Social distancing when we’re back in the office

For Reuters, Sarah Slobin and Feilding Cage imagine life back at the office with an interactive game. Navigate through different office scenarios while maintaining social distance:

To understand what that might feel like, we spoke to some experts on work and workspaces who predicted that social distancing measures and hybrid work models are here to stay. Walk through our simulations below to experience what going back to the old/new office might be like. Make sure to avoid contact with others along the way!

I haven’t worked in a proper office in many years, and it never appealed to me, but it sounds pretty nice these days.

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Why time feels weird right now

For Reuters, Feilding Cage provides a series of interactive tidbits to demonstrate why time perception feels like a mess these days.

Various factors skew our perception different directions. On emotion:

A busy day usually goes by quickly, but for some the opposite is true in 2020. Frontline healthcare workers, for example, know they are at high risk of exposure to the coronavirus, and the resulting anxiety heightens their attentiveness and slows their perception of how quickly a day passes.

For others, however, time can fly during joyful moments, such as a video catch-up or dinner with friends.

There’s nothing on why it feels like time is moving backwards though.

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Who should receive care first, an ethical dilemma

At greater disparities between low resources and high volumes of sick people, doctors must decide who lives and who dies, which seems a moral burden with a single case, much less anything more. So systems are setup to relieve some of that pressure. For Reuters, Feilding Cage uses clear illustrations to describe possible policies to help healthcare workers decide who receives care first.

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Using old ship logs as a window into the weather in the 1800s

For Reuters, Feilding Cage describes a weather time machine project by NOAA that uses old shipping logs to build climate models for the 19th century:

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of weather observations were carefully made in the logbooks of ships sailing through largely uncharted waters. Written in pen and ink, the logs recorded barometric pressure, air temperature, ice conditions and other variables. Today, volunteers from a project called Old Weather are transcribing these observations, which are fed into a huge dataset at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This “weather time machine,” as NOAA puts it, can estimate what the weather was for every day back to 1836, improving our understanding of extreme weather events and the impacts of climate change.

Consider my mind blown.

I wonder what researchers will extract from our current data streams a century from now.

Nevermind. I don’t want to know.

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Using old ship logs as a window into the weather in the 1800s

For Reuters, Feilding Cage describes a weather time machine project by NOAA that uses old shipping logs to build climate models for the 19th century:

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of weather observations were carefully made in the logbooks of ships sailing through largely uncharted waters. Written in pen and ink, the logs recorded barometric pressure, air temperature, ice conditions and other variables. Today, volunteers from a project called Old Weather are transcribing these observations, which are fed into a huge dataset at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This “weather time machine,” as NOAA puts it, can estimate what the weather was for every day back to 1836, improving our understanding of extreme weather events and the impacts of climate change.

Consider my mind blown.

I wonder what researchers will extract from our current data streams a century from now.

Nevermind. I don’t want to know.

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