Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers

Courtesy of Yahoo employees, here is the internal memo sent to employees from HR head Jackie Reses (left) about a new rule rolled out today by CEO Marissa Mayer (right), which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Yahoos,
Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of great benefits and tools to make us more productive, efficient and fun. With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J, we want everyone to participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum. From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing — I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices.
To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.
Thanks to all of you, we’ve already made remarkable progress as a company — and the best is yet to come.
Jackie

The anger from impacted employees was strong,   because many felt they were initially hired with the assumption that they could work more flexibly.

Most tech companies encourage workers to stay on their campuses, offering free food and other perks. But none enforce such rules beyond staff needed to operate an office.

The issue is an interesting and controversial one, with some certain that working at home is the wave of the future, while others considering it hurtful to productivity.

The move goes against a popular workplace perk among tech companies and a wider trend toward more work-from-home options across several industries.

Technology has made collaboration easier for employees who aren't physically in the same space, and companies who back telework say it has helped cut costs and compete for wider talent pools.

"Ten years ago, it was seen more as an employee benefit. Today, businesses around the world are seeing telework as a necessity," said Ron Markezich, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's U.S. Enterprise and Partner Group. He led a 2011 Microsoft survey of more than 4,500 information workers that showed a rise in teleworking.

Having no central workplace certainly works for Automattic, the company that controls blogging behemoth WordPress. 120 employees work from their homes in 26 countries, and its leader, Matt Mullenweg, sees distributed employees as the future of work.

Mullenweg said. "Just because Yahoo can't do it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being distributed."

Even the government sector, which isn't considered an early adopter of workplace culture change, has a star teleworking model in its ranks. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office boasts that 64 percent of employees work from home under various models.

"This has really been a very strong business strategy ... and it's a big part of our culture," said Danette Campbell, the Patent and Trademark Office's senior telework adviser.

The agency says it has seen increased employee productivity and significant cost savings on real estate — and the employees love it. "This is an initiative that really is a carrot for recruiting and retaining the highest quality employees," Campbell said.

Part of the results from a 2012 Citrix survey of what office workers do while they "work" from home arguably support Yahoo's decision. 43 percent of workers said they've watched TV or a movie while teleworking, 35 percent have done household chores, and 28 percent have cooked dinner while "working."

"People still face cultural resistance from their managers and teams, or find themselves as a second-tier citizen versus those in headquarters. The same often happens in "remote offices," Mullenweg blogged. The Citrix survey showed half of workers say their boss disapproves of remote working, and only 35 percent say it's tolerated.

Which side will win out in the debate over where to work? For Internet companies not called Yahoo, the so-called future may already be here. And big companies, like Amazon, include remote leaders - Its top engineer lives on a boat that's often sailing to Hawaii.

"The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible," Mullenweg said. "If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the Internet, live on the Internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you."


Adapted from NPR and AllThingsD

No More 'Negro' For Forms And Surveys

WASHINGTON - After more than a century, the U.S. Census Bureau is dropping its use of the word "Negro" to describe black Americans in surveys.

Instead of the term that came into use during the era of racial segregation, census forms will use the more modern labels "black" or "African-American".

The change will take effect next year when the Census Bureau distributes its annual American Community Survey to more than 3.5 million U.S. households, Nicholas Jones, chief of the bureau's racial statistics branch, said in an interview.

Months of public feedback and census research concluded that few black Americans still identify with being Negro and many view the term as "offensive and outdated."

"This is a reflection of changing times, changing vocabularies and changing understandings of what race means in this country," said Matthew Snipp, a sociology professor at Stanford University, who writes frequently on race and ethnicity.

First used in the census in 1900, "Negro" became the most common way of referring to black Americans through most of the early 20th century, during a time of racial inequality and segregation. "Negro" itself had taken the place of "colored." Starting with the 1960s civil rights movement, black activists began to reject the "Negro" label and came to identify themselves as black or African-American.

For the 2010 census, the government briefly considered dropping the word "Negro" but ultimately decided against it, determining that a small segment, mostly older blacks living in the South, still identified with the term. But once census forms were mailed and some black groups protested, Robert Groves, the Census Bureau's director at the time, apologized and predicted the term would be dropped in future censuses.

When asked to mark their race, Americans are currently given a choice of five government-defined categories in census surveys, including one checkbox selection which is described as "black, African Am., or Negro." Beginning with the surveys next year, that selection will simply say "black" or "African American."

In the 2000 census, about 50,000 people specifically wrote in the word "Negro" when asked how they wished to be identified. By 2010, unpublished census data provided to the AP show that number had declined to roughly 36,000.

Adapted from NPR and The Vancouver Sun

India's first mission to Mars

NEW DELHI — India will launch its first mission to Mars this year, President Pranab Mukherjee said on Thursday.

"Several space missions are planned for 2013, including India's first mission to Mars and the launch of our first navigational satellite,'' Mukherjee told parliament.

India will send a satellite in October via an unmanned spacecraft to orbit the red planet, blasting off from the southeastern coast in a mission expected to cost about $83 million.

The spacecraft, which will be made in India, will take nine months to reach Mars.

"The mission is ready to roll,'' Deviprasad Karnik, a scientist from the India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said by phone from the city of Bangalore.

India's space exploration program began in 1962. Five years ago, its Chandrayaan satellite found evidence of water on the moon. India is now looking at landing a wheeled rover on the moon in 2014.

India's mission to Mars has drawn criticism because the country is suffering from high levels of malnutrition and power shortages, and is currently experiencing its worst slowdown in growth in ten years.

adapted from Reuters
Photo Credits: NASA

Corruption can be found everywhere (video)

You can also watch this video by clicking on the Play Button

US Secretary of State on his first trip abroad

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry began his first trip abroad on Sunday.

Kerry left Washington and headed to London - the first stop on his 9-country, 11-day tour.

The State Department says Kerry will meet with various international officials in London and  Syria will be a key topic of discussion.

Kerry also plans to meet with the leadership of the Syrian Opposition Coalition during the trip.

From London, he will head to Berlin, then on to Paris where he will discuss Washington's ongoing cooperation with France and other countries in supporting troubled Mali.

Kerry's next stops will be Rome, Ankara and Cairo, where the State Department says he will push for greater political consensus, and meet with top Arab League officials to consult on shared challenges in the region.

Kerry then will go to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi before ending his trip with a stop in Doha, Qatar.

edited fom AP

General Electric to Invest $1 Billion in Nigeria

 L-R: Hon. Minister of Trade and Investment, President/CEO GE Africa and Global Chairman/CEO of General Electric Mr. Jeff Immelt during signing of $1billion deal with GE on Manufacturing, Assembly plant project in Abuja



ABUJA — American energy giant General Electric will invest $1 billion in Nigeria and triple the country’s electrical output over the next 10 years.

 Nigeria is a country that runs on generators. Most people don’t have access to electricity.

 On CNN last week, President Goodluck Jonathan said the country’s daily electrical problems will be solved by the end of the year. 

Clement Nwankwo, the executive director of the Policy and Legal Advocacy Center in Abuja, said that the president doesn’t realize how bad Nigeria's electrical system is.

“It’s possible the sound of his generator is far away from his house and office, so he doesn’t know when the switch is made between generators and public power supply, but there is very poor power supply to the generality of homes in Nigeria,” Nwankwo said.

Nigeria’s power sector is notoriously corrupt, he said, adding that every Nigerian leader claims to be able to stop the blackouts in a single year, and nothing changes.

However, Nigeria’s Minister of Trade and Investment Olusegun Aganga said this time will be different because General Electric will partner with private Nigerian companies and take over one of Nigeria’s major power plants. It will build turbines and a new factory and explore Nigeria’s abundant natural oil and gas supplies.

Aganga said the plan will work because it not just about generating megawatts, it's about boosting the national economy and encouraging investment.

“This is the beginning of much more to come. That is a clear message to the country, a clear message to Nigerians and a clear message to the international investor community. It’s not just about power. It’s more than that. It’s about manufacturing,” said Aganga.

In a speech Thursday in the capital, GE Chairman Jeff Immelt said GE will invest $250 million immediately. The projects will create more than 2,000 jobs in Nigeria and nearly all of them will go to Nigerians.

“The time is now. The place is Nigeria. The how is the local team. Now the focus on everything is the execution,” said Immelt.

In the Nigerian development world, the “execution” of projects is usually where things are stalled by corruption or violence. 

Last year, legislators produced a report that detailed how public funds got stolen by oil officials and fuel companies. The money was intended to subsidize the cost of fuel for average Nigerians, but instead, $6.7 billion disappeared. Much of it went to companies that did not work in the fuel sector at all.

In the Niger Delta, where the oil is and where GE’s new plant will be, oil companies say they lose as much as a billion dollars in revenue a month to oil theft and sabotage

                                  Nigeria’s President welcomes GE Vice Chairman John Rice to the Presidential Villa, Abuja

American Airlines, the world's largest airline (audio)

You can also listen to this audio file by clicking on the Play Button

Is Russia Marked For Meteors?

 A hole in the ice of Chebarkul Lake where a meteor reportedly struck the lake near Chelyabinsk, about 930 miles east of Moscow - AP photo

 

  Friday's spectacular meteor impact near Chelyabinsk, Russia, prompted many people to recall that a similar (though much bigger) such incident occurred at Tunguska in Siberia just over a century ago. Another big one, though less known, occurred at a place called Sikhote-Alin, also in Russia, in 1947.

The so-called 'Tunguska event' of 1908 produced an explosion comparable to a hydrogen bomb, flattening hundreds of square miles of forest. Russia's Pravda was quick to draw comparisons with Friday's event.

In an interview with the newspaper, Maxim Shingarkin, deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Natural Resources, Environment and Ecology, was quoted as saying the "the phenomenon that we could observe in Chelyabinsk this morning was similar, although it was of a much smaller scale than Tunguska."

So, is Russia just one giant meteor magnet?

In a way yes, says Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

"The best answer is just that Russia is by far the largest land area in the world and therefore it's just a greater likelihood that it will get struck several times than any other places," he says.

Scientists tracking DA14, but didn't know about the Chelyabinsk object, Chapman says, adding that there's no connection between the two other than an "amazing coincidence" that they are happening on the same day.

                                                                                                                                             NPR map

And what's the difference between an asteroid and a meteor? Let's define the terms:

Asteroid : a rocky body with a regular orbit around the sun. Most commonly found in the zone between Mars & Jupiter called the Main Belt. There are asteroids in the Main Belt as large as 600 miles across.

Meteoroid : On average much smaller than asteroids. Typically the size of a pea or smaller. No regular orbit. Typically debris from a comet or asteroid.

Meteor : A shooting star. The period during which a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes. Refers to the light phenomena associated with intense heat and friction.

Meteorite : A meteoroid that survives the intense heat of passing through the Earth's atmosphere. Once a meteor touches the ground it becomes a meteorite.

So the big differences are these:

• Asteroids have regular and predictable orbits.
• Meteors can come from asteroids, but also come from comets and their debris.

According to NASA, more than 100 tons of dust and sand sized particles slam into the Earth's atmosphere every day. Larger bodies, the size of a car, hit the Earth’s atmosphere, burning up in a bright fireball visible with the naked eye.

Want something bigger? That's when things get scary. Every 2000 years a meteor or asteroid the size of a football field makes it through the atmosphere and causes widespread and catastrophic damage.

Over the course of a few million year extinction level events are possible. Remember dinosaurs? It is believed a meteor struck the Earth near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out most of the dinosaurs.

Did the Russian meteorite come from the asteroid DA-14 that came so close to the Earth? The European Space Agency say no. But the timing and proximity of these two space events will always be linked in our minds.

Copyright 2013 Scripps Media, Inc.
adapted from NPR
 

Asteroid will pass very near Earth (video)

You can also watch this video by clicking on the Play Button

Pope to step down on February 27 (video)

You can also watch this video by clicking on the Play Button

Time to earn $ 1 million dollars

How long would it take an average person to earn $1m?

 To find out The Economist looked at how much the main breadwinner in an average household makes each year (before tax).

On this measure, USA creates the most millionaires (around 5m households, or 4% of the total). South of the border, Mexicans can expect to work for three centuries to earn the same.

 For those struggling to imagine $1m, consider this: stacked up and denominated in $100 notes, it reaches over a meter high and weighs ten kilograms.

from The Economist

US Airways and American Airlines near merger

 (Reuters) - US Airways Group Inc and AMR Corp, the parent of American Airlines, are nearing an $11 billion merger that will create the world's largest airline.

Under terms of a deal that are still being finalized, US Airways Chief Executive Doug Parker will become CEO, while AMR's Tom Horton will serve as non-executive chairman of the board until spring of 2014, when the combined company holds its first annual meeting.

The deal will come more than 14 months after AMR Corp filed for bankruptcy in November 2011.

The merger will value the combined carrier at between $10.5 billion and $11 billion, and will give AMR creditors 72 percent of the ownership in the new company and US Airways shareholders the rest.

The board of each airline will meet next Wednesday to vote on the proposed deal. Negotiations are continuing and could still be delayed or fall apart.

The AMR creditors committee will meet on Monday in New York and will continue discussions as the airlines finalize negotiations.

A combination with US Airways will create the world's top airline by passenger traffic and help the two carriers better compete with rivals United Continental Holdings and Delta Air Lines Inc.

US Airways will follow through on its agreement with AMR labor unions last year that the combined carrier will be branded American Airlines and be based in Fort Worth, Texas, where AMR is currently based, sources said. US Airways has its headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.

The airlines are estimating that a merger will bring about $1 billion in revenue and cost benefits.

A combined American-US Airways will provide the scale to match bigger rivals that are upgrading service and expanding international routes. The merged company will have revenue of $38.69 billion based on 2012 figures, ahead of United Continental, which had revenue of $37.15 billion last year.

The new American will have a solid presence on the important U.S. East and West coasts and on North Atlantic routes, given American's revenue-sharing joint venture with British Airways and Iberia.

from Reuters

Investigators expose global football fixing scam

Read the article and then jot down all the (1) legal and  
(2) sports-related words you find


Hundreds of soccer matches have been fixed in a global betting scam run from Singapore, police said yesterday , in a blow to the image of the world's most popular sport and a multi-billion dollar industry.

About 680 suspicious matches including qualifying games for the World Cup and European Championships, and the Champions League for top European club sides, have been identified in an inquiry by European police forces, the European anti-crime agency Europol, and national prosecutors.

"This is a sad day for European football," said Rob Wainwright, director of Europol. "This is now an integrity issue for football. Those responsible for running the games should hear the warnings."

The world's most popular sport, soccer is played on every continent.The World Cup and Europe's Champions League are beamed worldwide and generate billions of dollars for national associations, clubs and broadcasters.

Top players such as Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Argentina  and Cristiano Ronaldo, a Portuguese international who plays his club soccer for Real Madrid, are household names.

The matches in question, some of which have already been subject to successful criminal prosecutions, were played between 2008 and 2011, the investigators said. About 380 of the suspicious matches were played in Europe, and a further 300 were identified in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Corruption linked to Asian betting syndicates and organized crime has long been seen as a threat to the game, but Monday's announcement underlines the scale of the problem.

Ralf Mutschke, Director of Security for world soccer's governing body FIFA, said sports bodies and prosecutors needed to work more closely together.

"The support of law enforcement bodies, legal investigations, and ultimately tougher sanctions are required, as currently there is low risk and high gain potential for the fixers," said Mutschke, a German former police officer.

Criminal gangs are believed to be involved in match-fixing networks, using them as a way to launder cash. Last year the head of an anti-corruption watchdog estimated that $1 trillion was gambled on sport each year - or $3 billion a day - with most coming from Asia and wagered on soccer matches.

Singapore Connection

A German investigator described a network involving couriers ferrying bribes around the world, paying off players and referees in the fixing which involved about 425 corrupt officials, players and serious criminals in 15 countries.

"We have evidence for 150 of these cases, and the operations were run out of Singapore with bribes of up to 100,000 euros paid per match," said Friedhelm Althans, chief investigator for police in the German city of Bochum.

Singapore police said last month that they were helping Italian authorities to investigate alleged soccer match fixing involving a Singaporean, but said he had not been arrested or charged with any offense there.

German investigators said international matches were implicated as were games in Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Bosnia, Slovenia and Canada. Suspicious games had also been identified in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Fourteen people have already been convicted in Germany in connection with the investigation.

Austrian prosecutors are investigating 20 people, including players, on suspicion of fraud and money laundering linked to fixing and betting on soccer matches, a spokesman for prosecutors in the city of Graz said.

Investigators said no names of players or clubs would be released while the investigation proceeded. However, the fixing also included top flight national league matches in several European countries, as well as two Champions League matches, including one played in Britain.

UEFA, European soccer's governing body, said it expected to receive further information from Europol in the coming days.

"As part of the fight against the manipulation of matches, UEFA is already cooperating with the authorities on these serious matters as part of its zero tolerance policy towards match-fixing in our sport," it added.

England's Football Association said it was not aware of any "credible reports into suspicious Champions League fixtures in England."

Soccer has been affected by bribery scandals in the past, with the English game suffering in the 1960s and Italian soccer hit by a series of fixing cases in recent years.

The growth of televised sport and technology that allows gamblers to bet during a match have created fresh opportunities for fraudsters with links to organized crime.

Corruption goes beyond soccer. Three Pakistani international cricketers were jailed in Britain in 2011 for their part in a  scam where players agree to rig a specific part of a game, so-called "spot fixing".

Tip of the Iceberg

Althans said that while German police had concrete proof of 8 million euros ($11 million) in gambling profits from the match fixing, this was probably the tip of the iceberg.

Investigators described how gang members immediately subordinate to the Singapore-based leader of a worldwide network were each tasked with maintaining contacts with corrupt players and officials in their parts of the world.

Laszlo Angeli, a Hungarian prosecutor, gave an example of how the scam worked. "The Hungarian member, who was immediately below the Singapore head, was in touch with Hungarian referees who could then attempt to swing matches at which they officiated around the world," he said.

Accomplices would then place bets on the internet or by phone with bookmakers in Asia, where bets that would be illegal in Europe were accepted. "One fixed match might involve up to 50 suspects in 10 countries on separate continents," said Althans.

"Even two World Cup qualification matches in Africa, and one in Central America, are under suspicion," Althans added.

adapted from Reuters and VOA

5 in 5 - Future smart devices (video)

You can also watch this video by clicking on the Play Button

A school that makes a difference (video)

A school in Washington DC is making a difference for young African-American girls. Many of their families live below the poverty line of $35,000 for a family of four, in communities where more than half of all students drop out before they reach high school.





You can also watch this video by clicking on the Play Button

Mobile devices and the internet

The year 2002 was a turning-point for the telephone, invented 126 years earlier. For the first time, the number of mobile phones overtook the number of fixed-line ones, making the telephone a predominantly mobile technology.

During 2013 the same thing will happen to the internet, just 44 years after its ancestor, ARPANET, was first switched on. The number of internet-connected mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, will exceed the number of desktop and laptop personal computers (PCs) in use, according to figures from Morgan Stanley (see chart above)

IDATE, a consultancy, says that the number of people accessing the internet via mobile devices will overtake the number using fixed-line connections in mid-2014.

That does not mean that mobile devices will displace PCs altogether. The rise of mobile phones, after all, did not mean that fixed-line phones stopped working, even if their number is now in decline.  Yet the centre of gravity of the internet will shift as mobile devices are more popular and more capable,

All this will have far-reaching consequences for technology companies, which are being divided into winners and losers by the growing significance of mobile devices.

The biggest winner in all this, without question, is Apple. Its iPad dominates the fast-growing market for tablet computers, and its iPhone accounts for nearly three-quarters of the profits of the mobile-phone industry, despite accounting for less than 10% of global handset sales.

The biggest losers are also obvious: the giants of the PC era such as Dell, HP and Microsoft; mobile-device makers such as Nokia and RIM, which were too slow to put the internet at the heart of their products; and games-console makers such as Sony and Nintendo, which are suffering as gaming goes mobile too.

Most companies, however, are somewhere in the middle. The question now is how easily they can shift their business models towards mobile.

Twitter is well on its way: a majority of users of its microblogging service already use it from mobile devices. Amazon, eBay and other online retailers are also well placed, since a mobile device means you can shop from anywhere.

The biggest question marks hang over Facebook and Google. Both rely on online advertising for the bulk of their revenues. The problem is that advertising rates are much lower on mobile devices than on the desktop web. As a result, the amount of ad revenue a website makes from a mobile user is only about 20% of what it makes from a desktop user.

The rise of the mobile internet  will reshape the technology industry and will also transform the way people use and perceive the internet. Mobile telephony meant that instead of calling a place you could call a person.  Similarly, the internet - which used to be seen as a separate place accessed through a PC screen - is fast becoming an extra layer of reality, accessed by a device that is always with you. In the coming years that will be the most profound change of all.

from The Economist