Igal Zeifman:

Last March we published a study that showed the majority of website traffic (51%) was generated by non-human entities, 60% of which were clearly malicious. As we soon learned, these facts came as a surprise to many Internet users, for whom they served as a rare glimpse of “in between the lines” of Google Analytics.

Since then we were approached with numerous requests for an updated report. We were excited about the idea, but had to wait; first, to allow a significant interval between the data, and then for the implementation of new Client Classification features.

With all the pieces in place, we went on to collect the data for the 2013 report, which we’re presenting here today.

Jim Stingl:

You just can’t keep Paul Bialas and his cameras out of abandoned and crumbling brewery buildings.

A year after his photo book about Pabst came out, he’s back with another one featuring Schlitz, known for — say it with me — “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”

Like a vulture circling its lunch on the highway below, Bialas has an insatiable fascination with the history of these once-thriving Milwaukee giants and the carcasses left behind when the workers disappeared.

“I love it. Going in there gets me fired up, and few things do that. I wonder if I have just peaked and now I won’t have that feeling again. These two buildings — Pabst and Schlitz abandoned buildings — how do you top that?” he said.

The self-published “Schlitz Brewing Art” is available on Amazon; Bialas’ website, LakeCountryPhoto.com; and at local bookstores, including Best Place gift shop at the old Pabst site, Barnes & Noble, Books & Company and Boswell Book Company.

Just to be clear, Bialas had permission to photograph both brewery sites. It was easier at Schlitz, he said, because light poured in through the skylight atop the seven-story building that housed two brewhouses, two labs and a malt house.

Steven Poole

Loafing around can be an act of dissent against the ceaseless demands of capitalism.

Recently, I saw a man on the Tube wearing a Nike T-shirt with a slogan that read, in its entirety, “I’m doing work”. The idea that playing sport or doing exercise needs to be justified by calling it a species of work illustrates the colonisation of everyday life by the devotion to toil: an ideology that argues cunningly in favour of itself in the phrase “work ethic”.

We are everywhere enjoined to work harder, faster and for longer – not only in our jobs but also in our leisure time. The rationale for this frantic grind is one of the great unquestioned virtues of our age: “productivity”. The cult of productivity seems all-pervasive. Football coaches and commentators praise a player’s “work rate”, which is thought to compensate for a lack of skill. Geeks try to streamline their lives in and out of the office to get more done. People boast of being busy and exhausted and eagerly consume advice from the business-entertainment complex on how to “de-fry your burnt brain”, or engineer a more productive day by assenting to the horror of breakfast meetings.

A corporate guru will even teach you how to become a “master of extreme productivity”. (In these extreme times, extremity is always good; unless, perhaps, you are an extremist.) No one boasts of being unproductive, still less counterproductive. Into the iron gate of modernity have been wrought the words: “Productivity will set you free.”

Strategies to enhance the “productivity” of workers have been formalised since at least Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early-20th-century dream of “scientific management” through methods such as “time studies”. The latest wheeze is the Big Data field of “workforce science”, in which everything – patterns of emails, the length of telephone calls – may be measured and consigned to a comparative database to create a perfect management panopticon. It is tempting to suspect that the ambition thus to increase “worker productivity” is aimed at getting more work out of each employee for the same (or less) money.