Offices Resort To Sensors In Futile Attempts To Keep Workers Apart (bloomberg.com) 96
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Millions of workers in recent months have returned to offices outfitted with new pandemic protocols meant to keep them healthy and safe. But temperature checks and plexiglass barriers between desks can't prevent one of the most dangerous workplace behaviors for the spread of Covid-19 -- the irresistible desire to mingle. "If you have people coming into the office, it's very rare for them consistently to be six feet apart," said Kanav Dhir, the head of product at VergeSense, a company that has 30,000 object-recognition sensors deployed in office buildings around the world tracking worker whereabouts.
Since the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, the company has found that 60% of interactions among North American workers violate the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's six-foot distancing guidelines, as do an even higher share in Asia, where offices usually are smaller. [...] For those employers pushing ahead with a return to the office, sensors that measure room occupancy are proving to be a necessity, said Doug Stewart, co-head of digital buildings at the technology unit Cushman & Wakefield, which manages about 785-million-square feet of commercial space in North and South America. Most offices are already fitted with sensors of some kind, even if it's just a badging system or security cameras. Those lagging on such capabilities are now scrambling to add more, he said. The systems were used before the pandemic to jam as many people together in the most cost-effective way, not limit workplace crowding or keep employees away from each other, Stewart said. With that in mind, companies can analyze the data all they want, but changing human behavior -- we're social creatures, after all -- is harder, he said.
Understanding worker habits is more useful if you have a way to nudge them into new patterns. Since the pandemic began, Radiant RFID LLC has sold 10,000 wristbands that vibrate when co-workers are too close to each other. The technology was originally designed to warn workers away from dangerous machinery, not other people. So far, the wristbands are responsible for reducing unsafe contacts by about 65%, said Kenneth Ratton, chief executive of the company, which makes radio-communication devices. At this point, the data on more than 3 billion encounters shows the average worker has had about 300 interactions closer than six feet lasting 10 minutes or more. Nadia Diwas is using another kind of technology: a wireless key fob she carries in her pocket made by her employer, Semtech Corp., which tracks her movements and interactions -- making it useful for contact tracing if someone gets sick, which is as important as warning people they are too close. The technology originally was developed by Semtech to help devices such as thermostats communicate on the so-called internet of things.
Since the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, the company has found that 60% of interactions among North American workers violate the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's six-foot distancing guidelines, as do an even higher share in Asia, where offices usually are smaller. [...] For those employers pushing ahead with a return to the office, sensors that measure room occupancy are proving to be a necessity, said Doug Stewart, co-head of digital buildings at the technology unit Cushman & Wakefield, which manages about 785-million-square feet of commercial space in North and South America. Most offices are already fitted with sensors of some kind, even if it's just a badging system or security cameras. Those lagging on such capabilities are now scrambling to add more, he said. The systems were used before the pandemic to jam as many people together in the most cost-effective way, not limit workplace crowding or keep employees away from each other, Stewart said. With that in mind, companies can analyze the data all they want, but changing human behavior -- we're social creatures, after all -- is harder, he said.
Understanding worker habits is more useful if you have a way to nudge them into new patterns. Since the pandemic began, Radiant RFID LLC has sold 10,000 wristbands that vibrate when co-workers are too close to each other. The technology was originally designed to warn workers away from dangerous machinery, not other people. So far, the wristbands are responsible for reducing unsafe contacts by about 65%, said Kenneth Ratton, chief executive of the company, which makes radio-communication devices. At this point, the data on more than 3 billion encounters shows the average worker has had about 300 interactions closer than six feet lasting 10 minutes or more. Nadia Diwas is using another kind of technology: a wireless key fob she carries in her pocket made by her employer, Semtech Corp., which tracks her movements and interactions -- making it useful for contact tracing if someone gets sick, which is as important as warning people they are too close. The technology originally was developed by Semtech to help devices such as thermostats communicate on the so-called internet of things.
This is Slashdot (Score:1)
Re: This is Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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I was going to ask how we are supposed to have sex in the stationery closet while staying 6 feet apart but, yes, your point overrides that.
Some of us are just better equipped, I guess.
Re: This is Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Who would have thought that a glory hole was actually a medical safety solution?
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The Canadian CDC? [tmz.com]
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That's the BC CDC. The Canadian just recommended masks while having sex.
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A Breath of Fresh Air (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are strict regulations in most jurisdictions that require certain minimum amounts of outside air to be brought in, but they don't restrict recirculation except from spaces like toilet
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Correct, because these buildings were originally designed for cost-efficiency, and heating is expensive.
In light of Corona, and seasonal flu/cold's, buildings really should be forced air, with slight positive-pressure with air cleaning before recirculating.
When the office (which was built in 90's) was built here, the annual wildfires required replacing the filters sooner. They're not located at HVAC points, the entire building is open-plan. So really, the mechanism needed is to partition the HVAC by floors
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UV lights inside HVAC systems are not a panacea. They typically sterilize the inside surfaces of the equipment, mostly to prevent mold from growing on wet surfaces like the cooling coils and drain pans. But because of the short dwell time of particles in the air flow being exposed to the lights, they don't really kill much that's airborne.
The best ones create ozone that travels down the duct, being able to kil
Re:A Breath of Fresh Air (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, brother!
About a decade ago I was working in a company and we got hit very badly by the flu. The HR looked into the statitsics for the country and cried in anger - a company with a median age of 32 was having a sick rate double that of the national average. Of course HR always blamed the people for cheating.
I was a member of the so called workers council so we got to discuss this in a meeting with the MT. I pointed out that we had about half of the minimum recommended (and enforced by law) volume of air per employee. Coupled with a cheap air conditioning system that did not have even the simplest bug-filter in it and the fact that the people are young and dedicated (thus coming to work while they are contagious) resulted in this unexpected spike. I also demonstrated the insufficient power of the airco by measuring the CO2 levels in the building - it was so bad, that people got dozy and even the non smokers were coming out to take fresh air every couple of hours or so...
The minutes of that meeting, written by the HR, stated (I am not kidding!): Evtim says that the increased concertation of CO2 in the building makes people catch the flu.
No comment.
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It amazes me how short sighted companies can be with things like this. The cost of improving the work environment isn't that high, especially compared to the losses experienced by not doing it.
I sometimes wonder if it's a failure of process. The information to make the right decision is there but the mechanism to make it isn't. Or maybe it's just short term thinking or the delusion that they can simply crack the whip a bit harder to resolve most issues.
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The first costs of improving the work environment can be quite high, especially to the bean counters who can't quantify the future savings resulting from improvements. One of the few companies I worked with that took that seriously and wanted us to design high quality HVAC for them had a retired US Navy engineer in
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The cost of improving the work environment isn't that high, especially compared to the losses experienced by not doing it.
You don't think like HR or the bean counters, that's for sure.
The cost of improving the work environment is captured in a line item with a lot of zeroes after it. The loss of not doing it doesn't have a line item. It's got lots of little impacts on other line items, but it doesn't get its own.
So when you look at a line item with a lot of zeroes vs no corresponding one, the cost of improving the work environment is far too high to justify doing it.
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HVAC costs are an easy line item to quantify. Improved morale and productivity is ethereal, complicated, and difficult to measure. Bean counters optimize what they can see and measure, even if it just happens to be destroying the company in the process.
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LOL.. Now the big question - any of the bosses have pointy hair like in Dilbert?
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Also the baseline outdoor CO2 level is rising, so that a level of ventilation that was sufficient thirty or forty years ago is not enough today.
There is no sharp line between healthy and unhealthy levels of CO2, but for most people the first easily observable neurological symptom of CO2 impairment kicks in at around 1000 ppm -- drowsiness. That obviously has serious productivity implications, so a building's ventilation system needs to keep CO2 levels below that -- ideally quite a bit below that since a fe
Office buildings are pestholes, six feet a crock. (Score:3)
The stuffy buildings demanded since the late 20 century is a sure fire way to make everyone in a building ill when a single person walks in with a Corana virus sniffle.
No kidding.
The CDC has FINALLY admitted what has been known since about February: CoV2 DOES spread by aerosol, not just droplets. The aerosol particles can stay airborne, and the virus stay alive within them, for at least a couple hours. Each particle runs to tens of thousands of live virons, so you only need to inhale ONE and have it land
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No mention of ionization filters.
https://info.airoasis.com/blog... [airoasis.com]
Like red light and speed cameras (Score:5, Insightful)
We have traffic laws for good reason, to keep us safe. But installing red-light cameras that automatically generate citations goes a bit too far. This is because with automatic ticketing, it becomes less about safety and more about revenue and nit-picking the rules.
The same principle applies to automatic COVID rule monitoring. The 6-foot rule is a rule of thumb meant to help keep the virus from spreading. Escalating enforcement using automated detection turns it into a dystopian nightmare.
If businesses are that worried about enforcing the six-foot rule, they should just let people continue to work remotely.
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What bizarre thing are we going to do when everyone has the sniffles? When their face is flush from the cold air making that thermal fever detection shit useless when people enter the building? Winter is coming folks. Colds, flu, this covid, that covid, novel covid, and many people get a runny nose just being in cold weather and you cant make them stop doing that. Indoor heating d
Re:Like red light and speed cameras (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Like red light and speed cameras (Score:4, Informative)
Aren't we supposed to be well beyond trying to completely stop the spread anyways?
No.
Are the hospitals overloaded all of a sudden?
Yes.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/... [cbsnews.com]
And why would that be the metric? Is it ok to harm somebody as long as there's a hospital bed available to them?
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When their face is flush from the cold air making that thermal fever detection shit useless when people enter the building?
Found the lizard-person on the Internet!
Re:Like red light and speed cameras (Score:5, Insightful)
Arent we supposed to be well beyond trying to completely stop the spread anyways? Are the hospitals overloaded all of a sudden?
I only wear my seatbelt when the ER is full, otherwise it's not worth the minor inconvenience to help reduce the risk of serious injury in the unlikely event I get into an accident. And since I always make sure the ER has capacity, even if I get injured in an accident, it's really no problem, doctors will probably save my life (even though I may end up with a lifelong disability)
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Not wearing a seatbelt can easily impact others. The seatbelt, perhaps unsurprisingly, helps keep you in your seat in the event of minor collisions and large bumps/dips in the road (or other driving surface). It is rather difficult to control a car/truck when one is not firmly planted in the seat.
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No one is arguing here that we shouldn't have a six-foot rule, or that we shouldn't be required to wear seat belts. But imagine if your car had a device that would automatically detect when you fail to wear your seatbelt, and generates a citation for each violation, even if you are just driving a couple of blocks away to a nearby house in your subdivision. THAT is the analogy being made. It's the draconian enforcement that's at issue, not the policy itself.
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Well it should just be automatic to put your seat belt on. You can get killed just as easy close to home as anywhere. A citation goes too far but I notice most vehicles bitch if you don't put it on.
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Sounds like we agree then.
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Well, I think you should have your seat belt on even if only driving a couple of blocks on a side street. Hopefully you were just being hypothetical.
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I do too, but I don't think you should get automatically fined if you don't.
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OK, we do agree.
Re:Like red light and speed cameras (Score:4, Interesting)
As the Slashdot crowd gets older I'm sure many of us are thinking that while we would probably survive COVID-19 it wouldn't be pleasant and may well leave us with life-long health problems.
Employers are probably worried about lawsuits too. Failing to take reasonable action to protect people would be a health and safety issue here.
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Are the hospitals overloaded all of a sudden?
Yes, some are [cbs7.com] once again being filled [apnews.com] to capacity with covid patients [nytimes.com], mainly the mid [politico.com] and upper west [apnews.com], the places where they don't believe in science [fox4kc.com] or following a simple rule of wearing a mask [texastribune.org].
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Reading the articles you linked, it's interesting to learn that "dangerously full" means that 15% of patients in Lubbock hospitals have COVID. I would have thought the percentage would be much higher, judging from the dire headlines!
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that "dangerously full" means ...
That's not what the first article said. Read it again.
While you're at it, you can look for this headline:
Some KC-area hospitals forced to turn away ambulances as COVID-19 hospitalizations climb
And things like this:
"We got to the point where we knew there was no one that would take them," Ms. Gerving said of patients who were sick but not critically ill. "So then we started keeping them in our building. And then we started having an outbreak internally."
Re: Like red light and speed cameras (Score:2)
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What's interesting is that in the 1960s the US had more than 9 hospital beds per 1,000 people, while today it's less than 3 per 1,000. So most places don't have 15% excess hospital bed capacity waiting around for the extra patients that a pandemic brings every 100 years or so.
Also, you can't use ne
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'But installing red-light cameras that automatically generate citations goes a bit too far'
- Bzzzt, you are fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statue. We have notified the police department. Please, remain where you are for your reprimand!
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That's a bit of a false dichotomy. Somewhere between no-enforcement and creating a dystopian nightmare may be a level of enforcement that people can live with but provides a considerable margin of safety over non-enforcement.
The 6 foot rule actually is an example of that; it's based on the typical trajectory of droplets (non-aerosols) from normal volume level conversations. It's not that you get showered in droplets at 69 inches but there are zero droplets at 71 inches. Six feet was chosen because it wa
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I never said anything about NO enforcement. That extreme is not true with red lights (without cameras), nor is it true of businesses that don't use tech to enforce the six-foot rule. You are introducing a false dichotomy where there was none.
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I believe I see a possibility for nuance which perhaps you haven't considered. You said: "Escalating enforcement using automated detection turns it into a dystopian nightmare." While I think it that a dystopian outcome is certainly possible, it depends on what you do with the information and how you apply that policy.
If you *mechanically* apply *punishments* upon automatically detecting a violation, put that violation in some kind of database, and you apply that policy *selectively* to certain employees,
Extend the Tech (Score:5, Funny)
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It would need to be turned off for certain women. Some women - Damn! I mean Damn! If you're a man you're going to have to look. Sometimes even other women look. They really are that good.
Reminds me of this chick on the side of the road in 1993. Driving back from lunch with a co-worker. He saw her, I was driving the car, watching the road. Man he was wooping it up - whoa man! Look at her! Look at her butt! Like a dog in heat.
Then I passed her, he looked back at her
OH NO, YUCK! That Grill! Man they should lo
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Or we could take the sensors people already have with them [slashdot.org], and maybe come up with a solution that uses them together to help remind people when they're too close?
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Collars? Nah, just modify the office chairs [youtube.com]
The real long-term effects of the pandemic: (Score:1, Interesting)
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As a mod it's hard to tell. It's a deeply one sided post ignoring Long COVID and people's efforts to be together virtually but it's probably heartfelt and it's making an important point that people feel isolated. Sometimes it's hard to judge between a subtle troll and an honest emotional reaction.
Re:The real long-term effects of the pandemic: (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a worst-case scenario where an entire generation has to be socially isolated from each other so they don't get sick and die.
An entire generation? If people would actually socially isolate, the virus would be gone in just 1-2 months. And you imagine this has to go on for an entire generation.
It is the people who won't stop socializing, even though they know they could be spreading virus, that has kept the virus spreading. Will people die if they stopped going to bars for a month or two? Apparently some people thought so, because they continue to go to bars to "socialize" while knowing they could be infecting other people with the virus and killing some.
An entire generation? It is people like you who kept imagining sky-high price for stopping the virus, convincing yourself it is not worth the effort, and thus justifying doing nothing, which have helped the virus spreading around.
What you did is not different than the climate change deniers who claimed that reducing CO2 emission will grind economy to a stand still and everyone have to live in the stone age, so let's not do anything about it and keep burning fossil fuels.
Many countries, especially in Asia, have significantly contained the virus through self-disciplined behaviour. Pretending that it takes an entire generation socially isolating only makes you feel better about doing nothing.
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Only takes a fraction of the population acting irresponsibly to erase the gains of the rest of us are futily trying to achieve with mask wearing and isolation. Those folks keep us in this sustained purgatory. If we treated it like a "hair on fire" emergency for 1-2 months as you suggest we could soon be in-line with the various Eastern countries that seem to be keeping a lid on things.
Offices need real filtration, plenty of fresh air, and to keep the headcount in the office as low as practical.
As a countr
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Proof we dont trust Apple and Google (Score:3)
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Those hypothetical people "working in tech" are ignorant. How can Google or Apple misuse a series of randomly generated numbers that your phone picked up by pinging another device? If there's a significant privacy concern with the protocol they've devised, I haven't heard of it.
That aside, the Apple/Google solution is good for after-the-fact contact tracing of people who were in close proximity. It's not good for what the article describes, which is in-the-moment enforcement of distancing requirements.
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Those hypothetical people "working in tech" are ignorant. How can Google or Apple misuse a series of randomly generated numbers that your phone picked up by pinging another device? If there's a significant privacy concern with the protocol they've devised, I haven't heard of it.
Maybe possibly the same way Google misuse some other randomly generated strings, called cookies, to track your every move on the internet? By the time you heard about how they raped your privacy with it, it is already too late.
Trust, once gone, is not so easily restored simply by the proclamation. Google is a glutton for all data, people were right not to trust them with any private data. What they claim they can't/won't do today, you may found out tomorrow that they had been doing all along.
However, OTO
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I don't think you understand how the contact tracing protocol works. A cookie is persistent, which is why it can be used to track you. The contact tracing app frequently changes your random identifier for the express purpose of preventing tracking.
Whether contact tracing alone is enough to significantly alter the trajectory of the virus spreading is a separate conversation, unrelated to user privacy.
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The contact tracing app frequently changes your random identifier for the express purpose of preventing tracking.
So what? How do I know it's not using some side-channel to associate my google ID with that randomly generated identifier? Google wrote all the pieces, and distributes them as binaries. And the tracing app doesn't have to be doing anything as crude as sending the information home directly, so it doesn't have to be easy to snoop on.
Do I think Google is doing that? Eh, not really. Do I think they could? Absolutely. And I therefore understand why people who trusted Google before and then found out they aren't
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If you're willing to attribute that level of malice to Google, and you're that concerned about privacy, then why are you running an Android device? If Google wants to track you (and I'm sure they do and are), they really don't need to convince you to install a covid contact tracing app. You're already running the OS that they wrote. If they want to track you, they will. I don't see why they'd waste the time trying to side channel the contact tracing app.
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If you're willing to attribute that level of malice to Google, and you're that concerned about privacy, then why are you running an Android device?
Because I don't trust Apple, either. I've been fucked by them before, for example the B&W G3 Rev.1 data corruption problem that they told customers to work around by buying new hardware, then hid from the public by deliberately removing it when they converted the TIL into the KB.
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What's frustrating is that Google and Apple couldn't look at a pandemic, look at their near 100% capture of the market, and come together to make a privacy focused contact tracing app.
It's trivial to implement, they could open source it, vouch for each other, and make it cross-platform. Just have it running, and if you test positive, hit the "tested positive for COVID" button. Then it pings people who were in contact with you in the last 2 weeks to let them know. It could be done with varying levels of expo
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic because so many of the criteria you've listed are met by the solution Apple and Google have developed. Is the criticism that it isn't sufficiently open source?
I think it even does solve the "bar and gathering problem" you describe. I went to a restaurant for lunch last week (my only notable outing where I would've been exposed to a significant number of people) and in the week since I've gotten two pings from the NHS app using the Apple/Google protocol alerting me th
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I don't think you understand how the contact tracing app works [cdn-apple.com]. It tracks who your contacts are (in the form of a random ID that their phone sends to yours), but not where you made contact with them or where they've been.
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That, of course, means that you trust Apple and Google to actually implement it the way they claim it works, and therefore that they can't actually track you with it. That Google was just caught not clearing their own cookies in Chrome when you tell Chrome to purge everything doesn't exactly inspire a lot of trust.
sold 10,,000 units (Score:4, Insightful)
There corrected that for you.
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It never works (Score:3)
There is no technological solution to a behavioral problem, never has been, never will. If you want people to behave differently, you have to change their mindset, which is the purpose of education.
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What behavior problems have either solved? Despite the death penalty we still have instances of murder, mass murder, terrorist attacks, etc. Once could easily argue that both your examples have expanded behavior problems more than solved them.
Re: It never works (Score:1)
How are the production staff coping? (Score:2)
I have been working from home for over twelve months now, for health reasons. When I went into the office every day, the tea room could get quite crowded when the production workers were on a break. I presume that cannot happen any more. I understand that having so many engineering and admin staff working from home has made it possible to implement effective social distancing for the production staff, but I wonder about the socialising aspect to this. As far as I know, we have a largely happy workforce, and
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Our building switched to rolling breaks for production. Where it used to be three large groups taking breaks all at once, now it's department by department, and larger departments get broken up into two groups so they can each sit at their own tables in the cafeteria.
It seems to be working so far. We've had four positive tests, but when they happen nobody else in the building seems to get it from them. No known outbreaks from inside the building. The positive cases were people that had social interactio
easy (Score:2)
Business principles 101 (Score:2)
Re:Business principles 101 (Score:4, Interesting)
If you set the value of human life at $0, or simply very low, you can arbitrarily declare that we're there already.
But it also makes you a shitty person, and fuck you if you do that.
but don't use it to stop union activity! (Score:1)
but don't use it to stop union activity!
Of course it will fail (Score:2)
Your dealing with human nature, why would you be surprised. Just look at what you see when you go shopping. Most retail places have plexiglass in front of cashiers now as a means of protection. In theory this makes a nice impermeable barrier to droplets.
In practice it also makes a nice barrier to sound making it difficult for the customer and cashier to hear each other. This effect is made all the worse when both people are wearing masks. So what do you see people do all the bloody time? They stand to the s
Mandatory phone app (Score:2)
My large company went out and bought 20k company cell phones that employees are now required to carry on their person at all times when in a company building, just like your badge. The phones have both a bluetooth Covid-tracking app, and a 'work pass' app that makes you answer the standard exposure questions every day. You have to show the generated work pass to the security guard when you get your temperature checked as you enter the building. We assume that company legal decided they couldn't mandate the
Re:Mandatory phone app = they pay for plan (Score:2)
Re:Mandatory phone app = they pay for plan and phones
be afraid (Score:1)
Here's an idea. Since the word "office" appears in the title, these are people who do *not* need to be there. Making them go in yet spending all that money on surveillance indicates a real bastard of a company.