Should Firms Pay Workers to Get a Good Night’s Sleep?

Three-quarters of blind Americans are unemployed, but Josh Coffee’s digital tablet could create a new generation of architects and engineers.

Josh Coffee is not blind, and he didn’t spend much time thinking about the challenges blind students face while he was growing up. In fact, as an engineering major at the University of Vermont in 2011, his second choice for a capstone project was creating tactile graphing tools for the visually impaired — like most of his ski-addicted classmates, his top pick was to work for Burton Snowboards. “I was very fortunate I didn’t get put on that project,” he laughs now. If he had, the 28-year-old entrepreneur may never have found what’s become his calling: bringing STEM skills to the blind.

At UVM, Coffee built prototypes of a digital tablet that could create “raised” lines, giving students the ability to draw an image, feel it and, for the first time, to erase the 3D designs if they choose — think Etch A Sketch on steroids. While a number of products have appeared on the market allowing blind people to make raised lines, none had previously figured out how to permit users to erase a three-dimensional object.

A Tokyo business is offering to give its employees a bonus if they can prove sufficient bed rest.

According to tradition, Japanese schoolchildren preparing for entrance exams are encouraged to live by the exhausting credo of yontougoraku — “sleep four hours, pass; sleep five hours, fail.”

In other words, at an early stage in people’s lives, Japanese society transmits the message that sleep has intrinsically less worth than wakefulness and is a commodity that can — and should — be traded for something more valuable.

“Sleep debt” has become a national focus, but it remains unclear whether managers see this as anything more sinister than just the cost of business.

However, a small company in Tokyo called Crazy, an upmarket wedding-planning boutique, has taken an unexpectedly bold stand and decided to reward sleep.

Hockey teams are showing an increased disregard for draft capital.

For what would amount to nearly a full minute after the trade was announced, there were no words. Cameras clicked and shuttered, every flash pinging back against a clot of mics and tangled cables. Wayne Gretzky sat hidden beyond them, half-smiles and eye-rubbing coming in modest twitches as he pitched to his right and motioned for something just out of frame. A tissue. A glass of water. “I’m coming back,” he said. He never did. Instead, Gretzky moved offstage and took a spot in the corner. Then he cried.

Today it’s known as “The Trade,” and when you realize every NHL franchise is still being gouged because of it some 30 years on — well, you might just cry too.