portion of Gladwell's quote really intrigued me:
The [full court basketball] press doesn't guarantee victory. It simply represents the underdog's best chance of victory. It raises their odds from zero to maybe 50-50. I think, in fact, that you can argue that a pressing team is always going to have real difficulty against a truly elite team. But so what? Everyone, regardless of how they play, is going to have real difficulty against truly elite teams. It's not a strategy for being the best. It's a strategy for being better.
I have this conversation often with my friend Justin: Business strategy is not a zero-sum game. I think a lot of companies go out of business trying to find their silver bullet instead of just diversifying their revenue streams and ultimately building something stronger. As a culture we tend to value extreme change over incremental change, regardless of the costs associated.
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Tags: business, strategy
The other day I was having an interesting conversation about logos that seemed worth sharing. I was thinking about different media logos and how they were designed for the medium in which they were born. Take the New York Times or Washington Post (or any other newspaper for that matter). Their logos are long, generally a collection of a few words that stretches horizontally (this has caused me many headaches with Brand Tags). They, of course, were designed to live at the top of the paper so they had pretty of space to sprawl out.
Now move to TV and look at ABC, NBC or even CNN (who came later). These logos tend to be squareish, fitting the aspect ratio of the medium. Now move to the web and even mobile devices. It's interesting to think about how logos are being designed for companies native to these conditions. Web logos, I feel, are generally rectangle (for whatever reason). The iPhone, however, only allows for squares. What is that going to mean? Are more people going to need identifiable marks? (And the iPhone isn't the only thing, I realized that I had nothing good to identify Brand Tags with on Twitter when they asked for a square logo ... I ended up going with a "b" that I am still not all that happy about.)
Anyhow, am sure designers have been thinking about this stuff for ages but it was interesting to me.
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Tags: branding, design
Talking to an ergnomics expert about how not to destroy yourself while using a notebook.
Over the last few months I've been testing out the new Embody chair from Herman Miller. The folks over there sent me one to try out and offered me access to anyone I wanted to speak to should I be interested in writing about my experience. (Just to clear everything up, they sent me a chair, I was not paid anything and not required to post anything.)
The chair's arrival happened to coincide with a bit of shoulder/neck pain, I'm pretty sure it was mostly from laying on the couch and generally terrible posture while using my laptop. So, I took them up on their access and asked to speak to someone on their ergonomics team not just about the chair, but about how to set up a desk for optimal ergonomics. They put me in touch with Gretchen Gscheidle, who led ergonomics-related research on the Embody. Below are my questions and her answers (with a bit of commentary from me in brackets).
Hope this brings everyone a little less pain in their back, shoulders and neck.
Noah: So lots of people have told me the height of my chair needs to leave my feet flat on the floor, but what about the height of my desk? Where should that be?
Gretchen: There are a couple steps to this set up process.
- Start with your feet flat on the floor, and yourself sitting upright.
- With your upper arm resting at your side, bend your elbow to 90 degrees. Your surface, and in particular your keyboard home row, should be at approximately that height, some advocate a little lower, but no more than an inch. Similarly, some advocate a little higher, but again no more than an inch. Depending on how you're proportioned (lower leg length + heel height, torso length, and upper leg length combined) this measurement for the North American and European population ranges between 22" and 32" off the floor.
Without seeing your particular desk, I'm guessting that the sore neck/ shoulders you describe are a function of you "scrunching" your shoulders, i.e. your surface is too high, which is understandable given that 29" and 30" are "standard" desk heights. Really, it endorses the adjustabile height approach that is part and parcel to systems furniture. If, however, you work at a conventional desk, or say have a filing cabinet under your systems work surface, then you should put your keyboard on a supplemental surface that is at the right height for your body.
Noah: How about the computer monitor? Where should that be?
Gretchen: This is a little bit trickier, because of the effects of corrective vision, like bifocals, that some people require or will likely require as they age and sizes of displays. The rough rules of thumb are:
- The display should be about an outstretched, arm's length (or approximately 24") away from your eyes, and
- The vertical center of the display should be 10-15 degrees below an imaginary horizontal line projecting out from your eyes. Both conditions presume starting again from the upright seated position. [Holy crap, I have never even come close to this (especially with my laptop).]
Noah: How have laptops effected posture and ergonomics? I feel like my laptop leaves me constantly hunched over. [I was probably most interested in this one. It's really a terrible thing when you look around and see people scrunched up in a ball using their computers and it can't be good for our bodies. Laptops seem to encourage this bad behavior as we are always looking down at them.]
Gretchen: First off, I'd encourage you to refer to them as "notebooks"--the folks in the tech industry get a little jittery with the term "laptops." There was at least one lawsuit somewhere down the line where a person fell asleep with a powered-up notebook computer on his bare-skinned lap and suffered some serious burns as a result. The lawsuit came about because of the laptop term. But, I digress.
Notebook computers are a significant wrench in the ergonomic rules of thumb because the display and keyboard connection. For the display to be in the right location for the eyes, the keyboard needs to be in a location that is not ideal for keyboarding. The reverse can also be true: keyboard in the right place, display in the wrong place.
You can certainly chalk up that "hunched over" feel to your use of a notebook, but frankly, we see it in desktop configurations too. Herman Miller Research conducted video observation in a range of office settings with a range of office workers in the early 2000s. There were some notebook users in the study, but the majority were desktop users. Subjects' gross torso postures were measured as being upright or forward--including hunched over--some 75 percent of all time that they were seated at the computer. That is something that really caught the attention of Bill Stumpf and Jeff Weber, our designers, in the early days of development for the Embody chair. One of our regular ergonomics consultants has the theory that "the eyes always win." In other words, we will contort the rest of our bodies into awkward, even unhealthy postures as we work, unknowingly, even if it means allowing our eyes to get in the right spot to see most effectively. We chalk it up as well to the seductiveness of what is on your computer display. The thing is, we're not the only ones who've taken note of these hunched over postures. I have counterparts at HP who call these postures
"turtling."
Noah: What's the ideal ergonomic desk setup?
Gretchen: It is as simple as our ergonomic mantra: fit the user, fit the task, allow postural change and movement. So, fitting the user as I've outlined above. Fitting the task is taking into account all that you're doing with your computer--notebook or otherwise--and/or paper-based or other tasks. If you're doing a lot of visually-intensive work, you're going to benefit from a larger display, which almost always implies a wider and/or deeper surface. If you're doing keyboard intensive work, it's a good idea to use a full-size keyboard, rather than the built-in. Similar story with pointing tasks--opt for a mouse if it's intensive use, as opposed to a touch pad or such. If you work with paper, make sure there's sufficient space for that too, and also consider the frequency with which you access paper files or other non-computer reference materials. If it's frequent, keep it in your near reach zone--basically your arms extended and waved in a 3D arc. If it's less frequent, you can keep it farther away from you. Allowing postural change and movement, at the very least, you want to sit in something that allows you to sit upright or reclined--the changes in posture are very healthy. If you're all but tethered to your "workstation"--something that is also height adjustable to a standing posture delivers another degree of freedom.
Noah: Did you think about laptops when designing the Embody?
Gretchen Yes, although I would characterize it more broadly than that, and say that we thought about the pervasiveness of technology--notebook or desktop usage--in some cases multiples of that technology. I would also point out that the Embody chair has evolved from what began as a holistic look at the user/ technology interface or something that we call "the two hemispheres of work." Herman Miller plans
to unveil the second half of that equation in June.
Noah: I'd like to turn this post into something that generally outlines best practices for working with laptops for long periods.
Gretchen: What I've discussed here addresses those best practices in terms of a "conventional" setup of user/ chair/ technology/ desk. Recognize that there are a whole slew of other postural opportunities that notebook computers allow. I'm not advocating any of them, but lying face down on the floor, sofa, or bed while "working" on a notebook are all feasible. Herman Miller belongs to a non-profit research organization, the Office Ergonomics Research Committee, that is starting to study such in the hopes of developing some recommendations or best practices for those situations as well.
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, which I just so happen to be reading right now.)
Hi, I'm 