Eideard

Call centre workers in Norway are protesting against a hi-tech surveillance system that triggers an alarm if they spend more than eight minutes per day in the lavatory. Managers are alerted by flashing lights if an employee is away from their desk for a loo break or other “personal activities” beyond the allotted time.

But unions and workplace inspectors have branded the practice at insurance company DNB as “highly intrusive” and a potential breach of their human rights.

Norway’s privacy regulator called Datatilsynet has now written to DNB telling them the monitoring system is “a major violation of privacy”. It said: “Each individual worker has different needs and these kinds of strict controls deprive the employees of all freedoms over the course of their working day.”

The employees union Finansforbundet described the rules as unacceptable…

A spokesman added: “Surveying staff to limit lavatory visits, cigarette breaks, personal phone calls and other personal needs to a total of eight minutes per day is highly restrictive and intrusive and must be stopped.”

The firm said the aim of the checks was not to measure the breaks taken by individual workers but to assess staffing needs to ensure all calls from customers were answered and it would now be reviewing the policy. Hogwash!

It is the latest example of lavatory rules in Norwegian companies.

Last year the country’s workplace ombudsman said one firm was reported for making women workers wear a red bracelet when they were having their period to justify more frequent trips to the loo.

Another company made staff sign a lavatory “visitors book” while a third issued employees with an electronic key card to gain access to the lavatories so they could monitor breaks.

Norway’s chief workplace ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon said: “These are extreme cases of workplace monitoring, but they are real. Toilet codes relating to menstrual cycles are clear violations of privacy and is very insulting to the people concerned…”

Bosses who have a fascination with anything in an employee’s life – below the navel – really should be required to spend some time in therapy. Maybe get a life.

Is this a Norwegian thing? I’ve only had one supervisor in my life who seemed to have this sort of demented fixation on my life in the crapper. Harvey – are you still out there somewhere?

High on a rocky ridge in the desert, nestled among the brush, is the topmost part of a clock that has been ticking for thousands of years.

‘In the year 4000, you’ll go see this clock and you’ll wonder, “Why on Earth did they build this?”‘ — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos No one knows who built it, or why. They built it well, and even now it keeps perfect time. All we know of these strange people is that they were obsessed with the future.
Why else would they build something that had no purpose except to mark time for thousands of years?

The rich man is Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and he has indeed started construction on a clock that he hopes will run for 10,000 years.

For Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the clock is not just the ultimate prestige timepiece. It’s a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. His hope is that building it will change the way humanity thinks about time, encouraging our distant descendants to take a longer view than we have…

It’s a monumental undertaking that Bezos and the crew of people designing and building the clock repeatedly compare to the Egyptian pyramids. And as with the pharaohs, it takes a certain amount of ego — even hubris — to consider building such a monument. But it’s also an unparalleled engineering problem, challenging its makers to think about how to keep a machine intact, operational and accurate over a time span longer than most human-made objects have even existed.

I’ve been following discussions about building this clock for over a decade. Starting with articles by Danny Hillis and Stewart Brand at the Edge and Wired.

Check out the website. Reflect upon the task. It ain’t Ozymandias – I hope.

The last telephone-based time and weather services in the Unites States are getting the ax, telephone company officials say.

Verizon says its telephone dial-in weather and time services in the Washington, D.C., and Maryland area codes — the last such surviving services in the nation — will end this summer.

Callers to the weather line are hearing a terse announcement: “Effective June 1, 2011, Verizon will no longer offer time-of-day and weather forecast services.”

A spokeswoman for Verizon said the end of call-in services, with a history going back to the days of rotary dial telephones in the 1930s, has been coming for a long time.

“In Virginia, we discontinued the time and weather in late 2006; in Pennsylvania in late 2008,” Sandra Arnette told The Baltimore Sun. “People just have so many alternatives — radio, TV, online, wireless phones, PDAs.”

Many people still call Verizon for time and weather information, she said, but conceded it has become an “anachronism.”

Wonder how many high school graduates can spell “anachronism”?

Britain’s annual raspberry to slimming gurus and lettuce-based diets drew gasps as the record for demolishing a saucer-sized meat pie was demolished by an awesome 12 seconds.

Crumbs flew yesterday in the traditional setting of Harry’s Bar, opposite Wigan’s most popular multi-storey car park, as a middle-aged civil servant stormed to victory over the biggest bunch of rivals yet fielded.

Neil Collier, 42, took only 23.91 seconds to down the steaming slab of carbohydrate and snatch the coveted title of world pie-eating champion from 37-year-old Barry Rigby.

“He just seemed to open his throat and down it went,” said organiser Tony Callaghan, whose antics have boosted Northern pastry, meat and gravy for 19 years. “He’s from Bolton, mind, which is a crying shame for a Wiganer to have to say, but he’s certainly learned how to eat pies somewhere. Probably in Wigan…”

Next year’s championship is already heading for a place in history through the probable introduction of fifth and sixth officials, ahead of the international football authorities. Coining a new word, just to add to his satisfactory day at Harry’s, which he owns and runs, Callaghan said: “We intend to be particularly scrutineerinous of both competitors and pie meat. Adlington maybe, but our pies will only ever be sourced from the finest herds of beef-yielding cows that graze the majestic plains of the north-west of England.”

The previous record was 35.86 seconds, and other landmarks have included the brief and immediately discontinued use of vegetarian pies in 2007.

Fans of proper football worldwide will rejoice in the continuing saga of this aspect of food culture central to enjoyment of our favorite sport.

The distinctive “Flying B” that adorns the bonnet of Bentley cars has prompted a recall of almost 1,500 top of the range vehicles over fears it could impale pedestrians during an collision.

The metal motif is designed to retract in the event of an accident but a flaw has been found that in some models can cause the mechanism to fail. The fault has prompted the company, which was created in 1919, to recall 1,426 cars across the world including 298 in Britain…

Millionaire owners of the vehicles…have been told to bring in their cars for a one hour repair.

The Flying B badge at the centre of the recall dates back to the late 1920s, when W O Bentley was operating out of Cricklewood in north London.

It survived until the 1970s, when it was withdrawn for safety reasons…posing the risk of pedestrians being impaled on the badge although, according to Bentley, there have been no reports of any such accidents or injuries ever happening..

The probability of an event occurring is equal to the number of times the event has occurred in the past divided by the total number of opportunities for it to occur.

Zero divided by any rational number = less than zero.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The dispersal of large ash plumes from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland has generated widespread interest due largely to the impact on air transport and reports of ash-fall throughout the British Isles. Some reports allude to this as a unique event, which may be true as far as living memory is concerned, but there is ample evidence for such events occurring many times before in recent human history.

The RHOXTOR research group, a joint initiative between Royal Holloway, University of London and Oxford University, is dedicated to the study of past volcanic ash falls in Europe, and holds records of their sources, distributions and ages spanning the past 50,000 years and more. This provides information on recurrence intervals of volcanic activity and patterns of dispersal at the continental scale.

Dr Simon Blockley…says: “One interesting point that emerges from our database is the common transport patterns of the Icelandic ash falls and, more importantly, the apparent absence of volcanic ash from sites in Spain. Recent investigations…found that volcanic ash is absent from sediments spanning the last 40,000 years.”

He adds, “So far the number of sites investigated in Spain for these tiny volcanic glass particles is relatively low, and there is therefore urgent need for further research, but the evidence uncovered thus far lends support to the proposal to view Spain as a potential emergency international air travel hub during times of Icelandic ash dispersal over Europe…”

The President of Iceland and scientific sources have made a significant point which everyone seems afraid to address. The history of volcanic eruptions in Iceland is consistent and frequent enough to be a problem for the whole travel infrastructure built-up in the last 100 years.

Someone should start paying attention to solutions.

Stephen Fry was the second person in the UK to get a Macintosh computer. Doug Adams got the first.

Now, Stephen Fry certainly is one of the first to get an iPad. This is his video of unboxing the iPad. It mates up to the interview he did with Steve Jobs – that appears in the current issue of TIME magazine.

When this Canadian rock was on the equator it was covered with ice

Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected of occurring around that time.

Led by scientists at Harvard, the team reports on its work in the latest edition of the journal Science . The new findings — based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks in remote northwestern Canada — bolster the theory that the planet has, at times in the past, been covered with ice at all latitudes.

“This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation [the name for that ice age] has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a ‘snowball Earth’ event,” said lead author Francis A. Macdonald, an assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “Our data also suggests that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of 5 million years.”

The survival of eukaryotic life — organisms composed of one or more cells, each with a nucleus enclosed by a membrane — throughout this period indicates that sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.

Even on a snowball Earth, Macdonald said, there would be temperature gradients, and it is likely that ice would be dynamic: flowing, thinning, and forming local patches of open water, providing refuge for life…

Not exactly a dynamic tale to weave through our society’s politics-driven communications machine. Still, of critical interest to those whose vision carries further into history than last week’s episode of American Idol.

Man U probably won’t need the extra time against Wolves, today. But, everyone’s suspicions appear to be confirmed by this bit of mathematics. Football referees are afraid of the Red Devils and Sir Alex.

Sir Alex Ferguson likes to boast that his Manchester United team score more late goals than any other side in the world. Others argue that they get a bit of extra help from referees. It has now emerged that the Premier League champions do, as suspected, benefit from an imbalance in the amount of stoppage time that is added to their matches.

After the controversy over Michael Owen’s winning goal in Sunday’s Manchester derby, the Guardian has looked at all of United’s league matches at Old Trafford since the start of the 2006-07 season and discovered that, on average, there has been over a minute extra added by referees when United do not have the lead after 90 minutes, compared to when they are in front…

When Owen made it 4-3 on Sunday the game was five minutes and 26 seconds into stoppage time. In total, the referee, Martin Atkinson, allowed almost seven minutes, even though the fourth official had signalled a minimum of four. Mark Hughes, the City manager, spoke of feeling “robbed”. His sense of grievance will not be helped if he analyses the last three seasons.

In 2006-07, for example, United were winning 15 times on entering stoppage time and referees added an average 194.53sec. In the four games when United were not winning there was an average of 217.25sec. The following year the disparity was greater, Opta’s figures showing an average 178.29sec added when United were winning and 254.5sec when they were not. Last season it was 187.71sec compared to 258.6sec.

The pattern has continued in the first three games of the season. In the two games United have led they have played an average 304sec of injury time. On Sunday, Atkinson allowed the game to go on for 415sec.

We’re not exactly unfamiliar with the habit here in the colonies. The American League treats the Yankees much the same. When the Dallas Cowboys actually were a winning team – they were America’s Team. I lived outside Boston when the Celtics could do no wrong as long as they were playing on parquet.

Oh – and good luck, today, Mick.

Maccone claims glass can unbreak – for example

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse…

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity“.

Maccone doesn’t mean that your memories will never form in the first place. “What I’m pointing out is that memories are formed and then are subsequently erased,” he tells me.

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

Smacks of philosophic Idealism to me. Mind over matter. Or mind over matter over mind over matter.

In any case, accounting for physical processes with non-material devices.