I’m not a BT Broadband customer. Well, not directly. My home DSL service is supposedly provided by Pipex — which, when I last looked, had been acquired by Tiscali. But I am indirectly a BT customer because (a) they provide the phone line, and (b) they are the broadband wholesaler for Pipex/Tiscali. I’m paying for a service which theoretically offers 8mbps but in practice has never delivered anything better than 3mbps — against a theoretical maximum of 4mbps because of the distance between my home and the exchange. (I live in a village.)

I find the BBC iPlayer invaluable. But it’s often flaky. And HD is completely beyond my connection. Until I read this I was resigned to putting this down to the laws of physics.

BT Broadband cuts the speed users can watch video services like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube at peak times.

A customer who has signed on to an up to 8 megabit per second (MBPS) package can have speed cut to below 1Mbps.

A BT spokesman said the firm managed bandwidth “in order to optimise the experience for all customers”.

The BBC said it was concerned the throttling of download speeds was affecting the viewing experience for some users. Customers who opt for BT’s Option 1 broadband deal will find that the speed at which they can watch streaming video is throttled back to under 1Mbps between 1700 and midnight.

The BBC iPlayer works at three different speeds, 500Kbps, 800Kbps, and 1.5Mbps, depending on the speed of a user’s connection. There is also a high definition service which requires 3.2Mbps. Sources at the BBC said the effect of BT’s policy was to force viewers down on to the 500Kbps service, which can make the viewing experience less satisfactory.

I’ve just checked the speed of my collection at 6.15pm on a Friday evening. I’m getting only 1.78mbps. Hmmm… Time to investigate further. First stop, Pipex.

Just reading one of those “How I Work” pieces by Matt Mullenweg — the WordPress guy. “I’m very disorganized”, he writes. “I’m wildly late all the time and really bad at keeping a schedule. That is one of the many reasons I love Maya [Desai]. Her official title is ‘anti-chaos engineer’, which is another way of saying office manager.”

Yep. I could use one of those.

Lovely acerbic piece in The New Republic about the Huffpost’s proprietor. Sample:

Arianna Stassinopoulos is now Arianna Huffington, and she is best known as the proprietor of The Huffington Post, and as a personification of the hyperactive up-to-the-nanosecond news-and-opinion universe of the web. Her fame now approaches her immodest ambitions. And more than Huffington’s name has changed since she wrote those early premonitory words. She is now a steely–“bleeding heart” somehow does not fit–liberal, rather than a politically incorrect conservative. She has been, as Americans like to say, on a journey. Her historical timing has always been exquisite. If she is herself some sort of institution, she is an exceedingly adaptable one. (Click here for a slideshow that tracks Huffington’s many public makeovers.)

Now comes her twelfth book, lyrically entitled Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need To Know To End The Madness). It is only the most recent example of Huffington’s tireless ability to inhabit different places on the political spectrum. In the early 1970s, she made herself a star by rubbing outrageously against the liberal grain. A well-turned-out young woman in articulate recoil from feminism, a woman disputing the reigning ideologies and dogmas of her day–or at least the reigning ideologies and dogmas of college and university students–was ideally suited for the role of right-wing contrarian. But that may have been the last time she moved against the wind. Now “progressivism” reigns supreme in cyberspace and in the Beltway, and noisily progressive she is. No courageous heterodoxy this time around. Now she is a “player.” A look at Huffington’s career reveals someone uncannily–no, cannily–adept at recognizing and navigating the social and political currents, a zeitgeist artist, even though she has written nothing that requires her to be taken seriously as a thinker.

Huffington’s work is not intellectually consistent, but there are two strains that run through much of what she has written. The first is her limp spirituality, which never moves beyond fatuities and banalities. (“Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. “) The second is her frequent and caustic criticism of the Fourth Estate.

I remember her well. Our times as students in Cambridge overlapped. She was Arianna Stassinopolous then — a noisy, wealthy (daughter of a rich Greek family) and brass-necked hussy who became president of the Union (not to be confused with the — socialist — students’ union). Later she took up with Bernard Levin, who was once Britain’s best newspaper columnist, but went into sad decline for reasons unconnected with Ms S.

From ‘Hot News’ on the Apple site this morning:

The Internet turns 40, June 9, 2009

You’re so used to paying bills, getting your news and weather, and doing more and more of your purchasing online, you probably think the Internet has been around forever. But it hasn’t. As you’ll learn from this program on Open University, the Internet turns 40 this year. How did it get started? Where is it taking us next? Find out by listening to these Internet pioneers on iTunes U…

It seems that the recording of my interview is #4 in the top 100 downloads.

My post about the illusory Hawthorne Effect brought this lovely email from a reader:

“Curiously I was reminded of the Hawthorne studies just last week – I spent a pleasurable few hours with some friends at a local cinema watching Cinema Paradiso…a lovely film that I first saw one Thursday afternoon nearly 20 years ago.

As a student in Edinburgh, we had two lecturers in Organisational Psychology. One was always able to hold a theatre of 100 students attention no matter how dry the subject matter. The other spent far too long on the Hawthorne studies, and sadly for her, also lectured to us on Thursday afternoons.

Thursdays was half price for students at the Edinburgh Filmhouse.

Needless to say, in my finals, an essay choice centered around the Hawthorne studies. It was luck that I was able to choose from the others.

Almost 20 years later I am reassured that my time was not wasted.”

It’s strange to think of the colossal theoretical edifices that social ‘scientists’ have erected on such a flimsy foundation.

For nearly a century the so-called “Hawthorne Effect” has been Holy Writ in industrial sociology. It’s based on experiments conducted at the Hawthorne plant in 1924 in which two investigators studied the effect of changes in lighting conditions on the productivity of workers making telephone parts. The observers noted that no matter whether lighting was increased or dimmed, productivity went up — and concluded that it was the fact that the workers knew they were being experimented upon that explained it. (A kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for social scientists, perhaps.) But now it appears that all that may have been hooey. Here’s what a fascinating article in this week’s Economist reports:

The data from the illumination experiments had never been rigorously analysed and were believed lost. But Steven Levitt and John List, two economists at the University of Chicago, discovered that the data had survived the decades in two archives in Milwaukee and Boston, and decided to subject them to econometric analysis. The Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store for them. Contrary to the descriptions in the literature, they found no systematic evidence that levels of productivity in the factory rose whenever changes in lighting were implemented.

It turns out that idiosyncrasies in the way the experiments were conducted may have led to misleading interpretations of what happened. For example, lighting was always changed on a Sunday, when the plant was closed. When it reopened on Monday, output duly rose compared with Saturday, the last working day before the change, and continued to rise for the next couple of days. But a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Mondays. Workers tended to beaver away for the first few days of the working week in any case, before hitting a plateau and then slackening off.

Sigh. Yet another example of what TH Huxley described as “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact”.

Google’s front page this morning.