[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Off-topic: Magic Number 7 (WAS: Re: XML Editors - Word 2000?? )
John Simpson wrote: When I was at AT&T years ago, there was a company legend (possibly apocryphal) about the length of US telephone numbers. According to this legend, Bell Labs had surveyed large numbers of customers and determined that, on average, people could remember 7 "things," plus or minus 3, about another "thing." Ergo, a phone number would optimally be made up of: a 4-digit "main portion," sans exchange and area code; a 3-digit exchange; and a 3-digit area code. This was supposedly in descending order of need to remember the additional portions, assuming that you'd need primarily to call people in your own exchange, followed by people in your area code but outside your exchange, followed by people in other area codes. I don't know where Rick's magic 7 comes from. Small correction - it was 7+/- 2 "bits" of information, according to an article by George A Miller in the Psychological Review, No. 63 (1956). The article was called: "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on out capacity for processing information." Whether AT&T did the research John mentions I wouldn't know Regards Andy B. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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