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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.
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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
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
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!
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
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, I was wondering if I could get one those unscramble thingies so that I could figure out what my PHB was saying. Or do I really want to know?
Actually, mind-reading protection has been around for quite a while now.
"...albeit filled with workstations blowing hot air..."
At my place of work, we call those "managers".
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?
...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
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.
#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
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.
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
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.
I was under the impression that cubicles became popular because they allowed businesses to cram more people into the same amount of space.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
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)
Cubicles seem to be an American thing: I've never seen one in an office here (UK). You might have a small (like the height of a ring binder) divider to stop your papers spilling onto somebody else's desk, but that's about it. Senior managers get offices, every one else gets open-plan.
To me, cubicles seem to be the worst of both worlds: the noise transmission of an open plan with the visual isolation of an office.
As someone who works entirely from home - my only communication with co-workers is IRC, email and a weekly trans-Atlantic phone conference - working from home is not all good. Being able to choose my hours, dress-code and working environment is great, and the commute time can't be beaten. But I think if I stay more than a few years the complete lack of human communication will get me down.
I've heard that newspaper editors call the results of working from home "freelancer syndrome", and dread getting stuck on the phone to lonely freelance journalists, desperate for conversation. I don't want to turn out like that.
Here is a possible thought to include in the cube discussion.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
I've always assumed that these devices, that are intended to be noice cancellation devices, are only designed to cancel out frequencies in the so-called audible range, but that they have the effect of magnifying sounds outside that range when trying to cancel out sounds within the range.
The reason I think this is that when turning on these headsets I feel part of that same uncomfortable feeling of pain that some of us get around ultrasonic pest controllers, and even more folks shirk from from the backs or undersides of CRTs.
I figure that eventually they'll cancel out sounds up to a much higher frequency, and then the problem will go away.