Learn about how working from home actually makes people more productive; how the “triple point” can make a liquid can boil and freeze at the same time; and how you can change your narrative to overcome your next life challenge. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Working from Home Makes People More Productive — https://curiosity.im/2SrYdTX The Triple Point Is When a Liquid Can Boil and Freeze at Once — https://curiosity.im/2EhkuQy Facing a Challenge? Here's Why You Should Change Your Narrative — https://curiosity.im/2rZlXn9 If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how working from home actually makes people more productive; how the “triple point” can make a liquid can boil and freeze at the same time; and how you can change your narrative to overcome your next life challenge.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/working-from-home-ftw-changing-narratives-to-overcome-challenges-and-triple-point-chemistry
CODY GOUGH: Hi we've got three brand-new stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about how working from home actually makes people more productive, how a liquid can boil and freeze at the same time, and how you can change your narrative to overcome your next life challenge.
CODY GOUGH : Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning curiosity daily. New research suggests that working from home actually makes people more productive. This is totally me. How about you?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, absolutely. It's nice and quiet. I've got my cat there. I work much better with a cat in my lap, really.
CODY GOUGH: You already miss the holidays, don't you?
ASHLEY HAMER: I do.
CODY GOUGH: Well, look, it costs a lot of money to rent space for an office. Especially in bigger cities, like here in Chicago. So it's not a huge surprise that some companies are just letting their employees work from home. And not just in the US. Take Ctrip, for example. That's a Chinese travel agency based in Shanghai. And the company was paying exorbitant rates for its office space. And it only got worse as the team kept growing.
So the CEO teamed up with Stanford economists to conduct a nine-month study on 249 call center employees. Employees who had birthdays on even-numbered days worked from home four days a week. And those who had birthdays on odd-numbered days worked from the office. Management compared to the productivity of the two groups. And, of course, they expected that their employees who had worked from home would be slacking off. Well, surprise, surprise, the work from home crew had productivity levels increase by 13%.
That means the employees who worked from home accomplished nearly a full day of work per week more than their office-confined coworkers. And get this, the employees who are able to work from home took substantially fewer sick days, and quit their job at half the rate as the Office workers. Overall, the company's revenue increased by $2000 more per employee that worked from home. Ctrip was so impressed, they offered a work from home option across the whole company. And they're continuing to see spikes in productivity.
Now, obviously, this study was a huge success. And I'm personally a huge proponent of working from home. But working from home is not for everyone. It can make you feel isolated. And sometimes, people don't have a living space conducive to work. But there are definite perks to working from home, like cutting down on the time and vehicle emissions that it takes to get to and from work. Ultimately, working from home shouldn't be mandatory. But giving employees the option can have benefits for both the employees and for the company's bottom line.
ASHLEY HAMER: A liquid can boil and freeze at the same time. It's a freaky phenomenon called the triple point. And today in chemistry will explain how this is possible, and how it's helpful for doctors.
CODY GOUGH: Wait, so like when water is a solid, it's ice.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yep.
CODY GOUGH: When it's a gas, it's steam. When it's a liquid, it's, well, water. So which of these is the triple point?
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, it's all three. A substance at the triple point is a liquid, solid, and gas, all at the same time. And you can blame two things, temperature and pressure. You can kind of think of the triple point as the temperature and pressure that puts the solid, liquid, and gas states of matter into thermodynamic equilibrium. That's a condition where no one state of matter is trying to change into any other state. The boiling causes high-energy molecules to rise as a gas. And that lowers the temperature of the boiling liquid to make it freeze. That cycle continues as long as the substance stays at that triple point temperature and pressure.
For water, the triple point temperature is 32.02 degrees Fahrenheit. or 0.01 degrees Celsius. And the pressure is about six thousandths of Earth's average atmospheric pressure. Triple point is more than just a science experiment. The National Physics Laboratory says that triple points make ideal reference points for the calibration of thermometers. And the triple point of ethylene carbonate is close to human body temperature, which makes it a really useful reference point for calibrating clinical thermometers. Benzoate acids triple point is also close to the sterilizing temperature of medical drip solutions. A little chemistry can go a long way.
CODY GOUGH: A new paper says that one of the biggest things stopping you from solving a challenge could be your narrative. And this paper has some ideas for how you can change your narrative to help you reach your goals. As reported by Futurity. This paper comes from psychologist Gregory Walton, who's an associate professor at Stanford University. He says that for a long time, people like college administrators, psychologists, and social workers have been trained to focus on problems facing an individual person. But they can miss the social context around those problems.
So, for example, let's say you're a college student, and you're in a fight with a roommate, or you've got a bad grade on something, or a professor gave you critical feedback that you didn't take very well, right. Now those are individual problems. But you will see those problems a lot differently if you've got a broader question, like, do I belong in school? Now this can happen, especially in students with economic or racial backgrounds that don't look like your stereotypical college success story.
Dr. Walton has found in his research that those common challenges, like a roommate fight or a bad grade, can seem like proof of that fear that a student doesn't, quote unquote, "belong at that institution." Those feelings of exclusion can lead to poor performance, which can then lead to students going so far as to actually drop out of school altogether.
Walton said, quote, "it's easy for people to see a failing student and think, he just doesn't get. It he's not smart. Or he's not self controlled. Our basic intuition can tell us the problems are due to inadequacies in the individual. If only he were smarter or less lazy, he'd do fine. That can lead to victim blaming. And it ignores how the world looks to that person. Interpretations he draws, often reasonably, based on his experience in context that can prevent him from succeeding." unquote.
Walton says he hopes interventions can become more effective by influencing the ways that people make sense of themselves and their social situations. And as a first step, Walton and a team of social psychologists created a website for finding what they call Wise Interventions, at wiseinterventions.org. It's a searchable database of, psychologically, what they call wise interventions to help people flourish. Check it out if you're struggling to feel included, or you could use some help accomplishing your goals or getting over a challenge. One more time, that's wiseinterventions.org. Did you change your narrative to reach your New Year's resolutions?
ASHLEY HAMER: You know, yeah, I did. Because my big New Year's resolution is to budget. And I know from reaching past goals that a great way to reach a goal is to be like, I'm just a person who does this, instead of, I'm trying to do this. So I'm just a person who doesn't shop online all the time. I'm just a person who writes down everything that I spend. And that's just me now.
CODY GOUGH: Nice.
ASHLEY HAMER: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Special thanks to Jess Raines for script assistance with today's stories, and other stories this week. This episode was edited and produced by me. Join us again tomorrow for the award winning curiosity daily. And learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
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