Top 10 office faux pas… Electric car gets closer… P*rn loses appeal… Tourism called on to fight climate change

• Top 10 office faux pas
• Electric car gets closer
• P*rn loses appeal
• Tourism called on to fight climate change

Top 10 office faux pas

Businessweek has put together a list of the top 10 social no-no’s to avoid in the office:

1. BlackBerry addiction : surreptitiously checking an email on your BlackBerry while in a meeting or while someone is talking to you doesn’t work. Everybody can see you’re doing it, and it’s not polite.

2. Lunch snootiness: if you want to have a private lunch with a workmate, send them an email and meet them off-site. If you want to shout the invitation across a crowded office, be prepared to invite everyone.

3. Some things shouldn’t be done in the office: brushing your hair or applying a bit of lippy is fine – but flossing your teeth, tweezing your eyebrows or clipping fingernails at your desk is just not on. Ever.

4. Money talk: serious talk about wages and conditions is fine, but gratuitous bragging about the huge and very expensive boat you just bought with your new pay rise is not.

5. Avoid email spam: “reply all” is an email function that should be used with the utmost discretion. If you feel like sharing you’re oh-so-witty retort to someone’s email with the office – don’t.

6. Keep your dodgy schemes to yourself: what you do in your own time is your own business, fine. But asking your workmates to tell your significant other that you were away at a work event that weekend when you weren’t, that’s going too far.

7. Office campaigning is out: people don’t need to be hassled to support your political or religious cause. If they’re interested, they’ll ask.

8. Offer advice sparingly: nothing is more annoying that superior sounding, un-asked for advice. Say something if your workmate is about to make a huge blunder, but otherwise keep your views to yourself – unless, of course, it’s your job to give advice.

9. Tone down the scent: a little something is fine, but vast clouds of the latest pungent smelling deodorant actually count as office pollution.

10. No yelling: The oldest, simplest and most important rule. Yelling is for cave men, or when you’re warning someone they’re about to get run over by a bus. That’s it.

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The infrastructure’s coming, but where are the electric cars?

Electric vehicles may no longer be pie-in-the-sky, thanks to US entrepreneur Shai Agassi, who plans on creating a network of battery-charging stations in the US, Europe and the developing world.

Agassi is leaving the manufacturing of the cars up to the auto experts and green car developers like Tesla, but in the New York Times , the Silicon Valley technologist talks about his new system to sell electricity on a subscription basis and subsidise vehicles through leases and credits.

Agassi’s idea may be ahead of the times for our little corner of the world. Electricity-propelled cars aren’t in Australia yet, with the automakers citing high cost, lack of infrastructure and poor battery technology, but they may become more viable as the price of petrol rises.

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Online Gen-Ys prefer socialising to s*x

Thank goodness someone is restoring standards after the downward slide we saw under those morally decadent baby boomers. According to Hitwise figures reported by Time , p*rn, which in general comes in first or second (after search engines like Google) in these kinds of surveys, tumbles down the list of most viewed content by Gen-Ys.

Instead, the study found, Gen-Ys spend the biggest chunk of their online time perusing social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Search engines come in second, then web-based email, with p*rn all the way down the list at number four.

Interestingly, according to Hitwise, a study of viewing figures for the last two years shows that as visits to social networks have gone up, visits to adult sites have declined – in fact, visits to p*rn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the US in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Seems Gen-Ys get their kicks more from chatting than online voyeurism.

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Tourism not necessarily going under as the ocean rises

You might want to get away from it all over Christmas, but climate change isn’t going away and the tourism industry will suffer just as much as any other, reports Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail .

A recent international conference on the global challenge revealed tour operators who don’t own infrastructure and are flexible to respond to clients will cop the least, while communities and tourism operators with large investments in fixed infrastructure will suffer more.

A United Nations World Tourism Organisation report calls for operators in the tourism sector to take charge in overcoming climate change.

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