Interesting Facts

Brits are spending more more than £900 million a year simply keeping our smartphones and tablets charged. (If that's not bad enough, we waste £134 million a year by overcharging them: According to research commissioned by insurance provider Row.co.uk, part of the problem is overcharging which happens when users plug in their devices overnight. A massive nine in ten owners keep gadgets on permanent charge, often unaware that overcharging batteries can reduce their lifespan, and under certain conditions lithium-ion batteries can pose a safety hazard. The figures suggest that around 85,000 tonnes of CO2 could be saved if people disconnected as soon as charging was complete.) Average charging times:- Mobile Phone - 2 hours Laptop, with Express Charge - 2 hours Hand-held vacuum cleaner - 3.5 hours Mp3 player - 4 hours Digital Camera - 2 hours

Police forces across the UK will no longer be applying a margin of error for people driving over the speed limit. (For many years British motorists have relied on police allowing a ‘small margin for error’ when the speed dial creeps over the limit. Traditionally, this has been set at 10% plus 2mph of the posted speed limit, so in a 50mph zone, that would be 5mph plus an extra 2mph before the police would have issued a ticket or fine. However, new technology is so accurate that police chiefs are giving the order to crack down on anyone driving over the speed limit, in order to stem the rising number of deaths and serious injuries on British roads. In Scotland, the police force has announced it is abandoning the previous discretionary allowance and will issue any driver exceeding the speed limit by even 1mph with a warning.)

The Queen sent her first Tweet at the Science Museum on 24th October 2014. (At 11:35 am she removed a glove as she pressed "Post" to tweet ""It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R," using the @BritishMonarchy account. By 11:39 am she had her first troll who wrote: "Welcome to Twitter. Abdicate!" I wonder if she blocked him / her.)

According to ONS (Office for National Statistics) figures in the UK, just over 80% of "science, research, engineering and technology professionals" are male. (By contrast, 82% of workers in "caring, leisure and other services", and 78% of administrative and secretarial workers are female.)

According to research carried out by the Ultra Parallel Visible Light Communications project, a joint venture between the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Strathclyde, and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council wireless transmission reaching speeds of 10Gbit/s – more than 250 times faster than ‘superfast’ broadband is possible using converted LED lightbulbs. (The technology, cleverly called Li-Fi by Edinburgh University's Prof Harald Haas, would enable existing LED light bulbs to be converted to transmit Li-Fi signals with a single microchip.  The bulbs would have to be kept on to transmit data, but they could be dimmed to the point that they were not visible to humans, and would be more secure than Wi-Fi, as hackers would be unable to access unsecured internet connections from out of sight of the transmitter.) Source    

According to a new survey, run by the London School of Economics, the University of Manchester, and BBC Lab UK, there are no longer three social classes in the UK. (But that does not mean Britain is a classless society, oh no. There are now 7 social classes, which are (from the bottom up):- The precariat, or precarious proletariat - Most deprived group, with low levels of all three capitals. The traditional working class - Low on all three capitals, but not the poorest. Older on average than other classes. Emergent service workers - New class with low economic but high 'emerging' cultural capital. High social capital. Predominantly young and often found in urban areas. New affluent workers - Medium levels of economic, but higher levels of cultural and social capital. Young and active. Technical middle class - New, small class, with high economic capital but less culturally engaged. Relatively few social contacts. Established middle class - High levels of all three capit...

According to Cisco, mobile internet devices 'will outnumber humans by the end of this year'. (Seemingly the growth in the use of smartphones and tablets will see more than 7bn – the world's current population – in use.  Growth in Asia, the Pacific and Africa is driving this phenomenal increase. The downside is the existing internet infrastructure is coming under increasing strain.)

According to a survey by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, nearly two-thirds of office workers continue working outside office hours. (The culprits are smartphones, notebooks and tablets, technology which has turned people into "screen slaves".  Admit it, we often work while commuting or after we get home. The main problem, apart from stress related illnesses, is that working in these environments encourages poor posture, which can lead to back and neck pain. Unions say that people need to learn to switch off their devices, so I'm going to make myself a cuppa now.)

China produces almost the entire world supply of rare earths. (China produces more than 95% of the world's rare earth metals, which are used in high-tech goods like mobile phones, computers and flat screens TVs. They include: Scandium; Yttrium; Lanthanum; Cerium; Praseodymium; Neodymium; Promethium; Samarium; Europium; Gadolinium; Terbium; Dysprosium; Holmium; Erbium; Thulium; Ytterbium; Lutetium . Try pronouncing that lot!)

According to Google, about 42m new Android devices were activated in December 2011. (They calculate that  there are now around 280m active "Google Android" devices.  I own 2 of them, but unfortunately none of the newly activated ones, Santa wasn't that generous.)

Amazingly Microsoft is welcoming hackers with open arms. (They are opening up their Kinect technology so that amateur software developers can tinker with it. They have promised a development kit for personal development, but they have said they will release a commercial version in the future. At last! They are seeing the bigger picture!) <p> </p>

China has the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second. (The computer has more than 7,000 graphics processors and 14,000 Intel chips and has taken over the top spot from America's XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, which can only carry out 1.75 petaflops. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.  I still love the word "petaflop".  It reminds me of Sam.)

India is launching an identity card scheme. (Using the latest biometric technology including an iris scan, over the next five years the cards will log details of India's population of more than one billion people on a central database. It's all starting in a remote village, Tembhli, in India's western state of Maharashtra. More than 1,200 cards have been handed out, making Tembhli the first UID-compliant village in India. Well at least they now know who they are.) Source: BBC News

The $100 laptop actually costs $176. (Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop, for developing countries, is poised to go into mass production. It's actually more rugged and energy efficient than the laptops you can buy at the moment as it has a rugged, waterproof case and uses less power.)