Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer puts the kibosh on telecommuting.
In a decision that sent the internet into a tizzy today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that employees will no longer be allowed to telecommute to work. USA Today reports:
Yahoo’s decision is meant to foster collaboration, according to a company memo sent to employees Friday.
Yahoo’s head of human resources, Jackie Reses, wrote that communication and collaboration will be important as the company works to be “more productive, efficient and fun.” To make that happen, she said, “it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings.”
According to Census figures from 2010, about 9.5 percent of the U.S. workforce telecommutes at least one day a week. That’s actually not very much, considering telecommuting can be more productive for some workers, not to mention more comfortable. Millions of Americans working from home or local co-working spaces each day save millions of tons in emissions each year, and potentially cut down on traffic deaths.
According to a source inside the company, many workers across all of Yahoo’s divisions have been telecommuting for a long time now, in arrangements distinctly unlike those at other Silicon Valley tech giants.
The telecommuting issue is relevant to many office workers in America, but especially so in the Bay Area, with its crappy regional transit options and big distances between desirable office parks and desirable bedroom communities. Some of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies have enlisted their own private busing systems to cut down on telecommuting and also keep up with the desires of their workers to live in dense urban areas outside of sprawly, beige, boring Silicon Valley.
It’s not like we’ve looked to Yahoo for leadership in tech in a long (long, looong) time. Still, this is a sudden switch for the company’s culture, and it may be bad news for telecommuters at other organizations that want to get more “collaborative.”
So, Yahoo workers intending to keep your jobs by moving to the Bay Area: Please just don’t move to Oakland. Hey, I hear San Jose is pretty nice!
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Can Yahoo be more ‘efficient’ with more workers driving to the office?
Civic-minded hacktivists, you best brush off those keyboards and pick out a cute outfit, because tomorrow is International Open Data Day.
Cities around the world will be hosting hackathons to turn government data dumps into useful interactive applications for citizen engagement. Check the map for info on a ‘thon near you.
For this special holiday occasion, San Francisco’s Climate Corporation is hosting EcoHack. “EcoHack is about using technology to improve and better understand our natural environment,” say the event’s organizers. “Based on the hacking model of quick, clever solutions to problems, EcoHack is an opportunity to make a difference while having fun!” Woo, nerds!
EcoHack days held in New York in the past have resulted in some sweet projects, from routing bikes and building pollution sensors to mapping deforestation (fun!).
This year’s crew will be working on mapping community solar projects, visualizing oil spills, and “food’ficiency,” among other worthy data-driven causes. Also there will be pizza, which goes surprisingly well with depressing statistics. Just trust me on this one.
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Mosquitoes are, at best, horrible annoyances. At worst? They are genocidal maniacs, responsible for more than half a million deaths a year, transmitting malaria and other diseases. Were causing extinction subject to popular vote, mosquitoes would win in a landslide.
All of that, relative to the moment, is the good news. Now, the bad.
Mosquitoes laugh at your so-called repellant.
Well, they don’t laugh, as such, lacking the capacity for forced expulsion of air from their probosci and, likewise, any sense of humor. Point is, the most common chemical used to repel the little idiots is losing its effectiveness. From Smithsonian.com:
A group of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered that three hours after an exposure to DEET, many Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were immune to the chemical, ignoring its typically noxious smell and attempting to land on irresistible human skin. …
So why did the mosquitoes, as a whole, overcome their dislike of DEET? Previous studies by this group and others have found particular mosquitoes with a genetic mutation that made them innately immune to DEET, but they say that this case is different, because they didn’t demonstrate this ability from the start.
They suspect, instead, that the insects’ antennae became less chemically sensitive to DEET over time, as evidenced by electroantennography on the mosquitoes’ odor receptors after each of the tests — a phenomenon not unlike a person getting used to the smell of, say, the ocean or a manufacturing plant near his or her house.
In other words, all picnics should now be scheduled for two hours, 55 minutes in length.
That point about genetic mutation is an interesting one, worth pulling out. After all, one strategy used in Key West last year called for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that would deplete the region’s supply of blood-suckers by greatly decreasing the bugs’ lifespans. The proposal prompted some concern, quite understandably: Regular mosquitoes are bad enough. But mutants?
It’s not clear what the repercussions of mutated mosquitoes might be.
In a very good, thoughtful article that will appear in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the unintended consequences of tweaking skeeters. After noting how mosquitoes are adapting to mosquito nets (feeding more often during the day), Koerth-Baker considers the consequences of proposed plans to modify the insects or the malaria virus to reduce the damage each can do.
[A]ll solutions, whether as simple as a net or as complicated as splicing genes, come with risks. For instance, Aedes aegypti is the species primarily responsible for spreading dengue. It’s present around the world, but outside North Africa, it’s an invasive species. If scientists use flightless female modifications against A. aegypti and succeed in decreasing its presence in, say, Mexico City, then what will fill its ecological niche there? (What is its ecological niche anyway? One entomologist told me that we don’t even have a great understanding of mosquitoes’ place in our ecosystem, because we have focused our efforts on killing them rather than observing them.)
Even curing a disease poses risks, because in all likelihood it won’t stay cured forever. If G.M. mosquitoes completely neutered the malaria parasite’s threat, even in one part of the world, it would be an incredible success story. But what happens if the parasite adapts to circumvent the tools we’ve used to fight it? Today we know how to take precautions to prevent malaria transmissions and fight the disease with antimalarial drugs. But in the future, some version of malaria could surge through a population of humans without the cultural knowledge or pharmaceuticals necessary to defend themselves against it.
So, to summarize: Using repellant deters mosquitoes for a few hours. Genetically modifying them bears unknown risks. Oh, and as the world gets warmer, the insects’ range and seasons of activity expand, as we saw last year in Alaska.
But don’t worry. It’s winter. It will be weeks before mosquitoes are hovering over stagnant pools of water, attuned to your exhaled breath and ready to suck your blood. Make the most of it.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Here’s what gas prices have done over the last month:
This isn’t an unprecedented rise; prices went up last February, too.
What’s odd, though, is that the recent rise isn’t tied to rising crude oil prices, the traditional reason prices fluctuate.
So what’s happening? The Washington Post dug into it, noting concerns over Middle East stability, lower production by OPEC, and the continuing high price of oil — though crude prices dropped significantly yesterday.
One key factor is limited refinery capacity.
[S]ome analysts … pointed to refinery issues. Several refineries have been shut down for routine maintenance, and in the eastern United States, several refineries simply went out of business in the past year.
“Atlantic Basin capacity closures have improved refining fundamentals,” the nation’s biggest refiner, Valero, said in a slide presentation at a Credit Suisse conference this month. It estimated that refineries have closed nearly 1 million barrels a day of capacity on the East Coast or in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the past two years, which Valero said allowed it to increase profit margins.
Refinery constraints were a key factor in California’s huge gas price spike last summer. Let’s go back to the law of supply and demand. Less supply means increased demand, which means more profits. Valero’s suggestion that reducing refinery capacity increased profit margins falls squarely in line with that: Less crude oil refined into gasoline means less gasoline, which means a higher price per gallon. Granted, these refineries didn’t all close this month, but combined with other factors, the closures appear to be playing a role — and may help explain why the price of gas is going up independent of the price of crude oil.
Let that be consolation to you next time you go to fill up. It’s just basic supply and demand, manipulated by oil companies. As it always has and always will, the system works.
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A hopefully non-fatal accident.
The National Safety Council yesterday released its estimates of 2012 motor-vehicle deaths in the United States. And: bad news. From the report [PDF]:
Motor-vehicle deaths up 5% in 2012.
Motor-vehicle deaths in 2012 totaled 36,200, up 5% from 2011 and marking the first annual increase since 2004 to 2005. The 2012 estimate is provisional and may be revised when more data are available. The total for 2012 was also up 2% from the 2010 figure. … The estimated annual population death rate is 11.49 deaths per 100,000 population, an increase of 4% from the 2011 rate. The estimated annual mileage death rate is 1.23 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, an increase of 4% from the 2011 rate. …
The estimated cost of motor-vehicle deaths, injuries, and property damage in 2012 was $276.6 billion, a 5% increase from 2011. The costs include wage and productivity losses, medical expenses, administrative expenses, employer costs, and property damage.
The deadliest month on the roads was July, followed by August and June. The safest: February — not a surprise, since it’s the shortest month.
The NSC also provided state-by-state data, which is revealing. Last November, we looked at a report suggesting that red states were more likely to experience traffic deaths. That report used preliminary data — but the data released yesterday seems to reinforce the idea. You wouldn’t notice it looking at the raw, per-state data, however.
Speaking of:
Deaths per month
Darker shades mean higher overall numbers. Not surprisingly, states with larger populations have more road deaths. (There was no data for Vermont.) This doesn’t tell us very much.
Population per road death per month
In the map above, a lighter color means a bigger number, which is good — it suggests that there are fewer road deaths as a function of population. Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, New Mexico, and the South have more road deaths by population than many other states — reinforcing the link between red states and traffic deaths. New York’s rate of death as a function of population is relatively low.
Rate of change since 2011
Darker shades mean an increase in the number of deaths; lighter shades mean a decrease. Interestingly, the Northeast has seen a larger increase in the number of road deaths than many other regions. Two adjacent states saw the biggest changes — South Dakota went up, Wyoming went down — but this is largely because they have small populations, making percentages more volatile.
The moral of the story is this: If you don’t want to die in a car accident, move to New York. Or go back in time to 2011. Or don’t leave the house. All viable options.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Bike commuters in London.
Streetsblog, a network of sustainable-transportation-focused websites that you should read regularly, used the occasion of the 10th anniversary of London’s congestion pricing system to review its effectiveness. As you probably know, congestion pricing is a tool by which cities limit automobile and other traffic to certain areas by charging a fee for access. In London, that fee is £10, or about $15.
Has it worked? Streetsblog says yes — or, it did for a bit.
In its first few years, the London charging scheme was heralded as a solid traffic-buster, with 15-20 percent boosts in auto and bus speeds and 30 percent reductions in congestion delays. Most of those gains appear to have disappeared in recent years, however. Transport for London (TfL), which combines the functions of our NYCDOT and MTA and which created and operates the charging system, attributes the fallback in speeds to other changes in the streetscape and traffic management …
The congestion charge also raised millions in revenue, some $435 million in 2008 alone.
But the benefit over the past decade can be seen most clearly in the three maps Streetsblog provides.
Car traffic declines.
Bicycle usage rises.
Public transit use increases.
Less traffic, less congestion, more public transit use, more money for government investment. All the sorts of things that drive right-wing Americans insane. So I wouldn’t hold my breath for implementation in a U.S. city any time soon.
Lessons From London After 10 Years of the Congestion Charge, Streetsblog
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Whether because of budget cuts or natural disasters, many of our nation’s libraries are struggling. But DIY efforts are filling the cracks in a few especially hard-hit communities.
Urban Librarians Unite
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Urban Librarians Unite in New York has set up sidewalk mini libraries outside less-mini libraries that have closed due to storm damage.
These tiny, all weather libraries house about a hundred books at a time and there is no expectation whatsoever that the books will come back. … The Mini Libraries are a resource for our communities, a chance to experiment in library science, and a reminder to the public that even if the library itself is in ruins the librarians are still thinking of them.
ULU is quick to point out that its orange boxes, while super-awesome, aren’t a replacement for real library infrastructure.
Advocates of little libraries are often rabid supporters of big libraries as well and it is their respect for the institution that makes them want to emulate it. It is impossible to mistake a citizen’s reading exchange for a well run reference desk. Our Mini Libraries will suffer from the same limitations as any little library. They could never be mistaken as an alternative to the branch libraries they substitute and intended to support. They do offer some comfort and succor, especially to kids and families, and they remind people that libraries — and their librarians — are nimble, caring and quick to respond to the needs of their communities.
We hope that our Mini Libraries will evolve.
“I smell the spirit of Occupy,” writes a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger.
Jaime Omar YassinThe Biblioteca before the city booted it off library grounds.
For an even more grassroots effort on the opposite coast, there’s the six-month-old Biblioteca Popular in Oakland. On Aug. 13, 2012, activists occupied an abandoned library in East Oakland only to be booted by the city within the day. Undeterred, they set up on the grounds and sidewalk outside, providing garden space, kids’ activities, and books in both English and Spanish. At first the city left Biblioteca alone, but then three weeks ago it locked down the grounds and gardens, pushing the library onto the sidewalk outside, where it remains now.
All power to the book people.
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Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries
This May, New York City is expected to unveil its long-awaited bike sharing program, adding 5,500 bikes at various stations around Manhattan and Brooklyn. Eventually, the city will have 10,000 blue, Citi-branded bikes rolling around its streets.
Ed Yourdon
While the city may soon have more bikes, it may very well have fewer bike lanes — depending on who is elected mayor in November. From the Times:
In the early stages of the campaign for mayor, the candidates have expressed little enthusiasm about the expansion of bike lanes, and a few have made comments that suggest they may seek to erase some of them. …
John C. Liu, the city’s comptroller and a likely Democratic candidate for mayor, said in a phone interview that removing existing lanes would be “a likely scenario in some parts of the city,” particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, if he succeeded Mr. Bloomberg. …
Joseph J. Lhota, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a Republican candidate for mayor, also said he “could see” removing lanes that he deemed problematic. He noted that some bus drivers along the B63 route in Park Slope, Brooklyn, had complained about the perils of sharing space with bike riders.
Even public advocate Bill de Blasio suggested that bike lanes that “haven’t worked” should be scrapped. (Public advocate, for those wondering, is a New York-specific elected position intended to serve as a sort of civic ombudsman. It is often most effective at preparing candidates to run for other offices.)
Bike advocates and Bloomberg staffers suggest that rolling back bike lanes is unwise and unwelcomed. While opponents of bike lanes are often noisy, the Times also notes that they see 2-to-1 support among New Yorkers.
At least one candidate recognizes the value of bike lanes, even suggesting an expansion. Interestingly, he’s the candidate who came surprisingly close to upsetting Bloomberg’s bid for a third mayoral term in 2009.
Cyclists remember William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller and a likely Democratic candidate, for pledging, during a 2009 campaign against Mr. Bloomberg, to rip out a bike lane on Grand Street if he was elected. In an interview last week, he said he had no intention of removing lanes, and added that he would even consider expanding bike projects if the bike-share program, scheduled to begin in May, proved successful.
If the program is successful, and the city has 10,000 residents and tourists biking around congested stretches of midtown and lower Manhattan, there are two options: more bike lanes and added safety, or inadvertent Critical Mass-style road closures and biker fatalities. The candidates for mayor can be the judge of which will be a more effective tool for winning reelection.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Marine Stewardship Council
McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich was originally introduced in 1962 to appeal particularly to Catholic customers who eschew meat every Friday during Lent, which lasts for about 40 days. This year, McDonald’s will have new Fish McBites on hand, too. But it’s not just Lent, which begins this Wednesday, that’s been a boon for fast-food fish. From Time:
In recent months, fast food establishments have demonstrated a taste for chicken. Poultry has reached a new level of popularity among fast food restaurants and diners alike because it’s a cheaper and healthier alternative to beef (or at least it’s perceived to be so). Chicken is also easily prepared in bite-size portions (nuggets, dippers, McBites, etc.), making it a perfect fit for the rising culture of on-the-go snacking.
If one affordable, quick, and healthy (or at least healthier) snack proves to be a hit with customers, fast food restaurants are sure to see if similar offerings can succeed as well. That’s why we’re seeing a big push for fish lately.
And it’s not just McDonald’s.
This week, Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s introduced the Charbroiled Atlantic Cod Fish Sandwich at all locations around the country. The company announced the new sandwich was aimed directly at consumers tweaking their diets during Lent, and also folks concerned about eating more healthfully in the new year…
Meanwhile, next week, Wendy’s will begin advertising its Premium Fish Fillet Sandwich, which the chain has made available for a limited time around Lent for a few years in a row. None of this means that fish will come anywhere near the popularity of chicken at fast food establishments anytime soon. But more and more, the February-March period is clearly peak season for fans of fast food fish treats.
Here’s Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s sandwich commercial featuring a scantily clad swimsuit model, which might make you think twice about this whole “appealing to pious Christians” thing:
According to Seafood Watch, depending on how and where it’s caught, that Atlantic cod may be either a middling “good alternative” or a big “avoid” when it comes to sustainable fish-eats, which puts Carl’s Jr. just slightly behind McDonald’s greenwashed pollock when it comes to not destroying the oceans.
For the planet’s sake, Lent observers, maybe you could try going veg for a few weeks? It won’t hurt too much, I promise.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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