

What Europeans do at Night - there
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/08/what-europeans-do-at-night/

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cameldrv
Interesting, but flawed to the point that the opposite conclusion is true. The
median time zone for Europe is CET, which is GMT+1, not GMT as is put in the
graphs, and the median American one is probably something like GMT-6.3 or so.
If you move the graphs by 2.3 hours, they look pretty similar, except the
European one has a steeper drop off. This can be explained by the fact that
the majority of the U.S. population lives in either GMT-5 or GMT-8, but less
in between. This tends to smear out the dropoff of people going to sleep in
the U.S. On the other hand, the majority of European internet users are all in
the CET time zone, so there is a sharper drop as they go to sleep.

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timr
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that they don't take this into account:

 _"Even after we account for the multiple time zones in both Europe (3 if we
exclude Russia) and the US (4 if we exclude Halifax and Alaska), European
traffic really is different."_

This statement suggests that they've adjusted for the different time zones. Do
you have evidence that they didn't?

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silvestrov
1) The used a wrong offset, as the parent poster indicated.

2) They assumed a simple offset could adjust for the differences.

A simple offset isn't enough:

The (by far) majority of Europeans are in a single timezone.

The majority of internet-using Americans europeans are in two timezones with a
3 hour time difference, and very few users in the timezones inbetween.

This makes a significant difference. To compare to Europe, they should split
US into 2 "nations": east-coast and west-coast.

Their method was wrong. Not how they executed it.

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timr
_"The used a wrong offset, as the parent poster indicated. They assumed a
simple offset could adjust for the differences."_

The parent poster didn't have any evidence for that statement; he just
_assumed_ it, because of the way that the data was graphed. Point out the
place in the article where they say that they used a single offset.

From the section I quoted, they seem to be aware of the problem. They could
have easily adjusted each data set individually for time zone, then taken the
average of the sets to make the graphs shown. They _do_ say that they're
graphing _average_ European and American traffic.

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michaelfeathers
The article mentions a peak during dinner time, but many Europeans eat dinner
later than Americans. In fact, in some areas, the answer to "what do Europeans
do at night" (7-10PM) might be: dinner.

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pbhjpbhj
I'm in the UK, we have dinner at 6:30pm but then we have a pre-schooler.
Sometimes it's closer to 8, 8:30pm but rarely that late more than once a week.
In countries with a siesta I'd expect this to push back at least an hour. In
short, I concur.

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ja27
He completely ignores commute times. I think that's likely the cause of the
dip during "dinner" time.

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dkersten
Before I was working, mine was very much like the European one (and I _am_ in
Europe, so...). So was the internet usage of a bunch of friends. Sleep in the
morning, get on the net in the late afternoon and then go to bed somewhere
around 6am - some people went earlier, though, so the 3am dropoff seems about
right.

Now I get on the internet at 9am, stay on till about 6pm. Sometimes I use the
internet after that, but often I don't.

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troels
If the graph data is correct, there is a very interesting intersection between
European and American usage about 4 PM (First graph). What I read from this is
that we align our usage with each other. Europeans stay up late to interact
with Americans, which also explains the early American peak.

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onreact-com
I guess people in Europe go out at night while in American Suburbia there is
no alternative to go online.

