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Week 30, 2004
THE REGULARS: Summary
A) Song of
the week: ON HOLIDAY
B) Le texte
plus abordable de la semaine/Kidzworld: Bastille Day [La fête nationale
française.]
C) CNN/Global
Office: Workspace design gets thumbs-down
[La conception des bureaux et espaces de travail laisse à désirer.]
D) The New York Times/The Ethicist: ON
HOLIDAY
E) Slate/Dear
Prudence: ON HOLIDAY
F) Washington
Post/Miss Manners: ON HOLIDAY
G) Audio feature: ON HOLIDAY
THIS WEEK'S TEXTS: Summary
1) The Economist: Cloth of gold [Du nouveau pour les fabricants de tissu britanniques.]
2) Slate/Moneybox: The Capitalism of Soccer [Le sport le moins aimé des Américains est le plus fidèle aux valeurs américaines.]
3) Associated Press: Chip implanted in Mexico security workers [On insère désormais des puces électroniques dans les ouvriers mexicains.]
THE REGULARS
A) Song of the week: ON HOLIDAY!
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B) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Kidzworld:
Bastille Day [La fête nationale française.]
http://www.kidzworld.com/site/p3662.htm
Bastille Day - July 14, 2004
France celebrates Bastille Day on July 14th. It's like Independence Day in the US but this day remembers the end of the French monarchy and the beginning of the French Revolution. This is when a large group of people in France rebelled against their king and queen.
Behind The French Revolution
The French had good reason to rebel. France had the largest population
in Europe and hardly enough food to feed everyone. The wealthy, middle-class
merchants and businessmen had no say in anything. Every decision was made
by the king and queen. By the late 1780s people in France were fed up
with the king's decisions. They began speaking out and met in groups to
demand that new laws were made. King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette
tried to quiet everyone so they rebelled.
Storming Of The Bastille
Bastille was a prison where kings and queens usually locked up people
who didn't agree with their decisions. To a lot of French, the Bastille
prison was a symbol of the corrupt system run by the monarchy. On July
14, 1789 the Revolution began when a large group stormed the Bastille
prison.
Bastille Day Becomes A Holiday
The beginning of the Revolution brought some great changes. Kings and
queens no longer ruled France. Instead, citizens of France now have a
say in the decisions being made. The tricolor flag (blue, red and white)
was also introduced. Blue and red are the colors of Paris and white is
the color of royalty. In 1880, Bastille Day became a national holiday.
Most locals in France take Bastille Eve off and have festive dances and
big firework displays. The next day there are parades, bands and more
dancing.
Bastille Day Fast Facts
# The Bastille was attacked seven times and surrendered six times.
# The man who led the siege was Pierre-Augustin. He was in charge of the
queen's laundry. With help from a man named Elie they provided a large
amount of supplies to arm the crowds.
# When the prison was stormed on July 14th there were only seven prisoners
left in the Bastille.
# Have you heard about the Man in the Iron Mask? He was a Bastille prisoner
from 1698 to 1703.
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C) CNN/Global Office: E-mail anxiety [Le courrier électronique
crée de nouvelles sources de stress pour les salariés.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/03/15/desk.space/index.html
Workspace design gets thumbs-down
By Simon Hooper for CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Workers are spending more time at their desks than in their living rooms, yet most feel let down by their work environment. In a survey by office furniture manufacturers Logitech asking workers to grade the design of their workspace, 56 percent rated their office or cubicle as a "C" or below. Only six percent of employees gave their office an "A" grade.
More than half of those who rated their desks as "C" or worse said they would feel more valued if they were given more input into shaping their environment and 84 percent said their comfort levels could be improved.
"Whether because of clutter, lack of personal input, or poor computer systems, U.S. office workers are often displeased or see room for improvement with the state of their workspace," said Brenda Batenburg, senior manager of market research for Logitech. "With a little more control of layout and furniture -- and some better computer systems and peripherals -- workers tend to feel happier and even more valued. The overall design of the workspace is critical when considering just how much time people spend in their workspace, and what's expected of them."
Comfort and design
According to the research, workers now spend an average of 37.5 hours
at week at work -- more than 14 hours a week longer than in their living
room -- and a majority say they place equal importance on the comfort
and design of both.
Almost half of women (46 percent) and a third of men said their emotional state was affected by the state of their workspace and three percent of all those surveyed said they dreaded going to work because of the state of the desks.
A tidy desk was clearly linked to productivity, with 60 percent of respondents agreeing they find it easier to work when uncluttered by paper, files and computer cords. The modern preference for hot-desking in open-plan offices also gets a cool reception from workers. More than three-quarters said it was important to be allowed to personalize their workspace while almost half (43 percent) complained about a lack of privacy.
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D) The New York Times/The Ethicist: ON HOLIDAY
********************************
E) Slate/Dear
Prudence: ON HOLIDAY
********************************
F) Washington Post/Miss Manners: ON HOLIDAY
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G) Audio feature/WNYC On the Media: ON HOLIDAY
THIS WEEK'S TEXTS
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1) The Economist: Cloth of gold [Du nouveau pour les fabricants de tissu
britanniques.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1981515
Textiles: Cloth of gold
Jun 24th 2004 | BRADFORD AND HUDDERSFIELD
Lively parts of a near-dead industry
AFTER three decades of gloom, this week brought a rare good news story for the British textile industry: Nike, a big sports-shoe maker, ordered 9,500 metres of Harris Tweed for a new range of women's trainers. Aside from the odd idea of a tweed trainer, the story is not as unusual as it sounds: although the British textile industry as a whole continues to shrink, at the top of the market a lot of small and medium-sized companies are making a good living and big reputations.
The British textile business, centred in West Yorkshire, took a wrong turn in the 1960s. Under pressure from Asian imports, the old family firms imported cheap labour from Pakistan to try and compete on price. The Italians, meanwhile, invested in better design and technology. The British also failed to spot that the traditional Yorkshire virtue in a suit—longevity—was losing out to the tawdry appeal of style and designer labels. As the pressure from Asia tightened, Italy's textiles flourished while Yorkshire's mills closed down. But now, as smarter companies have moved upmarket, things are changing.
Firas Chamsi-Pasha arrived in Huddersfield from Syria in 1981 when Hield Brothers, an old family-run weaving business for whom he was an agent, ran into trouble. He bought the company and cut its middle-market cloth production to concentrate on the top of the market, and added shirts, ties, socks and shoes to create a complete Hield range of pricey menswear, retailing them in London and ten American cities. In 1993, he bought another Yorkshire company, Moxon. Its suits sell for up to $26,000 (£14,300) in America. Mr Chamsi-Pasha opens a finely-crafted box you might expect to contain diamond jewellery to reveal instead a pair of socks. They cost £275. “You can only wear them ten times,” he says.
Adrian Berry, managing director of Clissold, has transformed the £250,000-a-year turnover, two-person business he and some friends bought in 1976 into a firm turning over £10m a year. It makes suits selling for up to £2,000.
Clissold is a “loomless manufacturer”, only designing its suits: the cloth-making, cutting and stitching is done by others. This work, however is out-sourced not to Asia, but to local firms. Business, he says, is pretty good. Demand for suits is rising, driven by an upturn in the Japanese economy, an end to the fashion for casual clothes at the office and, he thinks, a trend amongst young people towards dressing more formally when socialising.
Why are British companies doing well at the top end of the market? Mr Chamsi-Pasha claims that good local water, needed for cleaning and processing wool, is most of the explanation. Another is that enough remains of the skills required for turning the long thin fibres from the best quality wool into the worsted cloth used in the finest suits which is the hallmark of West Yorkshire textiles.
Some of Yorkshire's textile firms are even finding demand is outstripping supply. “I reckon that there is a shortage of about 20% of weaving capacity,” says Edward Stanners, chairman of Textiles Forward, an industry research and training body. If the industry's decline is not yet reversing, at least it is slowing down.
^RETURN TO TOP^
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2) Slate/Moneybox: The Capitalism of Soccer [Le sport le moins aimé
des Américains est le plus fidèle aux valeurs américaines.]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2103170/
The Capitalism of Soccer: Why Europe's favorite sport is more American
than baseball.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, June 30, 2004, at 1:36 PM PT
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball," Jacques Barzun wrote a half-century ago. For decades, intellectuals like Barzun, pseudo-intellectuals like George Will, and storytellers of all types (Ken Burns, Kevin Costner) have mined the intricacies, symbols, and meaning of the national pastime to shed larger light on the politics, culture, and economy of the United States.
There is, we believe, something quintessentially American not just about baseball, but about all our major league sports. Basketball, football, and baseball engender competition and reward merit. They afford people, regardless of their background, the ability to gain fame and vast fortune. Each league marries marketing and brand-building to sex, power, and money. Sports are the ultimate market activity, with champions and losers minted every night and every season.
Just so, whoever wants to know the heart and mind of Europe—and Latin America, as well as big chunks of Africa and Asia—had better learn soccer, the national pastime of the rest of the world. And Franklin Foer's new book, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, is a great new guide. It combines a diary of an obsessive with some penetrating thoughts on globalism. It's as if Nick Hornby, author of the brilliant soccer book Fever Pitch, commandeered Tom Friedman's laptop. (Full disclosure: Foer once worked for Slate.)
As Foer notes, even though the U.S. men's national team reached the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, and Major League Soccer is in its ninth season, there's a sense that there's something not quite American about high-level soccer. In 1986, Foer writes, then-Congressman Jack Kemp opposed an anodyne congressional resolution to support U.S. efforts to play host to the 1994 World Cup: "a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist [sport]," the former quarterback said.
But Kemp got it exactly backward. For when you look at the business of professional sports—in both Europe and the United States—American sports are virtually all socialistic while the European soccer leagues more closely resemble the entrepreneurial capitalism we Americans fetishize.
The Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter—a tennis player, not a soccer fan—developed the concept of creative destruction, the touchstone of American-style capitalism. Schumpeter famously likened the elites of a society to a hotel, one in which rooms are always occupied but by an ever-changing roster of guests. The hotel concept almost precisely describes the soccer leagues of Europe. Every year, the worst-performing teams—three in England, four in Italy—check out. Relegated, they must play the following year in the next-lower division. Meanwhile, ambitious upstarts who have succeeded at lower levels check in. They are promoted.
This constant cycling has enormous financial consequences for the teams and their owners. Television, advertising, sponsorship, and gate receipts instantly plummet when a team is relegated. (Imagine what would happen to attendance at Shea Stadium if the New York Mets had to play AAA opponents this year.) Relegated teams release or sell off highly paid players and instantly face a renewed fight for survival. In the 2001-2002 season, St. Pauli, the Hamburg, Germany-based team, played in Germany's prestigious Bundesliga. Relegated twice in two seasons, it now plays in the strictly minor-league third division. Even long-entrenched incumbents can fall rapidly. Leeds United, which a few years ago finished fifth out of 20 in Britain's enormously competitive Premiership, was relegated this year after it ran into financial problems.
By contrast, the American professional leagues are like a Marriott Residence Inn—once you're allowed to check in, you never have to leave. There's no great punishment for consistently propping up the standings year after year. Yes, the market value of losing teams often suffers in comparison to those of winning teams. But once you're a member of the cartel, there's a floor under the price. The Montreal Expos, despite decades of gross mismanagement, these days by Major League Baseball itself, were valued at $113 million last year, according to Forbes. (Click here, and then scroll down.) To different degrees, Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the NBA are examples of European-style socialism among billionaires and Fortune 500 companies. They share revenues, tightly regulate admission to the cartel, and bargain collectively with powerful European-style unions, which act as barriers against reform. Losers not only can prosper, but they get first dibs on next year's crop of talent.
In America, someone who wishes to start a major-league sports team, or who wants to upgrade a minor-league team into a major-league one, is essentially out of luck. Not so in Europe. In 1997, Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian-born immigrant who bought Harrod's, purchased London-based soccer team Fulham FC, then a middling team in England's second division (the third-highest league). The parvenu spent lavishly on new talent and brought in new coaches. In 1999, Fulham was promoted to the first division. In 2001, after winning the Division One championship, it was promoted to the Premiership, where it has stayed ever since. Last season, aided in part by the import of two American stars, Fulham finished a highly respectable ninth. Last year, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich legitimized a portion of his fortune by purchasing Chelsea FC.
In other words, the European system rewards ambition and ruthlessly punishes sloth and incompetence. At the beginning of each year, every owner places every dollar of investment on the line. And in European soccer, that can mean a huge sum. The market capitalization of Manchester United, a publicly held company, is about $1.2 billion!
In Europe, the successful and rich teams grow richer. (For assembling
and stockpiling talent, the New York Yankees have nothing on Spain's Real
Madrid.) The poor get poorer, some teams fail entirely, and those intent
on self-improvement have an opportunity every year to rise above circumstances.
To quote another great middle-brow American intellectual (John Cougar
Mellencamp): "Ain't that America?"
Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox"
column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.
3) Associated Press: Chip implanted in Mexico security workers [On insère désormais des puces électroniques dans les ouvriers mexicains.]
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2004/07/14/chip/index.html
Chip implanted in Mexico security workers
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Will Weissert
July 14, 2004 | MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Security has reached the subcutaneous level for Mexico's attorney general and at least 160 people in his office -- they have been implanted with microchips that get them access to secure areas of their headquarters.
It's a pioneering application of a technology that is widely used in animals but not in humans.
Mexico's top federal prosecutors and investigators began receiving chip implants in their arms in November in order to get access to restricted areas inside the attorney general's headquarters, said Antonio Aceves, general director of Solusat, the company that distributes the microchips in Mexico.
Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and 160 of his employees were implanted at a cost to taxpayers of $150 for each rice grain-sized chip.
More are scheduled to get ‘‘tagged" in coming months, and key members of the Mexican military, the police and the office of President Vicente Fox might follow suit, Aceves said. Fox's office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
A spokeswoman for Macedo de la Concha's office said she could not comment on Aceves' statements, citing security concerns. But Macedo himself mentioned the chip program to reporters Monday, saying he had received an implant in his arm. He said the chips were required to enter a new federal anti-crime information center.
‘‘It's only for access, for security," he said.
The chips also could provide more certainty about who accessed sensitive data at any given time. In the past, the biggest security problem for Mexican law enforcement has been corruption by officials themselves.
Aceves said his company eventually hopes to provide Mexican officials with implantable devices that can track their physical location at any given time, but that technology is still under development.
The chips that have been implanted are manufactured by VeriChip Corp., a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions Inc. of Palm Beach, Fla.
They lie dormant under the skin until read by an electromagnetic scanner, which uses a technology known as radio frequency identification, or RFID, that's now getting hot in the inventory and supply chain businesses.
Scott Silverman, Applied Digital Solutions' chief executive, said each of his company's implantable chips has a special identification number that would foil an impostor.
‘‘The technology is out there to duplicate (a chip)," he said. ‘‘What can't be stolen is the unique identification number and the information that is tied to that number."
Erik Michielsen, director of RFID analysis at ABI Research Inc., said that in theory the chips could be as secure as existing RFID-based access control systems such as the contactless employee badges widely used in corporate and government facilities.
However, while those systems often employ encryption, Applied Digital's implantable chips do not as yet. Silverman said his company's system is nevertheless save because its chips can only be read by the company's proprietary scanners.
In addition to the chips sold to the Mexican government, more than 1,000 Mexicans have implanted them for medical reasons, Aceves said. Hospital officials can use a scanning device to download a chip's serial number, which they then use to access a patient's blood type, name and other information on a computer.
The Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve microchips as medical devices in the United States.
Still, Silverman said that his company has sold 7,000 chips to distributors worldwide and that more than 1,000 of those had likely been inserted into customers, mostly for security or identification reasons.
In 2002, a Florida couple and their teenage son had Applied Digital Solutions chips implanted in their arms. The family hoped to someday be able to automatically relay their medical information to emergency room staffers.
The chip originally was developed to track livestock and wildlife and to let pet owners identify runaway animals. The technology was created by Digital Angel Corp., which was acquired by Applied Digital Solutions in 1999.
Because the Applied Digital chips cannot be easily removed -- and are housed in glass capsules designed to break and be unusable if taken out -- they could be even more popular someday if they eventually can incorporate locator capabilities. Already, global positioning system chips have become common accouterments on jewelry or clothing in Mexico.
In fact, in March, Mexican authorities broke up a ring of used-car salesmen turned kidnappers who were known as ‘‘Los Chips" because they searched their victims to detect whether they were carrying the chips to help them be located.