Victim of LinkedIn Logic Malfunction?

People have been congratulating me on my new job. I’m very grateful for the messages of goodwill. The only problem is, I haven’t actually got a new job!

People appear to have been responding to messages generated by LinkedIn. These tell my contacts that I have a new job and suggest they congratulate me (using the button provided). Some of my contacts have even re-checked my LinkedIn profile, presumably to see what my new job actually was.

The cause of this misfiring of LinkedIn messages was no doubt the fact that I had added some additional details to my LinkedIn profile.

I added details of a second current part-time “job” which I rather grandiosely described as “Rental Property Manager (Private)”. I thought this would be useful in rounding out my profile with the different and valuable experience I had gained through renting out houses for the last six years.

I entered the start date (the year 2007) and left the end date blank (as this continues to this day).

LinkedIn must run some routine processes against its “back-end” databases which look for particular features and then generate electronic junk mail (sorry, I should say “generate carefully targeted communications of great interest and value”).

The logic LinkedIn is applying must ignore the start date of a newly entered job and focus solely on the fact that there is no end date.

i.e. if it is  a “current” job and it is newly entered, it must be a “new job”

Hence LinkedIn thinks something which started six years ago is “new”.

Here’s the rub: If I happen to be looking for a new job, I might want to enhance my profile on LinkedIn by adding additional details of my experience. Surely that would seem sensible. But if, as a result,  LinkedIn erroneously congratulates me on having found a new job, then all my contacts will assume the search is over and stop keeping an eye out for me!

Edgar Bolton. 2013

Why is my Speedometer 'faster' than my Sat Nav?

I have had a Sat Nav for over a year now. It is one of the best gadgets I have ever purchased. The amount of time I spend lost in cities has almost reduced to almost zero. I confidently navigate complex motorway interconnections. I find remote destinations.

One of the many features the Sat Nav helpfully provides me with is a measure of my current speed.

I have noticed that the speed the Sat Nav thinks I am travelling at is slower than the speed that the car dashboard speedometer thinks I am travelling at. I have been wondering why this is.

The Sat Nav measures speed by recording the time it takes to travel between fixed points calibrated by satellites. This should be fairly reliable (except on steep hills, when the distance actually travelled will  be further than the Sat Nav thinks, so the real speed will be greater).

The speedometer measures the speed of rotation of the wheels. In order to assess actual speed, it must make assumptions about how big the wheels are. If these assumptions are wrong then its calculation of speed will be wrong.  

Car manufacturers tend to 'play safe' by calibrating speedometers high. This also means that the number of miles "on the clock" will be higher than the number of miles actually travelled, and fuel efficiency calculations will appear more favourable.

Furthermore, as the car tyres wear down there will be a gradual increase in the speed that the speedometer calculates. This is because the distance actually travelled per rotation becomes less as the tyre wears.

How important is this difference?

Well, my Sat Nav currently measures 67 mph when my speedometer displays 70 mph. So if I am holding my speed, according to the Speedometer,  at 70 mph on long motorway stretches, it is actually taking me 5 minutes longer than I am expecting for every 100 miles travelled.

That may not seem much in itself, but over the course of a year, this could equate to the equivalent of a whole working day. Over 25 years that is roughly a working month of your life wasted.

So that's two good reasons why changing worn tyres could actually help you live longer!


Edgar Bolton. 2013

LinkedIn versus Facebook

Both LinkedIn and Facebook are frequently described as Social Media sites. I subscribe to both, although I use them in somewhat different ways. I've noticed that quite a lot of people I know also use both sites too. I am intrigued by the contrast between the differing versions of ourselves which we project.

On LinkedIn, many of us  attempt to marshal our very finest corporate vocabulary. Sometimes the resulting stack of superlatives would  make even the most brass necked of candidates on The Apprentice cringe.

On Facebook, we seem to strive to project a version of ourselves as very interesting, humourous, fun-loving people with very, very busy lives.

All these images of ourselves are to some extent works of fiction - deliberate projections of something we want to be, or want to be seen as.

The acid test for consistency would be to be able to swap your profile pictures between Facebook and LinkedIn and not feel even a slight increase in anxiety levels!

Anybody willing to take the challenge?

Edgar Bolton. 2013