![]() Take the QWERTY keyboard, which is clumsy, slow and should be replaced with the Dvorak keyboard, which was designed for maximum typing efficiency. Social inertia makes it hard to replace one system with another. The unit 20 minutes is one third of an hour, much easier to think about than 33.333 decminutes, or whatever we would call them. This makes it easy to talk in common fractions. Poor 24 is merely a “highly composite number”, but this still means that, unlike 10, it has more divisors than any other smaller number. The benefit of this is that 12, in mathematical terms, is a “superior highly composite number”, as is 60. When I was a student at the University of Edinburgh back in the 1960s, our professor of mathematics, Alexander Aitken, was a strong advocate for changing our entire counting system to be duodecimal (base 12). From working in retail at the time of decimalised currency and of metrication, I know just how much the public resents change. Too much is invested in the standard system and it is too intimate a part of everyday life. This ceased to be mandatory in 1795, but metrication survived and spread because a logical, standardised system was more useful than a hotchpotch of localised weights and measures.Īt the moment, it seems unlikely that decimal time will come into general use. These were each 30 days long, with three 10-day weeks. They didn’t quite manage to decimalise the year, which still consisted of 12 months. The day, from midnight to midnight, was divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes, each further divided into 100 seconds. The most famous experiment in decimal timekeeping occurred in France in the 1790s, along with the introduction of metric weights and measures. Once the Jesuits brought Western time to the country, China adopted the system. ![]() ![]() And until 1645, China had a decimal time system that went back millennia. In the US, the foot, the mile and the 64th of an inch are very much alive.ĭecimal time, while not in general use, still ticks over in scientific applications. It is worth noting that, in addition to time, many things aren’t measured in units of 10. Our 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in a hour and 60 seconds in a minute all derive from this. This system, which was also used by the Babylonians, divided both the circle and the year into 360 segments. The Egyptians used a sexagesimal system, with a base of 60. They broke the daylight hours into 10 sections, and added a “twilight” hour for the morning and evening. The division of the day into 24 equal parts comes from the Egyptians. ![]() The first attempts to measure time more accurately were concerned with measuring and dividing the hours of daylight, using a sundial and, later, sand and water clocks. Select Report Settings in the report toolbar and choose the desired display format.If you go far enough back in human history, time was divided into only two components: day and night.Select Timecard in the administrative toolbar to open a timecard.Select Turn Administration On from the File menu.You can select how time totals are displayed on reports, when editing entries, and when exporting time totals from Virtual TimeClock. You can easily set the report option for your employee timecards in the Hours & Minutes display format (instructions below).Ĭhanging to Decimal Hours or Hours & Minutes Workers often think about their time worked in terms of Hours & Minutes rather than the decimal format. Note: Never multiply hours and minutes to the wage to calculate wages. An entry displaying 7 hours and 30 minutes is displayed as 7:30 hours. The colon ( :) separator tells you that time is being displayed in hours and minutes. The Hours & Minutes display format reports time as you would read it on a clock. This allows your payroll provider to simply multiply hours to the wage to obtain gross pay. 50 because 30 minutes equals 1/2 hour or .50 hours in decimal format. Payroll hours are almost always reported in decimal hours. An entry displaying 7 hours and 30 minutes is displayed in decimal format as 7.50 hours. The Decimal Hours display format is the default report setting in Virtual TimeClock. When users are unaware of the differences between these two display formats, they question the accuracy of time totals and may even report incorrect employee payroll hours for payroll! Virtual TimeClock can display time totals in both decimal (7.5 hours) and hours & minutes (7:30) formats.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |