Tag Archive: study

A new study from the University of Melbourne in Australia apparently flies in the face of conventional wisdom—and many employers’ common sense. According to the study, workers who are allowed to use the Internet for personal reasons during the workday are actually nine percent more productive than workers who don’t. The reason? Perhaps surfing the Internet for pleasure or personal reasons increases worker’s concentration levels or eases anxiety about other parts of their lives, enabling them to concentrate more on their work.

The study dubs such productive personal Internet use as “Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing”—or WILB.

With legal music downloads so big in the online marketplace, you might think the problem of illegal downloads had started to recede into history. But that’s not the case, according to the University of Hertfordshire, which conducted a study among 1,200 participants. 90% own MP3 players, each containing an average of 1770 tracks – but half of those tracks have been illegally downloaded.

The study was commission by British Music Rights (BMR). It all means that those young users average 885 illegally downloaded tracks each on their players. 58% admitted to having copied music from a friend’s hard drive to their own, and 95% copy music in some way.  Read more...