Slashdot Mirror
Cubicle Privacy
DarthDilbert writes "The NYTimes has a story about a noise canceling box for nosy cubicle neighbors. " Still no protection from mind readers. They know stuff.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Does the company use one-way scrambling or will there be another device to unscramble the scrambled voices in case PHB wants that feature?
And in an open office organisation, everybody will "tune in" if one suddenly starts whispering. So is this device used as always-on or when-required basis?
If it's always-on, the tantalizingly familiar yet incomprehensible waterfall of voices can be equally annoying.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The article is more of a 2-page description of the company, with a one-paragraph sidenote about the product.
On another note, can I get one that fits in my PC and shuts up the godawful fan noise?
My other Sig is
I have a 40x15 office (albeit filled with workstations blowing hot air). but if I ever get demoted, I sure as hell want one!
(do I have to RTFA now?)
do you have shinyfeet?
And here comes lip-reading tech to bypass the noise-canceling box: http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/avcsr.h tm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/technology/30hil lis.html?ex=1275105600&en=4a1c68b85a47519f&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Reg free link.
I call them right cross and uppercut
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Any questions you may have about the article should be answered with a recursive RTFA
Geeks in the workplace don't need this. They have something called slashdot to tune out coworkers!
Seriously, this is an excellent idea, and an important step forward in this technology. Imagine one that works for an entire property,but in reverse.... and all the children who will use it when the guardians aren't home to have loud parties the neighbors can't hear! The neighbors can't hear you, and minors are getting drunk! Everyone wins....
The moral ramifications of this technology in a more advanced form (being able to work in reverse of this device) should be most interesting.... this is just the first step.
The Crimson Dragon
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven.
This is the last straw, I'm going to burn down the building!
Did any one else have visions of Milton's radio on Office Space?
Cubicle farms suck. There's no avoiding it--they are soul and productivity killers.
Attention corporate masters! What employees want are OFFICES with DOORS THAT CLOSE and WINDOWS THAT OPEN. Yes, on a nice spring/fall day I wouldn't mind being able to open the window.
Full disclosure; I got an office when I threatened my employer with working from home four days a week due to the clueless fuckwits who think everyone in a 50 foot radius needs to hear their cell phone ring.
Remain calm! All is well!
They won't help at all. I've never really been able to tell much of a difference between the headphones being on and off. It just sounds like there's an extra humming sound when they're on.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
"Can you hear me Chief?"
"What did you say?"
"Chief, do you hear me?!"
"What are you saying, Smart?!"
There. I feel better gettin that out of my system.
My cubicle is my own little world and I feel free to do whatever in it. If someone asks me to be a little less loud, I judge their request on how often they are similarly noisy. The more noisy and more often, the less attention I pay to their complaints. If I have to hear them screaming at technicians in the field, they have to hear me every so often getting a call on my cellphone.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
A few weeks ago, some consultants come up and sit with the guy across the asle from me. One of the guys kept peering over at my screen, reading what I was typing. Not only is it rude, but its also a security violation.
So i start up our internal IM client, and start chatting with a friend of mine. I start describing in great detail how this guy is peeing over my shoulder, how rude it is, and then I start going into how much this man weighs, how his beard looks like a birds nest, how ugly he is, whatnot.
The guy starts giving me REALLY mean looks.
To which I type out "Hi Mr Nosey, don't like what I am typing? Don't READ MY SCREEN!"
He turned around in a huff, and would not say a civil word to me that day.
It appears this is nothing to do with blocking unwanted noise. It rather for those who did not RTFA has to do with distorting speech to foil ease-droppers(sp?). Personally working in a office filled with a large cube farm I think this is a terrible idea. There is already a dull roar of unintelligible conversation. The last thing we need is out and out noise pollution, in the form of this thing adding other sounds in to screw up interpretation.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
When a recent visitor mentioned that the demonstration was like something from "Star Trek," Mr. Hillis was visibly enthusiastic.
"That's what I've always wanted to do," he said. "Be ahead of 'Star Trek.' "
(awkward moment)
"Ummm, actually, er- I meant- I mean, you're kinda still behind Star Trek, cuz I said it looked like it was FROM Star Trek... Star Trek had it first."
"Yeah, but Star Trek is centuries ahead of us, so- this, I- this is ahead of them...right?"
"Yeah, but it's a show, uh, thats on now. Since the 60s, really."
"I see- yeah, alright you've got a point. But still... as- as time goes... I'm first. Like on a timeline you'd have my invention first, and then....then you'd have Star- mine is real, you know."
"Never mind, man."
"It's what I've always wanted to do. Be ahead of--"
"Okay, just- just forget I said anything."
(more awkward silence)
"Well, I'm off to Sea World."
In Philip K. Dick's _Ubik_ there's a company that sells the talents- or rather antitalents- of people who can block telepaths. The idea is that if a telepath or precog has been hired to monitor you or interfere with you, you hire the company to bring in an "inertial" who will negate the psi, and so eventually that person leaves.
A good introduction to Philip K. Dick in my opinion. It's well written and plotted (unlike a lot of his stuff) and a mind-fuck, but not the complete and total mindfuck of _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_- which is great, but starting with that one would be really starting at the deep end of the pool.
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techrevie
Actually, mind-reading protection has been around for quite a while now.
I can assure you these are absolutely nothing like your headphones. Now you have to RTFA to find out why, or at least re-read the summary a bit more carefuly.
The mods too. You can at least read the fucking summary before modding offtopic comments as 'informative'.
http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=http%3A%2F%2F www.nytimes.com
whats a cubilicle ? Nobody in the cubicles adjacent to me knows either . Wait, I know! It's the new office suite to go with Longhorn, Cubilicle 1.0 ! Does it have a spell checker ?
They haven't got to my location ... yet.
No Privacy in Your Cubicle? Try an Electronic Silencer
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: May 30, 2005
Two people in an office here were having a tête-à-tête, but it was impossible for a listener standing nearby to understand what they were saying. The conversation sounded like a waterfall of voices, both tantalizingly familiar and yet incomprehensible.
The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.
The voice scrambling technology used in Babble was developed by Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm founded by Danny Hillis, a distinguished computer architect, and Bran Ferren, an industrial designer and Hollywood special effects wizard.
Babble, which is intended to function as a substitute for walls and acoustic tiling, is an example of a new class of product that uses computing technology to shape sound. Already on the market are headphones that can cancel extraneous noises and stereo systems that can direct sound to a particular location.
The system will be introduced in June by Sonare Technologies, a new subsidiary of Herman Miller, the maker of the Aeron chair, as part of an effort to move beyond office furniture. The company plans to sell the device for less than $400 through consumer electronics and office supply stores.
Herman Miller originally turned to Applied Minds without a specific product in mind; instead, they were hoping the firm would help it create new concepts.
"We complement each other well because Danny is a real scientist when it comes to deep analytics and physics," Mr. Ferren said of his partnership with Mr. Hillis. "I have a good general working knowledge and can give him insight on the aesthetics and design side."
The two men formed Applied Minds after leaving Walt Disney Imagineering in 2000. Mr. Hillis was a pioneer in the design of extremely powerful computers known as massively parallel supercomputers, having founded Thinking Machines, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that subsequently went out of business in 1982.
Mr. Ferren has been a leader in movie effects, working on such films as "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," and has won Academy Awards for technical achievement. He also developed mirrored sunglasses for Revo in the 1980's. Applied Minds, housed in a cluster of five converted warehouses here, is a technology playhouse for a group of 100 designers who work on projects ranging from designing buildings for government agencies to trying to treat cancer through the emerging field of proteomics, the study of proteins.
"I have known Danny for 25 years and Bran almost as long," said Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. Their partnership, Mr. Negroponte said, "brings together two of the most interesting minds" in the country.
In addition to its work with Herman Miller, Applied Minds is developing some 40 new concepts and products for sponsors as diverse as General Motors, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Northrop Grumman, and the toymaker Funrise.
The Babble voice privacy system is the first commercial example of Applied Minds' approach in collaborative product design. The partnership with Herman Miller began three years ago after Mr. Hillis met Gary S. Miller, Herman Miller's chief development officer, at a technology and design conference in Monterey, Calif.
The Babble scrambling technology is not the first attempt at using technology to provide office privacy. Acoustic materials have been used for dampening sound and white noise generators are commercially available, but the Herman Miller executives said that their new system was more effective.
While many companies resist outside design collaboration,
I wad visiting a friend at his office once and I saw that his cube farm had actual sliding doors on their cubes, that can be closed to give people some privacy. The doors clamped onto the side of the walls and looked like the beveled, frosted glass you see on a shower door. You could still see the silhouette of someone in the cube, but it gave the occupant some sense of privacy. You could have the doors open when you don't mind people coming into your office to ask questions and slide it closed when you're busy and don't want to be disturbed. Ever since I saw that I've been looking around in google trying to find them so I can tell my boss that's what we need. So far I haven't been able to find them. All I've ever turned up in my searches are cheesy things like these which aren't nearly as nice. Has anyone else seen those nice sliding doors for cubicles and know who makes them?
My next-cubicle neighbor at a previous job used a large fan under his desk to generate "white noise" to down out surrounding sounds. I referred to it as his Tesla coil, due to the amount of electromagnetic disruption it seemed to generate on our shared power circuit.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Sorry shameless "Get Smart" reference.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
Maxwell Smart and his boss. The show was 'Get Smart'. Barbara Felton played his partner. I had the hots for her.
,the guy who played Smart supplied the voice for Inspector Gadget. Ah yes, Don Adams (I had to look that up.)
Anyway, the thing was the cone of silence. When you were in the cone of silence, nobody could hear what you were saying; including the person you were talking to.
Anyway
...how whiny that sounds when you've worked in a bullpen.
r "Same observation applies to MREs and K-rations" j
The "Babble" technology that is discussed in this article is not noise canceling technology! Noise canceling technology uses soundwaves that are 180 degrees out of phase with the original waveform to cancel out the original soundwave.
From the article description, Babble simply 'scrambles' sound waves so that speech is unintelligible, but it doesn't actually make anything quieter (in fact, based on the description it probably increases the ambient noise, just like masking systems). This device is used for speech privacy (which can be useful for meeting HIPAA regs for example), not sound cancellation.
If you want to make things quieter, you'll have to resort to earplugs, sound-canceling headphones, or floor-ceiling partitions (ie walls).
Is it noise cancelling? It seems that it just adds sampled sound to mask conversations.
c hi02-2-mp2.mpg
i n/
"sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range"
Horrible article. No details on how the product works or what it does.
And for the map thingy... It's been done some time ago (2002).
Here's a movie (25 MB) from Sony research (Jun Rekimoto, SmartSkin: An Infrastructure for Freehand Manipulation on Interactive Surfaces):
http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/movies/
Use VLC to view the movie.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Movie taken from
http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/smartsk
Musings I had this last Friday afternoon, stuck in Yet Another Traffic Jam:
I have 95-99% of what I need to be productive with my Thinkpad and my PKI token.
Yet I haul my ass out of bed every day, put on office togs and get in the car. I drive 60 miles (that's about 2.5 gallons of gasoline) and walk into a cubicle farm, sit down, and plug my laptop into a docking station.
60 miles away, in my home office (which has a door and a view, mind you) sits another docking station which can do exactly the same thing.
After 8 hours, I get up, pack up the laptop, and drive 60 miles back home.
Now THAT's insanity.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Mr. Ferren has been a leader in movie effects, working on such films as "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier..."
It would figure that he would pick a business partner that looks like Spock's brother
Now if I could just find something that would keep the idiots within 50ft of me from using their cube phones as speakerphones. Just because they are to (*$(*# lazy to either pickup the handset or use a headset.
I normally just send them an IM (if they even use the corporate IM) and ask them to pick up the phone. One woman once told me she uses speakerphone b/c
a) Handsets are unsanitary (it's her F-ing germs on it).
b) She often needs to type while on the phone.
c) Headsets would mess up her hair.
Wouldn't the steering wheel always think everything is spinning?
Why is it that every article about a product of Danny Hillis' Brilliant Mind covers more about Danny Hillis' Brilliant Mind than the product itself?
What? What?
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Batman: ahahahah...yeah and they kept on discussing about noise cancellation technology schmechnology !
Robin: Naaahh ahahahh com'on that's unreal!
Batman: No no, it is for real ! They were all excited about this sound stuff they forgot why they accepted to work in cubicles to being with !
Robin : ahahaha losers , they think it's for company flexibility profiteabily blah blah blahability !
Batman: exactly ! And the more they're worried about escaping the goddamed cubicle and get a decent office the more they forget about getting a decently paid job, it's a win win situation for employer !
Robin: but the next time they may whine and ask for that sound technology stuff
Batman: never worry my young friend, by that time there'll be a restructuration layoff and they'll be worried about their job long enough for the cycle to start again !
Robin: shivers me timbers, that's evil !
Batman: watch your language young boy !
#8814 I gotta go. There's a dude next to me and he's watching me type, which is sort of starting to creep me out. Yes dude next to me, I mean you.
What my cubicle needs is a smell blocking device to defend against nearby insidious cubicle dwellers...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Anyone else find it funny that an article about cubicles was submitted by DarthDilbert?
Consider yourself lucky. We have several of the clueless fuckwits who think it's okay to dial their phone with the speaker phone.
I don't think office courtesy is an educated skill, but by odd coincidence the people most likely to do that are not college grads. They're also the same ones who think it's okay to listen to their messages on speaker phone.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Plus it means I have to put up with shitty overhead fluorescent lighting which makes my screen hard to see.
I hate open-plan offices.
Build cubicles with walls that go all the way up to the ceiling.
Once upon a time I was told that there was some study that demonstrated that office workers were more productive in cubicles. I was also told that it was actually cheaper to build offices out of dry-wall but that thanks to all this research people were opting to spend more for cubicles.
Since then I've seen the debate go back and forth, and about half that time I've been in an office, the other half in a cubicle. I;ve still yet to see any real evidence one way or another, just endless speculation, and from tme to time some new invention to make cubicle life more tolerable (funny there is no need to invent things to make regular office life more tolerable).
Hopefully one day most of us (information workers specifically) will work from home. That was predicted to the first of my knowledge in the early 70s when I was still in college. I haven't seen much of it happening yet. As I near retirement age I suspect I never will.
I hate loud typing when I'm trying to work. It irritates me so much. The sad thing is that's going to be the norm for someone in my field. I want one of these!
I think the death penalty is to good for them. This is something I might look into as long it works with the noise of nails being clipped.
I fail to understand why people insist on clipping their nails at work.
Of course the same guy hates it when I leave winamp on and the noise from my earbud headphones bothers him.
Excepting speed readers, who learn to quell subvocalization as a portal to speed reading, we all subvocalize. NASA has looked into sensors that detect the neural activity concurrent with subvocalization and act as an interface for a computer. This would be great for dictating sensitive information, not to mention, silencing the cell users who, for reasons unknown, feel it's necessary to raise the decible of their voice to let the world in on their mundane conversation. Maybe hardware like this can be implanted.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
You could be anywhere in the world, including India.
Authors of Peopleware gathered excellent information about disruptive work environments. It is a good book to make circulate when workers begin to complain about bad office space. I believe the book was written in 1987.
I don't think there is more to say in 2005, except the following question: Why is the debate not over? Are the crazy managers that powerful?
Managers often become totally illogical when discussing the possibility that people work from home, because they try to hide their fear of losing control over their workers.
and this can be considered prior art I guess, I was fiddling with some speech and audio processing stuff when a friend handed over an article about using laser reflections off of glass for spying. We got an idea and after about four hours, came up with a little gizmo that took the input from a microphone, created an opposing cancelling wave form, and mixed it with input from a stereo and we put it to a piezo which we cemented to a window. Presto, no further spying would work.
That was years ago when experimenting with hardware more basic than a premade circuitboard was still cool and surface mount devices were still ultra high tech, I know, but I've often wished it could be done with other things. Such as make objects emit waves out of phase to those coming in to make it hard to hear anyone or anything precisely and clearly past a certain distance.
Of course, enough Jack Daniels will do the same thing...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Unfortunately, home tends to be in India.
Geesh people, you dont get privacy in the work place unless you own the damned place.
You work for them, period. Its their place, their rules.
You want privacy? Go home.. ( well at least until the fucking government starts putting cameras and microphones in our homes to 'protect us'. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sound cancelling headphones really don't make things much quieter. You don't hear anything (other than music), yet you can still feel pressure on your ears, which can be unpleasant.
You're a suburbanite.
Should be so lucky, how about when the group leader is the person who decides what radio station is going to be the one to listen too? Go get a pair of ear plugs and try to drown out the stupid rock or hip hop he likes.
I worked at a company once that refused to get a "cube farm". They had a giant open room with large windows on two sides of the office and multiple desks without any partitions. People were placed together based on job/team/area within that particular office. White noise emitters were used, but not in abundance to drive you crazy but used only when noise was really "busy".
Cube farms are productivity and soul killers. The only way is with an "open" office without huge CRT's but flatscreens and hidden computer towers.
It's an article by Markoff, king of the fucking useless. Expecting anything more than fluff out of that retard is as realistic as... say... setting off a nuclear weapon by whistling into a phone.
The day that Markoff is unemployed is the day when the tech world gains some soul.
You're my hero!
Another cubicle-dweller
Another technology already exists: walls, as in offices
Regarding temp control and suicide rates:
... Breathe-o-Smart [building temperature control] systems. To begin with this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from asphyxiation.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical precision, with major failures of
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc. issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates.
The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart system on a particularly hot and humid day with the resulting evacuation of many hundreds of office staff into the street where they met the third event, which was a rampaging mob of long-distance telephone operators who had got so twisted with having to say, all day and every day, "Thank you for using BS&S" to every single idiot who picked up a phone that they had finally taken to the streets with trash cans, megaphones and rifles.
In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city, rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries of "Get off the line, asshole! I don't care what number you want, what extension you're calling from. Go and stick a firework up your bottom! Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!" and a variety of other animal noises that they didn't get a chance to practise in the normal line of their work.
As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a constitutional right to say "Use BS&S and die!" at least once an hour when answering the phone and all office buildings were required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.
Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-o-Smart tyranny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves, could now just clamber out on to their own window ledges and leap off at their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I have to move into a cube aka "loser cruiser" in two days. I've got an old wooden barometer/thermometer I'm going to put on the wall, and I'm trying to think of other ideas of decorations that will make it seem less like a cramped noisy cube and more like a small office decorated to promote relaxation and concentration. Anyone got any ideas?
I don't say I'd never work in cubicles, since it could happen that all other positions in the world are filled, but other than that... no, thanks. I happened to go to a job interview a few years back, for a position which I think I would've liked pretty much. After the whole tests, management and professional interviews were over, also the money wouldn't have been that bad, they showed me the "offices"... something which I call a partitioned football field... I thanked them everything and phoned them the next day to say goodbye.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I am a programmer at a LA, CA company that is Japanese owned and operated and we all sit at the picnic bench from hell. It's a long table with a W shaped partition that doesn't even bar your neighbor from taking even a casual stretch to see what you're doing and it has these goofy "biometric" incuts that require one to scoot up close to the 'puter and rest their elbows on the table and not the arms of our highly adjustable and otherwise very comfortable chairs. We also have no break room and really bad coffee. But, on the flip side, we all get regular trips to Vegas and Japan as company outings as well as regular team lunches at fine dinning places in LA all gratis and we all work together to make certain that after hours support issues are dealt with quickly and painlessly with minimal to no personal time interuptions. I'd almost kill for a nice cube and some quiet to concentrate ( got this really loud and boisterous group on the other side of the partition from me ) but heh, with my good Sony headphones and the right stream (KCRW.COM) I can't hear 'em 'Nway ;-) My point here? STFU! if you have a cube! You could be sitting in the big group room and getting really good pay but still resorting to using piles of mouse pads for your elbows like we all do.
Member ID: akzgsligpll Password: akzgsligpll
Bye, slashdot. I'm sick of your 'tude. Hello
I'm starting a new job where I have to sit in a cubicle, and with this device I'll be able to hold conversations with myself without anyone hearing me. OTOH, I might not need it because my cubicle is going to have a door.
2. replace walls with expensive equipment
Just.. typical.
Employers need to learn that to get the best results from programmers, we need quiet. I'm sitting here right now unable to concentrate because of the business types babbling away on the other side of the room.
If only I could move my desk into the server room. Cool air, whirring fans, no people. I don't need a window.
Yes some can work in noise some can't !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Other people seem to be having a similar problem with this board. Top notch otherwise.