Space and Pyschology

How do you sit when you are having a phone conference? Did you know that your posture says a lot about how you feel about your self and how confident you are? And that understanding could be useful for furniture and office space designers, say researchers who documented the relationship between the space that people take up and the sense of strength they feel. They even exposed how potentially corrupting such expansive “power poses” — and the ensuing sense of confidence and self-importance they can trigger — can be, leading to dishonest behavior. Posture might even help for those all-important job interviews. A recent study found, for example, that practicing expansive, striking poses before high-stakes settings like interviewing for a job or giving a presentation can improve a person’s performance — while huddling over a desk or hunching over a smartphone may inhibit innovative and confident thinking and increase anxious reactions.

Quiet

Does it ever seem like when you are trying to concentrate on writing that internet fax, no matter how much willpower you have, different noises will demand your attention? We jerk to the tug of noise like sonic marionettes. There’s good reason for this. Among mammals, hearing developed as an early warning system. There has been a transformation in our relationship to the environment over the millions of years since the prototype for human hearing evolved, but part of our brain hasn’t registered the makeover. We are still sensitive to the noises even if it looks like we are able to stop paying attention to them and it wrecks havoc on our bodies including the cardiovascular system. Of course it is not always possible to completely put ourselves in a cocoon but it would be nice to be able to hear ourselves think.

Dumb Phones

When was the last time you had the so called dumb phone? This is the phone that did not have any mobile applications or internet access with internet phones services. Not to mention all those games that you can play and waste plenty of time with. Technology is not going anywhere and, in my quest to downsize my life and be productive, I don’t want to be tethered to the internet wherever I go. I’ll still take a phone with me when I go out to eat or for a drive and you’ll still be able to call me or text me but if you email me or tweet me and expect a response, you’ll get that response whenever I next use my desktop or other supported device. I want to return to the living. This is not about discipline and not using certain applications. This is about not needing social networking or cloud applications 24/7. I want to return to the joys of listening to music without the need to hold up a sound app to identify the song.

Prison Phone Rates

The FCC has decided to decrease the phone service rates in prisons. Some of the rates can exceed upwards of $1 per minute. The prisons say that the reason for the high costs is that they have to closely monitor and save and track every communication that is done by an inmate, which requires advanced systems. It will take about 120 days for the new rates to take affect. The commissioners voted to impose a cap of 25 cents a minute for a collect call, and 21 cents a minute for a debit or prepaid call. That is less than one-fourth the current rate in some locations. One of the other solutions that prisons should consider is IP telephony which would also lower costs and have more people making calls to their family which might be long distance. What do you think about the current prices for inmates?

Phubbing

How many times have you sat at dinner with someone and you were just itching to check you phone to see if you got an email or a voicemail? And what are the chances that you actually tried to check it without the other person noticing? I thought so. Phubbing: snubbing someone by paying attention to your phone instead of them in a social setting. And there’s an awareness campaign begging us all to stop it. With so many people now owning cell phones, more people are likely to just disregard the person right next to them and pay attention to their phones as if they are going to miss some major announcement. What happened to people talking to each other when they go out together? In a second experiment, the researchers showed that discussing personally meaningful topics in the vicinity of a phone is particularly hazardous for relationships—likely because opening up makes us feel more vulnerable and therefore more threatened by the prospect of a listener being distracted.