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Majority of workers feel overwhelmed by deluge of data,
survey finds
By Eve Tahmincioglu
updated 8:18 p.m. ET March 16, 2008
Don't expect Shaun Osher, the CEO of Core Group
Marketing in New York, to answer your e-mail right away.
He has stopped responding to e-mails every minute and
only checks his e-mail account twice a day. He also started
turning off his BlackBerry during meetings.
This tactic has made him so much more productive
that earlier this year he held a meeting with his staff of 50
and "strongly suggested" that they stop relying so heavily
on e-mail and actually start calling clients on the phone.
And, he requested his employees put cell phones and
PDAs on silent mode during meetings, as well as curtail
the common practice of cc-ing everybody when sending
out an e-mail. "There was so much redundancy, so much
unnecessary work," he explains. "One person could handle
an issue that should take two minutes, but when an email
goes out and five people get cc-ed, then everybody
responds to it and there's a snowball effect."
It's not that Osher has anything against technology. In
fact, he loves it. The problem is, last year he realized he
was inundated with so many e-mails and so much
information in general that he began to experience data
overload. "In the beginning, e-mail and all this data was a
great phenomenon, revolutionizing what we do. But the
pendulum has swung way too much to the other side," he
maintains. "We're less productive."
Osher isn't the only one out there under a data
avalanche. Thanks to technological innovations, you can
be talking to a customer on your cell phone, answering a
LinkedIn invitation on your laptop, and responding to email
on your PDA all at the same time. Besides, during
tough economic times, who will want to miss any
information when your job could be on the line if you indulge
in the luxury of being offline? Turns out, seven out of 10
office workers in the United States feel overwhelmed by
information in the workplace, and more than two in five
say they are headed for a data "breaking point," according
to a recently released Workplace Productivity Survey.
Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets,
says there are a host of reasons we're all on the information
brink: "exponential growth of the size of the information
'haystack,' the immensity and immediacy of digital
communications, and the fact that professionals are not
being provided with sufficient tools and training to help
them keep pace with the growing information burden."
Ellen Kossek, a professor from Michigan State, believes
we are less productive in this age of 24-7 technology, and
our multitasking mentality has spawned a "not-mentallypresent"
society. "We're becoming an attention-deficit
disorder society switching back and forth like crazy,"
Kossek says. "We're connected all the time. We're
working on planes, in coffee shops, working on the
weekends. Work is very seductive, but yet we're actually
less effective."
The key to getting your head above the data flood,
according to workplace experts, is managing and reducing
the information you're bombarded with.
© 2008 MSNBC Interactive - (slightly adapted)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23636252/
honest-to-goodness android, so lifelike that it seems like
a real person. It has moist lips, glossy hair and vivid
eyes that blink slowly. Seated on a stool with hands
5 folded primly on its lap at the 2005 World Exposition in
Japan's Aichi prefecture, it wore a bright pink blazer and
gray slacks. For a mesmerizing few seconds from several
meters away, Repliee was virtually indistinguishable from
an ordinary woman in her 30s. In fact, it was a copy of
10 one.
Japan is proud of the most advanced humanoids in
the world, which are expected to eventually be used as
the workforce diminishes among the decreasing and aging
population. But why build a robot with pigmented silicone
15 skin, smooth gestures and even makeup? To Repliee's
creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Director of Osaka University's
Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, the answer is simple:
"Android science."
Besides the justification for making robots
20 anthropomorphic and bipedal so they can work in human
environments with architectural features such as stairs,
Ishiguro believes that people respond better to very
humanlike automatons. Androids can thus elicit the most
natural communication. "Appearance is very important
25 to have better interpersonal relationships with a robot,"
says the 42-year-old Ishiguro. "Robots are information
media, especially humanoid robots. Their main role in
our future is to interact naturally with people."
Mild colorblindness forced Ishiguro to abandon his
30 aspirations of a career as an oil painter. Drawn to
computer and robot vision instead, he built a guide robot
for the blind as an undergraduate at the University of
Yamanashi. A fan of the android character Data from the
Star Trek franchise, he sees robots as the ideal vehicle
35 to understand more about ourselves.
To imitate human looks and behavior successfully,
Ishiguro combines robotics with cognitive science. In turn,
cognitive science research can use the robot to study
human perception, communication and other faculties.
40 This novel cross-fertilization is what Ishiguro describes
as android science. In a 2005 paper, he and his
collaborators explained it thus: "To make the android
humanlike, we must investigate human activity from the
standpoint of cognitive science, behavioral science and
45 neuroscience, and to evaluate human activity, we need
to implement processes that support it in the android."
One key strategy in Ishiguro's approach is to model
his artificial creations on real people. He began research
four years ago with his then four-year-old daughter,
50 casting a rudimentary android from her body, but its
mechanisms resulted in strange, unnatural motion.
Humanlike robots run the risk of compromising
people's comfort zones. Because the android's
appearance is very similar to that of a human, any subtle
55 differences in motion and responses will make it seem
strange. Repliee, though, is so lifelike that it has
overcome the creepiness factor, partly because of the
natural way it moves.
Ishiguro wants his next android, a male, to be as
60 authentic as possible. The model? Himself. The scientist
thinks having a robot clone could ease his busy schedule:
he could dispatch it to classes and meetings and then
teleconference through it. "My question has always been,
Why are we living, and what is human?" he says. An
65 Ishiguro made of circuitry and silicone might soon be
answering his own questions.
adapted from www.scientificamerican.com - May 2006
is having an impact on the way people think about
datacenters. Companies around the world are
announcing ways to save energy and reduce costs by
5 buying new hardware and services. Yet, there is little
guidance on how you can take action to control energy
costs. In the past, electricity has been treated as an
overhead expense, like the cost of space. But with rising
power costs and issues regarding reliability, supply, and
10 capacity, electricity requires its own specific strategy.
Projects regarding performance optimization and
cost reduction are a part of everyday best practices in
nearly every area of business. So why not treat energy
cost in the same way?
15 As Information Technologies (IT) pros, many of us
make decisions about the configuration and setup of
servers, the specifications on the equipment our
organizations purchase, and the requirements for
datacenter upgrades and construction. We even provide
20 early design input during application development. When
it comes to these projects, we obviously have a golden
opportunity to be green and influence the energy
efficiency of any datacenter.
The first part of any strategy is to know your current
25 energy usage. You need to know where your energy is
used and by what specific equipment, as well as what
usage is efficient and what is wasteful in the datacenter.
Unfortunately, it's rare to find power-consumption
metering in place that can break down usage to a level
30 where people can see the results of their actions. Most
organizations typically only see a monthly power bill
that rolls up consumption into an overall bottom line.
This offers little incentive for saving energy since
individuals never see the impact of their decisions, and
35 there is no way for them to prove that their changes
have actually saved energy.
One of the first issues people confront when
considering a green datacenter initiative is whether they
have executive support. For the purpose of the article, I
40 am going to assume the answer is "not yet." Executive
support requires a serious commitment that provides
resources and budget for your initiative. And while there
is a lot of talk about green datacenters, the reality is
that there is still often a lack of serious support at the
45 executive level. If you did already have such executive
support, you would probably be running a green
datacenter right now.
Still, even assuming you are not getting the support
you need, there is a great deal you can do to push your
50 green datacenter initiative forward. So how do you
determine effective actions to take in achieving your
goals? Fortunately, energy efficiency is not a new
concept and there is a lot that IT pros can learn from
other industries. [.]
55 Anyway, for whichever direction you choose,
planning an energy efficiency program for your datacenter
will require collaboration across groups in IT. Until
recently, the typical approach to planning IT solutions
has been to ignore power costs early on during the design
60 phase, focusing on the hardware and software being
purchased, along with the labor and hosting costs of
the solution. When power is buried in the overhead cost
of running solutions in a datacenter, energy efficiency
is a low priority. Exposing the actual power being
65 consumed by solutions is the first critical step in changing
the behavior of your organization.
By Dave Ohara
TechNet Magazine, October 2007
Reducing the dependence on oil
Ildo Sauer, Gas and Energy Director, Petrobras.
Brazil's energy sector is following the worldwide
tendency towards greater diversification of primary energy
sources and the increased use of natural gas and
biofuels. There are several reasons for this change. The
most important are the environmental restrictions that
are gradually being adopted in the world's principal
energy-consuming markets and the need to reduce the
dependence on oil, set against a scenario of accelerated
depletion in oil reserves and escalating prices.
The share of gas in Brazilian primary energy
consumption has more than doubled in a short period,
increasing from 4.1% in 1999 to 8.9% in 2004, and this
share is forecast to rise to 12% by 2010.
Over the past two decades, the world gas industry
has experienced a structural and regulatory
transformation. These changes have altered the strategic
behaviour of gas firms, with an intensification of
competition, the search for diversification (especially in
the case of power generation) and the internationalisation
of industry activities. Together, these changes have
radically changed the economic environment and the level
of competition in the industry.
Brazil's gas industry is characterised by its late
development, although in recent years, internal supply
imports and demand have grown significantly - the
growth trajectory of recent years exceeds that of countries
with more mature markets, such as Spain, Argentina,
the UK and the US. And the outlook is positive for
continued growth over the next few years, particularly
when set against the investment plans already
announced in Brazil.
The country has a small transportation network
concentrated near the coast. The distribution network is
concentrated in the major consumption centres.
Domestic gas sources are largely offshore in the Campos
basin and Bolivia provides imports. Given the degree
of gas penetration in the country's primary energy
consumption, the industry is poorly developed when
compared with other countries. The industry requires
heavy investment in expanding the transport and
distribution (T&D) networks, as well as in diversifying and
increasing its supplies. Such investments are necessary
for realising the industry's enormous potential.
Another key industry highlight is the changing profile
of gas supply. A large part of the gas produced
domestically to date has been associated with oil
production. The latter diluting or even totally absorbing
the costs of exploiting the gas. In most cases, gas
production was feasible only in conjunction with oil
production activities. However, the country's latest gas
finds are non-associated. Thus, an exclusively dedicated
structure must be developed to produce this gas -
translating into a significant rise in production costs. This
is more significant when analysed against the high costs
associated with the market for exploration and production
(E&P) sector equipment. In recent years, the leasing costs
of drilling rigs and E&P equipment have been climbing in
parallel with escalating oil prices. This directly affects endconsumer
prices.
In a world of primary energy consumption
diversification, of greater environmental restrictions and
the reduced dependence on oil, Brazil has been seeking
to develop alternative energy sources - principally natural
gas and biofuels. The gas industry holds enormous
potential for Brazil, although there is still a long way to go
before it reaches maturity and major investment is
required.
p.29-31 (adapted)
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