We at DFC are notorious fans of work-life balance. As a trend in both business and private life, mindfulness meditation caught our eye early on, and it remains a hot topic today.
 
In (very!) short, mindfulness meditation involves paying close attention to the present moment, without judgment. It helps increase a practitioner’s sense of their presence in the world, and may uncover what is true to them, and therefore actually important for their contentment.
 
This has great benefits for the private citizen, and we’ve seen that mindfulness can have a positive impact at work too — from decreasing stress to increasing self confidence, to boosting working memory. But a new study on the connection between workers’ mindfulness meditation practices and their motivation on the job shows that there might be too much of a good thing — at least from a “boss’s” perspective.
 
Behavioural scientists Dr. Kathleen D. Vohs and Dr. Andrew C Hafenbrack conducted five experiments on groups of workers, some of whom meditated and others, as controls, journaled or daydreamed. The researchers then instructed their subjects to complete several business tasks, like editing memos. They then quizzed each subject on how motivated they were to complete this busy-work and found that those who had meditated mindfully were on average less inclined to do it. From the New York Times:
 
“Those people didn’t feel as much like working on the assignments, nor did they want to spend as much time or effort to complete them. Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project.

Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work. This was bad news for proponents of meditation in the workplace: After all, previous studies have found that meditation increases mental focus, suggesting that those in our studies who performed the mindfulness exercise should have performed better on the tasks. Their lower levels of motivation, however, seemed to cancel out that benefit.”
 
While the researchers’ Times article gently warns bosses “you don’t want your employees to meditate,” BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow claims that what “bosses” want is not motivation, but blindness to personal potential. Doctorow sees a correlation between this pooh-poohing of meditation and the criminalization of “mind-expanding” substances back in the ’60’s, when “the boss class realized that people who could perceive greater truths would be unshackled from meaningless materialism and the need to work to attain status goods.”
 
There is a powerful connection between meditation and personal fulfilment. But there seems to be a darker flip side — where existential anxiety spurs willingness to do work meaningless to oneself in aid of someone else’s goal. The former is great for the quality of life: the latter great for business. I wonder, as capitalism begins to falter and all the old rules fly out the window, which will fail first?
 

This week, I find myself in Hamburg, Germany, visiting my youngest son, who works here as a chef. It’s been a while since I’ve visited northern Europe, and I am struck afresh by the many small differences between Canadian daily life and life here. Delicious, strange berries! The coffee culture!
 
Also, people here are a lot more relaxed about city biking. It’s lovely to see collaboration and friendliness (well, a German level of friendliness) between cyclists and drivers, especially coming from a country where that relationship can get a bit… intense.
 
Dutch design student George Barratt-Jones has taken the eminently reasonable European pastime of peacefully riding a bike, and turned it into something even cooler — a gadget! Inspired by a cold day waiting for a train and Einhoven station, Barratt-Jones envisioned a stationary bike that powered a loom, which, with five minutes of exercise, would spit out a knitted scarf. So, he built it. From his project description:
 
“Imagine [it’s] the midst of winter. You are cold and [bored] waiting for your train at the station. This pedal powered machine gets you warm by moving, you are making something while you wait and in the end you are left with a free scarf! That you can decide to keep yourself or give to someone who needs it more… [It’s] all about spreading joy and making those boring moments more fun.”
 
Check out the video of the Cyclo Knitter in action here!
 
I love how this designer found a little niche of unused time and turned it into something productive for his fellow passengers. And I love how bicycles are involved! Now, if only we could bring this spirit of collaboration to Canadian biking — though, with our winters, I feel like we’d have to generate snowsuits, not scarves.

We at DFC consider ourselves enormously lucky that we get to be our own bosses. This is for the usual reasons: We set our own goals  are thoroughly invested in every aspect of our company, and do our work while surrounded by natural beauty of the Frontenac Arch! But there’s a new reason why we’re glad no one’s in charge of us coming down the pipes…
 
Three professors have taken it upon themselves to attempt to prove the “Peter Principle;” a formulation first presented semi-facetiously by Dr. Laurence J. Peter in 1968, that states: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The researchers — Danielle Li (MIT), Kelly Shue (Yale), and Alan Benson (Uminn) — crunched the performance-related numbers from a staggering 53,035 sales reps at 214 different American companies over six years. They did so to see if subjects followed the Peter Principle trajectory: doing well in a position and being promoted as a result, until they hit the failure point of landing in a position they cannot meet the demands of, and can therefore not be promoted up from. Bingo: managerial incompetence.
 
During the experiment, 1,531 of the best sales reps were promoted to managers, where the numbers quickly showed they began performing poorly. The researchers found a trend of repeated promotions for excellent salespeople, without consideration that their skills — that they were excellent at — might not transfer to management. This led to periods of instability not just for the promoted person, who took a productivity hit while they learned their new job, but for the entire team under them. From Forbes:
 
“A company that relies too heavily on sales as a criterion for promotion pays twice for the mistake. Removing a high-performing sales associate from the line potentially upsets her client relationships and puts the revenue of those accounts in jeopardy. The team newly under her direction is at greater risk of under-performing as she struggles in a role that demands quite different abilities. […]

The starkness of the results took Dr Benson by surprise. “I expected that the best salespeople would become merely-good managers: some skills translate to management and others don’t,’ he said. ‘To see that the best salespeople were becoming the worst sales managers was surprising.’”
 
The conclusion standard companies can draw from this new proof of the Peter Principle is that promotions are not as easy as they might seem, and can cost a lot of productivity if candidates are not accurately assessed for their real skills, rather than a demonstrated level of amorphously defined “success.” The conclusion that non-standard companies (like DFC!) can draw? Maybe it’s better to be your own manager — because if your manager is incompetent, you have no one to blame but yoursel

If you’ve ever investigated the culture of business or self improvement, you’ve likely heard tell of the marshmallow test: the study done at Stanford in the 1960s on young kids attending the university’s preschool program. Run by professor of psychology Walter Mischel, the test involved placing a marshmallow in front of a preschooler and telling them that, if they could successfully hold off eating that marshmallow for AN ETERNITY (fifteen minutes), they’d get a second marshmallow as a reward — then leaving them alone to rely on their own willpower. Mischel and team then tracked the kids into later life, and found that the ability to delay gratification led to greater incidences of “good” personality traits, like confidence — as well as, critically, higher SAT scores.
 
A new study out of NYU is now calling this classic test into question. This new team has tried the test again with an expanded subject pool, both in terms of numbers (900 versus the original 90), and of factors like race/ethnicity, parents’ education level, and household income. With a more representative sample, they have discovered that self-control is less an individual choice and more a result of social and economic background — and that in turn is the stronger predictor of later success.
 
“[A]mong kids whose mothers did not have college degrees, those who waited did no better than those who gave in to temptation, once other factors like household income and the child’s home environment at age 3 […] were taken into account. For those kids, self-control alone couldn’t overcome economic and social disadvantages.

The failed replication of the marshmallow test does more than just debunk the earlier notion; it suggests other possible explanations for why poorer kids would be less motivated to wait for that second marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.”
 
In short, context is key! In science and, most importantly, in life. Sometimes, personal responsibility includes taking ownership of your context in addition to your actions, and recognizing when the latter might not help you out with the former. Now, as an adult, I’m off to snack on as many marshmallows as my heart desires!

I’m no Brassica-phobe: I love broccoli. Steamed, roasted, in a crunchy salad or creamy soup: its flexibility and high vitamin C content make it one of my favourite green veggies.

But I draw the line at a new way of consuming broccoli developed in Australia, land of the weird  — where it is dehydrated, pulverized, and sprinkled in espresso-based drinks.

Hort Innovation developed the powder to combat two unfortunate vegetable trends: the fact that the average Australian is not consuming their recommended 5 – 7 daily servings of vegetables, and that a staggering amount of produce is turfed before reaching stores because it is too “ugly” to sell. But Australians love their coffee — which has led to this unholy piggybacking of veggie upon java.

“The production process involves pre-treatment before drying and powdering the vegetable, to retain as much of the original colour, flavour and nutrients as possible.

To make broccoli coffee, the powder is added to the cup after the espresso shot has been pulled. Steamed milk is added, and more broccoli powder is sprinkled on top.”

Apparently the broccoli powder does not seamlessly incorporate into the beverage: the taste is still a bit… cruciferous. But the creators are now investigating ways of bringing the powder to the home market — I imagine you’d have an easier time getting it down in a green smoothie or on top of a salad. (Though, if you’re already consuming smoothies and salads, Australia is probably not worried about you getting your seven daily servings…) I think we can agree that the concept — increasing veggie consumption while reducing food waste — is great. It’s just a matter of finding a more palatable execution!

And here I thought the biggest problem with NASA’s Voyager probes, launched for deep space exploration in 1977, was that they came with a handy map of how to get to Earth for whomever in the universe might be tempted to pop by and eat us. But a pair of scientists have taken a closer look at Voyager 1 and 2’s “Golden Records” — two duplicate plaques containing 115 images of life on our planet, natural and human-made sounds, as well as greetings in 55 languages. And what they hypothesize here is a failure to communicate.
 
Movies like Arrival epitomize recent trends in thinking about possible alien contact. There is no reason to expect humanoids with forehead ridges to show up; so who says that a civilization who might come across a Golden Record would have any reference point for what we’re trying to tell them?
 
Rebecca Orchard and Sheri Wells-Jensen of Ohio’s Bowling Green State University say that if aliens’ senses don’t include sight or hearing — let alone if they have a completely different way of organizing outside inputs — they will miss out on a good chunk of the shiny goodwill message from our humble planet.
 
“Orchard and Wells-Jensen went through the material on the record and considered what an alien civilization with a different suite of senses might make of it. The barrage of greetings ‘pile up in a way that could be construed as arguing’, said Orchard, in a language that has ‘no grammatical congruity’. That is, if they can hear.

The 12-inch gold-plated copper disc has audio on one side and images on the other, and this could lead to further misunderstandings, the researchers believe. If an alien civilization tried to match sounds to their objects, life on Earth can look very strange. ‘What if you pair the image of an open daffodil with the roar of a chainsaw?’ said Orchard.”
 
The Golden Record does take on darker shades when we think of accidentally confusing entities we might never begin to understand.
 
Perhaps our only hope is for one of the Voyagers to evolve itself into a more powerful, bionic being that can amplify and translate our peaceful message! Until then, you can find me preparing to greet our alien visitors by marinating myself in barbecue sauce.

We at DFC love elegant solutions — especially when they open up new experiences to folks underserved by the status quo. This is why we join most of the gaming community in a giant “w00t!”  in response to the just-announced Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC).
 
Created to address the accessibility challenges of the standard controller that ships with Microsoft’s popular Xbox family of consoles, the XAC is a streamlined flat white oblong that boasts but a few key inputs. Besides the two menu buttons and the d-pad, two hand-sized black buttons — the “A” and “B” keys — take up most of the real estate on the face of the device. These buttons can be reprogrammed with the Xbox Controller app, but their ease and variety of ways with which a gamer with different mobility requirements can hit them (wrist! elbow! foot!) doesn’t change.
 
But the really cool functionality of this device is unveiled when turned on its side. Arrayed there are nineteen 3.5mm jacks, all ready for a prospective user to plug in as many pieces of equipment they need to make up their unique gaming setup. The XAC becomes a hub for joysticks of all kinds, foot pedals, cheek- or head-operated buttons, sip/puff switches, and more! From Ars Technica’s incredibly comprehensive report on the XAC’s debut:
 
I watched MikeTheQuad, a member of the Warfighter Engaged community of disabled veteran gamers, test the XAC out. As a tetraplegic, Mike has some range of arm and hand motion, but his individual fingers are not up to the burden of holding a controller and pressing all its buttons. […]

Mike also quite frequently flicked his wrist at the XAC’s two big ‘dumb’ buttons to access controls like crouching or weapon swaps. As I watched Mike flick at the XAC with the same speed I might move my thumb from the ‘A’ button to the ‘Y’ button, I thought for the first time in my life about what a privilege it is to quickly tap around all of a gamepad’s buttons.”
 
While the XAC team does consider themselves a bit late to the overall accessible gaming scene, they are happy that their new device brings unprecedented flexibility to the table for an equally accessible price ($99.99 USD; other controllers on the market can go for $300 change). And, they profess to the belief that anyone else — Nintendo, Sony — should be able to look to the XAC for inspiration for their own platforms. The object is to get as many gamers as possible having as much fun as possible, without barriers. And who doesn’t love fun? — At least as much as elegant solutions!

As we considered back in February, blue is everywhere on the Internet, and due to that fact has a strong case for being its official colour. I bet we can, therefore, consider it to be the most modern colour, then!

Design arguments aside, Science Alert has more scientific evidence that bolsters blue’s avant-garde status. There is linguistic evidence that blue has been recognized as its own colour — and therefore “seen” by human eyes — in the modern era.

Writer Fiona MacDonald parses studies that are up to 200 years old, and of a variety of cultures, that show that most of ancient humanity (with written histories) lacked a distinct word for the colour blue, while faring well with black, white, red, and yellow. The first human culture to have a recorded word for blue was actually the ancient Egyptians, who had invented mass producible blue dye. The colour blue was important to the Egyptians, who lived along the Nile, and revered the river for its religious and agricultural significance.

But does the lack of blue in a natural environment necessarily mean it went literally unseen? More recent research shows that it’s more a matter of the definition of “blue,” rather than, say, certain cones being absent from the eye.

The Himba community of Namibia was tested by a team out of Goldsmith’s University of London in 2006. The Himba do not have a word for blue in their language — but many words for “green”. In visual tests that showed one blue square in a circle of green squares, the Himba subjects were unable to identify which of the squares was blue; they saw them all as the same colour. (In contrast, the researchers attempted the test again with a one square a slightly different shade of green than the others. The Himba subjects spotted the square immediately, while English speakers could not!)

“Another study by MIT scientists in 2007 showed that native Russian speakers, who don’t have one single word for blue, but instead have a word for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), can discriminate between light and dark shades of blue much faster than English speakers.
This all suggests that, until they had a word from it, it’s likely that our ancestors didn’t actually see blue.

Or, more accurately, they probably saw it as we do now, but they never really noticed it.”

There’s something lyrical about the idea of a colour coming into being for us only if we know we’re looking at it. It makes me wonder how much else we are missing out on, simply because we don’t have words for it. Perhaps our language will evolve to show us, as it has before. Then we — and our Internet — will never be the same.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any creepier: At the I/O conference at the beginning of this month, Google debuted a new add-on to its Google Assistant program. Dubbed Duplex, this feature is billed as making heavily digitized personal lives mesh more easily with others who haven’t caught up — by using sophisticated voice recognition and natural sounding recordings so your computer can talk to humans who don’t realize its a computer.
 
I cannot emphasize how freaky this is. Check out a clip of the keynote here, where Google CEO Sundar Pichai demos real conversations between Duplex (strategically deploying “um”s, uptalk, and informal syntax) and the poor, obsolete, flesh and blood humans answering the phone at a hair salon and a restaurant. Duplex finagles reservations or information out of both and then messages the user with updated info. It even books a successfully scheduled event in the calendar.
 
As handy as this might be for some of us, Google’s not doing an awful lot to address a specific concern that arose almost immediately after this announcement.  Google has a lot of information on each of us. Considering the issues the company has with keeping that info safe (as well as questions surrounding why on earth it needs it, to begin with), a deceptively helpful feature like Duplex could end up doing more harm than good to a user.
 
“It knows everything you browse on Chrome, and places you go on Google Maps. If you’ve got an Android device it knows who you call. If you use Gmail it knows how regularly you skip chain emails from your mom. Giving an AI that pretends to be human access to all that information should terrify you.

A bad actor could potentially cheat information out of the Duplex assistant in a phone call. Or use the Duplex assistant to impersonate you, making calls and reservations in your name. It’s also, just, you know, an AI that KNOWS YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.”
 
We have long held up our end of the bargain — we have given companies access to our data and metadata in exchange for fleeting fun or profit. I think the time has come for us to get a lot smarter about how we interact with potentially mercenary or exploitable tech… Because it looks like it’s just about ready to become smarter than us. 
 

At DFC, communication is both our business and our obsession. We strive for the perfect balance of simplicity and effectiveness in each solution we provide. That’s why I am bowled over with admiration for a unique method of inter-village communication devised by the Bora people of the Peruvian, Brazilian, and Colombian Amazon. Recently studied for the first time in depth by linguist Frank Seifart of the University of Cologne, the Bora “public address” system uses drumbeats to send messages across large distances. But instead of requiring a separate code or language, drummers and their drums represent the tones and timing of spoken Bora — resulting in messages that are easily understood by community members kilometres away.
 
This style of communication has been common for centuries among cultures with tonal languages, including Yoruba, and Chin. Bora has two tones, low (coded as female) and high (coded as male) — so two drums made of hollowed tree trunks (called manguaré) are required.
 
Seifart and team undertook their study in collaboration with five drummers and drums in the Bora region, and collected a staggering amount of specific data that had been handed down traditionally for generations.
 
“As predicted, the tones of the 169 drummed messages matched the high and low tones of spoken Bora. Words appeared in a formulaic order, and nouns and verbs were always followed by a special marker. […]
 
When the team compared the drumbeats to the words they represented, they found a second pattern: The intervals between beats changed in length depending on the sounds that followed each vowel. If a sound segment consisted of just one vowel, the time after the beat was quite short. But if that vowel was followed by a consonant, the time after the beat went up an average of 80 milliseconds. Two vowels followed by a consonant added another 40 milliseconds. And a vowel followed by two consonants added a final 30 milliseconds.”
 
This slight difference in rhythm makes completely different drummed messages (“go fishing” vs. “bring firewood”) thoroughly intelligible — and may, Seifart and co. theorize, be transferable to spoken, non-tonal languages too. Linguistics experts have long been stumped by the “cocktail party problem”, lacking an explanation for how the human brain can make sense of words spoken in noisy contexts (like a conversation with a friend in a loud bar). The human awareness of small changes in rhythm, even if unconscious, may point to a fascinating new direction for research!