You Don't Work as Hard as You Think You Do

You Don't Work as Hard as You Think You Do

—By 

| Fri Oct. 19, 2012 8:14 AM PDT

Via Matt Yglesias, here's an interesting BLS study from David Yanofsky about how many hours people say they work vs. how many hours they actually work. This is actually sort of a pet topic of mine. My experience is solely with white-collar offices, but for years I noticed that my colleagues routinely overestimated how many hours they worked. As it happened, I frequently worked a little late and a little on weekends, so I had a good sense of just how many people were in the building after 6 pm or on Saturdays. Answer: virtually no one. You could fire a cannon through the place and not risk hitting anyone. And yet, people routinely thought they worked something like 50 hours a week.

But guess what? 50 hours a week is actually a lot. It means working until 7 pm every night. Or it means working until 6 pm every night and then working a solid chunk of hours on Saturday. And there just weren't many people who did that. (Nor was much work being done at home. You'll just have to trust me on that.) The numbers are even worse for 60 hours a week. You'd have to work 10-hour days routinely and a good chunk of hours on both weekend days. There are people who do this, but honestly, not all that many.

Anyway, the chart below demonstrates this graphically. It shows the gap between hours reported and hours actually worked:

As you can see, people who report working 50 hours a week typically overestimate by about 5 hours. My take on this has always been simple. If you stay late a couple of days a week, itfeels like a strain. You feel like you've really put in the hours. And since, in the modern work environment, 50 hours sounds only moderately hardworking (60 hours is the lower bound for real workaholics), that's what you convince yourself you worked that week. But the truth is that two or three late nights actually adds up to maybe 45 hours or so.

At the high end it gets even worse: 75 hours is 10-11 hours every day, or 12-13 hours six days a week. Not many people really do that. But if you work 60 hours a week, the truth is that you're working a helluva lot of hours. That's 10-hour days six days a week. But since 60 hours is just your basic workaholic level, and you feel like you're doing more than basic workaholic hours, you figure you must really be working 70 or 80 hours a week.

There are some people who really do work these kinds of hours, of course. And there are people who work multiple jobs and put in lots of hours. But among your typical hardworking office types, bragging on your hours comes with the territory. As with other kinds of bragging, however, you should take it with a grain of salt.

Innovyze Unveils BalanceNet for IWLive, Next Generation of Real-Time Energy Management and Sustainability Software for Smarter Water Utilities

 

Innovyze Unveils BalanceNet for IWLive, Next Generation of Real-Time Energy Management and Sustainability Software for Smarter Water Utilities

New Release Raises Bar for Energy and Water Quality Management Software,
Delivers Economic, Operational and Environmental Benefits 

 

Broomfield, Colorado USA, October 16, 2012 — Innovyze, a leading global innovator of wet infrastructure modeling and simulation software and technologies, today announced the Beta release of BalanceNet. This new state-of-the-art real-time energy management and sustainability solution for drinking water distribution systems will change the way water utility operators around the world make informed decisions on managing their water supply and distribution systems to maximize energy savings, lower carbon emissions, enhance water quality, and optimize system performance.

Energy costs generally constitute the largest expenditure for nearly all water utilities worldwide, consuming as much as 65 percent of a water utility’s annual operating budget. BalanceNet is designed expressly to assist water distribution system operators and train new operators in managing their energy consumption more effectively by equipping control rooms with the unprecedented real-time ability to develop sound, cost-effective pump scheduling policies that reduce operational and chemical costs and enable more reliable operations.

Designed for online applications with existing SCADA systems, BalanceNet reads real-time field data, instantly updates the network model and determines the pump and treatment plant operation schedules that will yield the lowest operating cost while satisfying the system’s hydraulic and water quality requirements. It uniquely combines an optimized mass balance model with an advanced network solver to quickly produce a set of near-optimal solutions for improving system operations. The network solver automatically defines the mass balance model, accounting for changes in demand, controls and other factors in each time step. The mass balance model is then optimized using Genetic Algorithms. Both energy consumption ($/kW.h) and demand charges ($/max kW) are explicitly considered, and JET, Oracle, SQL and Pi databases are fully supported. These advantages represent fundamental advances in how readily water utilities operators can evaluate the operational efficiency of their water networks, then quickly and confidently develop improved system operations and more reliable performance.

“BalanceNet is an invaluable new water distribution planning and operations tool,” said Paul F. Boulos, Ph.D., BCEEM, Hon.D.WRE, Dist.D.NE, F.ASCE, President and Chief Operating Officer of Innovyze. “It will greatly aid water utilities in improving the efficiency of their distribution systems and ensuring more reliable operations at maximum cost savings. Since day one, our mission has been to bring powerful product development capabilities to the smart water network modeling community and foster its expansion. This new software is a significant leap — one that greatly enhances their ability to produce the best possible pumping schedules with minimum effort, reduced labor requirements and significant cost savings. BalanceNet exemplifies our ongoing commitment to delivering superior value to our customers who manage, operate and sustain safe, reliable drinking water distribution systems. Innovyze is very proud to offer this revolutionary new power tool to our clients.”

Nobel economics prize goes to two Americans: Lloyd Shapley, Alvin Roth

Nobel economics prize goes to two Americans: Lloyd Shapley, Alvin Roth

By , Updated: Monday, October 15, 8:46 AM

Two researchers whose work has made for better matchups among students and the schools they wish to attend, and between kidney donors and recipients, were awarded the Nobel Prize in economicsMonday.

Lloyd Shapley and Alvin E. Roth will share the $1.2 million prize for work that broke new theoretical ground (in the case of Shapley) and resulted in concrete uses for that theory (developed by Roth). It is an award that is not terribly relevant to the great macroeconomic crises of the day but that honors work that provided a deeper understanding of how markets work and put that knowledge to use for the practical benefit of humanity.

“The combination of Shapley’s basic theory and Roth’s empirical investigations, experiments and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets,”the Nobel committee said in its announcement awarding what is formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Shapley, a professor emeritus at UCLA, developed a theory of “matching methods,” for how to best to match people up in large groups of, for example, men and women considering marriage. The goal is to ensure that the system is “stable,” that both partners feel that they have gotten the most attractive possible match; otherwise, they might separate in search of something better.

Shapley and colleague David Gale developed a process for ensuring that those matches are as stable as possible. In the process, known as the “Gale-Shapley algorithm,” there are a series of rounds in which men and women rank potential mates, and matches are made until everyone finds a spouse and the system is stable.

That work was purely theoretical — no marriages were arranged through the algorithm. But years later, Roth, now at Stanford University, developed ways to apply Shapley’s work to practical uses. The earliest and most widespread was in the system used to match new medical residents with hospitals that wish to employ them.

Roth first recognized that the National Resident Matching Program, which attempts to ensure that new doctors and the hospitals looking to hire them can get as good a match as possible, closely matched the Gale-Shapley algorithm. After all, an employer and employee trying to find the best match are in many ways similar to a hypothetical husband and wife looking to match up.

Roth then helped the resident matching program adapt its process to deal with couples who wished to ensure that they be hired by hospitals in the same city and to make the system less prone to manipulation by participants trying to game the system.

New York City schools faced similar problems in their old system for matching students with schools; students listed their preferred schools, but the system was prone to manipulation when less-qualified students could improve their odds of getting into a school by ranking it higher than they really viewed it.

Roth helped the schools revamp the system, using the lessons from the resident matching program and the theoretical work by Shapley. The result, according to materials from the Nobel committee, was a 90 percent drop in the number of students who were assigned to a school for which they had expressed no preference.

The field of “matching” has life-and-death consequences as well. Research is underway on applying the Gale-Shapley algorithm to the challenge of matching up kidney donors and those who need a transplant. This is a field with particular complications, as many willing to give a kidney to a loved one are not a match, so multi-direction trades can be useful — but that requires a complexity far beyond the original Shapley work in the 1960s or Roth’s efforts to put it to work in the 1980s.

“Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems,” Roth, 58, told Forbes magazine in 2010. “I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.”

Link Washington Post

How to Use the Arc Map Editor in InfoSWMM

Note:  How to Use the Arc Map Editor in InfoSWMM

 

Step 1 is to use the Edit Feature for example the Subcatchment layer to bring up the Arc Map Editor Tool.

 

 

 

Step 2 is to use the Reshape Feature tool or Vertex tools to bring together mis matched Subcatchment Boundaries

 

 

 

Step 3 is to use save the edits and then Update the DB from the Map to recalculate the area of the Subcatchments

 

SWMM 5 Control Rules for Pumps

Subject:  SWMM 5 Control Rules for Pumps

 

If you want to define the setting for a pump between the Pump On and Pump Off depths then an IF statement based on the Pump flow will work better as in this example, which changes the setting for the pump between a depth of 18 and 20 meters.   The IF statement based on flow will ensure the rule only applies when the Pump Control depth is moving from the Pump On depth to the Pump Off depth and NOT between the Pump Off and Pump On depth.  Figure 1 shows how the Pump Flow is related to the Pump Setting.

 

RULE CONTROL_Rule2

IF PUMP PUMP1 FLOW > 0.000000

AND NODE WELL HEAD > 18.000000

AND NODE WELL HEAD < 20.000000

THEN PUMP PUMP1 SETTING = 0.700000

PRIORITY 2.000000

 


Figure 1   Pump Flow is related to the Pump Setting