Pain is important. It triggers the appropriate response to prevent even greater injuries or even to save your life. A couple of German researchers think so too, so they’re working on a way to make robots “feel” — or, more accurately, to detect and r…
I know what you’re thinking — another special edition for an indie game? Sure it’s been done before, many times, but the Hyper Light Drifter Collector’s Edition looks pretty sweet. It comes with a cyan “SNES cartridge,” a 24-page manual, a 24-inch b…
If you’re like me, your smartphone is always at your side and that means more chances for it to take a tumble. These smart devices also pack plenty of business tools, photo, video and audio capabilities, making them a virtual pocket-sized production…
Space is weird, and it’s well known that floating around up there takes its toll on our fragile human bodies. If we’re to ever conquer the final frontier, we’ll need to do more than eat our greens to keep healthy in alien conditions. A new experiment…
Today on In Case You Missed It: The US Navy shows off a UAV launcher that fires drones like an overgrown T-shirt cannon. We take a look at two uses for virtual reality — recreating crime scenes for jurors and Netflix’s digital Blockbuster — tha…
SoftBank’s Pepper robot is growing up. After working at smartphone stores, it’s ready for a new career in the fast food industry. Pizza Hut Asia is partnering with MasterCard on a trial run that will use Pepper for taking orders and information in restaurants by the end of 2016.
Once you pair your MasterPass account, you can pay for your meal, and even ask the robot about the calorie count, if you like talking to robots. It’s quicker to order directly from your phone, but enjoy it for the gimmick that it is. Pepper should help to take some of the work load off of Pizza Hut’s staff, while creeping out customers. As you can see by the demo below, it’s already a master at moving cheesecake inventory.
At least it won’t be making your pizza, thank God. I can’t imagine that would not end well.
[via Engadget]
Originally announced at CES in January, the minuscule HopperGo is a 64GB USB drive with a built in wireless access point. The little device connects to your Dish Hopper 3 or Hopper 2 – essentially Dish’s DVR – and sucks down up to 100 hours of TV. You can then unplug the little bugger and watch for four hours on one charge through the Dish Anywhere app. When I first pulled… Read More
By Aron Susman
An office that is simultaneously relaxed and productive? How does that work?
In the corporate world, we’ve long been conditioned to believe that a good work ethic is synonymous with a gritty, grinding style of professionalism, where the optimal results spring from long hours of hard work and discipline.
But recently, experience has told us otherwise, as startups embrace mantras like “work smarter, not harder,” as a way of re-engineering productivity.
A company like Google, which gives employees gourmet food, endless entertainment, and over-the-top perks, is arguably successful because of these policies, not despite them. The model goes a long way in explaining why so many startups have embraced more holistic work cultures, designed to nourish employees to their fullest potential rather than simply demanding more from them.
Here are five methods I have found work well at our company, a web and mobile search tool for commercial office space, to promote business growth through a positive, relaxed work culture.
Establish an Open-Door Policy
This flexible policy invites employees to interact, ask questions and challenge their managers – in a good way. When team members feel comfortable with one another as well as with their superiors, communication is faster, good ideas are less likely to be left on the table, and alternately, red flags are less likely to escape detection.
And “open-door” policies are not relegated to more open, transparent work cultures. Successful companies with more traditional organizational structures and cultures employ them successfully as well.
Keep Everyone Full
Free coffee is always nice, but a fridge full of snacks is even better. About 67 percent of employees who receive free food at work are very happy with their jobs. In addition to the cost benefit for employees, food around the office helps people stay energized and gives them less incentive to eat a heavy lunch that will put them to sleep later on in the afternoon. The same study found that this perk is more important to millennials than to other age group, yet only 16 percent of employees claim they get free snacks at work. That’s easy to fix.
Encourage Creativity
Give your employees an interactive canvas, collectively. For us, the canvas is a giant blackboard on the wall where anyone on the team can draw with chalk, write inspiring messages, place Post-it notes and more. While Slack often serves a similar purpose for us, we find the act of physically writing or drawing to be creatively liberating. Since many of us spend so much time behind our screens, it can act as a much-needed distraction, especially an artistic one that will stimulate the mind with new ideas.
Finally, it doesn’t hurt to add a bit of culture to the office by way of paintings or music, as long as it’s not provocative.
Get Out of the Office
Even though the office is a professional workplace, your teammates can benefit from getting to know each other on a personal level as well.
Engage your team through periodic happy hours and dinners to show that the relationships you build goes well beyond the confines of office walls. You can even try out team-building outings like sporting events, hikes, company-wide retreats and other events. These outings can promote bonding between team members, reduce employee stress, and give employees the chance to get to know one another outside of the office. When your colleague is also your friend, it’s that much easier to support them professionally.
Choose the Right Layout
Our recent survey of 75 New York startups revealed that 94 percent of founders believe office space plays a role in attracting talent. Rightfully so, considering most of us spend a significant part of our days (and sadly, our lives) in the office.
For your team to be comfortable and productive, choosing an airy space with plenty of natural light can be surprisingly effective. It’s one reason open floor plans are all the rage these days. This type of layout tends to be more visually appealing, friendly, and ultimately yields more fluid, collaborative work. In order for this type of layout to work without creating too many distractions, you’ll need to dedicate a few isolated quiet spaces (or breakout rooms) for meetings, calls or just heads-down work.
You don’t have to choose productivity over employee well-being and happiness. Instead, you can create an environment that melds perfectly with your mission and team while keeping things efficient and positive. Happy employees are 38 percent more productive than unhappy employees and produce 37 percent greater sales. The implications for employee retention and productivity are significant.
In time, you will find an optimal balance between your team’s enjoyment of the workplace and their productivity. You need both for your company to reach its true potential.
Currently the co-founder and CFO of TheSquareFoot, Aron Susman began his career in the International Mergers & Acquisitions group at Deloitte in Houston. Most recently a Vice President with MDTech, a healthcare technology company, Aron oversaw the company’s financial, accounting, and business development efforts. He graduated cum laude from the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a masters degree in accounting and holds a CPA license.
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In 2016, getting a college degree is not enough.
Twenty-five years ago I was a sophomore in college trying to figure out what to do with my life. My college advisor pushed me, “You need to decide on a degree! What do you like? What can you do for the rest of your life?” Advisors coached us on choosing a field that interested us and pushed us to get started.
Fifteen years ago, I began coaching other kids. I still wanted them to choose a path, but the message had changed, “Get your college degree. It really doesn’t matter what you choose because you’ll change career fields at least five times during your lifetime. Just get one.”
Today, the message has changed again. My message now is, “Find a career you love and start making connections. Talk to your professors. Seek out free internships. Get to know people.”
For many middle-class students, networking starts at home: The “syllabus” might include: meeting people in a variety of companies, conversing with company executives, company exploration and research, going-to-work-with-your-parent field trips, going out to eat with important people, asserting yourself and confidence-building. On the flip side, the large majority of low-income kids never have that opportunity.
Assertiveness and interaction with people in important positions isn’t given a second thought for middle-class students because they’ve met a variety of people at the dinner table or the soccer field. Even if a middle-class kid doesn’t excel in networking, it’s not the end of the world since their parents are thriving as lawyers, managing directors, consultants, doctors, etc., and the connections are in place.
Low-income students I work with have hard-working parents, often working two jobs to make ends meet. The best advice they know and offer their children is, “Do better than me.” They pass along skills they know and the idea of hard work, but there is little hands-on understanding of how executive jobs work, and there are seldom contacts and connections that can move their children quickly through the pipeline and up the ladder. Most of the parent’s jobs consist of cleaning houses, working construction, cooking in restaurants, cell phone assembly lines and chicken processing plants.
In addition to poverty, many of the students I work with are refugees who have recently arrived from other countries, whose parents don’t speak English. Being new to the country creates added challenges of learning a new educational system, figuring out how to have confidence speaking in a second language, and learning cultural practices that respect boldness and forthright behaviors when their home culture is more about timidity and reverence. The skills my kids’ parents know and teach their children, though beneficial, are often not enough in a world and an American society that is driven by who you know.
I’ve had people tell me, “The more prestigious a school they attend, the better their chances in life.” So far, I’m not buying it. Even my most assertive kids who attend the top schools struggle when they get out of college. One such student graduated a year ago with a biology degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a highly competitive university that only accepts the top 7 percent of high school seniors. She’s a bright young woman who has done everything right and has now been accepted into and will attend the University of Southern California to begin studying for a master’s in public health this fall. Despite what seems like a very competent and marketable young lady, she has only managed to find jobs that fit the skill sets she had before even going into college–secretarial work.
It’s true that some programs exist to help economically challenged students. However, there are not many and the really successful ones are often for extraordinarily high achievers. The application itself takes confidence to apply, knowledge of how to complete an enormous amount of complicated paperwork and exceptional skills to get accepted. Others do exist in some schools, but aren’t designed to help students know how to utilize their resources and connect to positions and people that can help them launch.
We have an abundance of jobs that need to be filled and many students out there who could potentially fill them if we only knew their talents and skills. By not equipping our low-income kids with the skills needed to connect with jobs, not only are they missing out, we are, too.
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The following post is adapted from THE WISDOM OF THE CHAKRAS: TOOLS FOR NAVIGATING THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE (Montague Press) by Ellen Tadd.
Some people are extremely bright yet emotionally crippled; others are very loving yet their daily lives are chaotic. Many have great faith but very little clarity, while others are creative but stymied by a lack of confidence. Why are people so lopsided in their development? Why do some of us feel love but find ourselves unable to express it? Why do some of us commit ourselves to an endeavor “from the heart” but again and again wind up disenchanted? Why do some of us feel confident and powerful within ourselves but become frightened when we try to realize our potential? What is the reason for such contradictions?
I had the feeling that the answers might lie in the chakra system. I was by no means an expert in this system, but I knew that the seven ethereal centers of the chakra system represented the different qualities of our nature and that the crown chakra in particular was the main source of happiness or, conversely, depression. So, some twenty years ago I turned to an examination of the chakra system to see if it could explain the imbalances that seemed to me so prevalent. I found that it did even more. It offered remedies to right out imbalances, which are the obstacles that prevent us from becoming the people we want to be and the beings that all of us have the capacity to become–which is to say, the spiritual beings that all of us in fact are.
This book is the result of my explorations and my counseling work with many people. I hope it will help those who find themselves and sometimes their lives out of balance, and I hope that the practical results that occur will encourage people to look more deeply into our common nature and perhaps begin to see that our nature is also the nature of the cosmos.
The word chakra means “wheel” in Sanskrit. There are seven major chakras aligned from the top of the head to the base of the spine. Each chakra center represents a different part of our nature, and it is through the chakra system that we receive, emanate, and process our life experiences. This network of energy interconnects the body, mind, emotions, soul, and spirit. When the chakra system is operating in a healthy manner–when all the chakras are open and in alignment–we actualize spiritual qualities such as trust, clarity, love, confidence, and well-being. When the chakra system is not operating in a healthy manner–when a chakra is closed and the system is out of alignment–we actualize such qualities as impulsiveness, lack of confidence, fear, and depression.
The study of the chakra system is similar to the study of anatomy; each chakra needs to be discussed independently, but it is always understood that each functions as part of an interdependent cooperative system. I found through experience that the chakra system both offers a framework to understand numerous common combinations of imbalances and provides tools to integrate our different characteristics, thus creating more harmony and balance in our daily lives.
With an understanding of the chakras, weaknesses can be identified and strengthened. Too often we have been conditioned to emphasize our strengths and to avoid our weaknesses. Yet our weaknesses can be our greatest teachers if we embrace them and work with them. In this way, the chakra system offers a mechanism for healing and deeper self-knowledge, as well as a more comprehensive and compassionate understanding of others.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
