- Your Company Wants to Know if You’ve Lost Weight
Disney , Whole Foods and dozens of other companies have introduced programs to reward employees for meeting certain criteria on health indicators such as weight-to-height ratio and blood pressure. Some incentivize workers to hit a target number of step counts and eat well: One wellness provider, Vitality, works with 31,000 grocery stores to analyze participants’ food choices and award points for healthy purchases, which can be redeemed for prizes.
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In addition to tests measuring indicators like blood pressure, wellness programs often involve taking detailed online health assessments that can include questions on alcohol consumption and pregnancy plans. Many programs employ wearable devices that track step counts, sleep and heart rates. Some privacy experts fear that by opting in, individuals may put their data at risk. Wellness programs that are run as part of group health plans are covered by HIPAA, the nation’s main health-privacy law. However, many others aren’t, leaving protection for employee data more porous, said Joy Pritts, who served as chief privacy officer at the Department of Health and Human Services until 2014. - How to Get Better at Small Talk
As Quartz mentioned, there’s the “triangulation” approach to small talk (named by Kio Stark, author of When Strangers Meet). This method involves three points: you, your partner, and the observable thing in front of you—in other words, your common ground.
It’s simple. Find the thing that ties you together and bond over it, even if it’s right in front of your eyes. The weather’s terrible! I can’t wait for lunch! Not again, Trump!
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-better-small-talk-1832124157
- Returning to the town that Walmart left behind
- We Need a Radical New Way to Understand Screen Use
The cruel irony, from a social scientist’s perspective, is that much of the data we seek (more, in fact, than has existed at any point in history) already exists on the servers of Facebook, Google, and several more of the most powerful companies on earth. Those corporations are the gatekeepers that hold researchers back from asking more urgent and incisive questions. For example: When college freshmen with depressive symptoms open YouTube, what do they watch? For how long? What does YouTube recommend them when they’re done, and what do they watch next?
Researchers would give almost anything to make these observations, because it would allow them to begin untangling the web of causes and correlations that bind our thoughts, behaviors, and development to our increasingly connected ways of being in the world.
https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-a-radical-new-way-to-understand-screen-use/
- I Studied Buttons for 7 Years and Learned These 5 Lessons About How and Why People Push Them
Yet in many contexts, both past and present, buttons are anything but easy. Have you ever stood in an elevator pushing the close-door button over and over, hoping and wondering if the door will ever shut? The same quandary presents itself at every crosswalk button. Programming a so-called “universal remote” is often an exercise in extreme frustration. Now think about the intensely complex dashboards used by pilots or DJs.
For more than a century, people have been complaining that buttons aren’t easy: Like any technology, most buttons require training to understand how and when to use them.W
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pand5v/power-button-politics-of-pushing-buttons
Photo by Thomas Le on Unsplash