new research is showing unstimulating, stressful environments can not only bore you to tears but change the physical structure of your brain because your brain stops producing new neurons. everyone knows cubicle farms are lame, boring and generally horrible but now you can sue your employer for potential brain damage and loss of future income.

i keep toys on my desk. use bright colours to cover the grey or beige. i’ve even been known to have a 6ft inflatable palm tree sitting behind me.

links:
seed mag article on the researcher liz gould (and her princeton page)
summary on the passionate users site where i read this first

a friend of mine told me about this sydney based firm atlassian who has a product called confluence which is a wiki chockers with features for people to collaborate with. i’m downloading the software now to give it a spin but it looks very cool.

You are invited to possibly contribute to an edited collection of chapters on
trust in computer-mediated relationships.

The call for proposals is available at:
http://ssbea.mercer.edu/brennan/Trust Book/CFC final.pdf

We are asking for a 250-500 word proposal sent to me by email no later than
March 15, 2006.

“From Virtual Teams to Global Work Teams” was held feb 15 2006. i wasn’t able to attend and it seems they haven’t put the proceedings online

we all know it is important to communicate clearly and the challenges which email (or other non f2f communication) bring to the table.

there’s new research (wired article here) that shows we have a 50/50 chance in figuring out the tone of emails although we think we have successfully ‘read’ an email correctly 90% of the time.

this would definitely be leading to conflict, confusion and mis-communication (among other things).

the results of this research provide evidence to what we probably already felt but what i find very interesting is this research was done with undergrad subjects – people who you would think would have a lot of experience with email as they have been using it and growing up on it for years. yet, they do not seem to understand tone any more than folks who may not have a lot of experience with email.

ref:
Egocentrism Over E-Mail : Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?. Kruger, Justin; Epley, Nicholas; Parker, Jason; Ng, Zhi-Wen; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 89(6) December 2005. pp. 925-936.

abstract:
Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.