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Google's unilateral change to its privacy policy in March will come under fire from European data protection commissioners within days, sources say.

The controversial changes, in which Google tied together the previously separate data collected under services including its search engine, YouTube and Google+ were announced in January and implemented two months later. While creating a unified privacy policy across all the services, it also in effect amassed the data into a single location. That attracted widespread criticism – and now the group of 30 data protection commissioners from across the European Union are believed to have determined that Google has breached EU privacy laws. Now Google might be required to undo the changes – although Auke Haagsma, a lawyer advising the lobby group Icomp, which is critical of Google's policies, said that would be like trying to "unscramble the egg."

According to a July 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on "the social economy," the average knowledge worker now spends 28% of her work time managing email. If you work 50 hours per week, that's 14 hours stuck in the inbox. McKinsey's report suggested that workers could improve their email productivity by 25-30% through better use of social collaboration platforms, buying back 7-8.5% of their workweek.

But even if your company isn't investing in such platforms, here's some low-hanging fruit for getting your head out of your inbox for a few of those 14 hours:

• Unsubscribe: Play offense with your inbox by getting yourself off any lists you don't read, and unsubscribing to commercial messages.
• Don't use folders: You can create one "archive" folder if you like to keep your inbox empty, but use the search function to find any information you need.
• Send email at the right time: According to Baydin's analysis, the average email user writes 40 messages a day, but there's no point writing these emails if they don't get read.
• Don't check email so often: Try checking just once an hour, doing 40 minutes of focused work, then 20 minutes of inbox management. Chances are, you'll get a lot more done.

Prime Minister David Cameron must have felt kind of cool, if a little late, when he joined Twitter on Oct 6.

“I promise there won’t be ‘too many tweets ...’ ” he wrote in his first message, as if quoting someone. Give him points for effort. But Cameron, who had already attracted more than 80,000 followers by Sunday afternoon, clearly had not reckoned with the sharp, anarchic sense of humor that Twitter can unleash, particularly among the annoyed and the restive. Angry at the government’s economic philosophy, at an austerity budget filled with measures cutting jobs and services, at the reorganization of the National Health Service, at recent suggestions by Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, that he would like to limit abortion rights, the Twitter-using public unleashed a torrent of witty, mean remarks. Some teased Cameron’s privileged background and rich friends. Others attacked his policies. Others were just funny.

Government support plays a vital role in incubating new ideas that are harvested by the private sector, sometimes many years later, creating companies and jobs.

A report published this year by the National Research Council, a government advisory group, looked at eight computing technologies, including digital communications, databases, computer architectures and artificial intelligence, tracing government-financed research to commercialization. It calculated the portion of revenue at 30 well-known corporations that could be traced back to the seed research backed by government agencies. The total was nearly $500 billion a year. The long-term importance of government-supported research may loom small in the current debate over how to reduce the federal deficit. But it is an economic issue worth keeping in mind, and one that points to the kinds of tough choices and trade-offs facing policy makers.