Even before our home and business’s move to bucolic rural eastern Ontario, we at DFC have long known the value of work-life balance. (In fact, we’re working on a new solution that supports just that: keep your eyes on this space in the coming weeks for more exciting details!

So it is with a heavy heart that we read an account in Quartz of the toll that workplaces take on their employees – mostly through lack of simple downtime.  The article is titled “This is what 365 days without a vacation does to your health,” and while there’s no precise stat on what damage an exact year without a holiday will do to you, there’s plenty to extrapolate from. For example, did you know that:

• “Researchers from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and elsewhere found that people who worked more than 11 hours a day (compared to those who worked 7-8 hours a day) were more than twice as likely to have a major depressive episode”?

• Allowing your mind to “wander” can actually increase access to your creativity – improving your ability to crack previously encountered problems? (From a study out of UC Santa Barbara.)

• “People who take vacations may boost the mental health of those around them?” (This Swedish study assumed antidepressant sales as a marker for depression levels, and found a “practically significant” correlation between more vacations taken and fewer antidepressants prescribed.)

Startlingly, many of these statistics are from European studies – a continent that gives the general impression of having solved the work-life balance puzzle. In Canada, the most recent large-scale analysis shows us working more than 45 hours a week, with only 23% of us reporting that we are “highly satisfied with life.” Oof.

While these differences can perhaps be chalked up to cultural expectation, it also goes to show that none of us can afford to get complacent – not about work, and definitely not about our quality of life.

Every time I have to call into a large company – especially my wireless provider, telephone company, cable company, etc. I have to gird every part of my being to get ready for what is almost always a frustrating and futile experience. Offshore call centers is usually the crux of my despair. So when I run into someone who gives me at least adequate service I am giddy. If I get competent and caring service I am floored and vow never to take my business elsewhere. I had this experience the other day, but first some background. (if you want to get to the outstanding service story skip the next paragraph).

Having recently moved to rural Canada from the largest urban center in the country I have had to deal with a multitude of service agents to transfer my phone, initiate my Hydro (Electric to non-Canadians) service, etc. My cell phone bill was totally messed up for three months until someone caring and competent fixed it once and for all and actually followed up to make sure the billing was correct! This in itself was amazing and stood as an example of how excellent service is not dead…until this week.

It’s almost November and everyone around here is preparing for winter. Coming from a big city naturally this gave me pause—it seems that here getting ready for winter is more than clothes & Christmas shopping. One item on that “get ready for winter” list is snow tires. Actually now they’re call winter tires (so that they can charge more by installing four tires)….Anyway after looking around and comparing prices, I decided to go to the local GM dealer in Kingston, Taylor AutoMall, because the price was very competitive and if anything went wrong, service would be readily available. Well something went wrong. The next morning after I had the winter tires installed, one was totally flat. I called my service guy, Scot at the dealer and told him there was something wrong. I proudly told him, that I live in the country and could fill the tire and drive over. It’s about a 30 minute drive to the dealer and Scot told me that if the tire goes flat while driving it could ruin the wheel or tire. He gave me all the necessary information to call roadside service and a couple hours later I was back at the dealer for the second time in two days. It turned out that the wheel was defective and another one had to be ordered in – the timing was tricky as I was going out of town the next day to a wedding. So the original tires were put back on and I was on my way in record time because I had a hairdresser appointment I couldn’t miss an hour away. Fast forward to this week…we are back in town and I knew that I had to make a third trip into Kingston to get those winter tires on. The replacement wheel had come in on that Friday, Scot made sure the tire was put on so that everything would be ready to go when I came back. When I called Scot to make that third appointment he mentioned that he had something for my inconvenience. When I arrived to get my tires switched around, again it was done right and in a very timely manner. Plus I was given a voucher for detailing my car! My car is the dog’s car – it is in constant need of cleaning so I was gobsmacked!

Yes, the car detailing voucher was the icing on the cake. The defective wheel was “just one of those things” however, what Scot at Taylor AutoMall did all along was to understand what the problem was, the possible consequences (not driving on it) and the best way to correct the situation for me, the customer and my car all within understanding the framework of the service department so as to how to deliver the best service.

Dear readers, I have a confession to make: these weekly missives in which I expound upon the latest tech-related news of the weird that has caught my eye, and that I think you might find just as diverting, sometimes do not come easy. More often than not, I am sometimes less-than-inspired: the right words elude me; the empty word processing page sits brightly in mockery. I try to write an introductory paragraph three times over, then have to take a break for a coffee or possibly a sandwich lest I become overwhelmed by existential despair.

Which is why I was very interested to see this article out of Psychology Today, which breaks down the actual, physical steps one can take to more easily enter that mental sweet spot — the state of maximum concentration and minimum effort that you may have heard athletes call “the Zone,” or psychologists “flow.” Practical-minded me appreciates that, though the state itself seems magical, the three steps require casting no spells.

My personal favourite step is charming in its direct permissiveness: “build yourself a fortress against interruption.” Our working lives often require such endless interruptibility (see our recent article about multitasking) that taking the time to physically shut the world out seem like sacrilege. But author Christine L. Carter exhorts us to take care of:

“Anything that might distract or tempt you away from your task […] before you drop into The Zone. Think of yourself as going on a road trip: What will make you pull over before you reach your destination? Will you need to plug your computer in? Get a tissue? Adjust the thermostat? Something as small as an itchy tag on the back of your shirt can weaken your focus if you are tempted to go to the bathroom to cut it off. Here is what I have to do before I find flow: Clear my desk of anything that might distract me. Remove yesterday’s coffee cup, close books, put pens away, stack papers into a deceptively neat pile. As I do this, I note anything on my task list that will need attention later, and make a time when I will attend to it.”

The other two (only two!) steps also offer great tips for finding your elusive flow, allowing you to work at your peak efficiency, while actually having fun doing it. This, I believe, is a state we workers deserve to be in, and I look forward to trying the tips extensively. How about you?

Tonight is the beginning of a new year. No you didn’t go to sleep and wake up mid-winter; it’s still late summer in this northern hemisphere, at least for another week. It’s the start of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. It’s a celebration, but it’s also the start of the 10 days of awe which are a time for personal reflection and contemplation; and observed by festive meals (of course) and prayers in synagogue. The synagogue services are long and no electronic devices are allowed. Yes, that means mobile phones are turned off – which can be a holiday in itself!

On Call while Offline: Decompressing in the Age of the Smartphone

It wasn’t too long ago that the tech revolution made multitasking a skill to strive for.  Today, we know of the hazards of multitasking – principally, if you’re using one brain to do two things, you’re going to do both things only half as well! While the working world may have caught up on this new development within the office environment, smartphones and 24/7 access to email make it harder to get the message across during off hours. And, it turns out, if you’re multitasking while also trying to relax, you’re going to relax only half as well – which can have a detrimental impact on your mental and physical health.

Craig Dowden goes into detail about this problem with “on call” culture in an article for Psychology Today. He cites a study of shift workers (folks whose working lives are literally spent on call), which showed that they had poorer sleep patterns, more physical health problems due to depressed immune systems, less responsive memory and learning patterns, and longer recovery time after illnesses. The unpredictability of being called into work was determined to be a major factor for each of these health challenges.

Dowden then extrapolates the results to today’s office workers, who experience a similar sensation of being “on call” while technically off work, primarily via our smartphones. And our failing is the culture of silence around this development:

“The sense of being ‘on-call’ is further reinforced by the lack of conversation about how we manage our smartphones. When I ask clients about the expectations of smartphone use after hours, my question is usually met with some discomfort. Most people tell me there has never been a formal discussion about it. People are reluctant to address it with their superiors for fear the subject will not be well-received or that they will be perceived as not being fully committed to their work.”

I agree with Dowden that the centre cannot hold. Sustained partial attention has certainly had an impact on me, and I can’t even imagine the difficulties of workers who aren’t self-employed, and feel like they can’t make their feelings known to their bosses. It’s time to fight back against the pernicious smartphone, and strike a blow for true productivity – and true downtime!

My new neighbors are shy and elusive. I don’t see them all the time and when I do see them, it’s usually first thing in the morning. I was so excited to see them when I first saw them, that I ran over to saw Hi, but they ran, no galloped away. Lately I’ve been more respectful of their reticence and have gotten to know them better: I discovered that one of the neighbors is probably a single mom because she was feeding her child out in the open in their backyard…I took a picture of mom and baby and this time she didn’t care….One time they were talking so loudly among each other that my husband heard them mooing in the shower. Yes, my neighbors are cows, nature’s methane producers!

Methane finds a Home in Used Coffee Grounds, or: Is there Anything a Good Cuppa Can’t Do?

We at DFC do love our coffee – but have long been stymied about what to do with the grounds left over once the brewing is through. Sure, we’ve tossed a bit around our garden – but the acidic nature of coffee grounds means we have no place to put them all – except the green bin, or worse, the garbage.

But scientists at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea have figured out a stunningly practical way to reuse the leavings from the beloved morning beverage: as a methane capture and storage method!

The technique involves saturating used coffee grounds in sodium hydroxide, and then heating them up to 700-900°C. In less than a day of processing, you are left with a mass of carbon capture material, ideal for keeping hold of methane, for a fraction of the time and cost needed for traditional methods.

“The absorbency of coffee grounds may be the key to successful activation of the material for carbon capture. ‘It seems when we add the sodium hydroxide to form the activated carbon it absorbs everything,’ says [paper co-author Christian] Kemp. “We were able to take away one step in the normal activation process — the filtering and washing –  because the coffee is such a brilliant absorbant.”

Kemp and his colleagues had their bright idea during a coffee meeting for a completely different project. And now, a harmful greenhouse gas can be more easily and cost-effectively removed from the environment, and marshalled as clean energy. (They’re also looking at hydrogen storage too.) Coffee really is the miracle elixir!

My house is a filthy mess. It has nothing to do with my housekeeping skills, (which I’ve never put on the list of things that help make me a whole person) I’ve been sweeping up at least twice a day and even the husband has been going around with the broom!

The culprits are none other the dogs and my new landscaping out front. The grading was changed and there is topsoil seeded with grass that is trying to grow….Jill loves sitting in the soil, she loves burying her bones in it, she & Samson both like digging and of course rough housing. And try as I might they don’t clean themselves off before they come in the house. Did I tell you Jill can open the door herself, both to go out and come in; so she comes and goes as she pleases.

Enough for now, I have to go clean the floors…again!

THE FIVE SECOND RULE RULED OBSOLETE
It’s happened to all of us: you’re sitting at your desk, happily working away and munching on a mid-afternoon energy-building snack. Suddenly, you lose your grip on your Ritz cracker smeared with almond butter, your corn chip, your seedless grape, and it falls to the floor in a desperate bid to escape your hungry mouth. You briefly hesitate, until a voice in your head shouts “Five Second Rule!”  So you snatch the fugitive morsel up quickly, wipe off the dust, and pop it into your mouth — day saved.

Or is it? C. Claiborne Ray of the New York Times’ Science Q&A column cites a 2007 study from the Journal of Applied Microbiology which exposes the Five Second Rule as a health-compromising misconception. Researchers took turns dropping slices of bologna and bread onto different types of surfaces contaminated with salmonella, then tested to see how much bacteria had transferred to the food. Their results were shocking (and gross): From tile, wood, and carpet, more than 99% of the salmonella present transferred to the food almost immediately, with no difference between the exposure times of five, 30 and 60 seconds.

(Digression: I recall a couple years ago that Adam and Jamie debunked this particular belief in their own unique style on Mythbusters. (watch this video ) It’s great to see their methodologies confirmed! Isn’t Science grand?

The fascinating full study can be found here. (You may not want to read it while eating lunch!) The short version: next time you lose a snack to gravity, grant it its freedom and put it in the trash — participating in this particular science experiment may not be worth the stomachache.

We at DFC have already reported on the many talents of the smartphone – from testing your stress, to becoming a high-powered microscope. Now there’s yet another service they can do to add to that list: helping to mitigate cravings for food, drugs, and other activities.

It has everything to do with what the subjects did (and most of do) on their smartphones: play games! Specifically Tetris, the finest Soviet-era puzzle game ever committed to pixels. Researchers from Plymouth University and Queensland University of Technology, Australia, have just reported on their experiment in the journal Addictive Behaviors. They rounded up 31 undergrads between the ages of 18 and 27, and had them self-report cravings they were experiencing (for things like food, sleep, cigarettes, coffee…) both when prompted by text messages and on their own. Half of the group then played Tetris on iPods for three minutes before reporting their levels of craving again.

The undergrads who played Tetris reported significantly decreased levels of craving than their co-subjects, to the tune of 50% to 76%. This marks the first time that “cognitive interference” has been proven an effective non-food craving management tool outside of a laboratory setting. How lead researcher Prof. Jackie Andrade postulates this works is very interesting:

“‘We think the Tetris effect happens because craving involves imagining the experience of consuming a particular substance or indulging in a particular activity. Playing a visually interesting game like Tetris occupies the mental processes that support that imagery; it is hard to imagine something vividly and play Tetris at the same time.’”

I’m sorry if you have a video-game obsessive in your life, because now they have science backing them up on the “At least I’m not doing [insert intoxicant here]!”  front. Otherwise: how cool is it that we can manage our own pesky cravings by distracting ourselves for three measly minutes! In fact, I bet it doesn’t even have to be with Tetris – just something as visually imaginative, as Prof. Andrade says. Maybe a game of tennis… There. There’s your totally unscientific rejoinder to your hypothetical video game nut. You’re welcome!

This August brings with it much memorializing, as it marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Pacific War, the last conflict of World War II. This end began of course with the cataclysmic use of the most extraordinary weapon humanity had seen to date: the atom bomb. The city of Hiroshima saw widespread destruction when the United States unleashed the bomb “Little Boy” at 8:15am on August 6, 1945; “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki on the morning of August 9. Japan formally surrendered on September 2.

While scholars are now, with the benefit of hindsight, divided on the necessity of using the A-bomb, at the time decision was regarded as inevitable, and taken very seriously (Harry S. Truman called it “an awful responsibility.”) In fact, during the long march into the Atomic Age, many other ideas were floated by Americans intent on breaking Japan. One of the nuttiest involved everyone’s favourite rabies vector, bats.

In January 1942, Dr. Lytle S. Adams of Pennsylvania penned a missive to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, outlining his plan to arm bats with incendiary bombs, and take advantage of their natural tendency to fly in a wide spread and roost in eaves to destroy the wood and paper homes of the Japanese people over whom these special bats would be dropped.

This plan, dubbed “Project X-Ray,” was perhaps crazy, but so well-elucidated (and Adams so well-connected: he was a friend of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt), that FDR kicked it up to the head of wartime intelligence, Col. William J. Donovan. Dr. Adams and his off-the-wall scheme got funded.

Adams footed a team of bat experts who sourced agreeable chiropterans from a Texas colony of Mexican Free-Tailed bats. Then thought turned to the nature of the bombs, both the ones the bats would be carrying, and the one in which they would be dropped from a plane. From i09:

“Two major tasks remained: designing the mini-bombs that each bat would carry, and the larger bomb that would house the whole shebang. The first problem was given to Dr. Louis Fieser, best known as the inventor of military napalm. It was a tricky project—the bombs had to be light enough for the bats to carry, and they couldn’t contain reagents, like phosphorus, that reacted with oxygen, because their bat carriers had to be able to breathe. Fieser settled on a light pill-shaped case made out of nitrocellulose, or guncotton, and filled with kerosene. A capsule on the side of the bomb held a firing pin, which was separated from the cartridge by a thin steel wire. The whole thing weighed seventeen grams (or about as much as three American quarters), and dangled from a string.”

“The larger, housing bomb was entrusted to the Crosby Research Foundation, a joint venture of famous crooner Bing Crosby and his brothers Bob and Larry [Ed. note: What?!]. Based on a design by Adams, it looked, from the outside, like a normal bomb, a cigar of sheet metal with a tapered nose and fins. But on the inside, it was outfitted with a parachute and heating and cooling controls, and stacked with enough cardboard trays to hold one thousand and forty bats.”

The bats would be prompted to hibernate by the cool interior temperature of the bomb. They would then slumber through the long flight to their target city, bearing mini bombs strapped to them, into which copper chloride, a corrosive, had been injected. Once released, they would awaken and scatter, hiding in the roofs of the structures that they found. And when night fell, they would instinctively chew through the strings holding the bombs to their bodies, and fly off in search of insect breakfast. (I was very happy to learn they were not intended to blow up too!) The copper chloride would then finally reach the steel firing pin, causing it to release, and the mini incendiary bombs to leap into flame. And the city – and any city they chose to rain bats on – would burn to the ground.

It wasn’t hubris or impracticality that ended up killing Project X-Ray, which saw continuous development for two years: it was the military’s need to push all available resources to the Manhattan Project. So we have no way of knowing how effective Dr. Adams’ batty plan would have been, though he maintained to the end that it would have been just as destructive as Fat Man and Little Boy’s combined efforts, with far less loss of life.

Moving to a new area after 40 some odd years requires getting to know the members of one’s new community. Of course there is plugging oneself into the local scene to find new hairdressers, butchers, dentists, etc. One member that I’ve taken the time and effort to get to know is someone I’ll call Charlotte…she’s my “friendly” backdoor spider. The reason that I call her “friendly” is that she stays out of the way during the day, tucked away, covered up in a corner of the back door, and at night she is out, spinning and repairing her web and catching all sorts of bugs. She is very busy at night, every night. Charlotte doesn’t call in sick or take a vacation, and she’s always busy preparing her meals.
At one time I would have taken a shoe to a spider that was sojourning in my environment, now I visit Charlotte every night and marvel at how industrious she is with the big bonus of being a very efficient bug zapper. I must ask my friend at the University of Guelph who is a world expert on spiders, how long she has to continue her work….I feel Charlotte is a member of my new community and I am interested in her.

Little Free Libraries: Forging Ties between Police and Communities
Just over two years ago, we wrote about Little Free Libraries — the “take a book, leave a book” phenomenon that has seen small book collections sheltered in purpose-built houses crop up in a variety of places.

The aim of Little Free Libraries is to help create a sense of community by fostering book sharing and conversation. The LFL organization is now seeking donations to extend that aim to where it is sorely needed: American police stations. From BoingBoing:

“Using the simple idea that books begets community begets new understanding, LFL has developed “Libraries of Understanding,” a new program that aims to establish and rebuild the relationship between police and the community. Todd and Co. have designs on providing Little Free Libraries available to each of the 18,000 police departments across the country, so that people in any neighborhood, anywhere in the country can gather, exchange books, exchange ideas and hopefully, extend the idea of what it means to be a community.”

The initiative has raised over $58,000 USD to finance the building and furnishing of the Little Free Libraries, and has already opened some for business in police stations in major American cities. (Go to their Kickstarter site for more info.)

Education and a common point of departure are key for communication between different groups — and libraries are places where that important work can happen. And, though the Little Free Libraries are indeed physically modest, the LFL movement was founded on the belief that something small can be the catalyst for something big. I have a feeling they will meet with success!

As I’m sure you are aware, dear readers, I share my life with two hulking yet adorable dogs. I love seeing how smart they are in their dog-specific skills. To change things up, we have a new game: I stand on the porch and throw dog treats for them to find. Jill, in particular, has proven quite adept with her nose: She was very fond of scent training back in Toronto, and now both she and Samson spend a lot of energy finding and rolling in all kinds of gross things in the hiking trails around our new home in rural southeastern Ontario. (Yay…?)

So, as a human with dogs in my life, I have a bit of an inferiority complex about my scent detection abilities. Thankfully, as I was sitting on my back porch working my way through back issues of The New Yorker and watching Jill and Samson snuffle through the grass for amphibious prey, I came across an article that explains why we have such a hard time identifying scents. And I feel a bit better about it!

In short, it involves socialization. Generally, human noses (unless injured or affected by congenital smell disorders) are able to detect differences between up to a trillion (!) scents. But the ability to describe and name what we smell depends on our culture. A team led by Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, pitted a group of Dutch speakers and a group of Jahai speakers against each other in a study verbally identifying scents. (Jahai is a language of hunter-gatherers in Malaysia and southern Thailand.):

“In Jahai, [in contrast to Dutch,] there are about a dozen abstract words in common use for distinct scents, such as the one that emanates from stale rice, mushrooms, cooked cabbage, and certain species of hornbill (yes, the bird). Majid couldn’t tell me for sure whether the Jahai facility with odor was the result of culture, physiology, or environment, but she suggested that their surroundings may play a significant role. When visiting the Jahai, Majid noticed a rich smellscape—heady wafts from flowers and pungent elephant dung. The thick jungle, she said, seemed to render vision less important.”

In European/North American culture, scientists theorize, sight is king due to a holdover from the Enlightenment (which emphasized visual evidence), childhood training (when was the last time you saw a Sesame Street sketch that taught scents like they do colours?), or even physiology (scents being processed by the limbic system, which, as the brain area associated with memory and emotion, is less able to turn around a complex description). As a result, the Dutch subjects of the study took an average of thirteen seconds to spit out a vague approximation of a smell’s description. The Jahai nailed them in an average of two seconds.

All this spells hope for me as I sit on my porch sniffing the country air, filled with scents of, um… pine? I plan to ask Samson and Jill for tips. Updates to come!