In 2003, DISCOVER published a profile of Tyrone Hayes, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hayes went looking for the effects of the herbicide atrazine on frogs and found evidence that it feminized males and diminished larynxes. Apparently the professor, also know to spin rhymes at conferences, has sent years worth of emails to employees of atrazine’s manufacturer, Syngenta. The company recently released them in a 102-page pdf.

Some excerpts follow:

March 16, 2006 (page 22)

dahh… and you guys think i’m unstable?
hey, i will update you on how screwed you are tomorrow.
love
papa

April 1, 2008 (page 25)

if you thought this was ever just about atrazine, you were set to lose from the beginning. not to worry… we all make mistakes… even me… I used to call you “friend”.

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Enron, for all its ruination of pension funds, 401Ks, and public trust, did provide us with a rare and fertile data set: logs of 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees by around 150 senior staff during the company’s last 18 months of existence. Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology got their hands on the data, and went to town. As New Scientist reports, the researchers:

[I]dentified key events in Enron’s demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails’ content.

Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

So what can we do with this finding? Gilbert Peterson at the Air Force Institute of Technology thinks the trend could be useful as an early warning signal that the natives are restless (or revolting).  “Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful,” he told New Scientist.

Of course, if there’s been ceaseless fraud, corruption, and lying by your chairman and CEO, there’s not much HR can really do.

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The spam emails clogging your Inbox are not only a nuisance, it turns out, but also an energy vacuum. Production of the 62 trillion spam emails sent around the world every year consumes more than 33 billion kilowatt-hours of energy—enough to power at least 2.4 million U.S. homes. Each piece of spam consume energy that’s the equivalent of driving three feet, and spam’s total emissions equal more than 17 million tons of carbon dioxide, the amount released from 3.1 million cars using 2 billion gallons of gas.

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Lying is part of human nature: People spend 25 percent of their time doing it. But if you really need to lie, pick up the phone. In two separate studies, researchers have found that it’s easier for people to lie in an email than in any other written form of communication, including hand-written notes.

The researchers asked a group of 48 MBA students to divide $89 between themselves and an unspecified person in the class. The students were told that they had to make an offer their partner was willing to accept, and that their partner knew the pot was between $5 and $100. The MBA students were asked to disclose in writing the amount they were giving to their partner. The disclosures were shown only to the researchers. When the students used email to write the amount, they lied 92 percent of the time, as opposed to 64 percent of the time when they hand-write it.

On average, the emailers wrote that they were giving $29 out of a total amount of $56. Then ones who hand-wrote the responses, on average, said they were offering $34 out of a pot of $67.

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