Organisations are present in all our lives, from the hospital in which we are born, to nursery and school, to university and workplaces. Everything we do is spatial - it happens in space and sometimes because of space. But how do space and organisation relate? How do organisations create their physical surroundings? And how does spatial configuration shape the ways in which organisations and the people within them behave?
Interesting read in the online journal PLOS ONE - researchers have mapped a large data set of phone calls within Great Britain to investigate whether regional boundaries are reflected in the everyday life of people.
Great article in the NYT on the cultures of nomadic working - what happens as people leave their private individual study rooms at home and decide to take their working processes into the public domain in cafes.
What if Darwin had discovered Angry Birds…
Makes me smile every morning on my way to work in Shoreditch.
This is a great series of maps of Europe and the world, seen from the perspective of one country and mapping the most common stereotypes. Hilarious!
I love data and visualisations, but I also love details and in-depth analysis, and this seems to be a nice presentation of all of those in HBR.
Six Ways to Find Value in Twitter’s Noise (reblogged from datavis)
Real good fun and interesting data visualisation of the London Underground network. Now you get an idea what they mean by the commonly heard announcement ‘we’re held here shortly to regulate gaps in the service’. My mind always turns ‘regulate’ into ‘create’ anyway…
And the winner is…
Spacelab architects have won two awards for their innovative workplace consultancy, developed in close collaboration with the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies at UCL.
The video was produced as part of the ceremony for the UCL Awards for Enterprise 2010, and actually also showcases office and working practices at Spacelab.
Seems like all my sleepiness and the crazy amount of hours I would need on a regular basis at least are worth it. ;-)
For years, scientists thought that the function of sleep was merely to rest the body and mind, but recent research suggests that sleep is essential for both learning and creativity. It’s no surprise that people who are well rested learn better and are more creative. What is new is the value of sleeping after learning something or during a break in trying to solve a problem. Studies have looked at the benefits of taking naps as well as sleeping through the night.
During sleep, rat’s brains (and yours) practice what they’re recently learned.
Researchers have discovered that your brain becomes very active when you sleep, and that during certain phases of sleep, your brain becomes even more active if you’ve just learned something new. In an early study that identified this process, rats were hooked up to measure the electrical activity of their brains while they learned a maze. Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers observed that their brains were emitting the same pattern of activity they had emitted during maze learning. Apparently, the rats’ brains were “re-running” the maze in their sleep and using this time to consolidate their memories of what they had learned. These rats performed better on the maze the next day than rats that were prevented from re-running the maze during sleep.
This same phenomenon has been observed in human learning. In other words, if you learn something and then sleep on it, what you’ve learned becomes clearer just as a function of sleeping. But what’s even more interesting is that sleeping on a problem helps people find better solutions. In a study titled “Sleep Inspires Insight,” participants were given puzzles that involved finding the final number to complete a series of digits. The way they were trained to solve the puzzle was to compare every two-digit pair in the series. What they were not told was that there was a shortcut that allowed people to identify the solution after only two steps. Participants performed three trials of the puzzle and then were given an eight-hour break before returning for ten more trials. Some of them slept during the break and some did not. The people who slept between the two sessions were twice as likely as the others to discover the easier way to solve the problem. According to the researchers, sleeping on a problem apparently allows for a restructuring of the brain connections, “setting the stage for the emergence of insight.”
Very funny blog on the things we do when we need to do something, but find there’s sooooo many other things that need doing before - and that is Yak Shaving.
