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Majority of workers feel overwhelmed by deluge of data,
survey finds
By Eve Tahmincioglu
updated 8:18 p.m. ET March 16, 2008
Don't expect Shaun Osher, the CEO of Core Group
Marketing in New York, to answer your e-mail right away.
He has stopped responding to e-mails every minute and
only checks his e-mail account twice a day. He also started
turning off his BlackBerry during meetings.
This tactic has made him so much more productive
that earlier this year he held a meeting with his staff of 50
and "strongly suggested" that they stop relying so heavily
on e-mail and actually start calling clients on the phone.
And, he requested his employees put cell phones and
PDAs on silent mode during meetings, as well as curtail
the common practice of cc-ing everybody when sending
out an e-mail. "There was so much redundancy, so much
unnecessary work," he explains. "One person could handle
an issue that should take two minutes, but when an email
goes out and five people get cc-ed, then everybody
responds to it and there's a snowball effect."
It's not that Osher has anything against technology. In
fact, he loves it. The problem is, last year he realized he
was inundated with so many e-mails and so much
information in general that he began to experience data
overload. "In the beginning, e-mail and all this data was a
great phenomenon, revolutionizing what we do. But the
pendulum has swung way too much to the other side," he
maintains. "We're less productive."
Osher isn't the only one out there under a data
avalanche. Thanks to technological innovations, you can
be talking to a customer on your cell phone, answering a
LinkedIn invitation on your laptop, and responding to email
on your PDA all at the same time. Besides, during
tough economic times, who will want to miss any
information when your job could be on the line if you indulge
in the luxury of being offline? Turns out, seven out of 10
office workers in the United States feel overwhelmed by
information in the workplace, and more than two in five
say they are headed for a data "breaking point," according
to a recently released Workplace Productivity Survey.
Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets,
says there are a host of reasons we're all on the information
brink: "exponential growth of the size of the information
'haystack,' the immensity and immediacy of digital
communications, and the fact that professionals are not
being provided with sufficient tools and training to help
them keep pace with the growing information burden."
Ellen Kossek, a professor from Michigan State, believes
we are less productive in this age of 24-7 technology, and
our multitasking mentality has spawned a "not-mentallypresent"
society. "We're becoming an attention-deficit
disorder society switching back and forth like crazy,"
Kossek says. "We're connected all the time. We're
working on planes, in coffee shops, working on the
weekends. Work is very seductive, but yet we're actually
less effective."
The key to getting your head above the data flood,
according to workplace experts, is managing and reducing
the information you're bombarded with.
© 2008 MSNBC Interactive - (slightly adapted)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23636252/
honest-to-goodness android, so lifelike that it seems like
a real person. It has moist lips, glossy hair and vivid
eyes that blink slowly. Seated on a stool with hands
5 folded primly on its lap at the 2005 World Exposition in
Japan's Aichi prefecture, it wore a bright pink blazer and
gray slacks. For a mesmerizing few seconds from several
meters away, Repliee was virtually indistinguishable from
an ordinary woman in her 30s. In fact, it was a copy of
10 one.
Japan is proud of the most advanced humanoids in
the world, which are expected to eventually be used as
the workforce diminishes among the decreasing and aging
population. But why build a robot with pigmented silicone
15 skin, smooth gestures and even makeup? To Repliee's
creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Director of Osaka University's
Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, the answer is simple:
"Android science."
Besides the justification for making robots
20 anthropomorphic and bipedal so they can work in human
environments with architectural features such as stairs,
Ishiguro believes that people respond better to very
humanlike automatons. Androids can thus elicit the most
natural communication. "Appearance is very important
25 to have better interpersonal relationships with a robot,"
says the 42-year-old Ishiguro. "Robots are information
media, especially humanoid robots. Their main role in
our future is to interact naturally with people."
Mild colorblindness forced Ishiguro to abandon his
30 aspirations of a career as an oil painter. Drawn to
computer and robot vision instead, he built a guide robot
for the blind as an undergraduate at the University of
Yamanashi. A fan of the android character Data from the
Star Trek franchise, he sees robots as the ideal vehicle
35 to understand more about ourselves.
To imitate human looks and behavior successfully,
Ishiguro combines robotics with cognitive science. In turn,
cognitive science research can use the robot to study
human perception, communication and other faculties.
40 This novel cross-fertilization is what Ishiguro describes
as android science. In a 2005 paper, he and his
collaborators explained it thus: "To make the android
humanlike, we must investigate human activity from the
standpoint of cognitive science, behavioral science and
45 neuroscience, and to evaluate human activity, we need
to implement processes that support it in the android."
One key strategy in Ishiguro's approach is to model
his artificial creations on real people. He began research
four years ago with his then four-year-old daughter,
50 casting a rudimentary android from her body, but its
mechanisms resulted in strange, unnatural motion.
Humanlike robots run the risk of compromising
people's comfort zones. Because the android's
appearance is very similar to that of a human, any subtle
55 differences in motion and responses will make it seem
strange. Repliee, though, is so lifelike that it has
overcome the creepiness factor, partly because of the
natural way it moves.
Ishiguro wants his next android, a male, to be as
60 authentic as possible. The model? Himself. The scientist
thinks having a robot clone could ease his busy schedule:
he could dispatch it to classes and meetings and then
teleconference through it. "My question has always been,
Why are we living, and what is human?" he says. An
65 Ishiguro made of circuitry and silicone might soon be
answering his own questions.
adapted from www.scientificamerican.com - May 2006