Research has shown that there is only 3.74 degrees of online separation or "When considering another person in the world, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend."

Online research has smashed the myth of 6 degrees of separation – that is the theory that there is only 6 people between you and any given person on the Earth.

This new research from Facebook shows that there are only 3.74 people between you and anyone else or ”When considering another person in the world, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend.”

Personally I think that this is a little misleading; Some people on social networks tend to accept friends from whom ever asks, not people they ‘know’. This must massively skew the statistics as it appears to assume that users know the people in their social networks.

Known as Dunbar’s Number this number is viewed as the theoretical number of people you can have social relationship with – something that should be applied to the Facebook degrees of separation research methinks.

Read the full BBC Article here

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  Almost three-quarters of firms and public sector organisations across nine European countries may not fully recover their computer systems or data after an IT failure, a survey suggests.

A survey suggests that 3/4 Firms are 'ill prepared for IT failure'

A survey by IT group EMC asked 1750 bosses if they were “confident they could fully restore their networks” – 74% said “No”!

It also found that 54% had lost data or suffered downtime in the last 12 months. Personally I’m amazed that figure isn’t higher! I guess it depends on what they are classing as ‘Downtime’.

Having been in the business a long time I can tell you that the number of customers I have dealt with on a regular basis, that think about these kinds of things are very few. It is not something that clients worry about. Furthermore, it is a topic that some clients feel that you are using to try to scare them in to buying something!

On the flip side of that coin we have seen several instances where a lack of disaster recovery planning has caused the company irreparable harm, resulting in the closure of the business.

It is not an easy thing to get a solid plan and systems in place, but they may stop the loss of business critical systems data.

Heed the warning – business continuity and disaster recovery should be near the top of any IT project!

Of course you can call us free of charge, for an initial chat about this… 08456 340 599

News article here

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  Research into producing electricity from urine has been carried out by scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol.
- BBC news article

Bristol university manages to create electricity from urine.

This made me both laugh and think, all at the same time..!

Have a read of this…

Now prepare yourself ~ this is the best excuse I’ve ever had for bombarding you with wee jokes!

Basically, the boffins at Bristol University have managed to create power from urine – this gave me some rather horrific memories of some long car journeys as a child and their inevitable ‘rest stops’.

Once this is in operation I think parents world wide will be plying themselves and their offspring/partners with liquid before the journey – no longer will mother ask if you’ve ‘been before we set off’.

It’s only a start, and only produces little power at the moment, but looks like being a runner for Microbial Fuel Cells (or MFCs as they are known).

Finally we have “Power from the P(eople)” 

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