Counseling Helps Problem Gambling in UK
Gamcare, the largest U.K. provider of gambling counseling services, this week released its latest services report, and the results show that while more calls may be coming in, the counseling itself--especially face to face counseling--in the long term is helping those with gambling problems.
Results of the services report show 81 percent of those seeking face-to-face counseling had brought their gambling problems under control at the end of the counseling and a further 62 percent of those remained free of gambling problems six to 12 months later.
Additionally, the service report findings indicate that a trend is being noted by Gamcare. The complexity of people's gambling behavior is increasing: Instead of getting into trouble with a single type of gambling, people are abusing multiple types.
Eighty-eight percent of callers to the charity service were men, and 38 percent were 25 or younger. The areas that proved most difficult for problem gamblers were debt and relationship struggles. The average debt incurred by problem gamblers was £15,500, with the high end of the debt being around £64,000.
World Cup Website Scores Big
Fans of the World Cup are keeping up with their teams and their rivals by way of the official FIFA Web site in large numbers, according to research firm Nielsen//NetRatings.
Audience tracking by Nielsen//NetRatings shows visitors of more than 1.86 million people in 17 countries have visited the Yahoo! site since the beginning of May. Fans in the United Kingdom are the most common, with 271,444 Brits accessing from home and an additional 343,775 hitting the site from work.
Soccer fans from Germany, France and Italy are also flocking to the FIFA World Cup site in record numbers. Since the matches are being held in Korea and Japan, most of the games are being played while Europeans are at work, thereby contributing to the need to get the timeliest information from the Web.
Korea Leads World in Broadband Penetration
New figures released by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and reported on by the Korea Times show South Korea has the most broadband penetration of any other country.
The OECD found that in 2001, there were 13.9 broadband subscribers for every 100 Koreans. This is a staggering leap from the next runner up, the U.S., where there are only 3.2 broadband subscribers for every 100 Americans. The Japanese are a distant third with 0.9 subscribers per 100 people and the European Union trails with 0.8 subscribers per 100 people.
The Korea Times newspaper also reported that the end of March 2002 saw the number of broadband subscribers rise to 8.31 million. That number is expected to reach 10 million by the end of this year.
Teleworkers Boost Their Numbers in UK
The most recent Labour Market Trends report published by the United Kingdom's Office of National Statistics shows a dramatic increase in the number of telecommuters there.
According to the report, the number of teleworkers has increased by more than 70 percent in the last five years to reach 2.2 million or 7.4 percent of the entire country's workforce. Of those, f1.8 million teleworkers say they could not perform their job without having both a computer and a phone line at their disposal.
The report also describes the demographics of the average teleworker: Roughly 66 percent are male, about 75 percent are in the private sector and most are in occupational groups such as professional, manager, senior official and technical.
Increase in Software Piracy Documented Worldwide
International Planning and Research Corp. was commissioned to conduct a survey of the six major world regions and 26 business software applications to determine the amount of software piracy in each region for the Business Software Alliance.
The researchers found that in 2000, software piracy was at about 37 percent but that number had risen in 2001 to 40 percent. Revenue lost worldwide actually dropped about $1 billion from $11.75 billion in 2000 to $10.97 billion in 2001, but the decrease is attributed to declining software costs and the global economic slide of the last year.
"For the second year in a row, we have seen a rise in software piracy around the globe. This is an alarming trend despite our extensive efforts to enact laws and develop educational programs that promote a safe and legal online world," said Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Business Software Alliance.
The countries with the highest piracy rates are: Vietnam (94 percent), China (92 percent), Indonesia (88 percent), Ukraine/Other CIS (87 percent), Russia (87 percent), Pakistan (83 percent), Lebanon (79 percent), Qatar (78 percent), Nicaragua (78 percent) and Bolivia (77 percent).