Science News

The OrgOrgChart (Organic Organization Chart) project looks at the evolution of a company's structure over time. A snapshot of the Autodesk organizational hierarchy was taken each day between May 2007 and June 2011, a span of 1498 days.

Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm.

From day to day, there are three types of changes that are possible:
- Employees join the company
- Employees leave the company
- Employees change managers

Instead of recomputing the full layout each day, we animate the transitions from one day to the next. In this version of the video, each second corresponds to approximately 1 week of activity.

1. If you have any questions, please contact me via email (http://www.autodeskresearch.com/people/justin) or on Twitter (@JustinMatejka).

A paper from the University of Tennessee explores the possibilities of organisational research using one type of image, the photograph, and considers how to help our shots hit the target.

Biochemists have long imagined that autocatalytic sets can explain the origin of life. Could it be that the same idea--the general theory of autocatalytic sets--can help explain the origin of life, the nature of emergence and provide a mathematical foundation for organisation in economics?

Harvard Business Review recommends "living in your calendar." In other words, don't maintain a to-do list, but rather schedule these tasks right into your Outlook calendar, around your other commitments, while also accounting for the time you'll need to deal with brushfires and other unexpected priorities. This serves, in part, as a sort of commitment device, which is akin to positioning your army with its back to a river so there's no possibility of retreat from the enemy.