Having just come back from a trip to the USA, we noticed many cultural differences which we had to get used to:
- Use of the word ‘pavement’ to describe the surface cars drive on, whereas in England ‘pavement’ is the surface at the side of the road that pedestrians walk on (sidewalk in the US)
- The majority of road signs being text whereas in Europe they tend to be symbols
- Having to remember to add sales tax onto the price of items being purchased
- Having to show ID to purchase alcohol, despite being well over 21
Amongst the many cultural differences, it was interesting to note some of the different approaches to recycling. Since waste minimisation, like good data quality, may take more effort than sending waste to landfill or providing poor quality data updates we need to ensure that people have the right motivation and awareness both to minimise waste and to maximise data quality.
Different approaches to waste minimisation provide a few useful comparisons of the approaches needed to improve approaches to data quality
Posted by Julian Schwarzenbach 

