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| A Sotheby's employee looks at an artwork by Adel Abidin called 'I'm Sorry' at Sotheby's auction rooms in London |
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9/30/2017
I'm sorry! (audio)
From Dishwasher to Millionaire
When Tashitaa Tufaa first arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, from Ethiopia in 1992, he remembers craning his head skyward in disbelief. Looking up at the tallest skyscraper he had ever seen, he began counting the stories until he couldn’t count anymore. Eventually, he found out the building had 55 floors.
It was a long way from Negele Arsi district in the Oromia region of Ethiopia where he grew up. As a child, he worked alongside his 13 siblings on the family farm.
Now he’d have to do other types of work. He thought he had a fluent command of English that would open doors in the job market. “But I found out that I didn't after I came to Minneapolis,” he said.
So he began as a dishwasher at the Hilton Hotel, earning $5.65 an hour. Eventually, he held as many as three jobs at once, including ones at manufacturing companies and another as a security guard.
The small paychecks of those days are long gone for Tufaa, who is now president of a successful bus company.
Each day, Metropolitan Transportation Network carries more than 15,000 children to schools, field trips and other destinations in Minneapolis and other Minnesota cities. The multimillion-dollar transportation company has more than 300 employees and recently moved to a new, larger operations center.
The road to success hasn’t been easy, but Tufaa believes his experience shows that for those willing to work hard, anything is possible. “I do not believe in giving up”, he said.
Tufaa came to the U.S. as a refugee. He had been a school teacher in Ethiopia and was also active in politics. Following the fall of Ethiopia’s communist Derg regime in 1991, he helped campaign for the Oromo Liberation Front in his native Oromia region.
When his party withdrew from the transitional government after a fallout with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, Tufaa no longer felt safe in the country and decided to leave.
“I was a political asylee. I didn't like or agree with the Ethiopian government,” he said.
While working his menial jobs in the U.S. he also earned his master’s degree in political science and international relations from the University of Minnesota. After obtaining the degree, he worked for the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority.
“I was a political asylee. I didn't like or agree with the Ethiopian government,” he said.
While working his menial jobs in the U.S. he also earned his master’s degree in political science and international relations from the University of Minnesota. After obtaining the degree, he worked for the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority.
Dishwashing and factory work were not enough to provide for his family, so he took an evening and weekend job as a shuttle driver, transporting senior citizens and people with disabilities to and from work.
“As a result, I fell in love with transportation and I call myself an addicted driver,” he said with a chuckle.
He left his city job after a conflict with a supervisor and began driving taxis. But other drivers complained that he worked long hours and favored shorter trips to avoid long queues at the airport. Eventually, the taxi company fired him and, with no other options, he decided to strike out on his own.
“As a result, I fell in love with transportation and I call myself an addicted driver,” he said with a chuckle.
He left his city job after a conflict with a supervisor and began driving taxis. But other drivers complained that he worked long hours and favored shorter trips to avoid long queues at the airport. Eventually, the taxi company fired him and, with no other options, he decided to strike out on his own.
“To do a business, you need to face a challenge. You can't start a business if there is luxury,” Tufaa said.
After sketching out their idea for a transportation company in 2003, Tufaa and his brother began delivering handwritten letters to public school districts seeking contracts. He started with his wife’s single minivan transporting homeless children.
Tufaa — who had once aspired to be a diplomat — says his negotiation and bargaining skills paid off. Their service was rated as excellent by public school districts and the business grew.
The business has steadily grown and now includes a fleet of nearly 300 buses and vans that take children to schools across the state. In 2012 Tufaa was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Metropolitan Economic Development Association in Minneapolis.
Since the beginning, Tufaa says, he prioritized the safety and punctuality of the children his company serves.
The business has steadily grown and now includes a fleet of nearly 300 buses and vans that take children to schools across the state. In 2012 Tufaa was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Metropolitan Economic Development Association in Minneapolis.
Since the beginning, Tufaa says, he prioritized the safety and punctuality of the children his company serves.
“I will not accept for my kids to arrive in school one minute late,” the father of five said. “I make sure that is the case for all the children we serve.”
Minnesota has long, snowy winters. Although buses typically drop off kids and leave, MTN pays its drivers to wait until the children get inside their homes or are met by an adult.
Employees marvel at his ability to grow the business without sacrificing his values.
Minnesota has long, snowy winters. Although buses typically drop off kids and leave, MTN pays its drivers to wait until the children get inside their homes or are met by an adult.
Employees marvel at his ability to grow the business without sacrificing his values.
“When I joined everything all I was hearing was, ‘We want to be more like a family,’” said Charles Marks, an assistant transportation manager at the company. “We kept that tradition and that makes the drivers come back every year. I always keep an empty chair next to my desk for anyone who wants to come and talk.”
Tufaa believes in building and empowering communities to be self-sufficient. He is active in the local Oromo community.
Tufaa believes in building and empowering communities to be self-sufficient. He is active in the local Oromo community.
Estimated at 40,000 by the Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota is home to the largest Oromo population outside of Ethiopia in the U.S.
Tufaa advises and mentors employees interested in starting their own business. In fact, since 2012, three former employees have started their own successful transportation companies.
“The greatest gift I think you can give people like you is that it can be done and I feel like I've done that,” Tufaa said. This, he says, is a lesson for all African immigrants pursuing their American dream.
“When a person is free, you can do anything,” he said. “So appreciate what you have, work very hard, and get rid of the wrong pride we have back home that if you have a college degree you have to be in a professional line of work and you can't dig the potatoes or do the dishes. Work is work and go out there and do what is available. Be proud of it.”
9/26/2017
Saudi Arabia will allow women to drive (captions and article)
Saudi Arabia will allow women to drive for the first time in the ultra-conservative kingdom, ending a policy criticized worldwide as a human rights violation.
Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world to bar females from driving, has received negative attention for years for detaining women who defied its ban.
Manal al-Sharif was arrested for breaking the law in 2011 when she filmed herself cruising behind the wheel of a car and uploaded the video to YouTube. Eventually, she was released from jail after an international outcry. She said the arrest only made her more determined to speak out for Saudi women's rights. Her passion led her to write a memoir, Daring to Drive: a Saudi Woman's Awakening.
"My society is very conservative. Women are treated as minors who need protection and permission of men for almost everything," al-Sharif said in an interview in July.
Al-Sharif explained that when 47 women tried to break an accepted norm by driving on Nov. 6, 1990, the religious establishment denounced them as immoral women who wanted to destroy Saudi society.
Activists are celebrating the news as a major development in a country where women face extreme social and personal restrictions as a result of the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.
The United States welcomed Saudi Arabia’s announcement on Tuesday, with State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying the U.S. is “happy” with the move. But he did not comment on other restrictions Saudi women face in the kingdom. For example, they are not allowed to travel without the permission of a male guardian and must cover their hair and bodies in public.
The progressive developments follow a decade of incremental change in Saudi Arabia. More women are working in retail and hold top executive positions in the Saudi stock exchange and Dammam Airport. Women can now also be appointed to the Shoura Council as well as run in municipal elections.
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9/25/2017
The technology that changed everything
For all our current anxiety about robots taking human jobs, it’s worth noting that only one of the 270 detailed occupations listed in the 1950 US Census has been eliminated by automation: The elevator operator.
The automatic elevator was the autonomous car of its day: It changed the way we travel through our everyday lives, and made the modern city possible. And the technology that made it all possible? The humble elevator button.
The rise (and rise) of the elevator button
1850s: The first elevators appear in department stores, office buildings, and luxury apartment buildings, bringing with them a new type of service employee: the elevator operator.
1880s: The first push-button elevators start to appear in private residences and other places where it wasn’t economical to employ an operator.
1915: Manufacturers install an automatic recording informing passengers that they are in an automated elevator, to fend off confusion or panic.
1936: New York City elevator operators go on strike, preventing more than a million office workers from getting to work.
1945: Another strike!
1950s: The shift toward operator-less elevators begins to take hold
1960s and beyond: Elevator operators are increasingly a rarity.
9/23/2017
Central Mexico's powerful earthquake (audio)
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9/20/2017
Today's American teens
Compared to teens from the 70s, 80s and 90s, today’s teens “are taking longer to engage in both the pleasures and the responsibilities of adulthood,” said Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the lead author on a study based on 40 years of survey data published Tuesday in the journal Child Development.
“The whole developmental pathway has slowed down,” she said, with today’s 18-year-olds living more like 15-year-olds once did.
The study relies on seven nationally representative surveys repeated with 8 million teens, ages 13-19, over several decades.
Twenge and her co-author Heejung Park, assistant professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College, say the trends all point in the same direction – a slowing of teen development that matches a well-documented slowing of young adult development. While people in their early 20s now often act more like teens, young teens often act more like children.
Some of the changes recorded among younger teens surveyed in 2010-2016, compared to those surveyed in the early 1990s:
• 29% had sex, down from 38%.
• 29% drank alcohol, down from 56%.
• 55% worked for pay, down from 76%.
• 73% had drivers’ licenses, down from 88%.
• 63% dated, down from 86%.
The shifts are seen in all economic groups and all parts of the country.
The lure of the internet – which might keep kids glued to screens instead of out driving and dating – probably has had some recent impact, Twenge said. And more attentive parenting, sometimes derided as “helicopter parenting,” certainly has played a role, she said.
Overall, today’s youths seem to be adopting a “slow life strategy” -- the opposite of “live fast and die young” – in a culture in which parents invest more attention in fewer children and life expectancies are longer, Twenge and her co-author conclude.
“There are advantages and disadvantages,” she said. “One of the advantages is that it’s safer.”
One disadvantage is that teens and youths often arrive at colleges and jobs unprepared for independence, Twenge said.
The trade-off between keeping teens safe and encouraging independence and resilience is a constant concern among today's parents, said Susan Borison, editor-in-chief of Your Teen Magazine.
“There’s something remarkably lovely,” about the close relationships many parents and teens now have, thanks in part to the constant connection made possible by technology, Borison said. “But the negative is that we are not letting our kids develop the capacity to problem solve and cope.”
9/18/2017
The Early Life of Bill Gates
At 31 Bill Gates became the youngest billionaire ever. At 39 he was the richest man on earth. What have some of the milestones along his path been?
Gates has had an unusual confluence of circumstances, family, luck, personal qualities, and perfect timing that have shaped his path. From age 8 Gates had access to a computer at his school, where he could learn to program - a luxury very few people at all had at that point in history - which happened to be the dawn of personal computing. This opportunity for an early start and his own ambition and perseverance (which got him banned from school for a while for hacking), helped him clock in10,000 hours of practice before even finishing high school.
Gates worked 16-hour days and never stopped learning and improving himself. He reads one book a week and believes he can improve the way he thinks by following the advice outlined in John Medina’s book Brain Rules which summarizes what scientists know about the brain and then offers practical ideas for our daily lives.
Luck, of course, has also played a part in his story. Like meeting Paul Allen while he was still a teenager, or working with Steve Jobs and being inspired to create Windows.
This infographic created by Anna Vital outlines some of the key moments of Bill Gates’ early life.
Infographic by Anna Vital / fundersandfounders.com
9/16/2017
Global Warming Research in Greenland (video)
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9/15/2017
Fighting to Keep 'Dreamers' in US (audio)
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Foster kids staying in mansion after Irma
After Hurricane Irma ripped through Florida, the SOS Children's Village Florida. a foster care community in Broward County was left without power, prompting authorities to remove the kids and their caretakers.![[​IMG]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t7ZncadapPVS9RIaxuD8WzQyvs_jeuRG3OdfArxgW8k8Z36ORegE9in_XQ-FU0uvoxhsvuj7MPdsy6K_kiMoYH-uGQqEOdyd_SVFOZoY04Ei-YE1ZTwkQNgkWNdENrEJzlw_lhedp2=s0-d)
Bell estimated they served at least 800 meals. More than 100 friends and relatives helped out, many working 12-hour shifts. The couple brought in singers, clowns and even athletes to entertain the kids. Teachers came to provide arts and crafts. The couple even provided manicures for the girls, and a masseuse donated time.
![[​IMG]](http://www.gossipextra.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Marc-Bell-5.jpg)
Article From USA Today
9/14/2017
The iPhone - the great disrupter (video)
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9/13/2017
Miami after Hurricane Irma (audio)
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9/10/2017
Where Mercedes-Benz and Porsche Were Born
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| The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. Clara Tuma for The New York Times |
When I stepped off the S-Bahn at the Neckarpark station in Stuttgart on my way to the Mercedes-Benz Museum, I ran into a group of high school students who nicely summed up the two automotive museums they had just visited.
“Mercedes has more details and has more history,” one of them told me. Porsche, he said, was more about Porsche and its racing heritage.
There you have it. My work is done.
Stuttgart is home to these two luxury brands, and as a car guy and automotive journalist, I have always wanted to make the pilgrimage there. Germany does not have the sort of geographic center for its auto industry that the United States has in Detroit. But since the companies’ founders got their 19th century starts in Stuttgart, it comes closest.
My first stop was Mercedes, which presents a captivating walk through the birth of the automobile with the kind of historical sheet-metal eye candy that will wow an automotive fanatic. It’s a tale the company is allowed to own because a founder, Karl Benz, is credited with making the first car, and its other founder, Gottlieb Daimler, was not far behind.
Though Henry Ford made the expensive automobile popular with his affordable Model T in the early 20th century, it was Mr. Benz, an engineer and inventor, who got things started in 1885, when he installed the almost-one-horsepower internal combustion engine he invented into a three-wheel buggy.
The building provides a floor-by-floor circular walk through Mercedes history over its nine floors and 177,000 square feet of exhibition space, with the timeline starting on the top floor. There I found a reproduction of that first car, with the real Daimler car next to it. Actually, a horse, thankfully another reproduction, greeted me as I began my tour at the start of the automobile age, when one horsepower meant what it advertised.
Within a few years cars started to look like cars instead of horse-drawn carriages — for example the museum’s 1902 40 HP, the oldest-existing Mercedes-branded car. Still, the industry used carriage types to describe its models, like phaeton (a light, open carriage), shooting brake (a carriage meant for gamekeepers and sportsmen) and cabriolet (a light carriage with a foldable hood drawn by one horse). Even dashboard is a leftover carriage term — it was the board that insulated the driver from rocks and dirt from the road.
The walls of the ramps that connect the floors are also part of the show. As I made my way down to the fourth floor, which highlighted safety, I learned that the ramp walls were made of polyamide, an airbag material. Clever.
Frankly, the museum can seem overwhelming because there is so much of that history to take in and so many beautiful cars to sigh over, like the 1955 300SL Coupe, known as the Gullwing. You will learn that Mercedes was the name of an important customer’s daughter, Mercédès Jellinek and that the company’s logo, the three-pointed star, symbolizes earth, water and air.
I traveled to the museum by train, but left with a strong urge to drive, but alas, there was no opportunity. I went to the dealership on the bottom floor, but was told test drives must be scheduled about a week in advance.
There is no such problem at the Porsche Museum, about seven miles away from Mercedes. Representatives in the lobby will let you drive an hour and up to about 60 miles, but be aware you have to leave a $3,000 deposit.
No matter — see the museum first. It’s more straightforward than Mercedes’s, with everything on one floor and a loft. It contains more than 60,000 square feet of exhibition space, and the displays are spread out. You can follow the development of Porsche’s models, from the design ultimately used for the Volkswagen Beetle, first created by Ferdinand Porsche, the company founder, to the car that defines the company, the 911. You can see how the sleek Type 64 racecar from the late 1930s led to the beloved Porsche 356 and then to the 911.
And for fun, there’s an area where you can press buttons to hear the engines of several cars, like the Panamera GTS and 911 GT3. Also impressive is the case that displays dozens of trophies from the company’s 30,000 motorsport wins. If you love the brand, especially its racing history, you’ll love this museum.
“Racecars have real road grime, dirt and dents,” Achim Stejskal, director of the Porsche Museum and Historical Communications, wrote in an email about some of the museum’s exhibits. “And all the cars actually run and participate in hundreds of events worldwide every year.”
Both museums touch on World War II and the roles that Mercedes and Ferdinand Porsche played, with Mercedes devoting part of a ramp wall explaining its use of forced labor and the allied bombing of its plants. Porsche has a brief mention of Mr. Porsche’s work as an engineer during the war, when he assisted Germany with tank design.
But do not, under any circumstance, miss the two-hour factory tour across the street from the Porsche Museum. My tour group was full of Porsche owners who were being schooled on why their cars cost so much.
Fun factory facts: It makes about 240 cars a day; 15 percent of the work force is women; it takes 4.5 hours to make the famed boxer engine; and, the tour guide said, most of the leather comes from Austria.
Many of the cars being built that day were headed to China and the United States. I watched as a powertrain arrived on an orange cart under a 718 Boxster for what my tour guide called its marriage into the chassis. A worker hit a button, and the powertrain rose precisely into the chassis. It was a beautiful thing to see.
I would have liked to have followed that car to its new owners, telling them I saw their baby being born.
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| The first car that bears the name Porsche, originally designed for a long-distance race from Berlin to Rome. Clara Tuma for The New York Times |
9/09/2017
Beyond Airport Security Checkpoints (audio)
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Fidget revolution
YOU
can spin them on your nose, chin, finger or tongue. Some include LED lights;
others resemble a ship’s wheel, or even a skull and crossbones. Originally
designed to help calm children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or
autism, it swept the world earlier this year as a toy that everyone could play
with.
Retail sales have undoubtedly
slowed recently, says Mark Austin of ToyWorld, a trade
publication—good news for the schools that have banned the toys as too
distracting for pupils. But the spinner has created a new “fidget” category of
playthings. And the global toy industry has learned lessons from its surprising
success.
The
fad started in America in February. By May, all 20 of the top-selling toys on
Amazon, an online retailer, were either fidget spinners or fidget cubes, a
close relation. There have been many such crazes but none that spread as fast.
Frédérique Tutt, an analyst of the global toy market for NPD, a data company,
says the spinner took just three weeks to cross the Atlantic and go global. No
one knows exactly how many have been sold but NPD estimates that at least 19m
were sold in the 12 rich-world countries that it tracks (including USA and the
biggest European markets) during the first six months of this year. Others put
the figure at over 50m.
Big toy retailers, the usual
arbiters of what sells, were initially caught flat-footed. Fidget spinners were
a plaything that children themselves discovered and shared on social media,
particularly on YouTube and Instagram. No person or firm had a patent on
spinners, so with no licensing fees to pay, anyone could make them. They are
produced in huge quantities in China, often by firms that previously
manufactured smartphone accessories. Others were made using 3D printing. That
has been a boon for small shops, which have been able to stock these unbranded
goods from wherever they can find them.
Big
retailers usually plan their inventory as much as 18 months ahead of peak
seasons such as summer or Christmas; schedules are often tied to toy-filled
films such as the “Star Wars” and “Cars” franchises. This is where most of
their attention, as well as their marketing and advertising budgets, goes. So
it was easy for big retailers to miss the eruption of fidget spinners online.
After the fidget spinner,
both manufacturers and retailers know they must respond faster to signals from
social media. A Californian company, MGA, which was founded in 1979, spotted
that children were watching YouTube videos of other youngsters opening
presents; to take advantage of this “unboxing” trend, it managed to produce the
L.O.L. Surprise! doll, which contains several layers of gifts, in just nine
months. It has become another best-seller.
The spinner’s successor may
be the roller, an oblong object weighted at either end. Mr Moulsher started
importing Japanese Mokuru rollers into Britain in July and has sold about
40,000. Learning from the fidget fad, he hopes the new school term and a smart
social-media strategy will see sales rocket. Teachers, be warned.
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Houston has a lot to rebuild (audio)
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The largest underground bike parking (captions)
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How do criminals make money from disasters?
HURRICANE HARVEY was still raining on Texas when the American government sent out an alert about phishing scams. “E-mails requesting donations from duplicitous charitable organizations commonly appear after major natural disasters,” warned the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Links and attachments in such e-mails, it said, could direct users to phishers or malware-infected websites. Last year the FBI received 300,000 complaints from victims of online fraud, who lost a combined total in excess of $1.3bn. Is this the main way criminals make money from disasters?
Setting up a website or social-media account for a fake charity and using it to get money and personal data from unwary donors is not difficult for cyber crooks. Within weeks of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, 4,000 new websites had been built, many for fake charities. At that time Facebook and Twitter were, respectively, new-born and non-existent. Fast-forward to 2017 and the sites offer criminals many more ways to lay snares. Online fraudsters can strike quickly, even before the flood, fire, earthquake or hurricane is finished. They can operate anywhere in the world, which makes it harder to track them down.
Yet as bad as they are, illicit solicitations represent only one part of disaster fraud. The big money comes with relief and reconstruction. The pilfering can be small and unsophisticated, but it adds up. Desima James of Atlanta, Georgia, was convicted of falsely claiming $30,000 in disaster assistance as a victim of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, and also of Hurricane Rita in Louisiana and Texas, Hurricane Wilma in Florida, severe storms and flooding in New Hampshire, and a tornado and severe storms in Indiana. Insurance firms have caught people deliberately driving their cars into flooded areas in order to make a claim. America’s Government Accountability Office estimated that of the $6bn in relief payments handed out after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, $1bn went to improper or fraudulent recipients.
Reconstruction also offers a fraudsters’ feast. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, estimates that the damage from Hurricane Harvey could cost as much as $180bn. This would make it the most expensive American disaster since the Chicago Fire of 1871, which left a third of Chicagoans homeless. Small-time operators go door-to-door, collect an up-front fee to fix homes, and then disappear. After flooding in Houston last year, some of the 10,000 damaged, insured cars were cleaned up and resold across the country. The insurance industry estimates that fraud accounts for 10% of its property and casualty expenses or about $34bn in an average year. Then there is bid-rigging, price-fixing and collusion around major reconstruction projects.
On August 31st the Department of Justice formed a special inter-agency group to combat fraud associated with Hurricane Harvey. Natural disasters, it seems, bring out the best in Americans, and the worst.
9/06/2017
Trump Ends ‘Dreamer’ Program (audio)
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