No, not pedal-powered PCs. Just some rather foolish statistics from 'a YouGov study of 2,100 Britons on behalf of information service 118118'.
• 34% of Britons would choose Internet access over exercise for a month
Well, that's not much of a surprise.
• 20% state that they pay the Internet more attention than their partner (Londoners were worst for this - 27%)
Ditto. Like most Internet scaremongering this misses the point that many people interact with friends on line (though I do think online interactions can easily be short and shallow).
• 54% found the loss of Internet in their home singularly more stressful than loss of gas, water or electricity.
This is obviously based on people who haven't had a power cut in a while and who haven't thought it through. The laptop screen will give you light and t'Web for a while, but what happens when you can't make a cup of tea, eh?
But when I look at the actual figures, and I'm making this graph bigger to make sure the figures are legible, it reminds me of the year that the music industry complained about unit sales of CDs not growing as fast as they had and then noticing that the industry had released 20% fewer CDs in that year.
Yes, people are copying DVDs they've rented or borrowed from friends (and yes, some of them are copying discs that might be pirated in the first place). But half of them - well over half in the US - are copying a DVD they've paid for. To me, that's a huge pent-up demand for legitimate copying - to transfer to a portable media player or to have on disk so you can pack up the DVD boxes and hide them in the loft. Something that HD-DVD was going to offer, but the studios never got round to it. No consumer demand, they said; it's not mainstream. These few hundred people don't make it mainstream, and the proportions will be smaller in the wider population, but if the studios want to sell more DVDs, how about offering a copy mechanism that lets me get a PMP-resolution copy without faffing about ripping it?
As we're discussing copyright issues, I should note that these graphs are taken from the Futuresource report written for Macrovision which includes this statement about re-use in the media, and I quote with my journalist hat on...
"Members of the press may use a press release in its entirety or take segments from it as necessary; they may also use a graph, a slide, or a section of a supplied research report less than fifty words long, provided all text is identified as “Source: Futuresource” and all graphics are credited with “Futuresource, Copyright 2008”. "
I like working for myself. The boss may be pushy and demanding but I've found she can be really reasonable when push comes to shove and we rarely disagree on the direction work should be taking. For my wage slave friends, if this is annual review time, I've got some statistics to make you feel - if not less fed up, then less alone.
84% of managers think they are fair, while only 69% of their colleagues agree with them. Only 39% of managers think they're good at setting objectives though 56% of the colleagues think they do well - so we've got a lot of unfair, insecure people here. And plenty of workers think it's endemic: if you ask if the company treats everyone fairly only 54% agree and 49% feel that change is something that they're on the wrong end of. 46% of workers don't think much of their manager's skills - again, it's that pungent blend of incompetence and lack of confidence as the reasons. 61% said poor decision-making leaves them frustrated and results in a loss of respect for their manager, while 83% said it damages morale (and I guess the other 17% don't care enough to respond any more). More than half believe it reduces productivity. But looking down from above, 82% of bosses consider managers in their organisation to be effective decision-makers.
And the top ten 'you'd have thought it was obvious' complaints about managers:
- not being fair
- not telling people what they need to know to get the job done
- not getting people involved in changes at work
- not having a good promotion path
- not telling people what the company wants to achieve
- flexible working, no thanks
- pretending the promotion path really is fair, because denying it's raining keeps you ever so dry
- what's the motivation for my character? what, *just* money?
- you can't go on a training day to get more efficient, there's too much work to do
- I may be a wage slave, but I'm a wage slave who expects to have a career path here
Actually I count several variants on not being fair, being seen to not be fair, being an idiot and expecting your staff to be psychic. BTW, a good manager makes a huge difference and they can transform a department, acting as an umbrella against all those drips from senior management; but they won't have the power to turn around a toxic company and company culture is self-sustaining - it's only natural to hire people we think we'll work well with. With some managers and some companies, taking the time to say 'this makes my job harder, can we fix it' is enough to improve things. If not, you have the choice of hating your job, hoping for a new manager, finding a way of coping or finding a new job. Personally I think it's a bad thing to stay in a bad job - I know people often don't have an easy or obvious choice, and I'm sure there are plenty of terrible employees driving their managers berserk in return, but if it's this bad no wonder everyone in offices spends the day reading Facebook...
The deluge of statistics in my mailbox today comes from a site asking you to pay £20 to have your management skills evaluated based on confidential feedback from your team. 360-degree reviews are excellent if they really are confidential, but I don't know how professional I believe a site is when it gives you a £5 Amazon voucher for everyone you persuade to go get evaluated as well. The management skills test is a bit odd too; I keep getting "hmmm. You’re probably a very nice person. But it looks as if you could do with some tips on all your management skills." Hmmmmm.
In the last six months, taxi passengers in London had reported losing 54,874 mobile phones (that's more than 2 per taxi), 4,718 PDAs, 3,179 laptops and 923 USB sticks. And I thought it was bad at Heathrow, where people leave 5 laptops and 10 mobiles a day behind at the security machines. Losing stuff in a taxi is a better bet; 96% of phones lost in taxis are returned but only 60% of what's lost at Heathrow, with the rest auctioned off locally (and do they wipe the hard drives? yeah, right).
I also like the list of other things that UK taxi drivers "admitted to finding" (was there much they were too embarrassed to admit?): a telescope, a drunken woman left as a tip by her boyfriend, a machine gun and 100,000 pounds worth of diamonds.
But was that all in the same cab?
For a journalist who deals with a lot of PR people, this one is fascinating. "The industry sector most likely to play host to identity-stressed workers is media and marketing, where ten percent of respondents say they completely change their personality at work."
This makes sense for people in PR who are always representing a client as well as their own company so they're at two removes from being themselves. I know PR folk who let their hair down after hours, but I don't think I know anyone who completely changes their personality. But then maybe their work face would be so different that you'd never get to know someone enough to see their off-duty real face.
In general, people think sales, marketing and finance workers are most likely to change their persona; finance workers agree we've got them bang to rights but only 41% of media and marketing folk expect marketing people to have a false persona. So are the people changing their persona so good we don't even know?
A third of managers (in all fields) have seen someone take credit for another employee's work. 34% have seen an employee shift the blame for their mistakes. I wonder if it's the same third or if we're 66% back-stabbing glory-grabbers? Employees who have changed their personality for work are more likely to see that in action, but not much more; 65% of them have seen colleagues or managers let others take the blame for their mistakes as opposed to 46% overall.
Technology can give you a different personality to some extent. It's easy to be terse in email or cute in IM. Software can remind you not to cut people off the CC list or make it look like you're at the airport when you're down the pub. It's your own habits that make you a workaholic and technology can help you escape or mire you in it further depending on how you approach it. It looks like we change ourselves far more than our (non-medical) technology does.
I love treemaps; they're such an elegant representation of both the information itself and the value of the information. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Netscan - the Microsoft Research tool that creates treemaps of Usenet groups. Looking for a nice graphical display of disk space information I found the free WinStatDir which linked to a history of treemaps that revealed they were developed to show disk usage patterns! And that linked to the rather lovely newsmap which could easily be the only way I'll ever want to read news again: the output of Google News as a treemap. Now if only I could pipe the feed of my choice into it: I'd like to use this as an interface for BBC News or CNet or The Onion...
- Mood:
busy
Over 22,500 people visited the opening of the new IKEA, Milton Keynes - one of the best attended UK openings in the IKEA history. Which added up to 1,900 hotdogs and approximately 17,710 meatballs. They expect 50,000 customers per week - approximately 2 million a year. Call that 7,000 people a day to account for repeat visits. Assume a 12 hour day (some are 14 hours, Sundays are less, so a reasonable average) - and you can't get round in less than an hour. 583 people per hour. 14 stores in the UK is 98,000 visitors a day; 8,166 an hour.
UK population in July 2005 was 60,441,457 (75% of whom have broadband and 10% a PayPal acount); the CIA figures are a year newer than those from the UK Office for National Statistics by the way. That's 4,317,246 per store; call it half the 7,465,100 population of London. 359,770 per hour; 617 times more people than now! That's about the population of Edinburgh (453,760) every hour or four times the average daily visitors to all the Ikea stores. If it took 617 times longer than now, that's over 25 days... Definitely shuffling room only.
A few more figures (from 2004)...
"Last year, 310 million people visited Ikea worldwide. On some Sundays in Britain, according to one estimate, almost twice as many people visit a branch as attend church; it has been calculated that 10% of Europeans currently alive were conceived in one of Ikea's beds. By the end of August, the company will have opened new stores, this year alone, in Amsterdam and Lisbon, in Moscow (the city's third Ikea) and in Kazan, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Tatarstan; in Seville, in Mannheim, in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, and in Naples; in Bloomington, Minneapolis; in Philadelphia, and in upstate New York. (The second Chinese Ikea, in Shanghai, opened last year; 80,000 people visited on the first day.) This brings the proportion of the globe currently covered in Ikea outlets to 3,979,600 square metres; the branch at Kungens Kurva in Stockholm, the world's biggest, occupies 55,200 square metres, making it about as big as eight Premiership football pitches. These figures refer only to retail space, and so do not include the 10,000,000 cubic metres of warehouse that the company owns in places such as Shah Alam in Malaysia, the Maryland town of Perryville, and Peterborough."
Guardian 2004
Ikea Group sales in billions of Euros
- Mood:mathematical
What counts as an 'open' project? Leaving aside the confusion between open source, open standard and open platform, there's often an assumption that everything on a project has to be either open or closed. Often the best solution might be a mix of what's available. MIT's OpenCourseWare sounds like an open project: free and open access to the syllabi, reading lists, course notes, lecture videos, and other materials from virtually all of MIT’s courses. They built it on top of a customized version of Microsoft Content Management Server; they also use FileMaker Pro (my favourite database for anything I can't do in Excel). From the initial 500 courses they're up to 1,100 courses and on target for virtually all of them by 2007.
- Mood:busy
Handy explanation of battery capacity, especially at it relates to PDAs, linked for reference.
Amp hours or Ah measures capacity. That is ultimately what we want to know about PDA Batteries from a consumers point of view. Amp hours quantify how long a pda battery can deliver a certain amount of charge before it runs out. As with all metric measurements, Amps can be divided into smaller (or larger) units by adding a prefix.
In the case of PDA Batteries, a milliAmp hour (mAh) is most commonly used. Note that 1000 mAh is the same a 1 Ah. (Just as 1000mm equals 1 meter.) Note that Amp hours do not dictate the flow of electrons at any given moment. PDA batteries with a 1 Amp hour rating could deliver ½ Amp of current for 2 hours, or they could provide 2 Amps of current for ½ hour.
Typically, PDA Batteries will use 1 to 3 Amps per hour, depending on the model's processor speed, screen size, screen brightness adjustment, usage, and other factors.
Keep in mind that slight variations in voltage generally do not impact the performance of your PDA. We see this all the time with universal and external batteries. The original battery might be specified at 10.8 Volts, but customers using a universal part can operate their laptop safely at either the 10 or 11 Volt setting.
Amps,-Volts,-and-MAh
Converting Sony's watt hours to amp hours
Battery Capacity Conversion http://www.camerahacker.com/Definitions/B
Comparing capacity of different battery technologies
Tungsten T3 900 mAH
Tungsten T5 1300 mAH
Tungsten C 1500 mAH
LifeDrive 1660 mAH
Treo extended battery 1800 mAH
Palm Zire 31 900 mAH
Palm m500/505/515 850 mAH
2004 iPAQ 1800 mAH
Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 1640 mAH
Dell Axim X50v 1100 mAH
Toshiba e830 1320 mAH extended battery 2640 mAH
- Mood:
cold
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sbisson points out the DNS numbers aren't necessarily accurate and the rootkit doesn't work on Macs so it's skewed (up or down?) but it's an interesting proportion.- Mood:arithmetic
- Mood:statistical
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