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SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The walls have come tumbling down in offices everywhere, but the cubicle dwellers keep putting up new ones. They barricade themselves behind file cabinets. They fortify their partitions with towers of books and papers. Or they follow an "evolving law of technology etiquette," as articulated by Raj Udeshi at the open office he shares with fellow software entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan. "Headphones are the new wall," he said, pointing to the covered ears of his neighbors.

Cubicle culture is already something of a punch line--how many ways can we find to annoy one another all day?--but lately the complaints are being heard by the right people, including managers and social scientists. Companies are redesigning offices, piping in special background noise to improve the acoustics and bringing in engineers to solve volume issues. "Sound masking" has become a buzz phrase.

Scientists, for their part, are measuring the unhappiness and the lower productivity of distracted workers. After surveying 65,000 people over the past decade in North America, Europe, Africa and Australia, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, report that more than half of office workers are dissatisfied with the level of "speech privacy," making it the leading complaint in offices everywhere.

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