TOP TEN
Business Jargon
Taken from
Amba Hotels’ BaconWrap:
The little book of business nonsense speak
,
a compendium of corporate jargon old and
new compiled by Amba Hotels and Adam
Jacot de Boinod.
1. Bacon wrap;
when you take something
good and elevate it to excellence by changing
it or adding value to it.
2. Buffling;
speaking at length and off the
point in a business context.
3. Derp;
a simple, undefined reply when an
ignorant comment or action is made.
4. Dumbwalking;
walking slowly, without
paying attention to the world around you
because you are on a smartphone.
5. Humblebrag;
the practice of saying
something apparently modest which is really
intended to boast – “
Just stepped in gum.Who
spits gum on a red carpet
”.
6. Nomophobia;
fear of being without your
mobile phone.
7. Power paunch;
a large stomach worn
proudly as a badge of status.
8. Qwerty nosedive;
falling asleep at the
keyboard.
9. Sunlighting;
doing a very different job on
one day of the working week.
10. Underbrag;
a boast which consists of
openly admitting to failings to prove you are
confident enough not to care what others
think of you.
Meteorologists at the University of
Birmingham have been developing internet-
connected temperature sensors that could
cut millions from road-gritting costs and help
local authorities prepare for bad weather.
Fitted on the street side of lampposts near
ground level, the hand-sized sensors collect and
transmit data on road-surface temperatures,
enabling local authorities, highways agencies and
other organisations to target precisely where
gritting is needed and where it isn’t. Temperature
data is transmitted viaWifi every ten minutes,
providing a non-stop stream of data.
Sensors funded by the Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in
conjunction with Amey plc have already been
successfully trialled in Birmingham, London and
other parts of the country.
Each one costs £200, compared to £10,000
or so needed to maintain a weather forecasting
station like the ones currently relied on by local
authorities. Because no cabling is required, the
sensors can be rolled out rapidly.
Project leader Dr Lee Chapman said:
“Generally, a local authority may have just two
or three of these weather stations, which means
the decisions they make are based more on
forecasts than actual information. But because
our new sensors are so inexpensive, local
authorities could afford to deploy scores or
even hundreds of them and make very localised
decisions about the need to grit on a route
by route basis. That’s extremely useful in view
of the fact that there can be a 10°C to 15°C
difference in road temperatures across a county
on a given winter’s night.”
He added: “The UK typically uses 2 million
tonnes of salt in an average winter. Our
estimates demonstrate that by eliminating
unnecessary gritting, this new technology could
easily enable savings of between 20% and 50%,
which would be equivalent to over £100 million
per year in salt across the country as a whole.”
Real-time decision-making has the potential
to be extended even further, with individual
gritting lorries switching their gritters on and
off as they move along in response to data
generated by sensor networks.
The next step is to work with industry
partners towards full commercialisation and
eventual mass production of the sensors.
IoTWatch:
Real World Internet of Things
Intelligent winter road maintenance
agenda
Photo credit: Simon Bell
