August 23, 2010 at 4:00 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Futures Research, Telework/telecommuting
T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men (1925) ends with the following stanza:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
We collectively seem to be striving toward Eliot’s end as we fail time after time to change our momentum toward heat death. Although weather is not the same as climate, are we warm enough these day? Naysayers about climate change, who crowed about its fraudulent predictions last winter, are strangely silent this summer. Even in coastal California where, until the past few days, the summer was day after day of fog and gloom, temperatures below normal. Now it’s in the upper 90s (mid-30s Celsius). But last winter and this summer are just the vagaries of the weather, right? The same goes for the floods in Pakistan, China and Tennessee and the drought and fires in Russia. Just a series of flukes.
Continue reading . . . but a whimper
Permalink
July 26, 2010 at 1:47 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
First the (hopefully) good news: On 15 July the House of Representatives passed HR 1722, the Federal Telework Improvements Act. If finally enacted, the bipartisan bill would:
- Instruct the Office of Personnel Management to develop a uniform, government-wide telework policy for federal employees;
- Strengthen the federal government’s capacity to effectively integrate telework into Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP);
- Designate one person as a Telework Managing Officer within every agency;
- Provide telework training and education to both employees and supervisors [Note: the government apparently has developed some training materials for this; you can get a copy of their book for $99 if you're a government person, $149 if you're not. On the other hand you can buy a copy of Managing Telework from Amazon for $40 and change.];
- Require the Office of Personnel Management to compile government-wide data on telework; and
- Require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to evaluate agency compliance and produce an annual report to Congress that is publicly available on the internet.
The Senate, although it has a version similar to HR 1722, has yet to approve the bill and time is short before the summer recess. Final approval by the Senate and signing by the President would finally put some teeth into the decades-old plan to seriously increase the amount of teleworking performed by federal employees. The telework-tracking provision of the bill would also enable much more accurate estimation of the environmental impacts of telework.
If you support telework and wish to give a boost to its extension to a much larger group of people, please let your local representatives know about the possibilities.
Now for the bad news: last week the Senate dropped all pretense of passing an energy/global warming bill. Continue reading Good news and bad news from DC
Permalink
May 25, 2010 at 3:37 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Peak oil, Telework/telecommuting
The latest events in the Gulf of Mexico have given a new dimension to the energy dilemma. With anywhere from 5,000 to 80,000 gallons of crude (depending on the expert you believe) spewing into the Gulf every day. BP (the well owner) is mad at Transocean (the owner of the exploded oil rig), Cameron (the company that built the failed blowout preventer) and Halliburton (the people who were supposed to have sealed the well). Fishermen, environmentalists, everybody (except attorneys) is mad at BP, et al. The public’s heat has now added the federal government to the list of “how could you let this happen” culprits.
Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
For years it has been clear that, as the easy sources of oil are depleted, riskier and more expensive methods of mining more reclusive oil fields have been necessary. That means, for example, going offshore instead of drilling on dry land. The crucial difference between dry land and offshore drilling is that oil spills are much more easily contained and stopped in the dry land version than they are out to sea. If the spill occurs at the underwater wellhead, then its seriousness depends on how far underwater the leak is. When the leak is in relatively shallow water, as it was in the Santa Barbara oil spills in the late 1960s, the process of stopping the leak and cleaning up is far simpler than when the leak is a mile below the surface of the water.
And guess what? A substantial portion of the Earth’s yet-to-be drilled oil reserves is in even deeper water than the BP well. So if you liked the current Gulf leaks you’ll love the ones yet to come. This is not a comforting thought for many people who are, finally, beginning to rethink our need for oil.
Because the real, fundamental culprit in this fiasco is . . . US!
Continue reading Pique Oil
Permalink
April 25, 2010 at 4:09 pm
· Filed under Energy & Environment, Telework/telecommuting
There’s an old joke about an effective way to train a mule. Step one: Hit him over the head with a two-by-four because first you have to get his attention.
This past month Iceland’s volcano Eyafjallajökull has definitely gotten the attention of almost anyone bound to or from Europe. Although estimates vary, the costs of the ash-induced travel interruptions since the beginning of April are in the tens of billions of dollars/euros/pounds. Those costs are measured in flights canceled, insurance claims, hotel and restaurant charges and lost productivity, among others, and are guaranteed to continue to mount as the volcano keeps erupting and the wind patterns closely resemble the recent ones. (For a different view of the productivity issue check Lucy Kellaway’s article in the 26 April Financial Times.)
There has also been a sudden rash in videoconferencing and similar forms of teleworking, according to press reports.
Now the question is: has anybody learned anything from all this?
Continue reading It takes a volcano?
Permalink
March 26, 2010 at 4:17 pm
· Filed under Telework/telecommuting
Last August I wrote a blog about health care and telework. Given the recent events in the U.S. Congress I think it’s time to look again. The newly enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act gives teleworkers, particularly self-employed teleworkers, a major reduction in those 3:00 AM worry sessions. Now it is possible for many existing teleworkers, as well as many more not-yet-teleworkers, to think about expanding their options. Why?
Because the most frightening barrier against teleworkdom is now materially reduced. The threat of losing health care coverage in case you have a “preexisting condition” or aren’t an employee of a generous corporation is vanishing (although it may still take awhile before all the provisions of the act are in effect). So let’s think about some of the new options open to existing or wannabe teleworkers.
Permalink
February 5, 2010 at 11:41 am
· Filed under Telework/telecommuting
One of the often mentioned downsides of telecommuting from home is the lack of face-to-face contact with coworkers. No more conversations around the water cooler. This can be particularly true for full-time home-based telecommuters. In one of our telecommuting demonstration projects we even had a telecommuter who quit the program so he could go back to the office full-time—and he was telecommuting only one day per week!
This risk of anomie is often quoted as a reason not to telecommute even though it is rare among part-time telecommuters. But now technology is coming to the rescue with robotic telepresence. A company named Willow Garage is developing a telepresence robot called the Texas Robot in order to help them understand the technical challenges and social benefits of robot telepresence.
Continue reading Lonely telecommuters? Help is on the way
Permalink
January 17, 2010 at 4:54 pm
· Filed under Telework/telecommuting
Six months ago I blogged about the possible consequences of widespread uses of information technology in fighting totalitarianism. The focus of the blog was on the use of the Internet by Iranian dissidents against the current regime in Iran. In an article (The Iranian Exile’s Eye by Nazila Fathi) in the January 17, 2010 edition of the New York Times comes another fascinating example of technological ingenuity. The author of the article, an exiled Iranian reporter, describes a key method of evading repressive authorities: bluetooth. Specifically,
one of the demonstrators’ most useful tools was the Bluetooth short-range radio signal that Americans use mainly to link a cellphone to an earpiece, or a printer to a laptop. Long ago, Iranian dissidents discovered that Bluetooth can as easily link cellphones to each other in a crowd.
And that made “Bluetooth†a verb in Iran: a way to turn citizen reportage instantly viral. A protester Bluetooths a video clip to others nearby, and they do the same. Suddenly, if the authorities want to keep the image from escaping the scene, they must confiscate hundreds or thousands of phones and cameras.
Flash back four decades to a meeting I had with a scientist from a country just east of the iron curtain. Continue reading Telework and totalitarianism, Part 2
Permalink
December 22, 2009 at 4:19 pm
· Filed under Telework/telecommuting
Like telework in general, telemedicine has a long, if obscure, history. The idea behind telemedicine is that information technology might be able effectively to facilitate the delivery of medical services without the collocation of patient and physician. Clearly, there are some apparent limits to the variety of such services. The doctor is in one location, the patient somewhere entirely else. I can easily imagine a tele-visit to the doctor’s office where, via color TV, the doctor has me stick out my tongue, takes a blood pressure reading, possibly with the aid of a local assistant, and prescribes some pills. That’s basically the state of the art in the mid 1970s. Let’s call that telemedicine 0.9.
The significant distinction between “ordinary” telework and telemedicine is the location independence issue. Many forms of information work are relatively insensitive to the locations of the participants. I can write a report anywhere and still get it delivered to its intended recipients anywhere else. But medical interactions? I used to joke that brain surgery was not a good candidate for telework; a certain intimacy between the surgeon’s hands and the patient’s skull seemed to be in order.
But, like almost everything else, the times they are a-changin’. Technology marches on and it alters the perspective for telemedicine. Let’s glance at telemedicine 2.0
Continue reading Telemedicine 2.0
Permalink
November 30, 2009 at 2:32 pm
· Filed under Telework/telecommuting
To all of you who have actually gone out into the crowds in search of holiday bargains here’s a thought: your exposure to a carrier of Swine Flu has probably at least doubled. The chances that you’re able to be vaccinated against SF, in case you haven’t already received the shot, are less than planned by the government, because of production delays. Also there are shortages of Tamiflu, according to the media. Furthermore, we are closing in on what is normally the peak season for flu, at least in the northern hemisphere. Also, SF appears to prefer young children and working age folks rather than the elderly. The clear implication of these factoids?
Swine flu may be a growing possibility in your working household. What to do?
Continue reading It’s that time again
Permalink
October 8, 2009 at 2:22 pm
· Filed under Telework/telecommuting
I am often asked why I make claims about the ability of telework to improve teleworkers’ effectiveness; whether there is some sort of magic that makes telework special. Well, telework may be special in its ability to increase effectiveness but it’s not magic. Here’s part of the secret formula.
QUIET!
That’s it. A substantial portion of the documented improvement in the effectiveness of teleworkers derives from the fact that they are interrupted less often than their in-office colleagues. The get more time to think about what they’re doing. Now there is an article in the October 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum that quantifies the impacts of interruptions on effectiveness. Here’s an example from the article Infoglut by Nathan Zeldes:
Field research by Gloria Mark and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, shows that information workers are interrupted, on average, every three minutes. Even if it only takes the brain a minute to get back in gear that’s a lot of wasted time.
“Interruptions” in this research included phone calls; incoming emails; colleagues socializing; Internet surfing; texting and similar deviations from the business at hand.
Routinely during our training sessions for teleworkers I would ask them how often they were interrupted when they were working in the office. Most answers were less than ten minute intervals. Mark’s research suggests that those interruptions were more frequent than the answers I’ve received. Next I would say, “Suppose that you have just thought of the breakthrough idea that would revolutionize your company’s business and you were interrupted; how soon could you recover that flash of inspiration after the interruption was over?” Often the answer was: “Never”.
Here’s the rest of that secret: Properly trained teleworkers experience significantly fewer interruptions than do their colleagues back in the office. Let’s do the numbers.
Continue reading Quiet! The secret of telework success
Permalink