Category: Current Affairs

Ever wondered what to tip?  I found a good guide at Tipping Etiquette Guide at FindaLink.net.

Asians and Americans see different things in the same picture.  When shown a picture of fish swimming, Japanese subjects described the stream, the rocks and then the fish.  Americans described the fish first.  Americans looked at the fish first and spent more time looking at them.  Japanese looked at the whole scene and then the fish.

Interesting applications for all of life and in particular international business.

Asians, Americans Show Perceptual Divide – Yahoo! News.

The Economist.com is my favorite business/news/political magazine.  One of the reasons I like it is because it’s not afraid to have an opinion and take a stance.  Unlike most newspapers that claim to be neutral and aren’t, the Economist very openly takes a side.  They also report about topics of real interest to me and they somehow make topics I wouldn’t normally find interesting very relevant to me. 

However, as I was reading last week’s edition, I had to laugh out loud at the blatantly biased and gratuitous comments.  For example, in an article about how Bush works out a lot, "The jock-in-chief", they write:

For Democrats the main qualification for a top job is "intelligence" – hence their constant complaint that Republican presidents are too dumb for the job.  But for Republicans the most important qualification is "character" – by which they mean an ability to hit balls and bang heads.

Or how about this one about the mob, "Gotti go now?"

She and her mother, also called Victoria (they are not an imaginative family, names-wise), were both in court this week and on message.

No doubts about where they stand, I guess!

Women continue to leave the technology fields and it’s not just in the US.  According to this article, Women ‘undervalued’ in science, in The Register, it exists in the UK as well:

In June this year, the Scientific Women’s Academic Network launched a six-point charter, aimed at changing the academic culture in the UK in a bid to stop so many women leaving the profession. The network said women often felt undervalued by colleagues and unsupported in their career progression.

LifeStraw is an entire purification system in what looks like a fat drinking straw.  It was designed by a Danish group to be produced for under $2 a straw in order to be marketable for the developing world where water borne diseases still kill thousands.

LifeStraw purifies water instantly for under $2 a year – Engadget – www.engadget.com.

Why are conversations about sex so hard to have?   (That’s a rhetorical question, I think.) This article by a doctor about the conversations he has with his adolescent patients is funny, but it just illustrates how hard these conversations are to have.  It’s Time for the Truth, When Body Clock Strikes 13 – New York Times.  It’s sad as well as funny when a boy has to ask his doctor whether Mountain Dew kills sperm or not. 

What struck me most initially was that this women was speaking up even though she hasn’t given up.  She is still married to the man who beat her 60 times in eight years and while she thinks the beatings are wrong, she still wants to be married to him.  Staying in a situation while publically committing to changing it is a very difficult situation to be in!  Most people condemn a situation after they leave it.  Sticking around to change it takes guts. 

I’m not saying she should stay and be beaten.  I’m just saying that not just walking (or running) away while being openly critical of the situation must take a very strong woman.

Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa – New York Times.

Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford this year and while his advise is hard to follow, it is inspirational.    He says:

And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

He says every morning you should ask yourself if what you plan to do today is what you’d do if you only had a day left to live.  If you answer "no" too many days in a row, you need to find something different to do.

Here’s the whole talk: ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says.

I don’t know why, but most of my female friends leave their high tech jobs in their 30s.  Most of them do not leave to spend more time with their children, as the predominate urban legend goes.  Why do they leave?  I don’t think women are more fed up then men, I think women are more able to leave a field.  Men might change jobs, but women are more likely to feel empowered to quit altogether, quit a job, quit a career, or leave for a lower paying job.  Men, I think, have a much harder time quitting.

This article, Where Have All The Women Gone?,
says we are spending too much money trying to bring in talent to the
country and worrying about women entering into technical fields when they should
be worrying about why women leave technical fields.   

I think we should focus our efforts on changing IT jobs not on getting women to stay in unpleasant jobs.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we work (other than the obvious – making money) and how you can figure out what you would be happiest doing.  Assuming you have to work because you aren’t independently wealthy, what should you do?  What would make you happiest?  What job would make you want to get out of bed and get to work as soon as possible? So far, theories run from whatever will make you the most money (like the philosophy in Die Broke) to doing the work you love the most. So if you like playing softball, getting as close to softball as you can – maybe coaching it.

Curious, I started thinking about careers and why people do them.  Take a career that’s not usually imposed on someone, say writing.  Writers, especially fiction book writers, usually write because they want to.  Nobody forces them to write, nobody asks them to write and nobody hires them to write.  And they only get paid if they are successful. So why do they do it? Do they love the result or the process?  I’d argue that they love the result because the common urban legend is the writer’s suffer a lot of writer’s block.  This article, 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work, also implies that writer’s force themselves to write.  So if people choose a profession that is hard, yet you have to assume they are satisfied, because at any point they could give up writing and go work at the local bookstore for probably more money, why do they do it?

• Is it the hopes of reward?  Do they write because they think they are going to win the lottery, i.e. write a bestseller?  Writing a bestseller is a lot more work than buying a lottery ticket!
• If we assume it’s to sell a bestseller, is it the money?
• Or the fame?
• Or is it something completely different like the satisfaction of seeing a book in print? This might explain the sucess of the self publishing business.
• Or do they have a burning idea they have to share?
• Or have they run out of books in their favorite genre and they want to contribute more?
• Or do they think they can write a better book than anybody else?
• Or do they have a burning point to make?  (Different concept than the burning idea to share!)

Whatever it is, I think understanding why writers write might give me more insight into how to find the career that is most fulfilling.