There certainly are, although they're not typically intended for home usage. But in industrial/commercial setups which use CO2 (beer/drink-cellars, dry-ice handling, pressure pipe-flushing, etc) they're relatively common. Obviously they're always detecting some level, but they're set to trip or alarm when concentration hits some threshold over ambient. http://duomo.co.uk/CO2_Alarms.aspx is just one example.
Low-O2 detectors are also common, and approach the problem from the other direction. They're more useful for N2 or other inert gases, since you're less concerned with toxicity and more with plain asphyxiation. IIRC they're used in some places to enforce "No riding in the same lift as the liquid-N2 dewar" safety rules.
Not really, you can buy CO2 sensors COTS for HVAC guys to prevent "stuffy" rooms. Its industrial grade product and price and you won't be buying them at walmart but the UI is very HVAC-dude oriented. Also if you sell dry ice you're supposed to own a permanently wall mounted one even if you officially keep the stuff outside (depends on local building code and licenses and regs I'm sure)
There's a different UI for combustion gas analyzers, most any HVAC guy owns one if he does furnace work. They're about an order of magnitude more expensive and the ratio of CO2/O2 tells you quite a bit about the level of draft (and they usually have a CO sensor too which only comes into play when draft/mixture is tremendously rich)
I think that a good deal of that fear/anxiety comes from the fact that people are expected to be more productive. If someone doesn't respond to an email immediately, we think the are not working or are being lazy.
I've recently noticed that I will often think about and come up with a solution to an issue at work while driving or eating dinner. I suspect this happens because I'm not being distracted by the problem. It also bothers me a little. If I worked in a factory assembling widgets, I would not be able to take my work home. You can't leave your brain at work if your job is mostly mental work.
> You can't leave your brain at work if your job is mostly mental work.
Trust me, you can. I simply ignore emails after 6pm. I will look at them first thing at 8am the next day, but not after 6. If someone presses you on it and they won't take "I have a life" for an answer, just lie and say you didn't see it or that you were at your kid's baseball game. I suspect that the frequency of someone's boss actually getting pissed that they did not respond right away to a 9pm email to be extremely low. In the unlikely occurrence that you actually work in an environment like this, I suggest polishing up the resume, because there are plenty of jobs out there that do not require your brain 24/7.
I do the same and while I do get away with it, it's not appreciated at all by those people who sleep with their phone in their hand. I get crap about it all the time and if I was an employee I would be very concerned about that habit affecting my career path.
All that said, there's no way in hell I'm changing this. If something is urgent I will get a text or even a phone call. Everything else is always important but not urgent and people just refuse to think about the difference.
I think that a good deal of that fear/anxiety comes from the fact that people are expected to be more productive. If someone doesn't respond to an email immediately, we think the are not working or are being lazy.
A quick but possibly meaningless e-mail response doesn't constitute productivity. The expectation you describe is just one of availability (or working), while ignoring productivity or presenting real solutions.
Unfortunately, enough, well, for the lack of a more elegant term, MBA leeches, have climbed the corporate ladder high enough to generalize equating the vague term "proactivity" (which tends to involve permanent availability, diligence and so much pseudo-politeness that it starts smelling a lot like ass-kissing) to productivity.
This is particularly annoying when it's augmented by unrealistic expectations, like "you're a programmer... you spend all your time on a computer, can't you check your inbox"?
I used to work in a place where this was common practice, especially among the HR and sales drones. They pissed me off so hard that I cracked up and explained one particularly pushy tie-wearer that I only check my mail every hour or so, when I take a break from, you know, work, and if something is more urgent than that, he can come to my office. He obnoxiously explained me that a lot of his work involves remote communication and he can't just go all the way to my office (which was otherwise on the same floor), so I just went like, ok, prioritize or whatever your newspeak language calls it and leave me the fuck alone.
I stubbornly enforced my "one e-mail checking each hour" until the whole department started doing it. To everyone's surprise, things went a lot more smoothly; instead of hurriedly replying some half-thought obvious crap just to show the boss how attentive you are to your work, you could actually take five minutes and explain the guy what he needed to know. Much fewer details slipped and everyone was eventually happier, save for the self-important rookies who thought Skyping and placing phone calls was the substance of their work.
Under average circumstances I have to drive about 50 minutes from my house to my office. This past winter we were expecting a bad storm one evening. Being a hardworker, I took home stuff to work on if I got stuck and couldn't make it into the office.
Just before I got home that evening one of my tires blew. I called the manager I was working for and explained the situation. I was planning on getting the tire replaced first thing. The tire shop didn't have internet, but I had plenty of paper work that didn't require internet, so I could work at the shop. And of course, I would call him as soon as the tire was fixed.
Next morning the storm had settled over our area. I limped to the tire store. It took about 1.5 hours for them to replace the tire (they had to wait on delivery of the tire from their supply house). When they had replaced it I called the manager and let him know I was en route. Unfortunately, a couple of exits down the road a tire related emergency light came on.
So, I turned around and headed back to the shop. En route I saw a large accident happen on the road I had just traversed. As soon as I got to the shop, I called the manager. I explained the current situation, and suggested that I just continue to work from the tire shop and when they were done I could work from home.
Long story short, this "productivity focused" manager insisted (i.e., I would be fired if I did otherwise) that I drive down to the office. I ended up spending 2.5 hours stuck in winter storm traffic, so that I could sit for an hour at a desk in an office to do paperwork that I could have done at home. Of course, I then had to turn around and drive back (thankfully that only took 2 hours).
So instead of 3.5 hours of productivity I got 4.5 of completely wasted drive time for 1 hour of actual work. (Then there's the fact that if I'm on a work roll at home, I tend not to stop, so he would have likely gotten more than just the 3.5 hours of work out of me.) All because his idea of 'work' is that someone in a seat in an office is productive while someone at home can't possible be productive.
I'm now much more punctual about working as close to 40 hours/weekly on the dot as I possibly can (I used to average many more hours).
I won't do more than cursory email checks from home.
And, I don't care how productive I am when I'm actually at the office.
Because clearly all that actually matters is that I'm physically there.
As the current generation replaces boomers, and hopefully comes to their senses, maybe we'll see a shift from "butt-in-chair-time" to actual output as the primary metric for productivity.
Available is indeed a key word. If someone is able to work from a connected location anywhere in the world, and they're at a connected location, are they available?
There are certainly some occupations, and some aspects of other occupations, that require a person to be at a very specific place at a very specific time (e.g. emergency room personnel). But there are also many, many jobs that do not inherently have a location and/or temporal requirement for the work to be successfully completed.
So my question to employers is whether it is more important for (a) work to be effectively completed within given time constraints or (b) employees to have a physical presence, particularly when the two are at odds (e.g., storm prevents someone from getting to work location, but the person can effectively work from their current location)?
Usually encountering problem and not solving it almost instantly, I switch to something else, switch off from original problem, come back few minutes later, either fix it instantly or go away again.
Stop thinking about thinking, that is one of greatest issues.
Sewer pipes and water mains in Philadelphia are owned and maintained by the Philadelphia Water Department, a government organization.
SEPTA bus, trolly, and train service is not too bad. There are parts of the city that are not well covered, but with Regional Rail, it's somewhat easy to get around.
I'll give you school funding, but Dilworth Plaza was a pretty awful place and the remodel looks nice.
Philly's not perfect, but with it's size, age, and location in the rust belt, it's not doing too bad.
I like the idea of the We The People petitions, but I think the focus is wrong. Petitioning the president is a way to get an idea noticed, but it's not the way the legislative process in this country works. Laws are created by the Congress. I think it would be a much more effective system if it petitioned Congress.
Right now you can contact your representatives, but I think this system of online petitions would work if the party leadership agreed to have a representative respond to each petition instead of a White House staffer.
