HOME/ARCHIVES http://www.kazooweb.com/textes/
Merci de choisir un ou plusieurs textes plutôt que d'imprimer la totalité... Les arbres vous sont reconnaissants...

********************************
Week 36, 2005
THE BEST SELLERS (recent popular articles):
1) USA Today: Off-duty behavior can affect job [Encore un article sur l'ingérance des entreprises dans la vie privée des salariés.]
2) The Economist: Financing German companies [Proposition de créer une 'usine à crédit' en Allemagne pour faciliter les prêts aux PME.]
3) The Economist: Project management: Overdue and over budget, over and over again [Alors qu'elle est désormais au coeur de l'organisaiton des entreprises, la gestion de projets semble poser de sérieuses difficultés.]

********************************
THE REGULARS: Summary
4) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Hurricane Katrina [Le cyclone qui devaste la Nouvelle Orléans.]
5) A puzzle: Car radio [Un casse-tête. Pourquoi le type se flingue lorsque son autoradio se tait ?]]
6) CNN/Global Office: Early life crisis hits male workers [Les hommes britanniques connaissent la crise de la quarantaine de plus en plus tôt...]

*******************************
1) USA Today: Off-duty behavior can affect job [Encore un article sur l'ingérance des entreprises dans la vie privée des salariés.]
ttp://www.usatoday.com/money/jobcenter/2005-06-12-off-duty-usat_x.htm

Off-duty behavior can affect job

By Stephanie Armour and Julie Appleby, USA TODAYMon Jun 13, 6:56 AM ET

Some companies are cracking down on employees' off-duty behavior, raising questions about how far employers should go in policing what workers do on their own time.

Employees are being disciplined or fired for such behaviors as drinking on their own time, using competitors' products and displaying political bumper stickers. No one tracks the number of such cases, but some workers rights' groups are concerned that the practice is on the upswing.

"The shock is that there's no legal protection," says Lewis Maltby, of The National Workrights Institute, a non-profit based in Princeton, N.J., that focuses on employee rights. "You can get fired just for having a bumper sticker the boss doesn't like."

For example:

• At the Atlantic City, Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, bartenders and waitresses can be fired if they gain more than 7% of their body weight. They are first given a 90-day unpaid suspension to lose the weight. Officials say it is a recent clarification to the company's appearance policy.

About 200 cocktail servers and bartenders, known as "Borgata Babes," are covered by the policy, and have to submit to weigh-ins. Weight gain for valid medical reasons, such as pregnancy, are exempt, but the waitresses have 90 days to comply with the target weight upon return.

"We believe the policy in place is not only legal and non-discriminatory, it is also fair," spokesman Michael Facenda said in a statement.

• Lynne Gobbell was fired from her job packing insulation by her Moulton, Ala.-based employer for displaying a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car, according to the Associated Press and numerous media reports. Gobbell could not be reached for comment.

• Ross Hopkins, who worked for a Budweiser distributor, sued after he says he was fired for drinking a Coors at a Greeley, Colo., bar after work.

But Jeff Bedingfield, attorney for American Eagle Distributing, says Hopkins was fired in 2003 for making disparaging comments about the company while at the bar wearing a company uniform. The case is expected to go to trial.

While about half the states have laws preventing employers from firing workers who smoke off duty, questions remain about other legal, off-duty activities. Some states have passed broader protections, says Kary Moss, executive director of the ACLU in Michigan.

"It's a growing trend," Moss says. "But whether or not they will go further to protect workers is an open question."

^RETURN TO TOP^

Financing German companies: The loan factory
Apr 14th 2005 | FRANKFURT

How financial mass-production could help Germany's artisans

HANS REICH, head of Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW),Germany's national development bank, has a recurring dream: an inexhaustible well from which the country's small and medium-size enterprises, collectively known as the Mittelstand, can draw loans at reasonable rates of interest. The savings banks used to be that magic source, but new capital rules and the loss of their state guarantee from July 15th this year have made them pickier about credit risk.

German banks have plenty to lend, but processing costs and wariness of smaller credits mean that they are all chasing bigger borrowers, with sales of €50m ($65m) or more. For a loan of around €300,000, a bank's processing cost is far more than the risk premium it can earn, says Mr Reich.

His solution is a Kreditfabrik (loan factory), for processing standardised loans cheaply on behalf of many banks. The banks would deal with customers, as now; the factory would do the back-office work.

The idea is not new. The Länder, or states, and co-operative banks would claim to have the basis for their own loan factories already; the savings banks also have a project, Modell K, that they say has already cut processing costs. However, the division of German banking into private-sector, public and co-operative banks hinders industry-wide collaboration. Meanwhile, rising numbers of small firms complain that they “hardly have access any more to credit and reasonable development capital”, said Mr Reich this week.

A survey of Mittelstand companies, by Creditreform, a commercial-debt advisory group, shows that a slight upward trend in expectations last year has been thoroughly squashed: forecasts of turnover, employment and profits have fallen. Even so, these companies still intend to invest, if they can only get credit.

Mr Reich hopes that a change in KfW's refinancing programme will help. Since April 1st banks that refinance Mittelstand loans through the development bank have been allowed to charge borrowers a risk-based rather than a flat interest rate. That may encourage more lending.

However, progress on the Kreditfabrik is slow. Even if it does come to fruition, it will not solve another acute problem facing the Mittelstand: lack of equity capital. In the 1960s, shareholders' equity accounted for 30% of German companies' balance sheets; now the ratio is only 17%. And 37% of the Mittelstand companies surveyed by Creditreform this year had less than 10% capital; last year's figure was 31.4%.

Venture capital and mezzanine finance—essentially, debt with equity-like features—are still rare in Germany. That is changing slowly. Last month Deutsche Bank, the country's biggest bank, and IKB Deutsche Industriebank, a specialist industrial lender, touted “equiNotes”, a mezzanine instrument for Mittelstand companies. These would be standardised enough to trade as securities. In July the Munich stock exchange will open a new segment, called M:access, for Mittelstand companies.

Neither innovation, though, will be much use to run-of-the-mill companies. M:access demands minimum capital of €2m, a website and an annual analysts' meeting. EquiNotes are aimed at companies with sales of at least €50m and an investment-grade rating. Most of the Mittelstand will have wait to for Mr Reich's loan factory to open for business.

*******************************
3) The Economist: Project management: Overdue and over budget, over and over again [Alors qu'elle est désormais au coeur de l'organisaiton des entreprises, la gestion de projets semble poser de sérieuses difficultés.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3886829

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4065653

Project management: Overdue and over budget, over and over again
Jun 9th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Companies are increasingly keen on projects. Why, when so many fail?

WHEN George Stephenson built a railway from Liverpool to Manchester in the 1820s, it cost 45% more than budget and was subject to several delays as it made its way across the treacherous Chat Moss bog. In the intervening 180 years the management of large-scale projects seems to have improved but little. At the end of May the reconstruction of Wembley Stadium, the hallowed home of English soccer, was threatened when Multiplex, the Australian developer of the site, admitted that it faced mounting losses on the £750m ($1.4 billion) project. An unanticipated rise in the cost of steel (which doubled in 2004) and the extra labour required to ensure the building is ready for next May's FA Cup Final were said to have thrown the management's calculations out of kilter.

Even projects deemed a success these days sometimes fail to meet their targets. The 1,770km (1,106 miles) oil pipeline from Azerbaijan's Caspian wells to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan was opened with much fanfare on May 25th by the presidents of the three countries under whose soil it lies (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey). But the $4 billion project, led by BP (see article), is several months overdue and 5-10% over budget. Although oil has entered the pipeline at Baku, it will be another six months before the high-grade steel pipe is full and ready to disgorge on to tankers in the Mediterranean.

Big projects today are as likely to be built on software as they are on steel. But IT projects are no better at meeting budgets and deadlines. A £6 billion project to put the medical records of 50m Britons online by the end of this year is way over budget and has already been postponed by several months. In March, the FBI finally abandoned a $170m internal IT project, two years after problems with it had first surfaced. The Standish Group, a research firm which produces an influential annual evaluation of IT projects, judged that in 2004 only 29% of such projects “succeeded”, down from 34% in 2002. Cost over-runs averaged 56% of original budgets, and projects on average took 84% more time than originally scheduled.

It is not as if project management is a new science. It has its origins in critical paths and Gantt charts, planning tools first widely used in the early 20th century, and its own well-established international association, the Project Management Institute (PMI), based in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. The PMI sets standards and professional exams that are taken by thousands every year. It boasts 150,000 members in 150 countries, all of them specialists in managing projects. So why do so many still go so wrong?

Projects, says the PMI, have five distinct phases: initiation; planning; execution; control; and closure. Problems arise most frequently when initiation gets separated from execution. To secure a project, bidders often make overly optimistic assumptions about costs and revenues—an example of what Max Bazerman of the Harvard Business School calls “self-serving bias”, a phenomenon he uses to explain why good accountants do bad audits. It may also explain why good project managers make bad forecasts, particularly in the public sector, where after-the-event accountability to a project's paymaster, the taxpayer, is less rigorous. This may be pronounced with prestige projects (such as Wembley Stadium) where bidders are chasing glory almost as much as commercial gain.

A study published this year in the Journal of the American Planning Association examined 210 big rail and road projects in 14 different countries, and found their forecasts of future passengers to be wildly optimistic: for the rail projects, they were, on average, an astounding 106% higher than eventually turned out to be the case, with one in eight out by over 400%; the road projects' miscalculations were more modest, by over 20% in more than half the cases. The article's authors, led by Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Denmark's Aalborg University, claim that the forecasts on such projects are no more accurate now than they were 30 years ago.

Projecting forwards

Greg Balestrero, the head of PMI, says that for years project management was largely ignored. But that is now changing. A recent PMI survey found that three out of four European companies employ project managers. When Compaq, a computer maker, was taken over by Hewlett-Packard in 2002, it had some 1,400 on its payroll.

Three years ago the board of Siemens launched a worldwide initiative to improve its project management. The German electronics group had worked out that half its turnover came from project-like work, and it calculated that if it could complete all of these projects on time and to budget, it would add €3 billion ($3.7 billion) to its bottom line over three years. A key element of the scheme was the introduction of project managers to the company's sales teams to try and temper their more extravagant promises, a move that requires a careful balance between reining them in and killing the deal.

Some companies have gone so far as to become more like project co-ordinators than producers of goods or services. The “business-as-usual” bits of their operations have been outsourced, leaving them free to design and orchestrate new ideas. Nike, for instance, does not make shoes any more; it manages footwear projects. Coca-Cola, which hands most of the bottling and marketing of its drinks to others, is little more than a collection of projects, run by people it calls “orchestrators”. Germany's BMW treats each new car “platform”, which is the basis of new vehicle ranges, as a separate project. Meanwhile Capital One, a fast-growing American financial-services group, has a special team to handle its M&A “projects”. For all these firms, project management has become an important competitive tool. Some of them call it a core competence.

Good project management can certainly make a difference. BP's fortunes were transformed when it converted its exploration division, BPX, into a portfolio of projects, each of them more or less free from head-office control—a structure which the company describes as an “asset federation”. Asset/project managers can no longer rely on head office for support. They are required to build their own self-sufficient teams.

Moreover, there are still difficult individual projects that get completed with time and money to spare. The winner of last year's PMI Project of the Year award was the Saudi-Aramco Haradh gas pipeline, whose original contracting document was lauded for the way it “defined the mix of contracts best suited to accomplish the project's objectives”. The three-year project to build a $2 billion gas terminal deep in the desert, 10km from the nearest road, was completed six months ahead of schedule and 27% under budget. Phew, what a scorcher.

^RETURN TO TOP^

********************************
4) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Hurricane Katrina [Le cyclone qui devaste la Nouvelle Orléans.]
http://teacher.scholastic.com/

Hurricane Hits Louisiana
By Suzanne Freeman

More than 1 million people left their homes in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina hit land Monday morning. Another 10,000 people huddled for safety in the Superdome. The stadium began to leak and temporarily lost electricity Monday morning as winds intensified.

"I can see daylight straight up from inside the Superdome," reported Ed Reams of CNN affiliate WDSU from inside the structure.

The Category 5 storm, with winds up to 160 miles per hour (mph), hit land around sunrise Monday. It quickly decreased to a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 135 mph. By 1 p.m. Monday, it was down to a category 3.

Much of New Orleans lies below sea level. A network of levees 18 feet high protects 70 percent of the city from flooding. Storm surges of 28 feet or higher are expected.

"[Katrina] is capable of causing catastrophic damage," said National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield. "New Orleans may never be the same."

The storm is moving north at 15 miles per hour, covering a 125-mile area. Hurricane warnings are posted from Morgan City, Louisiana, east to the Alabama-Florida state line. Hurricane warnings are for winds of at least 74 miles per hour. Tornadoes are also possible across southern portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle.

Only three other Category 5 hurricanes have hit land in the U.S. since records were kept. The first known Category 5 was unnamed. It hit on Labor Day in 1935. In 1969, Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Andrew, which hit Florida in 1992, was the costliest hurricane with $26.5 million in damage.

^RETURN TO TOP^

********************************
6) CNN/Global Office: Early life crisis hits male workers [Les hommes britanniques connaissent la crise de la quarantaine de plus en plus tôt...]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/08/03/early.life.crisis/index.html

Early life crisis hits male workers

By Nick Easen for CNN
Wednesday, August 3, 2005 Posted: 1319 GMT (2119 HKT)

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Most men want a better job, a bigger house, more holidays and a lot more besides. But the pursuit of a better work-life balance is proving a little too stressful for the younger modern male.

A new report says that many men in Britain are finding office and home life too much to handle. But it is not men facing a mid-life crisis that are going through this phase -- it is the younger generation that are now suffering from early-life crises.

The research group Mintel found that 23 percent of 25- to 44-year-old British men felt stressed in the office, compared with an average of 19 percent. This group is also concerned about a lack of personal time and earning enough money for the kind of lifestyle they want to live.

The survey of 1,883 men earlier this year found that nearly one in ten men between the ages of 25 and 44 are anxiety-ridden, worrying about employment issues and time pressures. Problems are made worse if they have children and especially if they are divorced. "British men are finding the work-life balance very difficult," Amanda Lintott, a consumer analyst at Mintel told CNN. "Only 25 percent do not worry about anything at all, and our research shows that women are handling things better." A further 16 percent of men worry about having enough money put aside for retirement and being able to pay for their children's education.

Many men in this early-life crisis phase hope to earn more money and work less, while still reducing their debt. Mintel suggests that these people need to dampen down their over-ambitious plans and be more realistic, if they want to lead happier and less stressed lives.

The change of men's role in society was also highlighted as one of the elements contributing to high levels of stress and anxiety. "There is a lack of direction due to their changing roles, men do not know where their roles are -- and whether they should stay at home, especially if their partner has a better job," says Lintott. One of the biggest changes in British society has been the increase in the number of women going to work, now only eight percent of men agree that a woman's place is in the home.

^RETURN TO TOP^

*******************************
7) Slate/Moneybox: Why French stocks rock [Pourquoi la bourse de Paris explosent dans un pays à l'économie moribonde.]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2125090/
moneybox Commentary about business and finance.

Après Moi Le Bull Market: Why French stocks rock
By Daniel Gross
Updated Thursday, Aug. 25, 2005, at 12:56 PM PT

France is an economic basket case. It struggles with chronic unemployment of about 10 percent. Those who do have jobs don't like to work much. The economy is rigid, with government ownership prevalent in key industries. Entrepreneurs flee burdensome regulations to create businesses in the United Kingdom and the United States. In recent months, France lost the lucrative 2012 Olympics to London, and an angry electorate resoundingly voted down the establishment's pet project, the EU constitution.

So, how can it be that in this year of woe, the French stock market is kicking our derrière—and the derrières of many other countries?

Thus far in 2005, U.S. stocks have struggled against the fierce head winds of rising interest rates and the rising cost of oil and other raw materials. French companies operate under many of these same constraints. And yet among the G-7 (the seven largest economies in the world), France's stock market has turned in the best performance so far this year in local currency terms. As of yesterday's close, France's CAC-40 index was up 15.78 percent. That noses out Germany's DAX 30, which is up 15.4 percent. By contrast, England's FTSE 100 has gained 9.6 percent, and the U.S. indexes are either flat or down. Check out this chart of the CAC-40 against the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq. The CAC-40 has seemed to gain momentum even as France's ordeals piled up this summer—it is up about 8 percent in the last few months.

Several macroeconomic and psychological factors are at play here. One is interest rates. U.S. short-term interest rates have risen sharply in the last year, as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan continues his campaign to return rates to normal levels. That works against our bourses in two ways. With yields on short-term bonds and savings accounts rising (at about 3.5 percent), these safe instruments provide an increasingly attractive alternative to poorly performing, riskier stocks. Rising interest rates are also bad news for banks and financial services companies, which account for a huge chunk of the S&P 500.

But in France—and the Eurozone at large—interest rates are significantly lower. The European Central Bank's overnight rate is 2 percent, compared with the Federal Reserve's 3.5 percent rate. And since Europe's central bankers are more concerned about slow growth than runaway inflation, investors think European interest rates are more likely to fall or remain constant than to rise. That's inherently bullish for stocks.

A second economic reason: The CAC-40 consists of the 40 largest France-based companies. Most are multinational titans like Alcatel, BNP Paribas, luxury-goods giant LVMH, grocery store operator Carrefour, tire behemoth Michelin, and L'Oreal. Just as many of the largest U.S. companies—Coca-Cola, General Electric—rely on foreign markets for most of their sales and growth, most of these French champions are truly global. In many instances, they've proved just as adept at competing in global branded markets as their U.S. rivals. And so while the French market stagnates, these corporations are able to grab a fair share of growth in rapidly growing markets like China and India.

There's some psychology at work here, too. Stock markets are future markets, not present markets. Pessimism has long ruled the day in Germany and, to a lesser degree, in France. But in recent months, contrarian investors have become more optimistic about the economic future of Old Europe. People figure things can't get much worse, so why not take a plunge?

Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business who runs the influential Roubini Global Economics Monitor, says France's structural rigidities may be exaggerated. "The 35-hour work week has effectively been phased out." he said. And there's increasing optimism that Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy will spearhead greater structural reform.

But the real grounds for optimism lie in the restructuring work being done by individual companies, not by governments. In August 2004, Ben Funnell, a London-based Morgan Stanley equity strategist, presciently argued that European stocks were poised to outperform U.S. stocks. And he's still bullish. He notes that French businesses—and European companies on the whole—are finally starting to do what U.S. companies did long ago: cut jobs, aggressively restructure operations, outsource, expand in low-cost overseas markets, and focus on profits. "Productivity in the U.S. is starting to slow, whereas it's starting to rise in Europe," said Funnell. "And that's being driven by better progress on company-by-company reform than we had anticipated." That bodes well for European corporate profit growth. And even after their recent run-up, French stocks trade at a comparatively low multiple to earnings.

Funnell notes a final factor weighing in favor of investing in France: European economies are far less sensitive to the price of oil than the U.S. economy. "In Europe, 80 percent of the pump price is tax," said Funnell, "whereas in the U.S., it's 20 percent." In other words, when the price of crude oil rises, as this chart shows, it will have a greater impact on the stock of Wal-Mart than on Carrefour.

By MATT LEE and TED LEE
Published: August 28, 2005

Douglas Heath, Ph.D., says he is on the verge of perfecting what he hopes will be the defining fruit of his career, one with a trifecta of rare and attractive qualities. It is a seedless tomato; it delivers the robust, sweet-and-tart flavor most supermarket tomatoes lack; and it has all the disease resistance the commercial industry demands. He has, in fact, created it -- the patent on the technique has been filed and approved -- but just a few minor kinks remain. Although seedless grapes have been around for more than 100 years, seedless tomatoes aren't yet commercially available.

At 7:20 one recent morning, Heath, 46, was tasting some cherry tomatoes and slicing into several other varieties, including a few that were full of seeds. At his five-acre trial field in the bottom lands in Woodland, Calif., Heath devotes most of his energies to his seedless project. He is also working on several aesthetic ''concepts,'' like exotic colors, patterns, shapes and flavors.

As a tomato breeder for Seminis, a multinational corporation that sells vegetable seeds to commercial growers, Heath has already developed several new hybrids that are now sold worldwide. Because fresh tomatoes are one of the fastest-growing segments in the global food market, surveying Heath's garden is a bit like looking into the future of the produce aisle.

In the shade between two tall rows, Heath cut into a tomato with tiger stripes, exposing standard-issue red tomato flesh that almost exploded with juice. The flavor was O.K. in the original heirloom tomato that he used to create this variety, but Heath likened its texture to that of a water balloon -- too soft on the inside. Now he had solved that problem.

''The main hook for this tomato is that wild color,'' he said. ''Through the years I've improved the firmness while maintaining the flavor.''

He walked on, stopping at a tangerine-colored tomato the size of a grape that goes by No. 3,756. He popped it in his mouth like a piece of popcorn. We tasted it, too. The tomato had an almost peachy flavor; other 3,756's that had sat on the vine a little longer tasted like apricots. Blindfolded, you might never guess they were tomatoes. ''My kids snarf these like candy,'' he said.

Heath views his life's work as putting back into market tomatoes what intensive breeding for commercial scale took out. Since the first hybrid tomatoes were developed in the 1880's, breeders have for the most part concentrated on matters of interest to volume growers, namely uniformity and firmness. As the capacity to fit into packing crates and withstand a cross-country journey became paramount with the establishment of a national highway system, the ability of a tomato to tantalize taste buds took a back seat.

The DNA that Heath is introducing in many of his plants comes from two main sources. For disease resistance, he turns to the ur-tomatoes that the Incas discovered in Peru. These wild tomato plants were collected by the geneticist C.M. Rick, who traveled throughout the Andes in the mid-20th century and who built a ''gene bank'' at the University of California, Davis, just a half-hour drive from Heath's plot. For flavor and other aesthetic qualities, he draws on any number of heirloom tomatoes, like the German stripe and the Cherokee purple. (One source for these tomatoes, as well as an inspiration for this 10-year-long project, came from Heath's friend William Frazier, a professor of horticulture at Oregon State University who died in 1995.)

The complex personalities of these tomatoes have pleased small farmers over the years, despite their uneven shapes, supersoftness and low yields. Their distinctive colors and bold sweetness have only recently become appealing to mass-market producers.

To perfect his half-finished tiger-stripe tomato, Heath will breed, or ''cross,'' the plant with other tomato plants whose fruit he knows to have both firmness and full-bodied taste. The work is all done by hand: a crew collects the open flowers of one parent plant and shakes loose the pollen, which is then taken to the greenhouse and dusted on the stigmas of flowers on the second parent plant. Seeds harvested from the fruit that results are then planted to see whether the desired traits have become dominant in the hybrid.

Nowadays, thanks to advancements in genetic research, a sliver of leaf from a young plant can almost instantly tell the breeder whether the plant carries a desired trait -- resistance to diseases like tomato yellow leaf curl virus or late blight (the cause of the Irish potato famine and a current concern for tomato growers on the East Coast). According to Heath, where it took his predecessors from 5 to 10 years to develop a hybrid tomato, it takes him only 2 or 3.

Heath led us to one edge of his plot and cut open what looked to be in every respect a regular fire-engine-red tomato. A slice of it, warmed slightly in the desert sun, tasted like late summer, grassy with impressive sweetness but with an appetizing tartness to match. Inside, the jellylike seed sacs were without their usual complement of pinhead-size seeds. The gel was tinted slightly green instead of the usual red -- its European heritage showing through (many Mediterranean tomatoes have a verdant cast). ''Most Americans aren't so used to seeing this,'' he said, referring to the green gel, but he wasn't concerned. ''I'll make one with red gel, just to appease those people.''

The real concern, and what's truly keeping Douglas Heath's miracle tomato from making its debut, were some fine concentric cracks around the stem -- stretch marks, essentially -- that he was pointing out with the tip of his knife. As with the green gel, it's just a matter of time before Heath breeds out this ''microcracking'' tendency, but he's getting fidgety. ''I don't know,'' he said, stepping out of his godlike role for a moment. ''Maybe we can just let it fly.''

*******************************
9) The Economist: State Fairs [C'est la saison des comices agricoles aux Etats-Unis.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%28X%24%29QA%2B%21%23%40%238%0A
State fairs: From Vikings to mobile phones
Aug 4th 2005 | GREAT FALLS, MONTANA

A venerable American institution becomes a little more urban

“THE best food ever” is an ambitious tag for a breaded meatball on a stick. But this delicacy, unaccountably called a Viking, is hailed as such by some people at the annual Montana state fair. What's the secret? Beef, veal and pork are mixed with egg, canned milk, oatmeal and spices. The concoction is cooked, dipped in batter, then deep-fried. “We wait for it all year—it's the only place you can get 'em,” explains Jan Sheryak, a fairgoer who has doused her Viking with ketchup.

Fair season in America is just getting underway. In most states this means a week-long frenzy of grease-gulping, rollercoasters and pig-racing, as well as more civilised activities such as goat-milking and quilting. Montana's fair, one of the earliest, is taking place this week. It could pull in 140,000 if the weather co-operates.

There are still plenty of agricultural trappings. Judges hand out ribbons for everything from sheep-breeding to Lego-stacking. Not to be missed is the “World's Largest Steer”: Big Red is more than 6 feet tall, 11 feet from nose to tail and, sadly, kept in a small pen. But fewer than one in 20 Montanans now live on farms. “In most places, there are less agricultural exhibits,” says Tom Atkins, who co-owns the travelling Mighty Thomas carnival. Since seven-year-olds no longer grow up milking cows every morning, they have to be introduced to these strange animals in petting zoos.

Meanwhile, two other urban blights are also forcing their way into state fairs: advertising and politics. In the old days, “marketing” usually meant no more than getting the fertiliser company to sponsor the prize for the sheepdog trial. Now Gary Goodman, of the International Association of Fairs and Expositions, points out that Madison Avenue is paying a lot more attention to the audiences that fairs draw in. The families who come are in the mood for entertainment and, to advertisers' especial delight, they are nowhere near their TiVos (ad-skipping remote controls).

The new consumer businesses want to make their events more interactive. At the Montana fair, Qwest, a telecom company, invites fair-goers to audition to be in its commercials. Hormel Foods, the maker of SPAM, sponsor a recipe contest at fairs across the country: the winner in Montana was “SPAM chops”, garnished with pear and pepper chutney (and arguably as vile as the Viking). At the huge Los Angeles County fair in September, Levi Strauss will peddle a body-scanning technique that will allow fairgoers to find the perfect pair of jeans in 10 seconds, says Mary Ann Halford of the Fair Network, a company which arranges sponsorships.

There has always been a degree of politicking at state fairs, but carousing with drunken farmers has given way to a more urban form of democracy. The Montana fair boasts two opposing booths: one, backed by PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) laments a recent state ballot initiative that banned gay marriage; the other booth joyously offers “Freedom from sodomy, Freedom in Christ”. The culture wars have reached the greatest American event of all. Oink.

^RETURN TO TOP^

*******************************
10) The Scotsman: African teams shown red card for city's Homeless World Cup [Des équipes participant à la coupe du monde de football des sans-abri se voient refuser des visas pour motif de défaut de domicile fixe...]
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1638712005
African teams shown red card for city's Homeless World Cup

JOANNA VALLELY

FIVE African teams have been refused permission to enter the UK to play in the Homeless World Cup in Edinburgh next week. The eight-man teams were all set to come to the Capital for the tournament which begins on Wednesday. But at the last minute the British embassies in their respective countries decided to withhold their visas. Homeless footballers from Burundi, Cameroon, Nigeria, Zambia and Kenya were told by UK embassies that they could not travel amid fears that they may not return home.

Mel Young, director of the Homeless World Cup, who had sought visa advice from government offices early on in the project, said today that the decision had left him "embarrassed to be British". He said: "I worry about the future of sporting events in Britain. And this raises questions about the future of the Olympic Games if they use the same criteria to allow people into the country as they did for the Burundi team. The implication of the Home and Foreign Offices is that only rich people can come and participate."

The Burundi players had to travel to Uganda and then Rwanda to be fingerprinted before being told they could not come.

One man's visa was turned down because he told officials there were four people in his football side - in the tournament the teams have four people and four on standby. The official apparently thought he was lying as there are 11 players in a regular side.

Other teams were refused visas because they did not have enough money to support themselves in Edinburgh.

Mr Young said that they had suspected there might be problems from the outset because the players were homeless. He said that the African players had been treated "abominably" at their interviews and many of the questions asked to get visas were inane. Mr Young said: "They were rejected because they were poor and couldn't satisfy the British High Commission that they had reason to return to their countries. Obviously, if they had jobs, bank accounts, etc, they wouldn't be coming to a Homeless World Cup."

The teams themselves e-mailed the Edinburgh organisers asking for help after being denied the right to attend the tournament. The Kenyan representative wrote today: "We are feeling very down and disappointed.We don't know where to go from here. It's a dead end. Help us please, we still wish to join you."

The Burundi team leader, Jean-Marie Bizimana, said his team felt equally desperate. He wrote: "Our homeless project within our association is finished now because I do not see how we will approach the homeless now. Our small fund has been used for Homeless World Cup preparation, in the hope that everything would be all right."

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said their representatives dealt with each case carefully. Sey added that they would have looked at the players as individuals rather than teams. She said: "We regret that some countries' visa applications have been turned down. But each applicant is dealt with in accordance with the immigration laws and on an individual case-by-case basis."

-*-*-
The facts

THE third Homeless World Cup will take place in Edinburgh next week. The tournament will open at 11am on Wednesday in Princes Street Gardens and public entry will be free.

A total of 26 teams participated in last year's World Cup in Gothenburg, Sweden, after the overwhelmingly well-received first World Cup in Graz, Austria, in 2003. Italy won the overall trophy in 2004, with Japan receiving an award for fair play and England's Kevin Wilson taking the best goalkeeper award.

The social impact report of the Homeless World Cup in Sweden showed sport can help the lives of the homeless . Out of 204 participants 78 players found employment, 95 players improved their housing situation, 70 players are pursuing education and 56 players have tackled their drug dependency.

The Scottish squad is coached by ex-Rangers player Ally Dawson, below, sponsored by Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland and organised by The Big Issue in Scotland.

^RETURN TO TOP^

The book on the Livermore public library's mosaic spelling fiasco is officially C-L-O-S-E-D.

The Miami muralist who misspelled Shakespeare, Michelangelo and nine other famous names on a mosaic outside the library slipped into town to correct her errors -- at a cost of $6,000 to the city. And this time, city officials promise they have checked her work before it gets set in stone.

On Tuesday, Maria Alquilar worked under the blazing sun, using power tools to reshape and install tiles changing "Eistein" to "Einstein" and "Van Gough" to "Van Gogh." But Alquilar -- who last year claimed artistic license and said she wasn't going to fix the faux pas because people were being too mean about it - - was in no mood to talk. Wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and working under a tent, she wagged her finger at a television cameraman and threatened to throw a rock at a Chronicle photographer. "No pictures of me!" Alquilar yelled, standing behind a barrier that officials had put up to separate her from the public. "If I'm in it, I'm going to sue you."

Alquilar had wanted to return quietly to do the edits, after news coverage of the flub made national headlines last year. City officials paid her $6,000 plus travel expenses, on top of the $40,000 she received for creating the 16-foot circular mosaic, made up of 175 historical names and cultural words. But after she began removing the offending tiles Sunday, word spread. On Tuesday, she had a consistent audience for her work, which city officials expected to be complete by today.

And unlike last time -- when the misspellings were not noticed until the library's opening, when the piece was already cemented down -- city officials said they triple-checked the replacement tiles before they were installed. "We certainly believe they are spelled correctly," assistant city manager Jim Piper said.

Livermore officials selected Alquilar in 2000 to create the colorful installation at the entrance to Livermore's new library, which opened in May of 2004. Icons representing science, art, literature and history surround a tree of life in the center.

Piper said that, with the controversy behind it, he hoped the public could simply enjoy Alquilar's mosaic for what it is -- "a wonderful piece of artwork," he said. But one library patron shook her head and laughed when she saw the artist at work, saying, "That poor lady." "I feel sorry for her out in the heat," said the woman, a nurse named Betty who wouldn't give her last name because she has "teacher friends who are just horrified by the misspellings." She thought the city did not have to change the mosaic at all. "It was kind of fun to have something unique," she said. "I thought it was very nice."

But Jarod Vash, 17, who was borrowing videos with his girlfriend and her family, said he thought the misspellings were just embarrassing. "When the story first broke, I thought, 'Oh, Livermore, the town that misspells stuff,' " Vash said. "The only thing we've got in Livermore is a library that misspells words." But he added, "Everybody makes mistakes."

Quipped his girlfriend's 13-year-old brother, Eric Smyth: "Not this bad."

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/men/news/education/s/166/166470_exam_failure_equals_deferred_success.html

Exam failure equals deferred success

THE concept of "failure" should be removed from the British education system and be replaced with "deferred success", according to a motion being considered by a teaching union. The proposal has been tabled for the forthcoming annual conference of the Professional Association of Teachers in Buxton on July 25.

Its author, retired primary school teacher Liz Beattie, acknowledged that the wording of her motion was controversial, but insisted it reflected the way in which the educational system was developing. It should be possible for pupils who fail exams to "bank" the parts in which they did well and then retake the remainder, deferring their success until they have passed all the papers and modules, she said.

Possible

Ms Beattie told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We have made so much development in recent years in making examinations more flexible, doing them in modules so you can concentrate on different parts of them at different times. "What happens when an exam is failed but, for example, three-quarters of it is perfectly satisfactorily done? It should be possible to do the other bits as add-ons afterwards and to defer the success of the exam."

Ms Beattie said the wording of the motion had been deliberately phrased to spark controversy. "When one words a motion for a conference or a discussion group, one isn't looking for agreement and a row of nodding heads, one is looking for an interesting discussion," she said. "Of course in the wording of this we were playing with words, but there is a very serious concept behind it, which is that there is certainly room for flexibility."

The Pat is one of the smaller teaching unions, with 35,000 members in schools, colleges and nurseries across the UK.

-*-*-
www.theherald.co.uk/news/43415.html

How to stop pupils failing: call it ‘deferred success’
CAMERON SIMPSON July 20 2005

Failure can come in many guises. Joseph Heller, the author, once described the "self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody". But if a group of teachers has its way, the word "fail" will be deleted from the school vocabulary and cloaked with the term "deferred success".

Being told they are a failure in class can put children off education for life, they believe. The idea will be put forward next week by members of the Professional Association of Teachers, one of the smaller teaching unions, at its annual conference at Buxton, Derbyshire. Liz Beattie, a retired primary teacher, said some children who struggle with academic subjects needed help to find success in other areas, such as work-related courses. Mrs Beattie and a colleague, Wesley Paxton, will propose abolishing the word "fail" in a motion which, if passed, would mean its becomes union policy.

The motion says: "Conference believes it is time to delete the word 'fail' from the educational vocabulary, to be replaced with the concept of 'deferred success'." Mrs Beattie, 68, who has 37 years of teaching experience, said: "If children at an early age decide, 'I can't do school, I can't learn to read or do this maths stuff,' they are losing an enormous part of their lives." She added: "We need to stop using failure as a dirty word."

It is not a sentiment shared by Truman Capote, the American writer. Failure, he said, was the condiment that gives success its flavour. Take it away and life could be as tasteless as school dinners.

-*-*-

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,5500,1532458,00.html

Kelly dismisses calls to ban 'failure' in class

Press Association
Wednesday July 20, 2005

The education secretary, Ruth Kelly, today dismissed calls for the word "fail" to be banned from schools and replaced with the concept of "deferred success".

The Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) will debate the idea at the union's annual conference next week. Some children are put off education for life after being told they are a failure in class, PAT officials will argue.

But Ms Kelly said she thought the notion of "deferred success" instead of failure deserved "nought out of 10". Young people must learn about success and failure to prepare themselves for adult life, she said. The minister told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "For that particular proposal, I think I might give them nought out of 10. "To be quite honest, I think it's really important for young people to grow up with the ability to get on and achieve, but also to find out what failure is. "When young people grow up and enter the adult world they have to deal with success and failure, and education is about creating well-rounded young people who can deal with these sorts of situations."

The general secretary of PAT, Jean Gemmell, defended the ideas behind the motion and suggested that Ms Kelly was being too "simplistic". She said it was "unhelpful" and "unfortunate" that Ms Kelly was commenting on a motion which had not even been debated yet, and was therefore not yet PAT policy. "It seems to me that Ruth's response is to the words of the motion, not what might be behind the motion," she said. "It's easy to look at the words of the debate motion and be simplistic about it."

She added: "Of course there are things that we all fail at and many of them don't matter. "I fail at trying to play tennis - so I don't play tennis," she said. "We are talking about young people who struggle to read, write and can't relate to other people. These are things you cannot be allowed to fail at."

Ms Gemmell backed Ms Kelly's view that children should be helped to understand success and failure to prepare them for later life. The PAT motion, being put forward by retired teacher Liz Beattie, from Suffolk, said: "Conference believes it is time to delete the word 'fail' from the educational vocabulary to be replaced with the concept of 'deferred success'."

^RETURN TO TOP^