12 Dirty Habits That Prevent You from Developing Exceptional People Skills
“Now You Can Immediately Improve Your Relations With Others Without Spending A Single Penny!”
Chances are, if you’re not very successful at dealing with people, you haven’t had the chance to properly educate yourself. Learning to deal with people is like learning to walk except it requires a lot more work!
Now imagine if your whole life you had been taught to walk backwards. Would this make your life much more difficult? Of course it would. Just like anything else, you need to learn exactly how to interact with people the proper way.
Here we go: here are the 12 dirty habits you should always avoid when interacting with people.
Dirty Habit #1
Looking down at the floor when speaking to someone. You must learn to look at someone directly in their eyes when speaking to them. If you were taught that staring at people was impolite, you’re absolutely right. However, this does not mean you can’t look at someone in his or her eyes.
Dirty Habit #2
Slouching when you’re standing or sitting down. Stand up straight. In our society being tall is a good thing. When you slouch you appear much shorter. Not only will standing straight make you look taller but it will also give you a confident look.
Dirty Habit #3
Frowning and not smiling enough. No one likes to spend time with someone who’s in a bad mood. If you’re not feeling too great then try to keep your distance. People love to spend time with upbeat, optimistic people. Make an effort to smile, not frown.
Dirty Habit #4
Avoiding strangers. Since the day you were born, your parents have taught you never to speak to strangers. Well, you’re a grown up now and things have changed. In order to develop exceptional people skills you need to be comfortable speaking to all types of people. You need to meet as many people as you can.
Dirty Habit #5
Making a poor first impression. Did you know that people will judge almost everything about you just by your first impression? Make an initial effort to get along with the person you are meeting and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble in the future.
Dirty Habit #6
Not making an effort to speak well. In order to develop great people skills you need to become a great conversationalist. This doesn’t mean you need to speak a lot; this means you need to speak well. You need to articulate and choose your words wisely. Basically, you need to listen to what you’re saying and not just blabber on about whatever you feel like.
Dirty Habit #7
Not being a good listener. Have you ever noticed how you tend to fall into a mind drift as soon as the other person begins to speak? Okay, well if you really don’t care about the person, then fine. But if you do, make an effort to listen and let the person speak. It will only help you further on in the conversation.
Dirty Habit #8
Not staying in touch with your acquaintances. To make sure you have the best relationships with all of the people you know, you must stay in touch with them. You need to regularly check your contact list and remind them all that you still exist. I’m not saying to call them up twice a week but an occasional check up is always nice.
Dirty Habit #9
Not being proactive. When there is not enough action and things are looking dull, it’s up to you to make a move. If you aren’t satisfied with the current situation don’t blame others, do something about it! Let’s face it: no one really cares if you’re unhappy, except maybe your mom...
Dirty Habit #10
Not enjoying your social life. If you want people to enjoy your company, you need to let them know that you’re a fun person to spend time with. If you’re a hard worker, then I congratulate you! However, you need to occasionally go out and be known for your excellent nights out! Go out and live your life to the fullest!
Dirty Habit #11
Not facing your fears. Actually, this relates to all aspects of your life but in this context I’m talking about meeting new people, career promotions, etc. If you need to do something logical but your emotions are getting in the way, then you need to analyze the situation and use some common sense.
Dirty Habit #12
Refusing to be open minded. There are all kinds of people out there. There are different religions, different races, different cultures, and different languages. Learn to accept others for who they are not who you want them to be. Give them your full respect and work out your differences unless of course you aren’t receiving the respect you deserve.
There you go! These were the 12 dirty habits to always avoid if you really want to develop exceptional people skills!
Friday, December 19, 2008
12 Dirty Habits That Prevent You from Developing Exceptional People Skills
Monday, November 3, 2008
What is Excellence?
A man once visited a temple under construction where he saw a sculptor making an idol of God. Suddenly he noticed a similar idol lying nearby. Surprised, he asked the sculptor, "Do you need two statues of the same idol?" "No," said the sculptor without looking up, "We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage." The gentleman examined the idol and found no apparent damage. "Where is the damage?" he asked. "There is a scratch on the nose of the idol." said the sculptor, still busy with his work. "Where are you going to install the idol?" The sculptor replied that it would be installed on a pillar twenty feet high. "If the idol is that far, who is going to know that there is a scratch on the nose?" the gentleman asked.
The sculptor stopped his work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, "I will know it."
The desire to excel is exclusive of the fact whether someone else appreciates it or not. "Excellence" is a drive from inside, not outside.
Excellence is not for someone else to notice but for your own satisfaction and excellence.
The sculptor stopped his work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, "I will know it."
The desire to excel is exclusive of the fact whether someone else appreciates it or not. "Excellence" is a drive from inside, not outside.
Excellence is not for someone else to notice but for your own satisfaction and excellence.
Monday, October 27, 2008
The Girl With An Apple
The Girl With An Apple
(This is a true story and you can find out more by Googling Herman Rosenblat. He was Bar Mitzvahed at age 75)
August 1942. Piotrkow, Poland.
The sky was gloomy that morning as we waited anxiously. All the men,women and children of Piotrkow's Jewish ghetto had been herded into a square.
Word had gotten around that we were being moved. My father had only recently died from typhus, which had run rampant through the crowded ghetto. My greatest fear was that our family would be separated.
'Whatever you do,' Isidore, my eldest brother, whispered to me, 'don't tell them your age. Say you're sixteen.
'I was tall for a boy of 11, so I could pull it off. That way I might be deemed valuable as a worker.
An SS man approached me, boots clicking against the cobblestones. He looked me up and down, and then asked my age.
'Sixteen,' I said. He directed me to the left, where my three brothers and other healthy young men already stood.
My mother was motioned to the right with the other women, children,sick and elderly people.
I whispered to Isidore, 'Why?' He didn't answer.
I ran to Mama's side and said I wanted to stay with her.
'No, 'she said sternly.
'Get away. Don't be a nuisance. Go with your brothers.'
She had never spoken so harshly before. But I understood: She was protecting me. She loved me so much that, just this once, she pretended not to. It was the last I ever saw of her.
My brothers and I were transported in a cattle car to Germany. We arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp one night weeks later and were led into a crowded barrack. The next day, we were issued uniforms and identification numbers.
'Don't call me Herman anymore.' I said to my brothers. 'Call me 94983.'
I was put to work in the camp's crematorium, loading the dead into a hand-cranked elevator.
I, too, felt dead. Hardened, I had become a number. Soon, my brothers and I were sent to Schlieben, one of Buchenwald's sub-camps near Berlin.
One morning I thought I heard my mother's voice.
'Son,' she said softly but clearly, I am going to send you an angel.'
Then I woke up. Just a dream. A beautiful dream.
But in this place there could be no angels. There was only work. And hunger. And fear.
A couple of days later, I was walking around the camp, around the barracks, near the barbed-wire fence where the guards could not easily see. I was alone.
On the other side of the fence, I spotted someone: a little girl with light, almost luminous curls. She was half-hidden behind a birch tree.
I glanced around to make sure no one saw me. I called to her softly in German. 'Do you have something to eat?'
She didn't understand.
I inched closer to the fence and repeated the question in Polish. She stepped forward. I was thin and gaunt, with rags wrapped around my feet, but the girl looked unafraid. In her eyes, I saw life.
She pulled an apple from her woolen jacket and threw it over the fence.
I grabbed the fruit and, as I started to run away, I heard her say faintly, 'I'll see you tomorrow.'I returned to the same spot by the fence at the same time every day. She was always there with something for me to eat - a hunk of bread
or, better yet, an apple.
We didn't dare speak or linger. To be caught would mean death for us both.
I didn't know anything about her, just a kind farm girl, except that she understood Polish. What was her name? Why was she risking her life for me?
Hope was in such short supply, and this girl on the other side of the fence gave me some, as nourishing in its way as the bread and apples.
Nearly seven months later, my brothers and I were crammed into a coal car and shipped to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia.
'Don't return,' I told the girl that day. 'We're leaving.'I turned toward the barracks and didn't look back, didn't even say good-bye to the little girl whose name I'd never learned, the girl with the apples.
We were in Theresienstadt for three months. The war was winding down and Allied forces were closing in, yet my fate seemed sealed.
On May 10, 1945, I was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10:00 AM.
In the quiet of dawn, I tried to prepare myself. So many times death seemed ready to claim me, but somehow I'd survived. Now, it was over.
I thought of my parents. At least, I thought, we will be reunited.
But at 8 A.M. there was a commotion. I heard shouts, and saw people running every which way through camp. I caught up with my brothers.
Russian troops had liberated the camp! The gates swung open. Everyone was running, so I did too. Amazingly, all of my brothers had survived;
I'm not sure how. But I knew that the girl with the apples had been the key to my survival.
In a place where evil seemed triumphant, one person's goodness had saved my life, had given me hope in a place where there was none.
My mother had promised to send me an angel, and the angel had come.
Eventually I made my way to England where I was sponsored by a Jewish charity, put up in a hostel with other boys who had survived the Holocaust and trained in electronics. Then I came to America, where my brother Sam had already moved. I served in the U. S. Army during the Korean War, and returned to New York City after two years.
By August 1957 I'd opened my own electronics repair shop. I was starting to settle in.
One day, my friend Sid who I knew from England called me.
'I've got a date. She's got a Polish friend. Let's double date.'A blind date? Nah, that wasn't for me.
But Sid kept pestering me, and a few days later we headed up to the Bronx to pick up his date and her friend Roma.
I had to admit, for a blind date this wasn't so bad. Roma was a nurse at a Bronx hospital. She was kind and smart. Beautiful, too, with swirling brown curls and green, almond-shaped eyes that sparkled with life.
The four of us drove out to Coney Island. Roma was easy to talk to,easy to be with.
Turned out she was wary of blind dates too!We were both just doing our friends a favor. We took a stroll on the boardwalk, enjoying the salty Atlantic breeze, and then had dinner by the shore. I couldn't remember having a better time.
We piled back into Sid's car, Roma and I sharing the backseat.
As European Jews who had survived the war, we were aware that much had been left unsaid between us. She broached the subject, 'Where were you,' she asked softly, 'during the war?'
'The camps,' I said. The terrible memories still vivid, the irreparable loss. I had tried to forget. But you can never forget. She nodded. 'My family was hiding on a farm in Germany, not far from Berlin,' she told me. 'My father knew a priest, and he got us Aryan papers.'
I imagined how she must have suffered too, fear, a constant companion. And yet here we were both survivors, in a new world.
'There was a camp next to the farm.' Roma continued. 'I saw a boy there and I would throw him apples every day.'
What an amazing coincidence that she had helped some other boy. 'What did he look like? I asked.
'He was tall, skinny, and hungry. I must have seen him every day for six months.'
My heart was racing. I couldn't believe it.
This couldn't be.
'Did he tell you one day not to come back because he was leaving Schlieben?'
Roma looked at me in amazement. 'Yes!''That was me!'
I was ready to burst with joy and awe, flooded with emotions. I couldn't believe it! My angel.
'I'm not letting you go.' I said to Roma. And in the back of the car on that blind date, I proposed to her. I didn't want to wait.
'You're crazy!' she said. But she invited me to meet her parents for Shabbat dinner the following week.
There was so much I looked forward to learning about Roma, but the most important things I always knew: her steadfastness, her goodness. For many months, in the worst of circumstances, she had come to the fence and given me hope. Now that I'd found her again, I could never let her go.
That day, she said yes. And I kept my word. After nearly 50 years of marriage, two children and three grandchildren, I have never let her go.
Herman Rosenblat of Miami Beach, Florida
This story is being made into a movie called The Fence.
(This is a true story and you can find out more by Googling Herman Rosenblat. He was Bar Mitzvahed at age 75)
August 1942. Piotrkow, Poland.
The sky was gloomy that morning as we waited anxiously. All the men,women and children of Piotrkow's Jewish ghetto had been herded into a square.
Word had gotten around that we were being moved. My father had only recently died from typhus, which had run rampant through the crowded ghetto. My greatest fear was that our family would be separated.
'Whatever you do,' Isidore, my eldest brother, whispered to me, 'don't tell them your age. Say you're sixteen.
'I was tall for a boy of 11, so I could pull it off. That way I might be deemed valuable as a worker.
An SS man approached me, boots clicking against the cobblestones. He looked me up and down, and then asked my age.
'Sixteen,' I said. He directed me to the left, where my three brothers and other healthy young men already stood.
My mother was motioned to the right with the other women, children,sick and elderly people.
I whispered to Isidore, 'Why?' He didn't answer.
I ran to Mama's side and said I wanted to stay with her.
'No, 'she said sternly.
'Get away. Don't be a nuisance. Go with your brothers.'
She had never spoken so harshly before. But I understood: She was protecting me. She loved me so much that, just this once, she pretended not to. It was the last I ever saw of her.
My brothers and I were transported in a cattle car to Germany. We arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp one night weeks later and were led into a crowded barrack. The next day, we were issued uniforms and identification numbers.
'Don't call me Herman anymore.' I said to my brothers. 'Call me 94983.'
I was put to work in the camp's crematorium, loading the dead into a hand-cranked elevator.
I, too, felt dead. Hardened, I had become a number. Soon, my brothers and I were sent to Schlieben, one of Buchenwald's sub-camps near Berlin.
One morning I thought I heard my mother's voice.
'Son,' she said softly but clearly, I am going to send you an angel.'
Then I woke up. Just a dream. A beautiful dream.
But in this place there could be no angels. There was only work. And hunger. And fear.
A couple of days later, I was walking around the camp, around the barracks, near the barbed-wire fence where the guards could not easily see. I was alone.
On the other side of the fence, I spotted someone: a little girl with light, almost luminous curls. She was half-hidden behind a birch tree.
I glanced around to make sure no one saw me. I called to her softly in German. 'Do you have something to eat?'
She didn't understand.
I inched closer to the fence and repeated the question in Polish. She stepped forward. I was thin and gaunt, with rags wrapped around my feet, but the girl looked unafraid. In her eyes, I saw life.
She pulled an apple from her woolen jacket and threw it over the fence.
I grabbed the fruit and, as I started to run away, I heard her say faintly, 'I'll see you tomorrow.'I returned to the same spot by the fence at the same time every day. She was always there with something for me to eat - a hunk of bread
or, better yet, an apple.
We didn't dare speak or linger. To be caught would mean death for us both.
I didn't know anything about her, just a kind farm girl, except that she understood Polish. What was her name? Why was she risking her life for me?
Hope was in such short supply, and this girl on the other side of the fence gave me some, as nourishing in its way as the bread and apples.
Nearly seven months later, my brothers and I were crammed into a coal car and shipped to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia.
'Don't return,' I told the girl that day. 'We're leaving.'I turned toward the barracks and didn't look back, didn't even say good-bye to the little girl whose name I'd never learned, the girl with the apples.
We were in Theresienstadt for three months. The war was winding down and Allied forces were closing in, yet my fate seemed sealed.
On May 10, 1945, I was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10:00 AM.
In the quiet of dawn, I tried to prepare myself. So many times death seemed ready to claim me, but somehow I'd survived. Now, it was over.
I thought of my parents. At least, I thought, we will be reunited.
But at 8 A.M. there was a commotion. I heard shouts, and saw people running every which way through camp. I caught up with my brothers.
Russian troops had liberated the camp! The gates swung open. Everyone was running, so I did too. Amazingly, all of my brothers had survived;
I'm not sure how. But I knew that the girl with the apples had been the key to my survival.
In a place where evil seemed triumphant, one person's goodness had saved my life, had given me hope in a place where there was none.
My mother had promised to send me an angel, and the angel had come.
Eventually I made my way to England where I was sponsored by a Jewish charity, put up in a hostel with other boys who had survived the Holocaust and trained in electronics. Then I came to America, where my brother Sam had already moved. I served in the U. S. Army during the Korean War, and returned to New York City after two years.
By August 1957 I'd opened my own electronics repair shop. I was starting to settle in.
One day, my friend Sid who I knew from England called me.
'I've got a date. She's got a Polish friend. Let's double date.'A blind date? Nah, that wasn't for me.
But Sid kept pestering me, and a few days later we headed up to the Bronx to pick up his date and her friend Roma.
I had to admit, for a blind date this wasn't so bad. Roma was a nurse at a Bronx hospital. She was kind and smart. Beautiful, too, with swirling brown curls and green, almond-shaped eyes that sparkled with life.
The four of us drove out to Coney Island. Roma was easy to talk to,easy to be with.
Turned out she was wary of blind dates too!We were both just doing our friends a favor. We took a stroll on the boardwalk, enjoying the salty Atlantic breeze, and then had dinner by the shore. I couldn't remember having a better time.
We piled back into Sid's car, Roma and I sharing the backseat.
As European Jews who had survived the war, we were aware that much had been left unsaid between us. She broached the subject, 'Where were you,' she asked softly, 'during the war?'
'The camps,' I said. The terrible memories still vivid, the irreparable loss. I had tried to forget. But you can never forget. She nodded. 'My family was hiding on a farm in Germany, not far from Berlin,' she told me. 'My father knew a priest, and he got us Aryan papers.'
I imagined how she must have suffered too, fear, a constant companion. And yet here we were both survivors, in a new world.
'There was a camp next to the farm.' Roma continued. 'I saw a boy there and I would throw him apples every day.'
What an amazing coincidence that she had helped some other boy. 'What did he look like? I asked.
'He was tall, skinny, and hungry. I must have seen him every day for six months.'
My heart was racing. I couldn't believe it.
This couldn't be.
'Did he tell you one day not to come back because he was leaving Schlieben?'
Roma looked at me in amazement. 'Yes!''That was me!'
I was ready to burst with joy and awe, flooded with emotions. I couldn't believe it! My angel.
'I'm not letting you go.' I said to Roma. And in the back of the car on that blind date, I proposed to her. I didn't want to wait.
'You're crazy!' she said. But she invited me to meet her parents for Shabbat dinner the following week.
There was so much I looked forward to learning about Roma, but the most important things I always knew: her steadfastness, her goodness. For many months, in the worst of circumstances, she had come to the fence and given me hope. Now that I'd found her again, I could never let her go.
That day, she said yes. And I kept my word. After nearly 50 years of marriage, two children and three grandchildren, I have never let her go.
Herman Rosenblat of Miami Beach, Florida
This story is being made into a movie called The Fence.
25 Things you can do with your Cell Phone
Check the below blog of Amit Bhawani.....
http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/25-important-uses-cell-phones/
Rgds,
Rajesh
http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/25-important-uses-cell-phones/
Rgds,
Rajesh
Indian Railways Tickets Search & Booking
Check the below blog of Amit Bhaawani.....
http://www.amitbhawani.com/india/indian-railways-tickets-booking/
http://www.amitbhawani.com/india/indian-railways-tickets-booking/
What Apple iPhone Does not Offer & Nokia Offers
Check this Blog....
http://artofc.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-apple-iphone-does-not-offer-nokia.html
http://artofc.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-apple-iphone-does-not-offer-nokia.html
Friday, October 24, 2008
What's pushing the US into recession?
What's pushing the US into recession?
By - Vivek Kaul
The consumption binge is over
MUMBAI: It was half past one in the night and I was about to go to sleep when the phone rang. "Do you feel like going out for a long drive?" she asked.
"A drive at this hour? No, thanks, I'd rather sleep," I said and hung up.
Ten minutes later, the door bell rang. I knew it was her, but opened the door nonetheless.
"Good to see you awake. Now, tell me about home equity loans," she said. "I have been reading about them, but can't quite understand how they work."
Anyone else and I would have exploded. But, somehow, she always had her way with me.
"Ah, home equity loans. it's when you borrow against the value of home equity," I said yawning.
"And what is home equity?"
"It is the difference between the market value of your house and the portion of the home loan taken to buy it, which is still to be repaid. So let us say the current market value of a house is $400,000 and the home loan to be repaid is $300,000, the home equity works out $100,000. The loan you take against this $100,000 is a home equity loan. Now can I now go to sleep?"
"Hang on, hang on. How are home equity loans linked to the US economy?"
I feel anger welling up, but can't quite scream. "Pest you are," I say. "Interest rates in the US were reduced after the dotcom bubble burst. By mid-2003, they had come down to as low as 1%. And that is where they stayed for the next one year. This made borrowing very easy and people used this as an opportunity to take home loans to buy homes. Since demand far exceeded supply, this ensured that the home prices started to rise. Once home prices started to rise, people realised that they could use their increasing home equity to borrow more. And that is precisely what they did. The money borrowed against home equity could be used for all kinds of things. It could be used for home improvements, going on a luxurious holiday, financing your children's education or just going on a sho pping binge. The bottom line was that the money was being spent and once money was spent, consumption increased and the economy kept growing at a good pace," I explained.
"Hmmm, that's terribly interesting. What happened after that?" she asked. "As interest rates kept coming down, people realised that they could get a greater home equity loan and continue paying the same equated monthly instalment to repay the loan. So they kept refinancing their home equity loans. At the same time, the home prices kept going up and that meant home equity kept going up and hence more home equity loans could be taken on. And that's what precisely happened. A large amount of consumption binge in the US was financed through home equity loans. This is what helped the US companies to keep growing. At the same time, countries like China and Japan also benefited. An estimate made by Martin Feldstein, an economist at the Harvard University suggests that home equity worth $9 trillion has been withdrawn. The banks and other financial institutions which were lending the money also kept playing along because interest rates were low and hence money was cheap. And when money is cheap, there is an incentive to keep lending until the last borrower has been exhausted."
"But from what I hear, the American economy is in a lot of debt. How did they get to borrow so much money?"
"All that consumption benefited countries like China, Japan and Russia, etc. These countries earned US dollars. The dollars made their way back into the US as these countries bought financial securities issued by the US government. The US dollar is the international reserve currency and most countries till very recently liked to hold their reserves in US dollars. So, they could either let the US dollars lie in their vaults and not earn any interest, or invest in US government financial securities and hope to earn some interest. Since the demand for US government securities was very s trong, the interest rates offered on US government securities were very low. So, in effect, these countries lent to the US government at an extremely low interest rate. The government, in turn, lent to banks and the banks to consumers at lower rates. That's how the chain worked - the US consumed, other countries earned dollars and the dollars came back into the US economy."
"So is that chain about to break now?"
"Home prices in the US have been falling since the beginning of 2007. Thus, there is no more home equity to encash. So, consumers have moved on to using their credit cards to consume. Now, credit cards also cannot be used for eternity. This means, the consumption binge in the US has more or less ended. So, the consumption-based US economy is headed towards a recession. Once that happens, countries like China and Japan, which export a lot of stuff to the US, will be hit hard. Also, the US dollar's status as the international reserve currency is a little shaky these days. And a lot of countries have been quietly moving their reserves into other international currencies such as the euro. What this means is that the other countries will not be ready to lend to the US at lower interest rates as they were in the past. And that will also have an impact on US consumption."
She was nodding in agreement. The smile was loud and clear.
k_vivek@dnaindia.net
By - Vivek Kaul
The consumption binge is over
MUMBAI: It was half past one in the night and I was about to go to sleep when the phone rang. "Do you feel like going out for a long drive?" she asked.
"A drive at this hour? No, thanks, I'd rather sleep," I said and hung up.
Ten minutes later, the door bell rang. I knew it was her, but opened the door nonetheless.
"Good to see you awake. Now, tell me about home equity loans," she said. "I have been reading about them, but can't quite understand how they work."
Anyone else and I would have exploded. But, somehow, she always had her way with me.
"Ah, home equity loans. it's when you borrow against the value of home equity," I said yawning.
"And what is home equity?"
"It is the difference between the market value of your house and the portion of the home loan taken to buy it, which is still to be repaid. So let us say the current market value of a house is $400,000 and the home loan to be repaid is $300,000, the home equity works out $100,000. The loan you take against this $100,000 is a home equity loan. Now can I now go to sleep?"
"Hang on, hang on. How are home equity loans linked to the US economy?"
I feel anger welling up, but can't quite scream. "Pest you are," I say. "Interest rates in the US were reduced after the dotcom bubble burst. By mid-2003, they had come down to as low as 1%. And that is where they stayed for the next one year. This made borrowing very easy and people used this as an opportunity to take home loans to buy homes. Since demand far exceeded supply, this ensured that the home prices started to rise. Once home prices started to rise, people realised that they could use their increasing home equity to borrow more. And that is precisely what they did. The money borrowed against home equity could be used for all kinds of things. It could be used for home improvements, going on a luxurious holiday, financing your children's education or just going on a sho pping binge. The bottom line was that the money was being spent and once money was spent, consumption increased and the economy kept growing at a good pace," I explained.
"Hmmm, that's terribly interesting. What happened after that?" she asked. "As interest rates kept coming down, people realised that they could get a greater home equity loan and continue paying the same equated monthly instalment to repay the loan. So they kept refinancing their home equity loans. At the same time, the home prices kept going up and that meant home equity kept going up and hence more home equity loans could be taken on. And that's what precisely happened. A large amount of consumption binge in the US was financed through home equity loans. This is what helped the US companies to keep growing. At the same time, countries like China and Japan also benefited. An estimate made by Martin Feldstein, an economist at the Harvard University suggests that home equity worth $9 trillion has been withdrawn. The banks and other financial institutions which were lending the money also kept playing along because interest rates were low and hence money was cheap. And when money is cheap, there is an incentive to keep lending until the last borrower has been exhausted."
"But from what I hear, the American economy is in a lot of debt. How did they get to borrow so much money?"
"All that consumption benefited countries like China, Japan and Russia, etc. These countries earned US dollars. The dollars made their way back into the US as these countries bought financial securities issued by the US government. The US dollar is the international reserve currency and most countries till very recently liked to hold their reserves in US dollars. So, they could either let the US dollars lie in their vaults and not earn any interest, or invest in US government financial securities and hope to earn some interest. Since the demand for US government securities was very s trong, the interest rates offered on US government securities were very low. So, in effect, these countries lent to the US government at an extremely low interest rate. The government, in turn, lent to banks and the banks to consumers at lower rates. That's how the chain worked - the US consumed, other countries earned dollars and the dollars came back into the US economy."
"So is that chain about to break now?"
"Home prices in the US have been falling since the beginning of 2007. Thus, there is no more home equity to encash. So, consumers have moved on to using their credit cards to consume. Now, credit cards also cannot be used for eternity. This means, the consumption binge in the US has more or less ended. So, the consumption-based US economy is headed towards a recession. Once that happens, countries like China and Japan, which export a lot of stuff to the US, will be hit hard. Also, the US dollar's status as the international reserve currency is a little shaky these days. And a lot of countries have been quietly moving their reserves into other international currencies such as the euro. What this means is that the other countries will not be ready to lend to the US at lower interest rates as they were in the past. And that will also have an impact on US consumption."
She was nodding in agreement. The smile was loud and clear.
k_vivek@dnaindia.net
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Small story on management lesson
A new vacuum cleaner salesman knocked on the door on the first house of the street. A tall lady answered the door.
Before she could speak, the enthusiastic salesman barged into the living room and opened a big black plastic bag and poured all the cow droppings onto the carpet.
"Madam, if I cannot clean this up with the use of this new powerful Vacuum cleaner, I will EAT all this dung!" exclaimed the eager salesman.
"Do you need chilly sauce or ketchup with that" asked the lady.
The bewildered salesman asked, "Why, madam?"
"There's no electricity in the house..." said the lady.
MORAL: Gather all requirements and resources before working on any project and committing to the client...!!!
Before she could speak, the enthusiastic salesman barged into the living room and opened a big black plastic bag and poured all the cow droppings onto the carpet.
"Madam, if I cannot clean this up with the use of this new powerful Vacuum cleaner, I will EAT all this dung!" exclaimed the eager salesman.
"Do you need chilly sauce or ketchup with that" asked the lady.
The bewildered salesman asked, "Why, madam?"
"There's no electricity in the house..." said the lady.
MORAL: Gather all requirements and resources before working on any project and committing to the client...!!!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
HOW GREEN IS YOUR COMPUTER?
Reducing carbon emissions is the order of the day.
From spiralling fuel prices to global warming, almost everything seems to be forcing us to quit our energy-intensive, pollution-causing habits. As we blame gas guzzling SUVs and electricity-thirsty plasma screens, we don’t even notice the little power consuming gadgets that quietly contribute to the growing menace. But there is a way of retaining computing power while cutting electricity bills and reducing our carbon footprint: 1 The next time you buy a computer or laptop, check if it is Energy Star rated. Most electric and electronic devices, from household devices to nifty netbooks—are usually Energy Star compliant. This means that they use about 20-30% less energy than their non-rated brethren.
2 Also check if the device is RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances directive) compliant. This is usually mentioned both on the box and the body of the device. Although RoHS isn’t related directly to electricity use, what it means is that your device carries very little of toxic substances. This ensures that when you dispose of an electronic device, it doesn’t leak harmful toxins into the soil.
3 Once your computer is ready for use, make sure you plug it in only when you want to use it. Even if your device is switched off, there is always some power leakage if it’s plugged into the power supply.
4 Don’t leave your computer on 24 hours a day, and don’t leave it connected to the charger when the battery is already fully charged. While the former ensures that power isn’t needlessly wasted, the latter will help the batteries last longer while giving optimum power. This is especially important as batteries contain toxic chemicals that are notoriously difficult to dispose of.
5 All computers and laptops have various energy settings. These can be accessed through the little battery icon present on the right hand corner of the window’s bar. You can use this setting to minimize the amount of power your computer uses. Switching off the screen when it’s idle for more than 5 minutes or switching off hard disks when not in use for more than 15 minutes ensures that less power is consumed without compromising on productivity.
6 Download any of the many energy-saving tools available on the Internet. These tools, usually free, help you keep track of where your computer’s energy is being wasted.
7 Check your computer’s brightness. Reducing a monitor’s brightness can significantly reduce the amount of electricity it uses.
8 Screen savers are a complete waste of energy. In stead, change your power settings so that every time your computer is idle for too long, it goes into “hibernation” or “sleep mode”.
9 It is very important to dispose of your computer responsibly. In the case of old computers, check if any of your friends or family can use some components. Companies such as Dell and HP now take your old computers if you buy a new one from them. This way you can ensure that your computer won’t make it straight into a landfill.
10 Contact e-Parisaraa (www.ewasteindia.in/ obj.asp), a Bangalore-based e-waste disposal company and send them your old computer.
ARJUN JASSAL For previous Toolkit columns, log on to www.livemint.com/toolkit www.livemint.com
From spiralling fuel prices to global warming, almost everything seems to be forcing us to quit our energy-intensive, pollution-causing habits. As we blame gas guzzling SUVs and electricity-thirsty plasma screens, we don’t even notice the little power consuming gadgets that quietly contribute to the growing menace. But there is a way of retaining computing power while cutting electricity bills and reducing our carbon footprint: 1 The next time you buy a computer or laptop, check if it is Energy Star rated. Most electric and electronic devices, from household devices to nifty netbooks—are usually Energy Star compliant. This means that they use about 20-30% less energy than their non-rated brethren.
2 Also check if the device is RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances directive) compliant. This is usually mentioned both on the box and the body of the device. Although RoHS isn’t related directly to electricity use, what it means is that your device carries very little of toxic substances. This ensures that when you dispose of an electronic device, it doesn’t leak harmful toxins into the soil.
3 Once your computer is ready for use, make sure you plug it in only when you want to use it. Even if your device is switched off, there is always some power leakage if it’s plugged into the power supply.
4 Don’t leave your computer on 24 hours a day, and don’t leave it connected to the charger when the battery is already fully charged. While the former ensures that power isn’t needlessly wasted, the latter will help the batteries last longer while giving optimum power. This is especially important as batteries contain toxic chemicals that are notoriously difficult to dispose of.
5 All computers and laptops have various energy settings. These can be accessed through the little battery icon present on the right hand corner of the window’s bar. You can use this setting to minimize the amount of power your computer uses. Switching off the screen when it’s idle for more than 5 minutes or switching off hard disks when not in use for more than 15 minutes ensures that less power is consumed without compromising on productivity.
6 Download any of the many energy-saving tools available on the Internet. These tools, usually free, help you keep track of where your computer’s energy is being wasted.
7 Check your computer’s brightness. Reducing a monitor’s brightness can significantly reduce the amount of electricity it uses.
8 Screen savers are a complete waste of energy. In stead, change your power settings so that every time your computer is idle for too long, it goes into “hibernation” or “sleep mode”.
9 It is very important to dispose of your computer responsibly. In the case of old computers, check if any of your friends or family can use some components. Companies such as Dell and HP now take your old computers if you buy a new one from them. This way you can ensure that your computer won’t make it straight into a landfill.
10 Contact e-Parisaraa (www.ewasteindia.in/ obj.asp), a Bangalore-based e-waste disposal company and send them your old computer.
ARJUN JASSAL For previous Toolkit columns, log on to www.livemint.com/toolkit www.livemint.com
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial » brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Socialism vs. Capitalism!!!
Hong Kong is just a little more than a backwater. It has no natural resources & then suddenly, one fine day, Capitalism is thrust upon it. The result? In just a few years, it goes on to become a beacon of international trade and success.
Zimbabwe was a shining star of Africa. It was known as the breadbasket of Africa with white farmers exporting food & making millions. And then suddenly, one fine day, Robert Mugabe confiscates their farmland, kicks them off, and gives the land to peasants who have no clue on how to farm the land. The result? In just a few years, it goes on to become an importer of food from an exporter of food - just to keep its starving people alive.
Which is better - Socialism or Capitalism? Or is it a wrong question to ask? Or the wrong example used? Don't worry - today's article is not heavily loaded, it just one good read ;)
Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be very liberal, and among other liberal ideals she was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs -- what her dad dismissed as "redistribution of wealth."
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch conservative, and a rich one at that - a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his, rather than benefit society.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. "You don't need to spend money on these expensive furnishings in this huge house when there are people who need to earn more than minimum wage and better food!" she lectured.
To her shock and amazement, all The Donald said in reply was "Welcome to socialism."
That's it? she thought to herself -- no argument? But before she could even think of a follow-up, he actually changed the subject! "How are you doing with your studies?" Trump asked her.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, "How is your friend Audrey doing?"
She replied, "Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over."
The Donald was closing in now. He asked Ivanka, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA."
Ivanka, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, "That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair!? I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!"
The Donald slowly smiled, winked and said gently, "Welcome to capitalism."
Zimbabwe was a shining star of Africa. It was known as the breadbasket of Africa with white farmers exporting food & making millions. And then suddenly, one fine day, Robert Mugabe confiscates their farmland, kicks them off, and gives the land to peasants who have no clue on how to farm the land. The result? In just a few years, it goes on to become an importer of food from an exporter of food - just to keep its starving people alive.
Which is better - Socialism or Capitalism? Or is it a wrong question to ask? Or the wrong example used? Don't worry - today's article is not heavily loaded, it just one good read ;)
Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be very liberal, and among other liberal ideals she was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs -- what her dad dismissed as "redistribution of wealth."
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch conservative, and a rich one at that - a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his, rather than benefit society.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. "You don't need to spend money on these expensive furnishings in this huge house when there are people who need to earn more than minimum wage and better food!" she lectured.
To her shock and amazement, all The Donald said in reply was "Welcome to socialism."
That's it? she thought to herself -- no argument? But before she could even think of a follow-up, he actually changed the subject! "How are you doing with your studies?" Trump asked her.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, "How is your friend Audrey doing?"
She replied, "Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over."
The Donald was closing in now. He asked Ivanka, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA."
Ivanka, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, "That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair!? I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!"
The Donald slowly smiled, winked and said gently, "Welcome to capitalism."
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
WAQT NAHI
Har khushi Hai Logon Ke Daman Mein,
Par Ek Hansi Ke Liye Waqt Nahi.
Din Raat Daudti Duniya Mein,
Zindagi Ke Liye Hi Waqt Nahi.
Maa Ki Loree Ka Ehsaas To Hai,
Par Maa Ko Maa Kehne Ka Waqt Nahi.
Saare Rishton Ko To Hum Maar Chuke,
Ab Unhe Dafnane Ka Bhi Waqt Nahi.
Saare Naam Mobile Mein Hain,
Par Dosti Ke Lye Waqt Nahi.
Gairon Ki Kya Baat Karen,
Jab Apno Ke Liye Hi Waqt Nahi.
Aankhon Me Hai Neend Badee,
Par Sone Ka Waqt Nahi.
Dil Hai Ghamon Se Bhara Hua,
Par Rone Ka Bhi Waqt Nahi . ( 100% fact)
Paison ki Daud Me Aise Daude,
Ki Thakne ka Bhi Waqt Nahi.
Paraye Ehsason Ki Kya Kadr Karein,
Jab Apane Sapno Ke Liye Hi Waqt Nahi.
Tu Hi Bata E Zindagi,
Iss Zindagi Ka Kya Hoga,
Ki Har Pal Marne Walon Ko,
Jeene Ke Liye Bhi Waqt Nahi.........
Par Ek Hansi Ke Liye Waqt Nahi.
Din Raat Daudti Duniya Mein,
Zindagi Ke Liye Hi Waqt Nahi.
Maa Ki Loree Ka Ehsaas To Hai,
Par Maa Ko Maa Kehne Ka Waqt Nahi.
Saare Rishton Ko To Hum Maar Chuke,
Ab Unhe Dafnane Ka Bhi Waqt Nahi.
Saare Naam Mobile Mein Hain,
Par Dosti Ke Lye Waqt Nahi.
Gairon Ki Kya Baat Karen,
Jab Apno Ke Liye Hi Waqt Nahi.
Aankhon Me Hai Neend Badee,
Par Sone Ka Waqt Nahi.
Dil Hai Ghamon Se Bhara Hua,
Par Rone Ka Bhi Waqt Nahi . ( 100% fact)
Paison ki Daud Me Aise Daude,
Ki Thakne ka Bhi Waqt Nahi.
Paraye Ehsason Ki Kya Kadr Karein,
Jab Apane Sapno Ke Liye Hi Waqt Nahi.
Tu Hi Bata E Zindagi,
Iss Zindagi Ka Kya Hoga,
Ki Har Pal Marne Walon Ko,
Jeene Ke Liye Bhi Waqt Nahi.........
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Hi
Here is another interesting service from Google. Want to know, which movie is being showed in which theater at what time? Just enter your city name. It lists everything. Really Cool! http://www.google.co.in/movies
NB: Thanks Navin (Pareek) for sharing this bit of information.
- rks
Here is another interesting service from Google. Want to know, which movie is being showed in which theater at what time? Just enter your city name. It lists everything. Really Cool! http://www.google.co.in/movies
NB: Thanks Navin (Pareek) for sharing this bit of information.
- rks
Thursday, June 19, 2008
TOP COMPANIES
TOP COMPANIES
1.Toyota
2.Google
3.Ikea
4.Ferrero
5.Johnson & Johnson
6.Tatas
Tatas is ranked higher than companies such as Walt Disney, Marks and Spencers, Xerox, Colgate-Palmolive, Sony, Honda, General Electric (GE), all of which are in the top 50.
OTHERS ON THE LIST
14th Infosys Technologies
77th Maruti Udyog (Suzuki) Ltd
107th State Bank of India
131th Hindustan Lever Ltd
147th Hero Honda Motors
161st Life Insurance Corp of India
169th Bajaj Auto
186th ONGC
191st Mahindra and Mahindra
199th Indian Oil Corp
ALSO RAN
Other Indian companies that were considered for the list, but failed to make the cut - ICICI Bank, Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Wipro, Grasim Industries, ITC, BPCL.
How they did it
The overall rankings are based on the companies’ performance on seven dimensions — workplace, citizenship, governance, products/services, innovation, leadership and performance.
1.Toyota
2.Google
3.Ikea
4.Ferrero
5.Johnson & Johnson
6.Tatas
Tatas is ranked higher than companies such as Walt Disney, Marks and Spencers, Xerox, Colgate-Palmolive, Sony, Honda, General Electric (GE), all of which are in the top 50.
OTHERS ON THE LIST
14th Infosys Technologies
77th Maruti Udyog (Suzuki) Ltd
107th State Bank of India
131th Hindustan Lever Ltd
147th Hero Honda Motors
161st Life Insurance Corp of India
169th Bajaj Auto
186th ONGC
191st Mahindra and Mahindra
199th Indian Oil Corp
ALSO RAN
Other Indian companies that were considered for the list, but failed to make the cut - ICICI Bank, Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Wipro, Grasim Industries, ITC, BPCL.
How they did it
The overall rankings are based on the companies’ performance on seven dimensions — workplace, citizenship, governance, products/services, innovation, leadership and performance.
Monday, June 16, 2008
In any Medical Emergency Call 1298 in Mumbai!
(from any telephone) in Mumbai for an
Advanced Life Support Ambulance.
Supported by Tata AIG Life, Rotary Club of Mumbai and Red Swastik Society.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Tata's rated as the sixth most Reputed Company in the World
Tatas in most reputed league
Press Trust Of India
The Tata group has emerged as the world’s sixth most reputed company in the annual “Global 200: The World’s Best Corporate Reputations” list, compiled by US-based Reputation Institute.
1.Toyota
2.Google
3.Ikea
4.Ferrero
5.Johnson & Johnson
6.Tatas
Tatas is ranked higher than companies such as Walt Disney, Marks and Spencers, Xerox, Colgate-Palmolive, Sony, Honda, General Electric (GE), all of which are in the top 50.
OTHERS ON THE LIST
14th Infosys Technologies
77th Maruti Udyog (Suzuki) Ltd
107th State Bank of India
131th Hindustan Lever Ltd
147th Hero Honda Motors
161st Life Insurance Corp of India
169th Bajaj Auto
186th ONGC
191st Mahindra and Mahindra
199th Indian Oil Corp
ALSO RAN
Other Indian companies that were considered for the list, but failed to make the cut - ICICI Bank, Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Wipro, Grasim Industries, ITC, BPCL.
How they did it
The overall rankings are based on the companies’ performance on seven dimensions — workplace, citizenship, governance, products/services, innovation, leadership and performance.
Press Trust Of India
The Tata group has emerged as the world’s sixth most reputed company in the annual “Global 200: The World’s Best Corporate Reputations” list, compiled by US-based Reputation Institute.
1.Toyota
2.Google
3.Ikea
4.Ferrero
5.Johnson & Johnson
6.Tatas
Tatas is ranked higher than companies such as Walt Disney, Marks and Spencers, Xerox, Colgate-Palmolive, Sony, Honda, General Electric (GE), all of which are in the top 50.
OTHERS ON THE LIST
14th Infosys Technologies
77th Maruti Udyog (Suzuki) Ltd
107th State Bank of India
131th Hindustan Lever Ltd
147th Hero Honda Motors
161st Life Insurance Corp of India
169th Bajaj Auto
186th ONGC
191st Mahindra and Mahindra
199th Indian Oil Corp
ALSO RAN
Other Indian companies that were considered for the list, but failed to make the cut - ICICI Bank, Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Wipro, Grasim Industries, ITC, BPCL.
How they did it
The overall rankings are based on the companies’ performance on seven dimensions — workplace, citizenship, governance, products/services, innovation, leadership and performance.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The story behind the Tata Nano
The story behind the Tata Nano
May 19, 2008
A peek into the design and creation of Nano which created history with its ingenuity
At Tata's Engineering Research Center, near the bucolic surroundings of the Tata Motors (TML) factory in Pune, India, there are two cars on display. One is a complete prototype of the Nano, the $2,500 compact car Tata unveiled in January, which has all the essentials and safety features of India's higher-priced automobiles along with a sticker price that will forever change the economics of low-cost cars. The other is a neat bisection, with the car's innards clearly visible. "Every day we invite people to come and examine the car and ask: “How can we make more savings?” says Tata Motors chief executive Ravi Kant.
That quest to build the world's cheapest car hasn't ended. The Nano should be available this fall, but the mission began back in 2003, when Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors and the $50 billion Tata conglomerate, set a challenge to build a "people's car". Tata gave an engineering team, led by 32-year-old star engineer Girish Wagh, three requirements for the new vehicle: It should be low-cost, adhere to regulatory requirements, and achieve performance targets such as fuel efficiency and acceleration capacity. The design team initially came up with a vehicle which had bars instead of doors and plastic flaps to keep out the monsoon rains. It was closer to a quadricycle than a car, and the first prototype, Wagh admits candidly, "lacked punch". Even a bigger engine, which boosted the power by nearly 20 per cent, was still dismal. "It was an embarrassment," says Wagh.
But the failure was also the catalyst for Tata's decision to build a proper car, not an upgraded scooter on four wheels or anything flimsy or cheap-looking. "We didn't want an apology for a car," says Ravi Kant. "We were conscious of the fact that whether it was a $2,500 car or not, it ought not to have looked like a $2,500 car."
Becoming a part of history
The tale of the creation and design of the Nano is one of innovation and ingenuity, both inside and outside Tata's own organisation. First, Ratan Tata called a meeting of his top parts suppliers and, after showing them the early, earnest but flawed prototypes, asked them to help. Companies including Germany's Bosch, which makes the computer that is the heart of car's engine, were sceptical. So were local Indian players.
But Tata persisted, pointing out that not only could a company's specific developments for the Nano help to make history but they could also improve their companies' businesses and bottom lines. Soon most of Tata's traditional suppliers were on board. Rane Group, for instance, makes a rack and pinion steering system. It focused on reducing the weight of the materials used, replacing the steel rod of the steering with a steel tube—a major cost-reducer. Typically, the product is made of two pieces, but it was redesigned as one to save on machining and assembling costs. According to Harish Lakshman, director of the $317 million company: "The world has seen this sort of integration of two pieces into one, but applied differently—not for a new car, and not to reduce costs".
GKN Driveline India, a subsidiary of global auto parts leader GKN, made the driveshaft—the component that transfers power from the engine to the wheel.
The team spent a year developing 32 experimental variants to create the perfect driveshaft for the Nano. It roped in designers from the company's French and Italian operations and changed the design to make it lighter and easier to manufacture. For the Nano's rear-wheel drive system, GKN designed a smaller diameter of shaft, which made it lighter and saved on material costs. "We thought if we were successful in this, we could dictate terms to the market, and every other car manufacturer would want to work with us," says Rajendra Ojha, chief executive of GKN Driveline India.
Taking the pulse of the project
All the suppliers have similar stories. And although none would disclose specific cost savings, most stuck to Tata's mandate to cut costs. That was, as Kant acknowledges, the biggest hurdle for the company—"then, now, and in the future,"—particularly as the price of raw materials like steel have more than doubled in the past four years, and the company has to follow new, tighter industry regulations. Kant, who recently led negotiations to acquire luxury auto brand Jaguar Land Rover, has little time to get involved in day-to-day details of Tata's many projects. However, with the Nano, "every cost, every component price, has to be run by me," he says.
Co-ordinating the vendors with Tata Motors' team was a whole new exercise in logistics. Wagh quickly realised it was necessary to bring everyone on board, "else it leads to last-minute heartache and delays". Every morning, he would spend an hour or two on the floor of the Pune factory, insisting that everyone involved—designers, manufacturing teams, vendor development people—be there to accelerate decision-making and problem-solving. "We had to have the pulse of the project and know exactly where the hurdles were," Wagh remembers.
Over time, Wagh's team grew to comprise some 500 engineers, an impractically large group to gather on a daily basis. So instead, a core team of five engineers gathered every day at three pm to discuss the latest developments. Each engineer represented a different part of the car: engine and transmission, body, vehicle integration, safety and regulation, and industrial design.
Attention to detail pays off
Fitting the parts of the car together required lots of little, head-breaking details, recalls Wagh. The engine, for instance, was designed three times. Initially, Wagh thought they'd buy an off-the-shelf engine and so studied all the small-capacity engines available. They were unsuitable, so in early 2005 he decided to build his own. The first was a 540 CC engine that, when fitted on the prototype, lacked the necessary power. So its capacity was increased by 9 per cent, then by another 9 per cent, before Wagh finally settled on a 623cc engine. Then the foot pedal had to be realigned to create more legroom.
The body had to be changed because Ratan Tata, over six feet tall himself, wanted it to be easy for tall people to get in and out of the car. "Imagine the plight of the body designer—he went through hundreds of iterations, then at the last minute the car length was increased by 100 millimetres!" Wagh says. The attention to detail paid off: When the car rolled onto the dais at the Auto Show in New Delhi in January, and Ratan Tata stepped out of the driver's seat with ease, it made an immediate impact.
What shook the automobile world most was the fact that the designers seem to have done the impossible: The sleek, sophisticated Nano doesn't look flimsy or inexpensive. If it had been an upgraded scooter on four wheels, Tata still would have been applauded for making a family of four safer on Indian roads. The Nano, however, affords both safety and status. "The innovation wasn't in technology," Kant recalls. "It was in a mindset change". The Nano, he adds, has put an end to all discussions of having variants of scooters or quadricycles as passenger vehicles on India's roads.
Organisational innovation
Still, the story of the Nano is not confined to its impact on the auto industry. It's a tale that illuminates the India of today—an eager, ambitious nation with a combination of engineering talent, a desire for low costs and value, and the hunger of young managers looking to break from a hidebound corporate environment. Indeed, the team that worked on the Nano—on average aged between 25 and 30—has helped to flatten Tata Motors' stodgy, multilayered management structure, which has resulted in an unexpected side-benefit Wagh calls "organisational innovation".
The factory in Singur, Bengal, is still being built, and machinery is being installed. Wagh now spends most of his time away from his Pune home, supervising the work at Singur leading up to the launch date in fall. Tata Motors is determined to succeed in its mission, Ravi Kant says. "We are hungry for growth—and innovation is a by-product of that."
Source: BusinessWeek, May 9, 2008
May 19, 2008
A peek into the design and creation of Nano which created history with its ingenuity
At Tata's Engineering Research Center, near the bucolic surroundings of the Tata Motors (TML) factory in Pune, India, there are two cars on display. One is a complete prototype of the Nano, the $2,500 compact car Tata unveiled in January, which has all the essentials and safety features of India's higher-priced automobiles along with a sticker price that will forever change the economics of low-cost cars. The other is a neat bisection, with the car's innards clearly visible. "Every day we invite people to come and examine the car and ask: “How can we make more savings?” says Tata Motors chief executive Ravi Kant.
That quest to build the world's cheapest car hasn't ended. The Nano should be available this fall, but the mission began back in 2003, when Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors and the $50 billion Tata conglomerate, set a challenge to build a "people's car". Tata gave an engineering team, led by 32-year-old star engineer Girish Wagh, three requirements for the new vehicle: It should be low-cost, adhere to regulatory requirements, and achieve performance targets such as fuel efficiency and acceleration capacity. The design team initially came up with a vehicle which had bars instead of doors and plastic flaps to keep out the monsoon rains. It was closer to a quadricycle than a car, and the first prototype, Wagh admits candidly, "lacked punch". Even a bigger engine, which boosted the power by nearly 20 per cent, was still dismal. "It was an embarrassment," says Wagh.
But the failure was also the catalyst for Tata's decision to build a proper car, not an upgraded scooter on four wheels or anything flimsy or cheap-looking. "We didn't want an apology for a car," says Ravi Kant. "We were conscious of the fact that whether it was a $2,500 car or not, it ought not to have looked like a $2,500 car."
Becoming a part of history
The tale of the creation and design of the Nano is one of innovation and ingenuity, both inside and outside Tata's own organisation. First, Ratan Tata called a meeting of his top parts suppliers and, after showing them the early, earnest but flawed prototypes, asked them to help. Companies including Germany's Bosch, which makes the computer that is the heart of car's engine, were sceptical. So were local Indian players.
But Tata persisted, pointing out that not only could a company's specific developments for the Nano help to make history but they could also improve their companies' businesses and bottom lines. Soon most of Tata's traditional suppliers were on board. Rane Group, for instance, makes a rack and pinion steering system. It focused on reducing the weight of the materials used, replacing the steel rod of the steering with a steel tube—a major cost-reducer. Typically, the product is made of two pieces, but it was redesigned as one to save on machining and assembling costs. According to Harish Lakshman, director of the $317 million company: "The world has seen this sort of integration of two pieces into one, but applied differently—not for a new car, and not to reduce costs".
GKN Driveline India, a subsidiary of global auto parts leader GKN, made the driveshaft—the component that transfers power from the engine to the wheel.
The team spent a year developing 32 experimental variants to create the perfect driveshaft for the Nano. It roped in designers from the company's French and Italian operations and changed the design to make it lighter and easier to manufacture. For the Nano's rear-wheel drive system, GKN designed a smaller diameter of shaft, which made it lighter and saved on material costs. "We thought if we were successful in this, we could dictate terms to the market, and every other car manufacturer would want to work with us," says Rajendra Ojha, chief executive of GKN Driveline India.
Taking the pulse of the project
All the suppliers have similar stories. And although none would disclose specific cost savings, most stuck to Tata's mandate to cut costs. That was, as Kant acknowledges, the biggest hurdle for the company—"then, now, and in the future,"—particularly as the price of raw materials like steel have more than doubled in the past four years, and the company has to follow new, tighter industry regulations. Kant, who recently led negotiations to acquire luxury auto brand Jaguar Land Rover, has little time to get involved in day-to-day details of Tata's many projects. However, with the Nano, "every cost, every component price, has to be run by me," he says.
Co-ordinating the vendors with Tata Motors' team was a whole new exercise in logistics. Wagh quickly realised it was necessary to bring everyone on board, "else it leads to last-minute heartache and delays". Every morning, he would spend an hour or two on the floor of the Pune factory, insisting that everyone involved—designers, manufacturing teams, vendor development people—be there to accelerate decision-making and problem-solving. "We had to have the pulse of the project and know exactly where the hurdles were," Wagh remembers.
Over time, Wagh's team grew to comprise some 500 engineers, an impractically large group to gather on a daily basis. So instead, a core team of five engineers gathered every day at three pm to discuss the latest developments. Each engineer represented a different part of the car: engine and transmission, body, vehicle integration, safety and regulation, and industrial design.
Attention to detail pays off
Fitting the parts of the car together required lots of little, head-breaking details, recalls Wagh. The engine, for instance, was designed three times. Initially, Wagh thought they'd buy an off-the-shelf engine and so studied all the small-capacity engines available. They were unsuitable, so in early 2005 he decided to build his own. The first was a 540 CC engine that, when fitted on the prototype, lacked the necessary power. So its capacity was increased by 9 per cent, then by another 9 per cent, before Wagh finally settled on a 623cc engine. Then the foot pedal had to be realigned to create more legroom.
The body had to be changed because Ratan Tata, over six feet tall himself, wanted it to be easy for tall people to get in and out of the car. "Imagine the plight of the body designer—he went through hundreds of iterations, then at the last minute the car length was increased by 100 millimetres!" Wagh says. The attention to detail paid off: When the car rolled onto the dais at the Auto Show in New Delhi in January, and Ratan Tata stepped out of the driver's seat with ease, it made an immediate impact.
What shook the automobile world most was the fact that the designers seem to have done the impossible: The sleek, sophisticated Nano doesn't look flimsy or inexpensive. If it had been an upgraded scooter on four wheels, Tata still would have been applauded for making a family of four safer on Indian roads. The Nano, however, affords both safety and status. "The innovation wasn't in technology," Kant recalls. "It was in a mindset change". The Nano, he adds, has put an end to all discussions of having variants of scooters or quadricycles as passenger vehicles on India's roads.
Organisational innovation
Still, the story of the Nano is not confined to its impact on the auto industry. It's a tale that illuminates the India of today—an eager, ambitious nation with a combination of engineering talent, a desire for low costs and value, and the hunger of young managers looking to break from a hidebound corporate environment. Indeed, the team that worked on the Nano—on average aged between 25 and 30—has helped to flatten Tata Motors' stodgy, multilayered management structure, which has resulted in an unexpected side-benefit Wagh calls "organisational innovation".
The factory in Singur, Bengal, is still being built, and machinery is being installed. Wagh now spends most of his time away from his Pune home, supervising the work at Singur leading up to the launch date in fall. Tata Motors is determined to succeed in its mission, Ravi Kant says. "We are hungry for growth—and innovation is a by-product of that."
Source: BusinessWeek, May 9, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Top Speeches
Check this web site that contains the audio and many times a written transcript of what scholars have deemed to be the top 100 speeches of the modern era.
The web site is http://www.americanrhetoric.com/newtop100speeches.htm
It is a great source of material for being inspired at how spoken words can literally change lives.
rks
The web site is http://www.americanrhetoric.com/newtop100speeches.htm
It is a great source of material for being inspired at how spoken words can literally change lives.
rks
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Blood Donation
Hi,
Recently I came across an article about a website called www.indianblooddonors.com in Hindustan Times. This site maintains an active database of Blood Donors in different parts of India. During an emergency, Patient's relative can send a request to the site for any blood group; the site administrator after verification, will forward the requester the list of donors in the city where patient is admitted.
Even you can join this site as a Donor. I have joined few days back as a donor and would like you to visit the site.
Rgds,
rks
Recently I came across an article about a website called www.indianblooddonors.com in Hindustan Times. This site maintains an active database of Blood Donors in different parts of India. During an emergency, Patient's relative can send a request to the site for any blood group; the site administrator after verification, will forward the requester the list of donors in the city where patient is admitted.
Even you can join this site as a Donor. I have joined few days back as a donor and would like you to visit the site.
Rgds,
rks
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Reducing paper wastage in the office
Ignorance is not always bliss because while you may have no idea how much your business is literally wasting away, you can be guaranteed that somewhere along the line there will be paper wasting away in your pocket – but it’s the type that will eventually make more of a noticeable and instant impact.
So what is waste all about and why should you care? Well, as a business you are committed to abide by the ‘Duty of Care’, which is basically a law that applies to all controlled waste; which is any household, commercial or industrial waste. It is your duty to ensure the safe disposal of this waste and once you start training yourself to think in an environmentally friendly way, then your first thought should be ‘how can I reduce the waste in the first place?’
In the modern age of electronic paperwork such as PDF proofs and email correspondence, it seems ludicrous that as a nation we are actually using more paper. Short emails are often printed off onto a whole sheet of A4 paper and we rarely stop to think about how this could be affecting the world on a larger scale. So what can little old you do I hear you cry. Well, the key issues to always keep in your mind are that you want to be reusing as much paper as possible, therefore maximising lifespan and cutting back wherever possible in areas such as packaging. Spell check before you print and test print one page before batch printing, use as much of the paper as possible; this means double-sided, reducing … even silly pointers like extending margins to fit more on to one page or reducing font size, all help.
When it comes to buying stationery and equipment for your office always ensure that you use environmentally friendly companies and those who will supply recycled paper. You can even find companies that will turn your waste paper, used on one side, into nifty little notepads – or why not make some yourself … using paperclips and not staples, of course!
Other paper products that make a big dent in the amount of waste you produce are of the cup variety. How many paper cups do you use each day when you head up to the water or vending machine? and let me ask you … where do the used cups end up - in a recycling bin, or just in the bin under your desk? I will hazard a guess that it’s the latter so immediately you can make a significant difference by simply using a ceramic mug or a glass. You will find most machines will accommodate one of some sort and it doesn’t take much to locate the right size – maybe just a lunchtime perusing the shelves of your local supermarket.
In the office environment the first step to becoming environmentally friendly, and pocket friendly, is education. Lead by example and if you educate your staff towards an environmental way of thinking, then the battle is almost won; you simply have to implement the processes and I guarantee you, in no time at all looking after the environment will become second nature … and nature will surely be thankful.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the author
Alice Griffin has vast and varied experience in the working world: design, print, marketing, research and publishing. She has worked for herself as well as corporate companies and her in-depth knowledge and down-to-earth approach provides direct no-nonsense advice. See more of Alice's work on her website www.keramay.co.uk
So what is waste all about and why should you care? Well, as a business you are committed to abide by the ‘Duty of Care’, which is basically a law that applies to all controlled waste; which is any household, commercial or industrial waste. It is your duty to ensure the safe disposal of this waste and once you start training yourself to think in an environmentally friendly way, then your first thought should be ‘how can I reduce the waste in the first place?’
In the modern age of electronic paperwork such as PDF proofs and email correspondence, it seems ludicrous that as a nation we are actually using more paper. Short emails are often printed off onto a whole sheet of A4 paper and we rarely stop to think about how this could be affecting the world on a larger scale. So what can little old you do I hear you cry. Well, the key issues to always keep in your mind are that you want to be reusing as much paper as possible, therefore maximising lifespan and cutting back wherever possible in areas such as packaging. Spell check before you print and test print one page before batch printing, use as much of the paper as possible; this means double-sided, reducing … even silly pointers like extending margins to fit more on to one page or reducing font size, all help.
When it comes to buying stationery and equipment for your office always ensure that you use environmentally friendly companies and those who will supply recycled paper. You can even find companies that will turn your waste paper, used on one side, into nifty little notepads – or why not make some yourself … using paperclips and not staples, of course!
Other paper products that make a big dent in the amount of waste you produce are of the cup variety. How many paper cups do you use each day when you head up to the water or vending machine? and let me ask you … where do the used cups end up - in a recycling bin, or just in the bin under your desk? I will hazard a guess that it’s the latter so immediately you can make a significant difference by simply using a ceramic mug or a glass. You will find most machines will accommodate one of some sort and it doesn’t take much to locate the right size – maybe just a lunchtime perusing the shelves of your local supermarket.
In the office environment the first step to becoming environmentally friendly, and pocket friendly, is education. Lead by example and if you educate your staff towards an environmental way of thinking, then the battle is almost won; you simply have to implement the processes and I guarantee you, in no time at all looking after the environment will become second nature … and nature will surely be thankful.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the author
Alice Griffin has vast and varied experience in the working world: design, print, marketing, research and publishing. She has worked for herself as well as corporate companies and her in-depth knowledge and down-to-earth approach provides direct no-nonsense advice. See more of Alice's work on her website www.keramay.co.uk
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Value of parents...
An 80 year old man was sitting on the sofa in his house along with his 45 years old highly educated son. Suddenly a crow perched on their window.
The Father asked his Son, "What is this?"
The Son replied "It is a crow".
After a few minutes, the Father asked his Son the 2nd time, "What is this?"
The Son said "Father, I have just now told you "It's a crow".
After a little while, the old Father again asked his Son the 3rd time, What is this?"
At this time some ex-pression of irritation was felt in the Son's tone when he said to his Father with a rebuff. "It's a crow, a crow".
A little after, the Father again asked his Son the 4th time, "What is this?"
This time the Son shouted at his Father, "Why do you keep asking me the same question again and again, although I have told you so many times 'IT IS A CROW'. Are you not able to understand this?"
A little later the Father went to his room and came back with an old tattered diary, which he had maintained since his Son was born. On opening a page, he asked his Son to read that page.When the son read it, the following words were written in the
diary :-
"Today my little son aged three was sitting with me on the sofa, when a crow was sitting on the window. My Son asked me 23 times what it was, and I replied to him all 23 times that it was a Crow. I hugged him lovingly each time h e asked me the same question again and again for 23 times. I did not at all feel irritated I rather felt affection for my innocent child".
While the little child asked him 23 times "What is this", the Father had felt no irritation in replying to the same question all 23 times and when today the Father asked his Son the same question just 4 times, the Son felt irritated and annoyed.
So..
If your parents attain old age, do not repulse them or look at them as a burden, but speak to them a gracious word, be cool, obedient, humble and kind to them. Be considerate to your parents.From today say this aloud, "I want to see my parents
happy forever. They have cared for me ever since I was a little child. They have always showered their selfless love on me.
They crossed all mountains and valleys without seeing the storm and heat to make me a person presentable in the society today". Say a prayer to God, "I will serve my old parents in the BEST way. I will say all good and kind words to my dear parents, no matter how they behave.
The Father asked his Son, "What is this?"
The Son replied "It is a crow".
After a few minutes, the Father asked his Son the 2nd time, "What is this?"
The Son said "Father, I have just now told you "It's a crow".
After a little while, the old Father again asked his Son the 3rd time, What is this?"
At this time some ex-pression of irritation was felt in the Son's tone when he said to his Father with a rebuff. "It's a crow, a crow".
A little after, the Father again asked his Son the 4th time, "What is this?"
This time the Son shouted at his Father, "Why do you keep asking me the same question again and again, although I have told you so many times 'IT IS A CROW'. Are you not able to understand this?"
A little later the Father went to his room and came back with an old tattered diary, which he had maintained since his Son was born. On opening a page, he asked his Son to read that page.When the son read it, the following words were written in the
diary :-
"Today my little son aged three was sitting with me on the sofa, when a crow was sitting on the window. My Son asked me 23 times what it was, and I replied to him all 23 times that it was a Crow. I hugged him lovingly each time h e asked me the same question again and again for 23 times. I did not at all feel irritated I rather felt affection for my innocent child".
While the little child asked him 23 times "What is this", the Father had felt no irritation in replying to the same question all 23 times and when today the Father asked his Son the same question just 4 times, the Son felt irritated and annoyed.
So..
If your parents attain old age, do not repulse them or look at them as a burden, but speak to them a gracious word, be cool, obedient, humble and kind to them. Be considerate to your parents.From today say this aloud, "I want to see my parents
happy forever. They have cared for me ever since I was a little child. They have always showered their selfless love on me.
They crossed all mountains and valleys without seeing the storm and heat to make me a person presentable in the society today". Say a prayer to God, "I will serve my old parents in the BEST way. I will say all good and kind words to my dear parents, no matter how they behave.
Vanilla Ice Cream that puzzled General motors!!!!
An Interesting Story
Never underestimate your Customers' Complaint, no matter how funny it might
seem!
This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors
and its Customer-Care Executive. Pls read on.....
A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:
'This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for
not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a
tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night,
but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the
whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive
down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a
new Pontiacand since then my trips to the store have created a problem.....
You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the
store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car
starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no
matter how silly it sounds "What is there about a Pontiacthat makes it not
start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any
other kind?" The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the
letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway.
The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well
educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just
after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice
cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after
they came back to the car, it wouldn't start.
The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got
chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car
started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.
Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's
car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue
his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end
he began to take notes: He jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type
of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc.
In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than
any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla,
being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the
store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the
store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out
the flavor.
Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it
took less time. Eureka- Time was now the problem - not the vanilla ice
cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: "vapor lock".
It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other
flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man
got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.
Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be
simple only when we find the solution, with cool thinking.
What really matters is your attitude and your perception.
Never underestimate your Customers' Complaint, no matter how funny it might
seem!
This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors
and its Customer-Care Executive. Pls read on.....
A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:
'This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for
not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a
tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night,
but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the
whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive
down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a
new Pontiacand since then my trips to the store have created a problem.....
You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the
store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car
starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no
matter how silly it sounds "What is there about a Pontiacthat makes it not
start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any
other kind?" The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the
letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway.
The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well
educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just
after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice
cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after
they came back to the car, it wouldn't start.
The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got
chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car
started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.
Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's
car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue
his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end
he began to take notes: He jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type
of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc.
In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than
any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla,
being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the
store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the
store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out
the flavor.
Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it
took less time. Eureka- Time was now the problem - not the vanilla ice
cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: "vapor lock".
It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other
flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man
got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.
Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be
simple only when we find the solution, with cool thinking.
What really matters is your attitude and your perception.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW YOUR CELLPHONE COULD DO
THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW YOUR CELLPHONE COULD DO
There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies.
Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for
survival. Check out the things that you can do with it: -
1 EMERGENCY*
The Emergency Number worldwide for **Mobile** is 112
.* If you find yourself out of coverage area of your mobile network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you,and interestingly this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked.
**Try it out.**
2 Have you locked your keys in the car? Does you car have remote keys?
This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone:
If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock.
Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
3 Hidden Battery power
Imagine your cell battery is very low , you are expecting an important call and you don't have a charger. Nokia instrument comes with a reserve battery.
To activate, press the keys
*3370#
Your cell will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell next time.
4 How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone:
* # 0 6 #
A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. when your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either.
5 Be careful while using your mobile phone
When you try to call someone through mobile phone,don't put your mobile closer
to your ears until the recipient answers.
Because directly after dialing, the mobile phone would use it's maximum
signaling power, which is: 2watts = 33dbi
Please Be Careful, Message as received (Save your brain)
Please use left ear while using cell (mobile), because if you use the right one
it will affect brain directly.
There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies.
Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for
survival. Check out the things that you can do with it: -
1 EMERGENCY*
The Emergency Number worldwide for **Mobile** is 112
.* If you find yourself out of coverage area of your mobile network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you,and interestingly this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked.
**Try it out.**
2 Have you locked your keys in the car? Does you car have remote keys?
This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone:
If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock.
Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
3 Hidden Battery power
Imagine your cell battery is very low , you are expecting an important call and you don't have a charger. Nokia instrument comes with a reserve battery.
To activate, press the keys
*3370#
Your cell will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell next time.
4 How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone:
* # 0 6 #
A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. when your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either.
5 Be careful while using your mobile phone
When you try to call someone through mobile phone,don't put your mobile closer
to your ears until the recipient answers.
Because directly after dialing, the mobile phone would use it's maximum
signaling power, which is: 2watts = 33dbi
Please Be Careful, Message as received (Save your brain)
Please use left ear while using cell (mobile), because if you use the right one
it will affect brain directly.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Subscribe my blog...
Posts
All Comments
