How rude! Words to Avoid When Sending Email

List of Deadly Words to Avoid in Emails

The most pleasant and well manner person could seem like jerks in an email and writing an email which comes out like one would do in person is a fine art. In a conversation, one can adjust the tone, together with the facial expression accompanied with gestures and postures to fit the mood of what is being conveyed to the other person. This is done since people tend to respond on how it is said than to what is actually said. Email tends to strip a conversation plain.

It seems well-organized though otherwise, it turns easy communications into messy misunderstandings. Without the involvement of facial expressions and body posture for guidance in conveying message, people tend to view each word that is typed as an indicator of tone and mood.

Outsource-Philippines firm, a provider of global outsource solution, has gathered a list of ten deadly words which people should not use while composing emails, to make sure that you are not giving the recipient the wrong impression. Should you be using words like `thanks’ or showering with `I’s, me’s together with plenty of exclamation point !!!?, to end the emails, you could be considered as rude even if you don’t intend to do so. Some of the tips to be observed are avoiding swearing, usage of exclamation points sparingly, single one at most. One should avoid using word like `actually’, since it seems to make one sound, insulting and annoying.

Definite Terms/Words Best Said in Person

The site also recommends avoiding saying `sorry’ in an email since it seems better to apologize in person when one tends to make a mistake. According to the company, ‘communicating with clients and colleagues through email does not mean that one should not be careful with the choice of words. There are definite terms or words which are best said in person since one can identify easily the meaning behind it by observing the facial expression and tone of the speaker.

In fact, some of the tips tend to make sense especially in the context of customer care emails. Leslie Katz of CNET points out that some of the suggestions come across as far too broad, with regards to dealing with customers. The word `important’ could be helpful in underscoring a point without implying rudely the readers who are not smart enough to know the important emails when they seem them. She adds that `digital communication like several human interactions is far from one byte that suits all.

Swearing Not Helpful in Winning New Customers

At times, a bit of spontaneity together with a few exclamation points could go a long way in humanizing an exchange even one which tends to originate with a big faceless company and they actually can. As the infographic recommend, for instance, `fine’ could convey a couple of various messages - `that works’ and `sure, be that way’. Swearing will not possibly win one any new customers. Google `rude emails and one will encounter various tips on how to keep the emails on the right side of being rude.

Several recurrent points seem to be common sense and are worth bearing in mind, irrespective of the recipient. One needs to be professional and respectful, steer away from a Debbi Downer vibe, mitigate criticism with support and in stick circumstances, should give oneself, time-out before hitting the send key and be cautious of the risky reply-all.

EE Aims to Improve 4G and Relocate Customer Services in UK

EE Bringing Customer Service Operation Back to UK

After being branded as one of the worst mobile networks for customer satisfaction of UK, EE is making attempts of bringing its customer service operation back to the UK. The operator has mentioned that 100% of its customer service calls would be controlled in the UK and Ireland towards the end of 2016, giving rise to 600 new jobs in Merthyr, North Tyneside, Plymouth and Ireland.

Marc Allera, the new boss of the company had stated that EE had already improved customer satisfaction and reduced complaints by 50% by creating 1,400 new service jobs in UK and Ireland since 2014. He had stated that they are creating 600 additional jobs to handle all EE customer service calls in the UK and Ireland by the end of this year, offering the best possible experience for the customers.

 Alex Neill, director of campaigns and communications for Which, had stated that telecoms are a vital part of present life and providers need to begin delivering for their customers. EE had also made an announcement of a major investment in rural 4G coverage with a pledge to cover 95% of the landmass of UK by 2020.

Vital Aim of Covering Whole of UK with 4G

Usually mobile operators have focused on population coverage which means that the majority of investment has been put in providing 4G in cities and towns, where the population density seems to be the highest.

Though presently EE coverage has reached over 95% of the UK population, it has only reached about 60% of UK geography which means that large paths of the country does not have 4G coverage at all. Allera has stated that customers desire 4G speeds wherever they go and mobile operators are too used to saying `no’ to new coverage.

He further added that presently they have an ambition to go further than any operator has ever gone and with the vital aim of covering the whole UK with 4G. EE had made this commitment by switching on 4G in Shetland and the Isles of Scilly, which is almost 1,000 miles apart at the opposite ends of the UK.

EE to Build More New Cell Sites

This has been possible due to the fibre broadband links installed by BT which had recently closed its £12.5 billion acquisition of EE. EE intends to build more than 750 new cell sites all over the country, as part of its rural 4G rollout. Mr Allera has stated that the demand for 4G could help mobile network challenge public opposition to infrastructure like transmitter mast need to enable it.

The barriers needed to overcome are around how fast and easy it can get access to these sites as well as how to ensure that we do not have landlords who can charge ransom rates that would make it prohibitive to get a solution. He further informed that EE is working with the government in tackling the issue. Matthew Howett, Ovum analyst mentioned that reforms are vital for the success of the strategy and unless the government takes a lead on ensuring fair and reasonable access and site rentals, EE hopes 95% coverage will be apprehensive with difficulty.

Are We Getting Ripped of by Today’s Data Packages?

The Big Data Switch Campaign

As mobile users we were charged to send text and to make calls and the cost to the Telco service provider for each text or call was quite less and individuals comprehended the relationship. Those were the initial days of mobile phones which were very simple and users learned how to use predictive text. However with the arrival of the internet-cabled smartphone, it has completely overhauled the relationship the customers tend to have with their devices and their Telco provider. Presently it is all related to data.

Australia’s biggest consumer network, will be partnering with news.com.au to launch The Big Data Switch Campaign, which is a people powered campaign that will be reducing the cost of mobile and broadband data. This would result in companies moving to reasonably economical voice as well as text messaging packages besides adding more expensive pricing schemes around data.For instance, in 2010, the use of second gigabyte of data on a Virgin mobile plan would have cost the user 140 times more than the first gig; and the user would not have realised it for days. Overpriced excess data rates had been a main money spinner for Australian telcos but are now a thing of the past.

The Legacy Cost

Some of the companies like Telstra, Optus and Vodafone had all brought in processes of reducing cases of bill shock and most of the plans tend to now add an extra GB of data for $10. This has brought about a radical change in the overall cost which customers tend to pay for data. For instance, less than three years back, Optus would charge 25c per megabyte for excess data usage that amounted to $250 for an extra GB. Though most of the customers presently can have an automatic top up for $10, those who are not on a plan may encounter a bit expensive price.

 Telstra, for instance tends to charge three cents per MB for additional mobile data without a data pack that works out to $30 per GB. Paul Budde, telecommunication expert, had informed news.com.au, that `there is no direct correlation between the cost of data and what we pay’. Customers on the contrary, are paying for the infrastructure and administrative costs of companies like Telstra when they branch out of data which Mr Budde refers as `the legacy cost’.

Category 11 4G – Introduced by Telstra

He adds that regarding paying for mobile data, it is determined by marketing as well as industry competition. In September, Mike Wright, Telstra’s Group Managing Director of Networks, had informed news.com.au that telcos base their data additions in the plans around how much they consider their networks can handle without slowing down. Upgrades to infrastructures like Category 11 4G had been introduced by Telstra last year. Mr Wright had said that `letting more phones on the network to download at high speed than ever before, allows data costs to go down’.

He added that updates and developments related to the proficiency and ability of the network are a way for telco companies in bringing down their cost though will not have any impact on what customers pay for mobile packages. Presently if all have unlimited mobile data and constantly streaming high-definition Netflix, the network would come to a halt.

But the recent free data days put by the company portrays that their network has the potential of handing huge jump in data use. He further adds that competition and not technology tends to dictate the price more than anything.

Kepler Spacecraft in Emergency Mode

Kepler Entered Mode on April 6

According to an update of April 8 from Charlie Sobeck, mission manager at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California, Kepler seemingly entered the mode on April 6. Kepler had burnt more of its dropping supplyof fuel in an emergency mode, which is essential to ignite its thrusters and position the spacecraft in communicating with Earth.

The turning manoeuvre which would have begun the new planet hunt had not yet been executed by the spacecraft. Kepler, till now had discovered planets by observing the slight dimming of starlight triggered by an orbiting planet that passed in front of a star. The investigation has been enthusiastically successful, discovering over 1,040 confirmed planets as well as more than 4,700 planet candidates since the launch of 2009.

The new campaign is said to have run from April 7 to July 1 and it would have looked out for the temporary brightening of star due to a different effect known as gravitational microlensing. The gravity of an intervening object, in microlensing, like in the case of planet, tends to focus and intensify the light from a background star, causing it to brighten.

Microlensing Targets Big Planets at Great Distances

Contrasting to Kepler’s other discoveries that seem to be smaller planets comparatively close to their host stars, microlensing tends to target big planets at great distances from their stars or even lonely planets seem to bewandering on their own through the depth of space. Ground-based telescopes have revealed 46 planets through microlensing and the astronomers expect that Kepler would discover 10 or more during the campaign.

 These kinds of discoveries would be helpful in narrowing the statistics on how common free-floating planets could be throughout the Galaxy. Astronomers have synchronized an intricate plan wherein around two dozen ground-based telescopes that have been spread across six continents, would be gazing at the same area of the sky at the same time as Kepler.

 They comprise the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment – OGLE survey that tends to hunt for microlensing events from the Las Campanas Observatory, in Chile. OGLE intended to shift its observing strategy slightly to overlap with the same fields which Kepler had been looking at. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was to have joined in the hunt too, in late June.

Kepler’s Microlensing Campaign Presently on Hold

It could have been the first microlensing survey directed at the same time from the ground as well as from space. The different vantage points could have enabled astronomers to research the potential microlensing planets much more easily than just utilising one or two ground-based telescopes. Andrew Cole, astronomer at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia had stated that `there is a strong feeling like it’s Christmas morning and we were all set to unwrap a shiny new toy and then we had to put everything on hold owing to power outage or something’.

His team had scheduled to use a 1.3-metre telescope in Tasmania in order to track on microlensing alerts from Kepler. The start of Kepler’s microlensing campaign presently is on hold till engineers tend to get the telescope working again. It is presently about 120 million kilometres from Earth, which means that each message tends to take 13 minutes to reach Kepler and back. Days that are lost from the microlensing campaign would be difficult to make up later.

 NASA’s director of astrophysics, Paul Hertz, had touted that the Kepler microlensing survey is a step towards the next big space telescope of the agency, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, that is intended to do microlensing searches after it launches in 2020.

MIT's new Chronos System Promises Precise Wi-Fi Tracking

Chronos – Wireless Localization Technology

Several users tend to use Wi-Fi to browse social media, check emails and watch videos. However according to Dan Misener, Radio technology columnist, researchers at MIT have invented something known as Chronos which is the latest way of using Wi-Fi in tracking the exact position down to the centimetre. Chronos is a `wireless localization’ technology or a Wi-Fi positioning system and is essentially a method of utilising Wi-Fi in figuring out where you are.

There are various means of doing this though Chronos tends to work by measuring the time it may take for a signal to travel from one wireless device to another device. For instance, if you have a smartphone and it is connected to a wireless router, the router tends to send information to the phone. The phone receives the same and then sends back a signal.

On measuring the time taken and by applying some calculation to the signal, one can determine where the smartphone is with regards to the router, the distance and the angle. In many ways, it tends to be the same way how radar or sonar systems seem to work. Chronos could be considered as a way to turn a regular Wi-Fi router into a kind of radar system which can distinguish objects and where they could be in the world.

Difference is Accuracy

The big difference is the accuracy. Customers-grade GPS tend to pinpoint you within a few metres distance but Chronos system tends to locate you within tens of centimetres. Moreover there are instances where GPS sometimes does not function at all like in underground or when one is indoors. Chronos tends to work anywhere within a Wi-Fi router range.

There are various other Wi-Fi based location system and are often utilised in airports, hotels and shopping mall to track foot traffic. U.S. malls tend to use shopper’s cell phones to track them, but those systems need several access point and many routers to cover a large area and triangulate the location of someone.

The distinctive thing regarding Chronos is that it only needs a single access point, a single router and one can set this up at home or a small business without incurring much expense.

Utilised in Locating Lost Device within the Home

The researchers have also informed that Chronos tends to be 20 times more accurate than the prevailing systems. One reason for using it in home is `home automation’ wherein there is a rise of the smart homes which tends to respond to who is in them.

Hence knowing who is at home and where people are within a home could be useful information. In a demonstration, the researchers had shown how Chronos tends to accurately identify which room a person was in 94% of the time. This device could also be utilised in locating a lost device within the home which could be helpful whenever a phone or a tablet would be misplaced.

Chronos can be used in controlling who gets to access the Wi-Fi, which could be useful for small businesses. Deepak Vasisht, one of the MIT researchers had informed at last month’s symposium, that if one walks into a Starbucks, they tend to get free Wi-Fi, but if one talks to them, they inform that they are very much keen in restricting free Wi-Fi access only to their customers and do not want to give free Wi-Fi to their neighbours which could end up causing congestion for their own customers. Hence a coffee shop could use Chronos to cut off Wi-Fi freeloaders.