Last week, Yahoo News reported that in June this year, a Chinese construction crew completed a 15-story building in only six days (Dykes, 2010 & Jia, 2010).
The steel building is located in south-central city of Changsha. It covers 610.83 square meters and is of 49.95 meter height. 200 workers with over 200 transport vehicles brought all the building components, which had been previously produced in factories, to the site and the construction was only to install and assemble the parts.
The Centre for Retail Research recently launched the Global Retail Theft Barometer 2010 report, revealing that total global shrinkage (stock loss from crime or waste expressed as a percentage of retail sales) cost retailers and the public US$ 107.3 billion, equivalent to 1.36% of their retail sales.
A previous blog post, USA top hospitals ranking based on performance improvement, presented the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks, an annual, quantitative study dedicated to measuring performance across the industry, that identifies the best hospitals in USA, overall, as measured on the 100 Top Hospitals Balanced Scorecard.
According with a recent article published by Harding (2010) in the Financial Times citing Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, Google is currently developing and testing a new daily measure of inflation using web data.
Google Price Index (GPI) is envisaged to provide accurate daily statistics of the inflation trends for the products and services transacted via web, and could one day provide an alternative to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), once with the generalization of the online shopping.
The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks is an annual, quantitative study dedicated to measuring performance across the industry, that identifies the best hospitals in USA, overall, as measured on the 100 Top Hospitals Balanced Scorecard.