Swatch Internet Time

Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of "Beat" watches.

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.

History

Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98, attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children.

Beat (1997 film)

Beat (Hangul: 비트; RR: Biteu) is 1997 South Korean gangster film directed by Kim Sung-su and written by Sam Shin about a high school dropout who is forced into gang life. Jung Woo-sung played the lead Min and Ko So-young his love interest Romy. The plot is based on a bestselling graphic novel by Huh Young-man.

The role solidified Jung as a leading Korean actor and was also based on his real-life experience as a high school dropout. This was the third and final film pairing Jung and Ko, but the director would later work with Jung again in Musa (2001).

Plot

Three friends in Korea all drop out of high school. Min is a feared brawler whose widowed mother is a drunk. The story traces his journey from high school to the underworld as his best friend introduces him to life in the mob. Complicating Min's life further is his love for the volatile Romy, a girl from an upper-class family with dreams of going to a prestigious college.

Cast

Beat (police)

In police terminology, a beat is the territory and time that a police officer patrols. Beat policing is based on traditional policing (late 19th century) and utilises the close relationship with the community members within the assigned beat to strengthen police effectiveness and encourage cooperative efforts to make a safer community. Beat police typically patrol on foot or bicycle which provides more interaction between police and community members.

Before the advent of personal radio communications, beats were organised in towns and cities to cover specific areas, usually shown on a map in the police station and given some sort of name or number. Officers reporting on duty would be allocated a beat by their sergeant and sometimes given a card indicating that the officer should be at a particular point at set times, usually half an hour, or forty-five minutes apart. The points would usually be telephone kiosks, police pillars or boxes, or perhaps public houses where it would be possible to phone the officer should he be needed to respond to an incident. The officer would remain at the point for five minutes and then patrol the area gradually making his way to the next point.

Service

Service may refer to:

Acts of service

Religion

Service (economics)

In economics, a service is an intangible commodity. That is, services are an example of intangible economic goods.

Service provision is often an economic activity where the buyer does not generally, except by exclusive contract, obtain exclusive ownership of the thing purchased. The benefits of such a service, if priced, are held to be self-evident in the buyer's willingness to pay for it. Public services are those, that society (nation state, fiscal union, regional) as a whole pays for, through taxes and other means.

By composing and orchestrating the appropriate level of resources, skill, ingenuity, and experience for effecting specific benefits for service consumers, service providers participate in an economy without the restrictions of carrying inventory (stock) or the need to concern themselves with bulky raw materials. On the other hand, their investment in expertise does require consistent service marketing and upgrading in the face of competition.

Characteristics

Service (business)

Business services are a recognisable subset of Economic services, and share their characteristics. The essential difference is that Business are concerned about the building of Service Systems in order to deliver value to their customers and to act in the roles of Service Provider and Service Consumer.

Service definition

The generic clear-cut, complete, concise and consistent definition of the service term reads as follows:

A service is a set of one time consumable and perishable benefits