Image credit: GP.

The it support center in our Abu Dhabi campus displayed three wall clocks. One for each NYU campus: New York City, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.

The display of exact time at each location is actually quite crucial considering the many joint activities we carried on involving stakeholders in the three different campuses.

This display of information is not efficient for two reasons: first of all the analog dial displays only 12 hours: when your analog watch tells you that it is 2 o’clock, you need to complete this information with external cues in order to discern if it is 2am or 2pm. Usually for the location we are in, this is an easy task to perform most of the time as the environment provides unequivocal cues most of the times: in this case, I know I am in Abu Dhabi, I know it is 10:43 am. I know this, because of natural light from the outside, because I already had breakfast but not yet lunch and also because it is highly unlikely to find oneself in the IT office at 10:43pm (and find it open, too).

So I can discern without effort what the time is in Abu Dhabi while I must still deal with ambiguous information about New York and Shanghai.

The clocks say only that it is 2:43 in both places. Now, someone with a modicum of knowledge of basic geography and astronomy would not take too much time to figure out that:

1. It cannot be the very same time in both locations
2. If it is 10:43AM in Abu Dhabi, it has to be earlier in New York (west of Abu Dhabi) and later in Shanghai (east of Abu Dhabi).

But these are pieces of information that one is supposed to received instantly, effortlessly, not mentally calculated. Imagine entering the IT Support Center at 730am, let’s say to get some IT deskhelp for the most important conference call of the day, set for 8pm NYC time. You check the clocks and one of them displays New York, 11:30. You might experience some panic when you mentally realized that it is indeed 11:30pm in New York! Does it mean you have missed your call? Not at at all, since at this very moment they are one day behind in NYC! Yes, the benefits of the analog representation are amazing but for multiple time zones clock displays you must go digital and digital only. And add a date as well.

The potential for confusion in the 12-hour clock is a well known fact. The division of the day in 12 hour halves PM and AM is a pretty straightforward convention: twelve hours are Ante Meridiem, before midday - and twelve are Post Meridiem, after midday. So 7am is around breakfast time and 7pm is more likely dinner time. This apparently innocuous system creates confusions twice a day at noon and midnight. The Wikipedia entry linked earlier does a good job in indicating how we have been trying to minimize this problems; recently we have noticed the appearance of a new abbreviation “MN” for midnight. A two-letter acronym for a two syllable word. Exercise: Does this solve or add to the problem?