February 2006 – Page 4 – Gavinsblog.com

Blog-aholics

Here is an interesting statistic according to a recent study, 25% of US workers read blogs. This contributes to a loss of 9% of the working week. In other words U.S. workers in 2005 wasted the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. Here’s the money quote:

According to a survey (sub.) by the magazine Advertising Age, a leading culprit is Weblogs. The survey indicates that one in four U.S. workers reads blogs regularly while at work, losing, on average, some nine percent of the workweek. This amounts to 551,000 years of labor lost in 2005 alone. If only the bloggers whose words seem so compelling were the ones sending us e-mail: 34 percent of workers surveyed by Information Mapping, Inc. reported wasting thirty to sixty minutes a day trying to interpret “ineffectively” written messages. A third study offers comfort—or at least a way to pass the buck for all the lost time. Having examined productivity in nine countries, it concludes that 37 percent of the time spent at work is wasted—but that poor management and inadequate supervision are largely to blame.

Brain drain in Ireland

The latest issue of the the Atlantic has an interesting set of statistics concerning the percentage of physicians that leave their own country to practice elsewhere. According to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine Ireland loses 41.2% of its graduates to the four countries of US, UK, Australia or Canada.

The actual figures are stated as 9,166 physicians practicing in Ireland, with 6,423 graduates from Ireland practicing in those 4 countries.

Roughly one fourth of all doctors in the United States, the UK, Australia, and Canada were born elsewhere; of those, anywhere from 40 percent (in Australia) to 75 percent (in the UK) come from low-income countries. (This dependence is largely confined to these four countries: in only three of the other twenty-six OECD nations do foreigners make up more than 10 percent of all physicians.) In absolute numbers, India supplies the most doctors to the four Anglophone countries cited, followed by the Philippines and Pakistan. However, the biggest proportional losses tend to be in Caribbean and sub-Saharan countries. And matters are likely to get worse before they get better, the study notes: mounting pressure in developed countries to increase the number of doctors will probably lead to further recruitment from overseas.

Here are the stats:

Danish Mohammed cartoons

This really has stirred up a hornet’s nest. Michelle Malkin has, perhaps rightly, been going to town on it.

Last night RTE’s Prime Time decided not to show any of the cartoons.

I have decided to link to the cartoons, I actually think they are not that good, and to be honest I can’t see what all the fuss is about. Decide for yourselves whether you think these are offensive, feel free to comment below.

Here are all of them.

Click here to see images of Mohammed from history.

Adam Boulton blogs

A reader has pointed me to the new blog of Sky News’ Adam Boulton. I hope Adam enjoys the blogosphere.

Oprah as journalist

The Daily Show do a great piece on how the journalists of America could learn something from Oprah’s grilling of James Frey.

Watch the video here.

I find the Random House blurb by Coates Bateman quite funny:

What’s interesting is that the most affecting scenes (for me at least) are not gratuitously violent. They’re not graphically explicit. They’re not emotionally manipulative. They’re quiet conversations between a son and his parents. But, they are some of the most devastatingly honest, heartfelt, self-loathing, eloquent and hopeful conversations one will come across in a book.

He succeeds because of his honesty, responsibility, a sense of humor and a greater sense of purpose.

James Frey lied. Nobody died. (Or did they?)

Andrew Sullivan moved

I really do like the new look of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, since his move to Time.com.

You can catch him here from now on.

Cork bloggers

Donal has a post about who exactly lives in Cork, and blogs from there. He mentions that a few of us have been left out of the new site, CorkBlogs.com. Could fellow Corkonian bloggers make themselves known!

Old blogger returns

Tom Cosgrave has returned. Three cheers!

HMS Daring launched

The most newsworthy aspect of the launch appears to be that crew quarters will be fitted with iPod docks.

Development of the Type 45 goes back to 1988, when it was a multi-nation project, that broke into a tri-nation one in 1992, and then a UK only project in 1999. Construction began in April 2003, and her main hull was launched this week. She is expected to enter service in 2009.

The question is, with all the PR stuff concerning tracking a grapefruit from 200 miles, will this class be able to cope with a modern symmetric battlefield in the 21st century?

I say symmetric because it was designed during the cold war, but appears to have been adapted to cope with the threat posed by more current threats, like supersonic missiles and mutiple attack aircraft.

But if say China were to launch 25 supersonic antiship missiles at a target like the Daring, perhaps from submerged platforms, what chance would it have? In the event of the loss of the Daring the Chinese would have spent relatively little to take out such an expensive ship.

Blasts rock gaming halls in Russia's Caucasus

It could be political or criminal, you never know in this region:

Near-simultaneous blasts rocked three slot machine halls in the Russian Caucasus town Vladikavkaz on Thursday, killing two people, the local Emergencies Ministry said.

There was no word on what had caused the blasts in the gaming parlors, which are popular across Russia after gambling was outlawed in Soviet times.

“Thirteen people are injured and two people have died,” a spokesman said.

Russian news agencies reported most casualties were young people in their 20s and there were some children among the injured.

Vladikavkaz is in North Ossetia, the same region where Chechen militants took a school in Beslan hostage in September 2004, resulting in the deaths of 331 people, more than half of them children.