Smart solutions to decarbonize buildings (TED Talk)

 

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UAE four-and-a-half day week

The United Arab Emirates cut its working week to four-and-a-half days and moved its weekend from Friday-Saturday to Saturday-Sunday in a major shift aimed at improving the country’s competitiveness, officials have said.

The “national working week” is mandatory for government bodies and will bring the resource-rich and ambitious UAE into line with the non-Arab world.

Under the new timetable, the public sector weekend starts at noon on Fridays and ends on Sunday. Friday prayers at mosques will be held after 1.15pm all year round.

The move is intended to “better align the UAE with global markets”, said the state news agency WAM, calling the new working week the shortest in the world.

“The UAE is the first nation in the world to introduce a national working week shorter than the global five-day week,” it said.

The UAE observed a Thursday-Friday weekend until 2006, when it moved to Fridays and Saturdays with the private sector following suit.

“The extended weekend comes as part of the UAE government’s efforts to boost work-life balance and enhance social wellbeing, while increasing performance to advance the UAE’s economic competitiveness,” the WAM report said.

“From an economic perspective, the new working week will better align the UAE with global markets, reflecting the country’s strategic status on the global economic map.

“It will ensure smooth financial, trade and economic transactions with countries that follow a Saturday-Sunday weekend, facilitating stronger international business links and opportunities for thousands of UAE-based and multinational companies.”

From The Guardian (edited)

Is procrastinating a sign of laziness? (audio)

 

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Breakthroughs in e-car battery technology (video)

 

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Teen pilot’s world solo flight

 

• Part 1 -  Please fill in the blanks with suitable words

(CNN) — Teenage aviator Zara Rutherford has become the youngest woman to fly __________ the world solo.

The 19-year-old, who has dual British-Belgian nationality, landed  __________ Kortrijk-Wevelgem Airport  __________  western Belgium  __________  Thursday, completing an epic 41-country journey spanning over 52,000 kilometers , and broke two Guinness World Records  __________ the process.

"I made it," Rutherford, who received a rapturous welcome on her arrival, told reporters.

Zara has beaten the record held by American Shaesta Waiz, who was 30 when she circumnavigated the globe unaccompanied __________ 2017, and now holds the title for the first woman to circumnavigate the world  __________  a two-seat ultralight aircraft that was provided by Shark Aero, one  __________  her sponsors, with customizations such as a second radio, and an additional fuel tank in the place where the second passenger seat would typically sit.

The plane has an optimum cruising speed of 160 mph, according  __________  Zara Rutherford's official website Fly Zolo, and is equipped __________ an integrated parachute.

Zara Rutherford is also the first Belgian to fly  __________  the world alone.

When Zara departed  __________  August 18, 2021 in a Shark ultralight aircraft, she believed her aerial escapade would take about three months.

But she faced many setbacks, including month-long delays __________ both Alaska and Russia due to "visa and weather issues," pushing her schedule back eight weeks.

"The hardest part was definitely flying __________ Siberia -- it was extremely cold. It was minus 35 degrees Celsius  __________  the ground," Rutherford said during a press conference  __________  Thursday.

She was also forced to make an unscheduled landing __________ Redding, California because of poor visibility as a result  __________ the wildfires  __________  the Seattle area and was later denied permission to fly  __________ China.

Zara has flown __________ many destinations, such as Singapore, Egypt and Greece, along with Russia and South Korea. Anyway, she hasn’t been able to explore any of them on land due to Covid-19 restrictions.

Zara plans to go to university __________  September to study computer engineering. Although both of her parents are pilots and she has been learning to fly  __________ she was 14, Rutherford didn't get her first license __________ 2020.

One of her main aims for this challenge was to ensure greater visibility for women in aviation.

Last year, Zara spoke  __________ her disappointment  __________  the fact that just 5.1% of airline pilots around the globe are women, according __________ figures  __________ the International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA).

She hopes that her high-profile journey will encourage more young girls and women to consider a career  __________  aviation.

 

 

• Part 2:  Ask questions so as to get the underlined answers

1. Teenage aviator Zara Rutherford completed an epic 41-country journey .
2. Zara broke two Guinness World Records
3. The plane has an optimum cruising speed of 160 mph.
4. Zara  faced many setbacks.
5. Zara was forced to make an unscheduled landing because of poor visibility.
6. Zara plans to go to university to study computer engineering.
7. She has been flying with a license  since 2020.
8. She hopes that her high-profile journey will encourage more young girls and women to consider professional  aviation.

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Article from CNN (edited) 

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Los Angeles Airport therapy dogs (video)

 

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Developers wanted to buy his island

• Thor Vikström's Il Ronde

• Thor Vikström, 93, gazes out at Île Ronde from his dining room window

Thor Vikström ____________ (get) countless calls from developers who ____________ ( want - buy ) his seven-acre island that he can see from his Quebec home. He ____________ (own ) the island since the 1960s, and ____________  (protect) it as a natural habitat.

Developers ____________ (ask-him- sell ) so they could build roads, high-rises and bridges on it.

“You think you’re going to destroy my island with that stupidity?” he ____________ (answer) to the developers, who ____________ (open ) their bids decades ago at $500,000.

He ____________ (buy) the island, called Îl Ronde, in the late 1960s for $5,000, with one goal in mind: to protect and preserve it. He recently ___________ (donate) it for the very same reason to the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Now, it ____________ (value ) at $125,000, he said, but he ____________ (believe) it is worth much more than that.

“From now on, the island ____________ (protect) forever. I ____________ (negative-want ) money. I want the island to be an island, and I want the life that  ____________ (come) and____________ (go)  here to have a home,” Vikström said.

Vikström, 93, still ____________ (work) at a family-run hydraulics company he ____________ (begin) in 1980. The island, surrounded by the Prairies River,  ____________ (consider) a rare jewel of biodiversity.

From his home's vantage point, he often ____________ (see) water birds, map turtles and unique tree species, flourishing in their natural habitat. It’s the same view he ____________ (have) for the past five decades, and yet, it still ____________    (fill) him with wonder.

Vikström ____________ (move) from Sweden to Canada with his late wife and firstborn son in 1962 and subsequently ____________ (found) Scanada, his hydraulics company.

Not long after ____________ (arrive) in Quebec, Vikström____________ (build) his dream riverside home.

“I ____________ (love) nature since the day I ____________ (be born )” Vikström said.

Although it  ____________ (take) several years to persuade the previous owner of Îl Ronde to sell it to him, once the island was in his possession, “you can’t imagine how happy I was,” Vikström said.

His family regularly ____________ (visit) the natural oasis and ____________ (spend) time with friends there, too.

“I ____________ (grow) up here and it ____________ (be) actually the best thing in the world,” said Vikström’s eldest son, Hans Vikström, 63.  When he was a child he ____________ (wake) up early in the morning to see the sun rise on the island, hot chocolate in hand, sitting next to his father, who ____________ (take) his coffee as he ____________ (admire) the animals. And  he  ____________ (keep) doing the same today when he  ____________ (visit) his father.

The Vikström family ____________ (enjoy) the island as a backyard haven.  Anyway, there ____________ (be) strict rules in place — such as no fires or littering.

Although Vikström’s three children, as well as his six grandchildren, all____________ (swear) they would continue caring for the island and its inhabitants, the family ____________ (agree) that in order to protect the natural habitat indefinitely, they ____________ (need) to donate it.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada, a private nonprofit conservation organization, is elated by Vikström’s donation, which ___________ (finalize) last month. “Every time someone ____________ (make) a gift, it’s for everyone,” said Joël Bonin, the associate vice president of development and communications for the organization’s Quebec chapter.

The donation ____________ (contribute) to Canada’s goal of protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030.

 “A significant portion of NCC’s protected areas ____________ (come) from generous donors who____________ (choose) to donate ecologically valuable land,” said Annie Ferland, a project manager at the organization. “It’s a way to help protect our beautiful planet.”

Although the island is no longer in the family’s possession, “we are free to enjoy the island for as long as we live,” Hans Vikström said.

Thor Vikström is now at peace knowing his island ____________ (stay - always) in good hands.  “I ____________ (fall) in love with this island many decades ago,” he said. “It’s a dream for me now that it  ____________  (preserve) forever.”

From The Washington Post (edited)

CES-2022 latest tech innovations (video)

 

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Baseball team owner surprises workers

 

Three days after Christmas, Michael Gartner, summoned the employees of the Iowa Cubs minor league baseball team to a staff meeting at Principal Park, the team’s stadium in Des Moines.

The team’s sale to a global sports and entertainment company had closed that day, and Mr. Gartner, 83, said he wanted to give the employees their new business cards.

But there were no business cards in the envelopes that he handed out. Instead, inside there were checks worth $2,000 for every year each employee had worked for the team — $600,000 in total for the 23 full-time workers.

Employees who work in maintenance, accounting, marketing and other areas received checks for $4,000 to $70,000, said Mr. Gartner, who was the team’s majority owner for 22 years, until the sale closed last Tuesday.

“My jaw dropped,” said Alex Cohen, 33, who has been the team’s radio broadcaster since 2018 and has worked in professional baseball since 2009. “It’s an industry where you work really hard, and sometimes you don’t get compensated like that. Seeing all the people who had been there for two decades, three decades, tears streaming down their faces, it was a very special, emotional day”.

Mr. Gartner, who had owned the team with his son and three other partners, said on Saturday that sharing proceeds from the sale “was the right thing to do. A lot of those people have worked for us for over 20 years, and they’ve helped us build a successful team. They’re just fantastic people. They need the money more than we do. A lot of them still have mortgages and car payments and college payments.”

Scott Sailor, 63, who received $46,000 for his 23 years working for the team in media relations, sales, marketing and other areas, said the checks were “not out of character” for Mr. Gartner, a businessman, lawyer and third-generation Iowa newspaperman.

A former editor of The Des Moines Register and a former president of NBC News, Mr. Gartner won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for editorial writing at The Daily Tribune of Ames, Iowa. Two years later, he bought the Iowa Cubs, the Triple-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, and became a fixture in the front office and in his usual seat behind home plate.

In 2020, when the minor league baseball season was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Gartner kept every full-time employee on the payroll, with benefits.

“The surprise was not that he was generous because that’s the way he’s been,” said Randy Wehofer, the team’s vice president and assistant general manager, who joined the club in 2008. “We’ve had above-standard health insurance and we’ve always been the organization that people looked at and said, ‘Gee, I wish everybody did that’. That’s always been his way, as long as I’ve been part of the organization.”

Michael Gartner owned the Iowa Cubs for 22 years until last week, when he sold the team to Diamond Holdings.

On his final day, he surprised employees with checks — $2000 for every year they'd been with the team.

Gartner gave away a total of $600,000 to 23 full-time workers. pic.twitter.com/aEh4OkN1zL

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) January 3, 2022

From The New York Times (edited)

California universities to go back online (video)

 

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California twins born in different years (video)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS8jC4DTEE4

One twin was born in 2021, the other in 2022

• How about filling in the blanks with a suitable word?

Just 15 minutes can make a big difference.

Newborn twins Aylin and Alfredo Trujillo came into the world 15 minutes apart but will celebrate their birthdays ____ different days, months and years.

Baby boy Alfredo Antonio Trujillo was delivered first, ____  11:45 p.m. ____  New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31, 2021. His younger sister, Aylin Yolanda Trujillo, entered the world exactly _____ midnight, ______ Jan. 1, 2022.

Alfredo weighed  2.75 kg, while Aylin weighed 2.65 kg, according ____ the Natividad Medical Center ____  Salinas, Calif.

“This was definitely one ____ the most memorable deliveries of my career,” said Ana Abril Arias, a family doctor at Natividad Medical Group. “It was an absolute pleasure to help these little ones arrive here safely ____ 2021 and 2022. What an amazing way to start the New Year!”

Although twin births ____  the United States are fairly common, “twins with different birthdays are rare,” the hospital said, citing estimates of the chance of twins being born ____  different years as 1 in 2 million.

The babies’ mother, Fatima Madrigal, said in a statement released by the hospital that the twins will join three older siblings, two girls and a boy. “My oldest son is especially excited to have a brother and my whole family can’t wait to meet the newborn pair. It’s crazy that they are twins and have different birthdays,” Madrigal said.

Globally, twin birthrates have reached an “all-time high,” with 1.6 million twins delivered each year, according ____   a report from Britain’s University of Oxford published ____  2021. One in every 42 babies is now born a twin, it found.

The study also said the use of fertility treatments was a factor in the global rise.

There were about 120,000 twin births ____  the United States ____  2019 and 3,000 triplet births, according ____  the latest U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, with twin births accounting ____  just over 3 percent of all births ____  the country.

From The New York Times (edited)

What is China's "Tang Ping" or "Lying Flat" ? (video)

 

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US "Lying Flat" (video)

 

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China's 'Tang Ping' trend

Fed up with a culture of overwork, through-the-roof housing prices and skyrocketing living costs, many Chinese youth are "lying flat" to express their frustration with little reward and the lack of upward social mobility.

The new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts.

The first online reference to the term appeared in March in the discussion forum Tieba. The anonymous post "Lying Flat Is Justice" described how to live a happy life without a stable income. "You just lie flat. Lying flat at home, lying flat outside, lying flat like the street cats and dogs. ... I choose to lie flat, and I'm no longer stressed," the post said.

Lying flat includes opting out of getting married, having children, purchasing a home or car, and joining the corporate money-making machine. The tang ping movement embraces doing the bare minimum to maintain a minimalist lifestyle. It rejects the so-called "996 life" of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, a schedule that often fails to provide sufficient income for exhausted workers to get ahead.

In the COVID-19-influenced job market, the Class of 2021 is competing for jobs with the still-unemployed members of the Class of 2020. And because the post-pandemic recovery has been driven by an expansion of blue-collar jobs, lying flat makes sense to many university graduates.

"I graduated from a top university in Nanjing with a degree in architecture two years ago, but I struggled to find a job," said Zhang, a 24-year-old living in the rural area of China's southwest Sichuan province, of his choice to lie flat. Zhang said that a lot of his classmates and friends are still trying to find their way in big cities, "but they come back home either with diseases from overworking or with a mountain of debt."

"I chose to lie flat from the beginning. It's too hard to buy a house and a car in big cities. It's hard to find someone to marry, and if you have kids, you have to enroll them in all sorts of activities to give them a head start," he said. "So I chose my current lifestyle. Simple food, simple life, some gigs to make a little bit of money."

Analysts say the lying flat attitude is rooted in the lack of upward social mobility. People born in the '50s, '60s and '70s benefited from Deng Xiaoping's 1978 policy, a series of transformative economic reforms that opened China up to the international community and foreign investment. The reform set the stage for the emergence of Chinese companies with international reach, such as Huawei and Alibaba.

Yet the current generation finds that they no longer have the same opportunities as their parents to achieve upward mobility.

According to 2017 data from the latest Chinese survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Science, people under 35 experienced a high level of unstable employment and relatively low salaries, partly due to the economic slowdown in 2015 and 2016. One of the survey's key findings is that college graduates in China face difficulties getting jobs.  And if they do, many feel they're expected to overwork.

Lucy Li, 35, works in the banking industry in Beijing. "I know 996 is prevalent in the tech industry, but now it has spread to every sector. In our bank, the leadership will drop by unannounced around 8 p.m. to see who's still working, and those still in the office are the ones getting promoted. So everyone ends up working 12 hours a day. It's just not sustainable."

Another worker, Wang, said he quit his job with the tech giant Alibaba because he often started work around 9 a.m., returned home around 7 p.m. and then returned to the office after his two children went to bed, or around 9 p.m. Back at the office, he usually worked until midnight — or as late as 2-3 a.m. if he was developing a product or it was the busy season.

The 996 culture has led to death by overwork, a phenomenon first recognized in Japan's workplace culture, or karoshi. Japan passed the Work Style Reform Bill in 2018 to limit brutally long work weeks.

Earlier this year in China, the deaths of two employees of the online agricultural marketplace Pinduoduo sparked discussion of overwork. Many young people took to social media to say they didn't want the 996 lifestyle, and they started to advocate for a more relaxed attitude toward work.

The official Xinhua News Agency wrote in a commentary published last month that "lying flat is shameful. Only hard work brings happiness." 

Xinhua later posted a video of an 86-year-old Chinese scientist surnamed Zhao who wakes up at 4 a.m. each morning to go to work. "After his retirement, he still works for 10-12 hours a day voluntarily for the country and for the people," Xinhua said

From VOA News and BBC (edited)

Eco-Friendly Blue Jeans? (video)

 

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Santander UK wants the money back

Santander UK is trying to recover about $175 million, or about 130 million pounds, that it accidentally paid tens of thousands of people on Christmas Day.

About 75,000 people received the mistaken payments, including many customers of rival banks. Santander is seeking help from the other banks to recoup the money, the bank said in a statement.

The mistaken deposits could look like normal payments to recipients because they were duplicates of regular and one-off payments that about 2,000 of the bank’s commercial and corporate customers had already paid to people including their suppliers and employees.

 “We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” the bank said. “None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result, and we will be working hard with many banks across the U.K. to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”

To recoup the money, Santander UK has asked the banks where people received the payments to help retrieve the money. Meanwhile it was also using its own processes for recovering money that was paid in error. It was not clear how the banks would deal with customers who had already spent the money.

Santander UK, the British arm of Banco Santander of Spain, has more than 14.4 million customers.

Last May, the bank apologized after a “technical problem” left some customers unable to use banking services, including making payments, for several hours.

It is rare for banks to deposit millions in error, but such mistakes can be the most costly for those who receive the money by mistake.

In April last year, a USA 911 dispatcher was arrested on fraud and theft charges after she bought a house and an S.U.V. using some of the $1.2 million that the financial services company Charles Schwab had accidentally deposited in her brokerage account.

In February 2008, two sisters from Blackburn, England, were jailed after they spent nearly £135,000 that a bank accidentally deposited in one of their accounts.

From The New York Times (edited)