Shrinking Office Space

It recently occurred to me that every time I have changed the work that I do, the available space has reduced. If the trend continues I will be doing all my work on a laptop sitting in a chair in the corner.

This started as an undergraduate where I had an entire room. Granted it was also a bedroom as well and not very large, but it was wholly mine (shared accommodation at universitys are not common in Australia, although I gather it is standard in the US) and was my major workspace at the time. I did a lot of good focussed work in that room - as well as a bit of socialisation.

As a post-graduate, I did nearly all my work in the lab; a room about 8m x 8m with 4m ceilings. I shared with my supervisor, his research assistant and 3-4 other students. Despite not being particularly interested in the topic I was able to get a fair bit done and had close, but not intrusive, contact with everyone I need to collaborate with.

As a post-doc fellow, I had a small glass-walled office in a corner of much smaller lab. The rest of the team (more senior people) had their own offices elsewhere, but that room was the meeting place when we were working together.

My first 'real job' was in a open-plan office. Partitions were shoulder-high on a standing person and each section was about 4m square with 4 seats in it. Since teams were almost always co-located (we moved desks a lot) there was always a lot to talk about with the people in the 'pod' with me and there was not a lot of interruption from outside. Again a productive enviroment - if a little de-personalising.

That was at a client site. When we moved back to our own company offices the sections were smaller - maybe 3m on a side - with walls at waist height. It was possible to stand at one corner of the floor and look over to the other to see if someone was at their desk or not. Noisy conversations (which were not uncommon) in the next partition led to frequent interruptions and it was at this time that I really appreciated the fact that I tend to get in a couple of hours before the majority of my fellows. It was really quite difficult to do any individual work during the main part of the day.

Several years later and our company has moved to new offices and our workspaces have shrunk dramatically. No more sectioning of the space - we now have rows of desks stretching across an open space 100m across. The 'wall' between me and person in the desk facing is roughly eye-level while seated. By roughly, I mean slightly less so that I can look them in the eye if I peer around the screen.

Company management congratulate themselves on the design and how modern and efficient it is to cram as many seats as possible into the space available. I just feel like one of the cattle in a stalls - although with less room or privacy. Or more relevant, like one of a thousand monkeys banging away at a keyboard trying to produce something - even a limerick (forget about aiming for Shakespeare). I get more creative work done on the train on the way home.

I see a scene reminiscent of 1950s movies with wage-slaves, heads bent over hand-cranked calculators, under the watchful eye of the floor supervisor.
I wonder when the whole idea of a productive workplace was lost.

Letting go

I have just come off a project where a great number of things went wrong. Without going into details (I may cover later - or not, given the topic of this post) I found myself fuming most evenings.
It was apparent to me very early on that we were rushing head-long towards the edge of a cliff, but could not get any of the managers to agree. By the end of it, I had been completely marginalised and could say nothing without it being ignored or verified with someone else.
This is despite the fact that most of the concerns I raised blew up at some point and led to major issues. Indeed, throughout the project, we spent more time painting over the cracks without ever addressing the cause. The result is now in production and as beset with more problems than I expected - and still no-one is addressing the underlying issues, just patching the immediate failures.
But that is not the point, and yet again I find myself getting off topic.
The question is why I spend so much time angry and stewing about it. There are probably a number of things I could have done - although what is still not clear. But going over and over what should have been was never very helpful. Even more so now that I am not even involved any more! There is really no point in getting upset over an injustice done over a year ago when no-one else involved even remembers the situation.
[It is quite apparent that our managers never recall the past and only ever look a short distance into the future. This is not right but neither is it something that can be fixed by complaining.]
So, chalk it up as a learning experience (and I DID learn a lot) with one of the major learnings to be when to let go and when to push harder.
Now if I can only put that into practice...

The Master's Cat

There was an old master at a mountain monastery came to own a small kitten which he loved dearly.

Unfortunately the kitten would try to climb into the abbot’s lap every morning while he was meditating. To remove the distraction the abbot asked the youngest of the novices to tie the animal to a nearby tree during the morning observances.

This continued for a number of years. As the novice was promoted another took his place and made sure that the cat was tied up each morning.

Eventually the old master died and was buried with great ceremony. The next morning, the youngest novice again tied the cat to the tree. This was his task and he had not even been at the monastery when the master had first found his mediations being disturbed.

As time passed, the task of tying up the cat continued to be assigned to the newest novice until, as happens to all things, the cat itself grew old and died. By this time, no-one remembered why it needed to be tied up, only that it must be done every morning during observances. So, of course, another cat was obtained to ensure that there would always be one tied to the tree.

In such a way are traditions born.

Knowledge Bases

Some time ago I started writing a whitepaper on the concept of knowledge management. It was never finished, for a number of reasons, and eventually the motivation for it disappeared. One of the problems I had with it was that whenever I sat down to write about one aspect the topic started to diverge and I ended up talking about something else. Not so good for a tight coherent whitepaper.

But exactly the sort of thing that appears in blogs. So why not explore some of the thoughts here?

The original incentive was a small application that my brother-in-law put together. The purpose, as far as I could tell, was to extract semantics from a digital artefact and hence more closely correlate items from multiple sources. One of the major intended uses was in targeted search. Of course, I may be a bit wrong on that since the descriptions I got were rarely so clear or concisely expressed.

At the same time our team at work were talking about how to induct new people into the fairly esoteric set of tools that we use. In particular how to make sure that key knowledge from our experts did not get lost as they moved on to other things. The company knowledge base is a useless tool which just collects scattered documents of all sorts and vaguely sorts them into general categories. Besides the team knowledge we had gathered was not generally applicable outside.

So how do you draw something meaningful from several hundred artefacts, of many different types. There were documents specific to a very narrow area and overview diagrams which purported to show the high level. Spreadsheets summarising the last twelve months and 100 slide packs which detailed yesterday’s status updates. All of which was essentially useless because it was not possible to find anything specific without talking to the person who put it there – if they remembered themselves.

So the ideas of what constituted a useful knowledge base were on my mind and I made several starts on covering off the key points that it should cover. The first of which is the critical role that searchability plays!

One other aspect is the actual definition of a knowledge base and why one would be useful. Obviously the purpose would drive the which aspects were most important and hence the design of any specific instance.

The best known and most readily available knowledge base is, of course, the internet itself. Almost anything you need to know is out there somewhere and there are a number of very clever people who have dedicated themselves to helping you find it. However the approach taken is to identify the pages (or pages) which most closely match the request.

What do you do when ALL the documents are at least tangentially related to the search topic, or when the information desired is scattered over a number of different artefacts. This is where a well designed knowledge base could be used.

DC or not DC

My previous article reminded me of something that has been on my mind in the past.
Electronic devices, ones that do very little mechanical work, generally operate best with DC power supplies. In mobile devices such as phones or notebooks, the input power is used to charge the battery and it is the battery which supplies the actual electronics. But even in a desktop computer there is an internal power supply which changes the input AC power into various DC voltages before passing it on to the different components.
This is obvious with devices which are charged through a transformer (technically a SMPS). The transformer is commonly a little black box on the power plug which makes it impossible to fit in the socket next to any other device (who designs these things?).
While ideally there is as little as 5% loss of energy in per device, it may actually be significantly higher. And each one is wasting power.
Now AC is supplied to homes because this is the most efficient way to transmit electricity over long distances. Devices which draw large amounts of power – such as whitegoods or power tools – also built make use of the full amount available. But smaller devices need to drop power to reduce it to usable levels and this basically wastes the energy as heat.
An alternative, hinted at above, would be to have a single transformer which converted the input supply to some standard DC voltage for use within the home. As car chargers are common amongst the devices in question, a 12V supply would seem to be appropriate.
It would even be fairly easy so set up such a system. All you need is a couple of car batteries, a trickle charger and a bank of sockets to plug in the device chargers. A competent electrician should be able to do it in an afternoon.
I imagine that the best option in most houses would be a single supply point where mobile devices could be charged, but there is no reason why multiple points could not be spread throughout the house. It would mean a secondary wiring job but DC is a lot easier to deal with than AC and the concept of twinned supply already exists with grey water systems.
Another extension to the concept would be to wire in solar panels (which naturally supply DC) so that the secondary system is fully self-contained.

Big battery

I just caught a news item about a town in Texas which is building the world’s biggest battery. The intent is to maintain power supply when the single line from the national grid goes out – as it regularly does.
Now I don’t know how much wastage there is in storing power in this way, but the idea is great from a theoretical point of view. The normal pattern for electricity is for a central point of supply with failure prone transport to the point of usage. The risk of failure in transport is (usually) mitigated by using multiple redundant pathways – the electricity grid. This mechanism fails in the case mentioned in the article because there is only the single line into the town.
There are several known problems with the standard way that power is supplied. One of the biggest is that the grid is built around large scale centralised feed-in to the network and storage is apparently not practical at that scale. Hence electricity is generated to match demand – increasing production as more is drawn from the grid and dropping when usage falls. The possibility (probability) of under or over supply is obvious.
Balance is managed by using several sorts of power generation, at least some of which can quickly and easily brought on- or off-line. Even petrol powered generator may be included occasionally to meet short term peaks. At the other end, power is shed (read wasted) when supply outstrips demand.
In other words load balancing is done with methods which are quite expensive from both monetary and environmental points of view.
Storing (relatively) cheaply generated power during slack times and drawing against high demand would seem to make a great deal of sense. I assume that this is not possible at the national scale and so cannot be used in the central power plants. Given the fact that a town-sized battery is such big news, I guess that even storing at the sub-station level would be difficult.
But let’s take the concept further; how about power storage at the street or house level? Could each office building, which already have maintenance staff, include some electrical storage mechanism?
There may be maintenance concerns around having a bank of batteries behind the switch-board in every property – especially since traditional technologies use a number of toxic chemicals. But battery technologies have progressed fairly far in the last decade, riding on the back of the green movement and electric cars. At the same time the environmental and financial drivers for such a strategy are becoming stronger.
The idea ties in very well with the local generation of power. The input to the storage device need not be the national grid, it could just as easily be solar panels or a wind turbine placed on top of the house.

Carbon Trading

There has been much discussion in the last few years about carbon dioxide and how to reduce emissions. I don’t want to talk about global warming or similar. To my mind reducing any sort of venting of any sort of waste is a good thing; whatever justification is used.
Australia’s response has been to introduce a framework for trading in carbon dioxide. Companies who vent are charged accordingly but given credits based on various factors (which I admit I have not bothered to understand). These credits can be traded to reduce or eliminate the amount that needs to be paid.
The idea is, of course, to artificially impose a market value on carbon and hence allow the normal economic forces to counter the drive to throw it away. The trouble with this is the unintended consequences which attend almost any attempt to use economic forces to drive anything.
The intended consequence is for the artificial costs of producing CO¬2 to be passed on to the consumer which, in theory will reduce demand. In many areas this will provide incentives for alternatives – even in areas such as power generation. However, there are so many other consequences that I suspect that the dynamics of the situation are likely to change completely. I will leave it to the economists to consider in detail.
However, one major point of concern is that this is an artificial market in carbon. Indeed the market is in a secondary resource – carbon emission credits. I would have thought that a better solution, although considerably more difficult, would be to create a real market in carbon. Who would vent a valuable commodity into the air if it could instead be sold to off-set production costs?
The underlying problem is not with CO2 production per se, but with the fact that it is vented to environment. Indeed this is the case with any pollutant: gaseous, particulate, solid or liquid. They are created because the most efficient industrial processes used to produce the enormous number of consumables we use also create large amounts of waste product as a side-effect. Disposal of the waste products is done in the most cost effective way – which often means just venting because capturing and/or storing them is often more expensive.
The problem here is the classification of substances as ‘waste’. One industry’s waste is another industry’s raw material. The point of carbon trading is to make the CO2 worth something so that it is traded instead of thrown away. But the value created is artificial – imposed by government regulation. But what if the gas had some real and tangible value as a raw material in some other industry?
Actually there are a number of industries whose waste product provides a raw material for some other industry. Connecting these production systems could (does?) provide a lucrative business for some entrepreneur.
This could be a prime area for some basic research – what can CO2 be profitably used for?
I am not an expert in this field and so I cannot answer that question myself but I would have thought that it was a ripe – over ripe – field of inquiry. Is there anyone in the world looking into it? I know it can be used to carbonate drinks, but I suspect that this will not use a great deal of the current world supply. I have heard of mechanisms of using C02 as a purifying agent – say for de-caffeinating coffee. Injected CO2 can be used to greatly enhance the strength of concrete. I can conceive of using it as a fuel or additive in cars – thus reducing petrol consumption at the same time.
CO2 is used to make dry ice – is this something that could be more extensively used in our society? Are there any other properties of the gas which may be useful? Could we fill our greenhouses with it – or at least increase the partial pressure a little (we don’t want to kill those people who work in greenhouses). Are there any medical uses? The possibilities are endless (mostly because I don’t know enough to discard them).
By providing funds to research agencies (most of which are government owned in Australia) to follow this chain of logic is likely to provide greater benefit for less outlay than the current approach. Of course, the approach is not restricted to carbon. Most major industries could profit from creating an alternate market for their own waste material. Even in obscure cases - waste heat from power generation need not be vented, especially when the power is, itself, going to be used to generate heat somewhere else. The trouble is in transporting the waste from the major industrial centres where it is generated to the places where it can profitably be used.
However, that is drifting off topic somewhat and I think I will explore another time.