text:
Most Recent "Shopping" Articles
From Becoming the Perfect Stranger to the Perfect Partner
Written by: Kandice Skaggs | Distributed: 2013-10-15 | Word Count: 843 | Page Views: 5553 | Votes: 14 | Rating: 1.43
Although we are aware of people who have fostered good relationships out of online dating, it doesn't happen all the time. As a matter of fact, most of them fail because of a slew of reasons. Here are some reminders on how to walk that ground so you can become just the right partner that another has been dying to meet.
Choosing Rainwear
Written by: Rathi Niyogi | Distributed: 2010-11-04 | Word Count: 741 | Page Views: 5681 | Votes: 3 | Rating: 0.67
Rainwear does more than simply keep out rain or snow, it protects from wind, cold, and chemical splashes. Your choice of rainwear depends on the expected weather, the expected temperatures, your planned activities, and your budget. Rainwear materials and designs greatly affect the performance you can expect. There are three major types of rainwear:
Celebrity Perfume Gift Sets Are Always Welcome
Written by: Robert Moore | Distributed: 2010-08-05 | Word Count: 736 | Page Views: 4988 | Votes: 3 | Rating: 2.00
Perfume is one of the best gifts for your loved ones on almost every occasion, whether it is Valentine's Day, Birthday, Wedding Anniversary, or even Christmas Day.
Best Cologne Gift Sets Are A Great Idea For Men
Written by: Robert Moore | Distributed: 2010-07-29 | Word Count: 770 | Page Views: 4950 | Votes: 8 | Rating: 2.00
Hair, clothing and looks are important, but the right cologne transforms a man. Giving him the confidence to know he smells good when approaching beautiful women in a club or giving a presentation for work. When it comes to fragrances for men companies now understand that men want to smell good while attending parties, formal events, the office, on a date or simply while relaxing at home.
Must-See 2010 Summer Music Festivals
Written by: Ryan Hogan | Distributed: 2010-04-28 | Word Count: 885 | Page Views: 5386 | Votes: 5 | Rating: 0.60
One of the best things about summer, at least for music fans, is the plethora of music festivals held all across the country and all though out the season. These festivals bring together dozens of great bands usually for more than one day and usually on more than one stage.
How Does A Blu-ray Disc Work?
Written by: Titus Hoskins | Distributed: 2010-04-27 | Word Count: 444 | Page Views: 6630 | Votes: 9 | Rating: 0.89
Blu-ray Players are all the rage in home entertainment, but how exactly does a Blu-ray disc work and why is it so much better than a regular DVD disc or system? Read this informative article to discover how a Blu-ray disc works.
Understanding Personal Injury Law and Knowing When You Need a Personal Injury Lawyer
Written by: Keith Stachowiak | Distributed: 2010-03-10 | Word Count: 497 | Page Views: 4362 | Votes: 2 | Rating: 0.50
When in an accident caused by someone else's carelessness or deliberate actions, one of the first thoughts that goes through most people's minds after the panic and relief subsides, is whether they should seek out a personal injury lawyer. Before you make this decision, you should know what personal injury law is, whether you even need a personal injury lawyer, and when you should choose one.
Tattoos Have Transformed From Mom To Artwork Of The 21st Century
Written by: Bree Levine | Distributed: 2010-02-25 | Word Count: 554 | Page Views: 6279 | Votes: 6 | Rating: 0.50
You could call it a 21st century art form: people use their bodies as living displays of what they care about in the form of pictorial art. Over time, tattoo artists have become more and more sophisticated, able to create complex and well-executed designs.
The Best Traditions And Advice For The Tattooing Experience
Written by: Eileen Howerton | Distributed: 2010-02-24 | Word Count: 566 | Page Views: 4694 | Votes: 4 | Rating: 0.25
The ritual of tattooing and adorning the body with ink and color has been a tradition for centuries. Tattooing is definitely not a fad, or a practice reserved to any particular element of society. It is a tradition that has been found in all parts of the world, in different sects of society.
Shopping Online to Save Time and Money
Written by: Janet Davis | Distributed: 2009-12-31 | Word Count: 880 | Page Views: 4670 | Votes: 4 | Rating: 1.50
There is a certain convenience in shopping from the comfort of one's own home, a convenience that has been met in the past through mail-order catalogs, shopping television channels, and home-delivered grocery services. With the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, this trend has reached its culmination and most elegant expression yet.


text: Apple Watch SE (September 2020) Heavy on features. Light on price. An expansive Retina display so you can see more at a glance. Advanced sensors to track all the ways you move. Powerful features to keep you healthy and safe. Apple Watch SE is a lot of watch for a lot less than you expected. On everyone's watch list. Same iconic design and large display as Apple Watch Series 6. Powerful S5 dual-core SiP for fast performance. Fall detection and Emergency SOS for your safety. Available with cellular to let you go without your phone. Go to new heights, lengths, depths. Run circles around your goals. The Activity rings show all the ways you move throughout the day using three simple metrics — Move, Exercise, and Stand. You'll also be motivated with friendly competitions, personalized coaching, and awards. Come in, the water's fine. Apple Watch SE is water resistant 50 meters. So dive right in and start tracking your splits and sets in the pool, or even map your route in open water. Workouts to stretch your limits. You'll find dozens of workouts to tap into, including running, walking, yoga, cycling, high-intensity interval training, and dance. Apple Watch SE also pairs with compatible gym equipment. It brings more, so you can too. For all your ups and downs. Twists and turns. Leaps and bounds. Just raise your wrist to see metrics like distance, pace, laps, cadence, calories burned, and heart rate. An always-on altimeter lets you see your elevation changes in real time as you climb up or down. It's music, podcasts, and audiobooks to your ears. With Apple Music, you have 70 million tracks of musical motivation on your wrist.3 You can also catch up on the latest podcasts or listen to an audiobook. It's all the inspiration you need for your next workout. And every one after that. Apple Fittness + (Coming late 2020) Now warming up. Introducing a new fitness experience powered by Apple Watch. With the world's most welcoming and knowledgeable trainers. And workout metrics that are transported to your iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Dialed into your health. A watch you can feel good about. Apple Watch SE inspires a healthier life. It keeps you more informed and encourages better habits. It can monitor your heart rate and let you know if something is wrong so you can take action and consult a doctor. And can even call for help in an emergency. You snooze. You win. The new Sleep app works with iPhone to track your sleep and help you create a schedule and bedtime routine to meet your sleep goals. You can view your sleep trends to see how consistently you're meeting them. Well-worn wellness. Get reminders to wash your hands for the recommended 20 seconds. Receive a gentle tap if noise levels get too high. Track your menstrual cycle from your wrist. Take a moment to center yourself with the Breathe app. Your well-being is well in hand. Fall detection and Emergency SOS. With its built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, Apple Watch SE can detect if you've taken a hard fall and connect you with emergency services if you're immobile. You can also get immediate help in an emergency — even when you're traveling internationally — by simply pressing and holding the side button. On the go. In the know. Everything within reach, even without a phone. Make a call to the office, reply to an urgent email, navigate with a built-in compass, get turn-by-turn directions from Maps. With available cellular, you have the freedom to go without your phone. The right connections are everything. Your family, joined at the wrist. With Family Setup, you can use your iPhone to pair watches for your children or older adults who don't have their own iPhone.8 So everyone can stay in touch by phone, text message, or Walkie-Talkie. They also can do things like play music, find apps, and close their Activity rings. It's more independence for your kids and parents, and you have the comfort of knowing they're just a call away. Siri is all talk. More action. Want to find a taqueria nearby? Need tomorrow's schedule? Or the name of the '90s song you just heard? Just ask. Siri can even translate foreign languages in real time. Easier said, then done. No wallet. No problem. Make purchases in stores that accept contactless payments.9 Show your boarding pass for a flight. Or send money to a friend in Messages. It's the cashless, effortless, safer way to pay. Yours for the making. Start with the finish. Choose from silver, gold, or space gray, all in 100 percent recycled aluminum. Up-and-coming bands. Introducing a whole new way to wear Apple Watch. The Solo Loop comes in two lightweight, ultracomfortable materials — soft silicone and braided yarn. With no buckles or clasps, it easily slides on and off the wrist. And with nine sizes, there's sure to be an ideal fit for everyone. There's a face for that. No matter what you're into — surfing, hiking, photography — you can always find your happy face. And now it's even easier to discover new faces on the App Store, websites, blogs, and social media. Then share with friends and family by email or text. A whole lot more. Weather See the current conditions for the day, along with hourly and 10-day forecasts. You can also get air quality, UV index, and wind speed information. Calendar See what the day holds right from your wrist. Just tap the Calendar complication on your watch face or ask Siri. Reminders Get timely reminders every day. And with just your voice, you can quickly set new tasks on the fly. App Store Discover and download new apps while barely lifting a finger. Browse curated collections, see reviews, and install apps more easily than ever. Walkie-Talkie A fun way to chat with other Apple Watch wearers that's quicker than a call and more personal than a text. Over and out. Camera Remote Use Apple Watch as a viewfinder for your iPhone camera. See a preview, then set a timer or just snap away. Specifications: Finishes Aluminum Silver Space Gray Gold Apple Watch Nike available in silver and space gray aluminum. Features GPS/GNSS Compass Always-on altimeter Water resistant 50 meters Second-generation optical heart sensor International emergency calling Emergency SOS Accelerometer up to 32 g-forces with fall detection Gyroscope Ambient light sensor Speaker Microphone Apple Pay GymKit Capacity 32GB Ceramic and sapphire crystal back Display 44mm 368 by 448 pixels 977 sq mm display area 40mm 324 by 394 pixels 759 sq mm display area Retina LTPO OLED display 1000 nits brightness Chip S5 SiP with 64-bit dual-core processor W3 Apple wireless chip Connectivity LTE and UMTS5 GPS + Cellular models Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz Bluetooth 5.0 Power Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery Up to 18 hours6 Magnetic charging cable Dimensions 40mm Height: 40mm Width: 34mm Depth: 10.4mm 44mm Height: 44mm Width: 38mm Depth: 10.4mm Weight 40mm GPS: 30.49g GPS + Cellular: 30.68g 44mm GPS: 36.20g GPS + Cellular: 36.36g

subset: commoncrawl


text:
In MBA programs, students are taught that companies can't expect to compete on the basis of internal managerial competencies because they're just too easy to copy. Operational effectiveness—doing the same thing as other companies but doing it exceptionally well—is not a path to sustainable advantage in the competitive universe. To stay ahead, the thinking goes, a company must stake out a distinctive strategic position—doing something different than its rivals. This is what the C-suite should focus on, leaving middle and lower-level managers to handle the nuts and bolts of managing the organization and executing plans.
In Brief
The Conventional Wisdom
It's a truism among strategists that you can't compete on the basis of better management processes because they're easily copied. Operational excellence is table stakes in the competitive marketplace.
What the Data Shows
There are three problems with this thinking. First, effective management processes are highly correlated with measures of strategic success. Second, differences in process quality persist over time. Third, there's little evidence that best-in-class processes can be imitated. GM tried for years to adopt Toyota's superior production system and failed miserably.
Organizations need competent management just as much as they need analytical brilliance. We should stop teaching business school students that operational issues are beneath the CEO—and should encourage firms to invest in strengthening management throughout the organization.
Michael Porter articulated the difference between strategy and operational effectiveness in his seminal 1996 HBR article, "What Is Strategy?" The article's analysis of strategy and the strategist's role is rightly influential, but our research shows that simple managerial competence is more important—and less imitable—than Porter argued.
If you look at the data, it becomes clear that core management practices can't be taken for granted. There are vast differences in how well companies execute basic tasks like setting targets and grooming talent, and those differences matter: Firms with strong managerial processes perform significantly better on high-level metrics such as productivity, profitability, growth, and longevity. In addition, the differences in the quality of those processes—and in performance—persist over time, suggesting that competent management is not easy to replicate.
Nobody has ever argued that operational excellence doesn't matter. But we contend that it should be treated as a crucial complement to strategy—and that this is true now more than ever. After all, if a firm can't get the operational basics right, it doesn't matter how brilliant its strategy is. On the other hand, if firms have sound fundamental management practices, they can build on them, developing more-sophisticated capabilities—such as data analytics, evidence-based decision making, and cross-functional communication—that are essential to success in uncertain, volatile industries.
Achieving managerial competence takes effort, though: It requires sizable investments in people and processes throughout good times and bad. These investments, we argue, represent a major barrier to imitation.
In this article we'll review our research findings and then discuss the obstacles that often prevent executives from devoting sufficient resources to improving management skills and practices. Throughout, we'll show that such investments are a powerful way to become more competitive. If the world has really entered a "new normal" of low productivity growth, as Robert Gordon and others have argued, pushing managerial capital up a level could be the best route out of the performance doldrums.
The Research
Over the past century, scholars have learned a great deal about how core management processes affect a company's performance. For example, researchers such as Kim Clark, Bob Hayes, and David Garvin documented differences within factories, industries, and companies. But a lack of big data encompassing many firms, industries, and countries inhibited the statistical study of management practices. In the past decade, however, we have developed ways to robustly measure core management practices, and we can now show that their adoption accounts for a large fraction of performance differences across firms and countries.
As we've described in earlier articles in HBR, in 2002 we began an in-depth study of how organizations in 34 countries use (or don't use) core management practices. Building on a survey instrument that was initially developed by John Dowdy and Stephen Dorgan at McKinsey, we set out to rate companies on their use of 18 practices in four areas: operations management, performance monitoring, target setting, and talent management. (See the sidebar "Core Managerial Practices" for a detailed list. Though these don't represent the full set of important managerial practices, we have found that they're good proxies for general operational excellence.) The ratings ranged from poor to nonexistent at the low end (say, for performance monitoring using metrics that did not indicate directly whether overall business objectives were being met) to very sophisticated at the high end (for performance monitoring that continuously tracked and communicated metrics, both formally and informally, to all staff with an array of visual tools).
Core Managerial Practices
Our aim was to gather reliable data that was fully comparable across firms and covered a large, representative sample of enterprises around the world. We realized that to do that, we needed to manage the data collection ourselves, which we did with the help of a large team of people from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. To date the team has interviewed managers from more than 12,000 companies about their practices. On the basis of the information gathered, we rate every organization on each management practice, using a 1 to 5 scale in which higher scores indicate greater adoption. Those ratings are then averaged to produce an overall management score for each company.
That data has led us to two main findings: First, achieving operational excellence is still a massive challenge for many organizations. Even well-informed and well-structured companies often struggle with it. This is true across countries and industries—and in spite of the fact that many of the managerial processes we studied are well known.
The dispersion of management scores across firms was wide. Big differences across countries were evident, but a major fraction of the variation (approximately 60%) was actually within countries. The discrepancies were substantial even within rich countries like the United States.
In our entire sample we found that 11% of firms had an average score of 2 or less, which corresponds to very weak monitoring, little effort to identify and fix problems within the organization, almost no targets for employees, and promotions and rewards based on tenure or family connections. At the other end of the spectrum we identified clear management superstars across all the countries surveyed: Six percent of the firms in our sample had an average score of 4 or greater. In other words they had rigorous performance monitoring, systems geared to optimize the flow of information across and within functions, continuous improvement programs that supported short- and long-term targets, and performance systems that rewarded and advanced great employees and helped underperformers turn around or move on.
Achieving operational excellence is still a massive challenge for many firms.
By interviewing several companies multiple times throughout the past decade, we were able to observe that these large differences in the adoption of core management practices were long-lasting. This isn't really surprising: According to our estimates, the costs involved in improving management practices are as high as those associated with capital investments such as buildings and equipment.
One of our findings may surprise readers: These differences show up within companies, too. A project conducted with the U.S. Census revealed that variations in management practices inside firms across their plants accounted for about one-third of total variations across all plant locations. This was particularly true in large firms, where practices can differ a great deal across plants, divisions, and regions. Even the biggest and most successful firms typically fail to implement best practices throughout the whole organization. Some parts of it are effectively managed, but other parts struggle.
Our second major finding was that the large, persistent gaps in basic managerial practices we documented were associated with large, persistent differences in firm performance. As we've noted, our data shows that better-managed firms are more profitable, grow faster, and are less likely to die. Indeed, moving a firm from the worst 10% to the best 10% of management practices is associated with a $15 million increase in profits, 25% faster annual growth, and 75% higher productivity. Better-managed firms also spend 10 times as much on R&D and increase their patenting by a factor of 10 as well—which suggests that they're not sacrificing innovation to efficiency. They also attract more talented employees and foster better worker well-being. These patterns were evident in all countries and industries.
But these empirical findings raise a major question: If the benefits of core managerial practices are really so large and extensive, why doesn't every company focus on strengthening them? Also, a more existential issue (which we'll address toward the end of the article) is, What should executives, business schools, and policy makers take away from this body of research?
What Causes the Differences?
Some of the variation in management practice is driven by external factors. The intensity of competition is one; competition creates a strong incentive to reduce inefficiencies and kills off badly managed firms. Labor regulations play a role as well; they can make it difficult to give opportunities to employees on the basis of merit or to adopt performance-related compensation. On the flip side, regulators may be in a position to create incentives for employee training or support firms that prioritize managerial competence.
We've also observed that inconsistencies often result from stubborn blind spots and deficiencies within companies. Here are the things that typically hinder the adoption of essential management practices:
False perceptions.
Our research indicates that a surprisingly large number of managers are unable to objectively judge how badly (or well) their firms are run. (Similar biases show up in other settings. For example, 70% of students, 80% of drivers, and 90% of university teachers rate themselves as "above average.")
Consider the average response we got to the question "On a scale from 1 to 10, how well managed is your firm?," which we posed to each manager at the end of the survey interview. Most managers have a very optimistic assessment of the quality of their companies' practices. Indeed, the median answer was a 7. Furthermore, we found zero correlation between perceived management quality and actual quality (as indicated by both their firms' management scores and their firms' performance), suggesting that self-assessments are a long way from reality.
This large gap is problematic, because it implies that even managers who really need to improve their practices often don't take the initiative, in the false belief that they're doing just fine.
In a variant of this problem, managers may overestimate the costs of introducing new practices or underestimate how much difference they could make. This was a situation we encountered in a field experiment that one of us conducted with 28 Indian textile manufacturers. Accenture had been hired by a Stanford–World Bank project to improve their management practices, but many proposed enhancements—such as quality control systems, employee rewards, and production planning—were not implemented because of skepticism about their benefits. Consultants trying to introduce methods that are standard in most U.S. or Japanese factories were met with claims that "it will never work here" or "we do things our way." Yet the firms that adopted the methods boosted their performance.
Perception problems are hard but not impossible to eradicate. The key is to improve the quality of information available to managers so that they have an objective way to evaluate their relative performance.
As our survey shows, self-reported metrics are likely to be at best very noisy—they're imperfect indicators of what really happens on the ground. There are various reasons why. A common issue is that employees don't raise problems for fear of being blamed for those they identify. That dynamic deprives managers of critical knowledge needed to understand a firm's gaps.
In our experience, managers can address this issue by proactively creating opportunities for candid—and blame-free—discussions with their employees. That's the approach followed by Danaher, a large U.S. conglomerate known for its relentless (and effective) adoption of the Danaher Business System (DBS)—a tool kit of managerial processes modeled on the Toyota Production System—across its many subsidiaries. Danaher typically initiates the relationship with a newly acquired subsidiary through a series of hands-on, structured interactions between senior Danaher managers and the acquisition's top executives, which challenge the latter to identify managerial gaps that may be preventing the business from fulfilling its potential. People taking part in these open conversations—especially those with longer tenure—describe them as eye-opening experiences that significantly change attitudes toward core management processes.
Governance structure.
In other cases, managers may be fully aware of the need to improve their practices but pass on this opportunity for fear that change may jeopardize private objectives. This problem is particularly common in firms that are owned and run by families, as you can see in the exhibit "Family-Run Firms Tend to Have Weaker Management." Even when we cut the data by firm size, sector of activity, and country, family-run enterprises still had the lowest average management scores.
Why are family firms so reluctant to embrace strong management processes? One explanation—which finds support in our research—is that their adoption may have significant personal costs to family members. New practices may require hiring or delegating authority to talent outside the family circle. (Indeed, we've seen that higher management scores tend to go hand-in-hand with more-decentralized decision making.)
A large number of managers can't objectively judge how well their firms are run.
An example of this is Gokaldas Exports, a family-owned business founded in 1979 that had grown into India's largest apparel exporter by 2004. Gokaldas was a highly successful firm with 30,000 workers, was valued at approximately $215 million, and exported nearly 90% of its production. Its founder, Jhamandas Hinduja, had bequeathed control of the company to three sons, each of whom brought his own son into the business. Nike, a major customer, wanted Gokaldas to introduce lean management practices; it put the company in touch with consultants who could help make that happen. Yet the CEO was resistant. It took rising competition from Bangladesh, multiple visits to see lean manufacturing in action at firms across Asia and the United States, and finally the intervention of other family members (one of whom we taught in business school) to overcome his reluctance.
Self-reflection exercises can help family CEOs clarify whether they value their firms' long-term success more than "being the boss"—even if success means sharing the glory with other managers. In our experience a candid evaluation of one's priorities is crucial—managers are often oblivious to the fact that their own desire for control may be inhibiting the growth and success of their organizations.
In addition, family executives—and especially owners—should understand that introducing new managerial capabilities within the firm does not necessarily entail a loss of control. It is more likely to create a different role for them—but not necessarily fewer responsibilities.
It's unwise to teach leaders that strategy and basic management are unrelated.
That is what happened at Moleskine, based in Milan, Italy. Launched in 1997 by three friends, Moleskine went from being a niche notebook producer to a market leader in the space of a few years. Its success created a dilemma for its founders: While it was clear that the company had tremendous potential to grow further, they also recognized the pressing need to professionalize its operations. The founders searched for a private equity firm that could provide the necessary capital and expertise and help them find a new CEO. Eventually, they chose Syntegra Capital and Arrigo Berni, an experienced chief executive who had held leadership roles at family-owned producers of luxury products. Berni brought new rigor to strategy development and operations and at the same time crafted a role for the founders that made the most of their commercial and design expertise. Thanks to this successful partnership—and an IPO in 2013—Moleskine was able to deepen its competitive advantage and develop new growth opportunities globally.
Skill deficits.
Good management practices require capabilities (such as numeracy and analytical skills) that may be lacking in a firm's workforce, especially in emerging economies. Indeed, our data shows that the average management score is significantly higher at firms with better-educated employees. Being located near a leading university or business school is also strongly associated with better management scores. Superior performance is likelier when executive education can be had nearby, it seems. While to some extent the availability of skills is shaped by a firm's specific context, managers can play a critical role by recognizing the importance of employees' basic skills and providing internal training programs.
Organizational politics and culture.
Even when top managers correctly perceive what needs to be done, are motivated to make changes, and have the right skills, the adoption of core management processes can be a challenge. Videojet, a subsidiary acquired by Danaher, provides a case in point. In 2005, Videojet launched a new internal initiative that required the engineering and sales teams to collaborate on developing an innovative printer. The Videojet executives decided to use core DBS managerial processes—which up to that point had been used almost exclusively within manufacturing—to structure regular debriefing and problem-solving sessions between the two teams.
Unfortunately, preexisting divides between engineers and salespeople meant that the structured interactions, which had been effective in driving continuous improvement in manufacturing, became perfunctory meetings. For example, just before the product launch, a member of the sales team raised concerns about some technical aspects of the new printer, which in his eyes could seriously compromise its success. The core DBS processes had been introduced to help teams identify and address precisely this type of concern. Whereas in manufacturing, employees were encouraged to stop the production line to flag quality problems in real time so that they could be isolated and fixed, in this instance the feedback was ignored and interpreted by the rest of the team as a boycotting attempt rather than a constructive suggestion. Shortly after this episode, the printer was launched to a poor market reception, which confirmed the gravity of the issues the salesperson had raised. Thanks to this experience, Videojet executives understood that they would need to work more consciously to foster interactions between diverse pockets of expertise within the firm. They continued to use the DBS tools but also committed to frequent, longer structured interactions and collective sign-offs between engineers and salespeople during the various product development stages. Videojet launched a very successful printer just a couple of years after the initial failed product launch and has since become an exemplar in the use of DBS tools for product development.
Sometimes the organization at large resists change. Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson provide a fascinating account of the difficulties GM encountered in implementing the Toyota Production System during the 1980s and 1990s. Even in the face of mounting competition, GM found it hard to adopt Toyota's superior management methods, mainly because of adversarial relationships with suppliers and blue-collar workers. Employees, for example, thought that any productivity enhancement from the new practices would just lead to head-count reductions and would more generally put employees under greater pressure. This distrust inhibited GM's ability to negotiate for the working arrangements needed to introduce the new practices (such as teams and joint problem solving).
Videojet's and GM's experiences illustrate a fundamental issue: Management practices often rely on a complicated shared understanding among people within the firm. The inability to foster it can easily kill the efforts of the most able and well-intentioned managers. On the other hand, once such an understanding is in place, it's very difficult for competitors to replicate.
A question that managers face is how to create this common understanding. Changing individual incentives is unlikely to work, since the adoption of new processes usually requires the cooperation of teams of people; it's difficult to disentangle the rewards to be assigned to a single employee. And adoption is hard to measure, so it would be challenging to tie an individual bonus to the implementation of a certain practice. As organizational economists know, simple contractual solutions are hardly effective in these situations.
About the Research
But managers have a different weapon at their disposal, which in our experience can potentially be more effective. It's their presence. The successful adoption stories that we've encountered in our research often took place in organizations where someone very high up signaled the importance of change through personal involvement, constant communication, message reinforcement, and visibility. "Walking the talk" matters enormously and can drastically affect the odds of success for change initiatives.
Related Reading
This idea is supported by a large-scale research project on the relationship between management and CEO behavior that Raffaella conducted with a different team of researchers at the London School of Economics and Columbia University. After a painstaking exercise in which they codified the agendas of more than 1,200 CEOs of manufacturing firms in six countries, they found that management quality was significantly higher in organizations in which CEOs dedicated a larger portion of their time to employees than to outside stakeholders.
Though core management practices may appear to be relatively simple—in that they often rely on nontechnological investments—they are not light switches that can be flipped on and off at will. They require a profound commitment from the top, an understanding of the types of skills required for adoption, and—ultimately—a fundamental shift in mentality at all levels of the organization.
Next Steps
Our findings have implications for how managers are trained. Today business students are encouraged to judge case studies about operational effectiveness as "nonstrategic" and to see these issues as not pertinent to the role of the CEO. But it's unwise to teach future leaders that strategic decision making and basic management processes are unrelated, and that the first is far more important to competitive success than the second.
Indeed, our work suggests that the management community may have badly underestimated the benefits of core management practices—as well as the investment needed to strengthen them—by relegating them to the domain of "easy to replicate." Managers should certainly dedicate their time to fundamental strategic choices, but they should not suppose that fostering strong managerial practices is below their pay grade. Just as the ability to discern competitive shifts is important to firm performance, so too is the ability to make sure that operational effectiveness is truly part of the organization's DNA.
One frequent suggestion in this era of flattened organizations is that everyone has to be a strategist. But we'd suggest that everyone also needs to be a manager. Core management practices, established thoughtfully, can go a long way toward plugging the execution gap and ensuring that strategy gets the best possible chance to succeed.


text:
An Interview with Damian Taylor
In a highly publicized new interview on Salon.com, Brian Eno asserted that 'success ruins artists.' I beg to differ, especially after hearing the new Björk album Biophila and interviewing her engineer and Music Director Damian Taylor. Björk has used her success to collaborate, push boundaries and reach new heights in experimentation. Among other things, Damian employed Max to create alternative creative environments for Björk to conjure within. Damian was nice enough to share one of his Max patches, Woodpecker, with everyone. Hats off to Björk and her team.
So, you seem to be a man of many countries. You're living in Montreal now?
Yeah. We've been here for about a year and a half.
Prior to that, we lived in this tiny little fishing village in British Columbia for a couple of years, but basically I built my career up over ten years in London. I've got three passports which is handy; a British, a New Zealand and a Canadian. I was born in Canada, lived in New Zealand in my teens for a bit before heading to London. But I moved around a lot in each country, so I don't really have a hometown. It gets a bit confusing!
Are you enjoying Montreal?
I love it here, yeah. It's fantastic. Awesome people, killer food, and the city is beautiful.
And they have a great music scene...
Yeah, exactly, I really like how it's very creative, but not too heavily dominated by the music industry, it feels like a more freely creative place. On the flip-side it's an easy commute to New York, L.A. and London, nicely in the middle. I've built my own studio in 1,000 square feet of the corner of a warehouse in a great part of town. You couldn't really do that in New York or London — unless you're just doing like hard-ass pop music. [Laughs.]
You've been working with audio from a young age. Are you trained as a musician?
I did the more traditional thing when I was young, between age 6 and 13. This gave me a good grounding in both playing and theory but I didn't go to a super-high level. When I was 15 I started playing bass in guitar-type bands with friends in high school. After a year of that I bought a cheap second hand 4-track and got really into recording. My tastes evolved a lot over the next couple of years and I started getting heavily into electronic and sample-based music which led to my move to London when I was 19.
Do you think that experience helps in your work?
Oh yeah. I've got a musical background, a good understanding of music, and I've got a musical ear, however I'm not at all a genius player. I've played quite a lot of different instruments in different environments though, so this allows me to understand artists I'm working with far more than if I hadn't had that experience.
So, were keyboards your weapon of choice back then?
I did piano for a few years, then trumpet, and then played bass in bands and then bought a guitar and drum kit and played those once I focused on recording. So I've kind of done a little bunch of everything — but if you wanted me to do a guitar solo, there's no way I could pull it off, you know? [Laughs.]
I was Björk's musical director on her last tour, so I did live electronics with her. Actually it was amazing to perform with that stuff, I'm far better with that than a traditional instrument. I had a crazy amount of gear and that was insanely fun, so I'd say taking a musical approach to technology is my thing, really.
I'm a young record producer though, essentially. I was getting gigs engineering and programming all through my twenties and now I'm getting a lot more production gigs — production and mixing. Production had always been my goal.
To clarify though: with Björk's projects I work as her engineer - or you could say I'm her technical enabler based on whatever situation she's in. She produces herself. This has kept me busy pretty much full time with her for six years, though now that her new project is wrapped up I'm able to work on other stuff again.
Is she based in New York these days?
She has many bases but mainly goes between New York and Iceland. I first worked with her in 1999 on Vespertine. I worked on the early stages of that record, which is how we had the foundation for our relationship.
How did that come about?
The first really good situation I found as an engineer was when I was 21 and linked up with the producer/writer Guy Sigsworth. He was Björk's MD [Music Director] for the first two tours for her first two albums then later co-wrote stuff with her on Vespertine and on Homogenic. He asked me to work with him on all his projects and one of them was Björk.
That was a brilliant time with Guy because we had one of the first Pro Tools Mix Plus systems in London — this was in like '97, '98 — we were the first people we knew doing everything in the box. People kind of freaked out when they came to our studio and there was almost no gear! My engineering background, even though I was young, was with tape and mixing consoles and outboard gear, but I got in very early on with the whole next level of computer processing that opened up a whole bunch of creative stuff.
People's iBooks now have a lot more power than we had back then [laughs], but it was a really exciting time. Vespertine was technically about taking any sound and slicing it into a million pieces, just doing crazy editing, drawing waveforms and pops and clicks with the pencil tools and all that kind of stuff. Guy was really into hyper-tight ultra detail (I think he still is!) and Vespertine was a perfect match for that. For me that album is a high-water mark in terms of the intricacy of programming and all that kind of stuff.
In terms of what Björk and I did on the new record though, we wanted to try to take a different approach where you still had the ethos of electronics but re-contextualized; presented it in a different way. Essentially we wanted to create an acoustic event that was controlled electronically. Does that make sense? I could bang on about that for hours! [Laughs.] That's the abridged version.
The previous record I did with her, Volta, we were just kind of 'let's just keep it super raw and not be too clever', basically. Energetically, I think she just wanted to make a bit of an extroverted album that would be fun to go play festivals, while for this new one her concept was a lot more in-depth. She had a lot of musicological concepts that she was really keen to explore.
It must be really rewarding to work with an artist who's so creative, and also has budgets.
[Laughs.] You hit the nail on the head, there.
She's experimental, with a pop budget...
Yeah. The most amazing thing with Björk is that no matter how avant-garde or experimental you get, fundamentally she can just sing like nobody else. So it's like you can do the craziest stuff, and once she sings on it and it's going to have an emotional resonance you can't find anywhere else.
I've worked on plenty of projects where we've been super fucking clever with electronics, but then you spend like two years trying to find a singer and it doesn't really happen. [Laughs.]
But yeah, that's part of the joy of working with her, it really is an adventure. I remember a number of years back when she wanted to record with Toumani Diabate and she's saying "Oh yeah, we should go to Africa." And I remember thinking "Yeah, sure... I'll believe it when I see it!" And then three days later you get your ticket! At that point I had only really been working in the London studio circuit so it has been amazing to go beyond that with her.
When we were with Spike Stent to mix Volta, a friend sent her a YouTube link for the first Reactable demonstations. The Reactable is like something out of Buck Rogers. So we're watching these videos, and at that point she hadn't asked me to go on tour, but she says, "Oh, that would be fun to take on tour," and I kind of again was like, "Yeah, right! It doesn't even exist! It's imaginary! That must be... like... a computer animation!!!" And then three months later I was playing it on the headlining set at Coachella. Bonkers, right? So she's got an amazing ability to make things happen — and the vision to even dare to imagine it in the first place.
I think she's also at a point where she just looks at every project like 'let's make an adventure, let's do something different.' Fundamentally I think she just wants to keep things really interesting for herself. So different projects for different phases of her career would have a completely, totally different feel.
But again, it always comes back to her amazing sense of... well, the artistic aspect, basically, and the emotional quality that she wants it to have. So she's always really, really firmly rooted in her instinct - does it feel right? So as far as I'm concerned, I just listen to what she wants and try to help her however I can.
What a great gig. Congrats!
Thanks. Yeah, it is kind of nuts. But there's the flip side: that the process takes forever. Insane amounts of time. We were on Biophilia for two and a half years. That's very different to making an album in say, two weeks.
So, at what point did you get into Max programming?
We spent 18 months on the album Volta. Björk doesn't really work long hours in the studio, so I wound up having more spare time than at any other point in my career. When we were finishing up the Volta tour she started talking about her ideas for the next project and said, "It's going to be really big. It'll probably take two or three years."
So I was like "holy shit!!!", but then I realized it might be the one opportunity in my career to jump on a learning curve where I might not get anywhere worthwhile for a couple of years. So that got me into the Max side of things, investing the time to investigate technology and programming languages at a much more fundamental level — instead of doing the, dare I say 'normal' studio engineer stuff, where all your tools are already made by someone else and you just use them. Actually, while all that was going on, I also started hand building analogue outboard gear for my studio in my spare time as well.
How was the Max learning curve for you? Did you lock yourself away?
It's actually a credit to Mark Bell, who's one of Björk's longtime collaborators. She was talking about wanting to have the music and the visuals synched or something. So Mark — who is really quite an amazing boffin [back-room geek] — decided, "Oh, we should all just learn Max because they've got the Jitter side of it, which is the video stuff, and you could just use the same messages in this whole system and make it feed everything."
So the day the tour finished, I flew up to Iceland to work on some other stuff with her, but the second I got to my hotel I downloaded the demo of Max and started a tutorial. To cut a long story short, I wound up being the only person who actually learned it!
Back to the learning curve though; if you've never done any code or computer language programming before, there are a lot of times where you just have to try to absorb things without really knowing what the hell they are for. And I mean that in the nicest possible way!
I just slowly worked my way through all the tutorials, largely without understanding what the hell I was doing, but just absorbing what was going on, trying to follow every step that was presented. And yeah, it really was a case of locking myself in a room. If there was another noise anywhere, I just couldn't do it. It took really intense concentration; just trying to absorb what was going on and follow a tutorial from start to finish.
But then at some point I figured I needed to speed things up, so I got in touch with Harvestworks, in New York, who I actually was aware of through an interview on the Cycling '74 web site. I got tutoring from Matthew Ostrowski — and it was amazing, a complete revelation.
It's been the same with me for a number of different things that I've tried to learn in the studio. Watching someone do something. I'd speak to Matthew and ask how to implement some really basic piece of logic in a patch, and he'd start tapping away. Just watching him physically do it, making objects and linking them together, something not working, deleting objects, relinking them until it worked. There's something about physically seeing someone do it in real time that's amazing and is far different to opening something that's already complete and trying to reverse engineer. I started seeing the alternatives and possibilities. Matthew was an absolutely invaluable resource and I remain profoundly grateful for everything he shared with me.
So, you found direct tutoring to be the best route for you?
I would hugely recommend trying to find a teacher at some point, or otherwise hanging out in an informal setting with a more experienced cat and asking them how they might approach a problem.
But as time went on and I found my feet, I found that I'd be trying to do something and would remember, "Oh, yeah, there was a tutorial I did last year that was similar to that." So I'd dig back, and go through the tutorials, and then start ripping code out of examples and modifying them to serve my purpose.
So actually sitting down and going through all the tutorials was a really good way to just imprint your mind with some of the capabilities of the language, even if you don't understand quite how to use them yet.
Actually the perfect metaphor came from a lovely lady who came to teach us Spanish while we were camped out in Puerto Rico during the production of Biophilia; she'd say we'd need to have a basic pool of vocabulary available and memorized before we could start putting sentences together.
Even though it was a challenge, the whole learning process was really exciting for me as well. My work in the studio is highly technical but I'm very fluent with it already, so it was really interesting to venture into another highly technical field where the landscape was unfamiliar. It was a fascinating process of expanding and rearranging my brain patterns, and I think that's actually had a really positive effect back in the world I usually inhabit, if that makes sense?
It does. I can see where you would approach the studio with new eyes.
Did you use Max on the new album, or are you only using it for live work?
Well, when I started messing around with all this stuff I'd make notes, "Maybe you could do this with that, or that with that," you know. For example you start messing around with the drunk object and go, "Oh, OK, cool, I could have a slider that will manipulate stuff in a certain way." Even if you don't know quite what that other stuff is yet!
Björk had been talking about a lot of the musicological concepts that she had, not specific musical ideas like an exact melody or chord, but she liked this type of phrasing, or that way a melody could unfold, or wanting to go beyond straightforward time signatures, for example. So as I'd tinker and explore I'd sometimes discover some objects or externals that would ring a bell with what she had been saying, and I'd realize I could modify some variables in a system to make them able to exist in that world.
To cut a long story short, I wound up designing three significantly different performance systems using a Jazzmutant Lemur and a video-game controller as physical interfaces. There's a Max tutorial on getting a data stream out of a Logitech game controller. That became a huge jumping off point for everything I was doing, as Björk responded really strongly to being able to hold the game controller and press buttons while she sang. It's very different to sitting down at a piano!
So, basically, there are six songs on the new album that were written using these systems. I just focused totally on the Max side of things for data processing which would generate beautiful music as MIDI messages from a disparate stream of button presses and OSC messages. I designed a system of musical rules, ways of creating melodies and linking them together, then spent a lot of time making interfaces that would be conducive to the creating process.
Were these systems that Björk used herself?
That was a key thing with the design, I wanted to make stuff that Björk could use super intuitively. Because we've spent a huge amount of time together, I kind of, not to say I know what she would like, but I've got a pretty good intuition about what she might find fun, and I've also seen her get very frustrated when something is above a threshold of complexity that she's comfortable with.
So we created this environment whereby she could just hold a video-game controller and press buttons and things would happen. We were excited about that tension between something being a little bit unpredictable to the point where it might surprise you, while also being very controllable.
She ended up creating a huge amount of sketches and musical explorations while messing around with these things. I think she always has like a million and one melodic or lyrical ideas in her head — I have no idea what she's sitting on! So I think often she'd experiment to see if anything she had would fit with what she was discovering on the systems, and other times she'd create something with the systems that would inspire a totally new vocal.
Basically, because the systems allowed her to control electronics in this very intuitive way she was able to have the electronics follow her as a singer and a live performer; it let her write in a completely different way to anything she's done before.
So, Max played a pretty important role in the album.
Max was an absolutely critical part of the writing of the album — and for the live stuff as well, because the songs were a direct result of these systems.
Since we used Max to create the songs, we had wanted use the same systems live. Well, we had built in our own kind of, I wouldn't say chaos, but they're a bit more... well, let's say chaotic. [Laughs.] They're a bit more difficult to steer than a traditional instrument, if you know what I mean.
But a regulated chaos.
You can totally guide the systems, but, you know, she's got a 25-piece choir. So they're counting say 13 bars in 17/8 before their entry. If you're performing something on your own you can just vibe out for a while and then feel OK, now we're going to the next section... Whereas in a big ensemble you have to be very precise and predictable, so we went with more conventional approaches for the live situation.
So, the performers retain their independence.
Exactly. On the flipside though there's one song called "Dark Matter" where I custom wrote a Max patch specifically for the live setting. This was to give Björk a way to play something that she had written in the studio using a different system. The song is completely in free time, no tempo or measures to it at all. Our MIDI tech for the live tour, Paul Eastman, has done a bunch of iPad app development. He made a big button that just sends single midi note messages from the iPad which I converted into bangs in Max. Then I mapped out a network of messages that send the appropriate chord changes to the instruments onstage. That way, Björk can just sing it in her own intuitive phrasing and tap the screen when she wants to jump to the next musical event; this ensure the music totally follows her phrasing and feeling and she can concentrate 100% on that flow.
Going back a step though, Mark Bell was such a huge influence in this whole thing for me, even going back a couple of years before I got into Max. He would show me some of the mad patches in Reaktor and how he'd use them, as well as a lot of the more esoteric capabilities of Ableton Live, especially all the MIDI processing in there. This was a totally different approach to music than that which I had come up through with notation, scores, tape, and linear sequencers.
The real gateway to my more heavy duty Max programming was during a bunch of the early Biophilia sessions when Mark was bringing a bunch of his midi systems over. He was using more traditional midi controllers to influence them, then I hacked the Logitech game controller tutorial to give him MIDI messages from the controller. On the song "Dark Matter," Björk performed with the game controller going through one of his systems in Ableton Live.
So he introduced me to a lot of concepts, like how you can use a scale plug-in, or a chord plug-in, and my earlier Max patches ran through some of that stuff in Ableton. So he really set a lot of my mental processes in motion and woke me up to a lot of possibilities. Then as time went on I started discovering new things in Max and getting into Bidirectional OSC with the Jazzmutant Lemur. I wound up designing things that had a lot more rhythmic elements and a lot more subtlety and capability with arrangements, but also had very usable and streamlined interfaces.
Did you use any of your patches to actually compose with?
Yeah, including "Dark Matter" there are six songs on Biophilia that Björk wrote with them, the others were written conventionally.
It really was a lot of fun and very liberating having them as compositional tools. There's one patch I designed which will let you make stuff that just seems so incredibly complex and clever, but it's just from the most basic kind of inputs. That one was used to write Moon, Crystalline, and Hollow. In this case, it's completely the tool itself that brought those particular songs to life; there's no way you'd sit down at a piano and write music like that, or hum it into a dictaphone. So it was pretty significant.
That's one of my favorite things about Max, sometimes stuff that seems like it would be so complex is achievable in this very elegant simple way. And there's a profound satisfaction in that. Just that Frankenstein moment where you kind of zap it with lightning and it's suddenly alive, and you're like, "Holy shit, it makes music!"
Do you have a favorite object, or one that you use often?
[Laughs.] The button... for keeping it simple.
But actually, my tutor, Matthew, kept hammering into me that Max is brilliant for processing lists. It took me quite a long time to grasp that, but I'll just go for the coll object along with zl and its many variations.
How would you describe your patching style?
Really basic. [Laughs.] My main focus is on data processing as opposed to audio or video processing, I think I may have tapped about 5% of the capabilities of Max. At the most!
I'm just in a trying-to-keep-it-simple phase. After the stuff that was used on the album, I spent like three or four months making this crazy monster patch that's controlled by four Lemurs, but that's a whole different story. So maybe if you wanted a one-liner I'd say 'crude but effective.'
But if it works for you...
That's exactly it, yeah. And again that's what's so cool with Max, you can really tailor it to your needs.
Are you using any other type of hardware controllers besides the Lemur and the game controller?
Yes! Well, actually, they didn't make it onto the album because the songs were already written by that point, but the ongoing process during the course of Biophilia was really exciting. Once I had a basic handle on Max itself I got into a lot more exploration and development with physical computing. I had just started breaking the tip of the iceberg with Arduinos.
After spending a week or so trying to learn the Processing language, I found the maxuino objects, which was just amazing for me. I'm infinitely grateful to that community for making something so useful. So I just started messing around with pressure pads, and tilt sensors, accelerometers, LEDs and that kind of stuff. Actually Mark and I had done some really basic forays into physical computing right at the start of Biophilia but it wasn't until 18 months or so in that I really started digging into it.
At this point there's only one finished instrument that came out of it so far. It's just this kind of cool makeshift thing. Not really wanting to give too much away; it generates chords based on your physical movements and gives visual feedback. There's lots of ways to interact with it to modify the music, maybe it'll pop up further down the line in future work.
Oh and also I have a monome 256; I wound up writing some patches for it to control the tonality of all the other systems, kind of like a master harmony control center. Pretty cool.
Now that the production of Biophilia is finished I'm super busy making more records with other artists again. I'm working on a whole bunch of different projects now but if I had another spare year, I would definitely be going down the physical computing route, messing around with controllers and physical feedback. It's really exciting because you can feel that they access different parts of your brain and body. Also it's totally gratifying on a nerd tip. It was a nice kick to start figuring out basic electronic circuits and getting them to be a bridge between the real and virtual worlds.
Now it's all opened up to movement, too, because the new Wii controllers.
Yeah! I messed around a bunch with the Wii stuff, specifically with OSCulator, it's amazing.
The other important point is that we did all of this before the iPad was even announced; this development was taking place back when Biophilia was going to be a musical house, then a film! I'm really enamored of the open communities that I accessed while exploring all this. To me, collectively, Max, the Lemur, the Arduino, monome, the video-game controller, and so on, all become this really accessible platform for people to develop, explore, and share their ideas.
I just love the way that there's so much stuff out there that you can mess around with - it's really inspiring. And the online communities are just amazing to me. I spent two years on the internet, sniffing around, posting questions, reading threads. Just the way that that's all so openly shared, it feels like the DIY punk underground of our generation.
What's the future hold? Are you going to go on tour?
Well, actually Björk recently opened the Manchester International Festival and my super talented friend Matt Robertson covered for me onstage while I stayed home to welcome my second child into the world. I think Björk wants to do a series of residencies along the lines of Manchester, so hopefully I might be involved in some of them down the line. She had the idea to go somewhere and set up for a month or so and create a very specific environment.
She's really into the musicological and educational aspect, giving kids a different way to interact with music. Which is what a lot of what she's done with the iPad apps is about.
I think she's looking at the residencies as carrying on for quite some time, at different spots in the world.
I hope she brings it to San Francisco!
That would be amazing! The whole ethos of the city is really aligned with what she wanted to do, and of course lots of the app developers for the iPad stuff are based there. I love the city too. It would make a lot of sense.
But you know, as always with Björk, I never really know what she's going to do. [Laughs] So I would advise anyone to just stay posted to her web site for updates and ignore any guesses I might have. Seriously!
I mean, it's like on the last tour I did with her, I'd find out what gigs we were going to do on her web site. I wouldn't know for months in advance what was being planned, then I'd click on her site be like, "Oh, OK, cool. I'm off to Lithuania!" kind of stuff.
All in all though it's a really interesting time for me just now. Biophilia was the context in which I learned Max and a lot more besides, and I'm really looking forward to developing fresh stuff to use in different situations as well.
Any last thoughts?
You know, it's worth saying; I started just after Max 5 came out, so all the work that everyone at Cycling 74 had done to make it a bit more accessible, well, it really made a huge difference to me. Like, the key command you hit to bring up the help file. [Laughs.] Really basic stuff like that, or if you control-click on an inlet, then it'll tell you what messages are going on there. And the tutorials — they have put a huge amount of thought into making it more accessible for people. And yes, I'll mark myself out as a complete noob with no programming cred, but those rounded boxes and the cleaner graphics helped me feel less intimidated at the beginning.
If you're a musician or composer, Max is an amazing tool that will really open up a completely different way of thinking about music. If you've been working on sequencers, looking at time lines, working on tape, or reading off musical scores, then without really realizing it you start looking at music in this very linear way and your brain gets formed into a lot of similar patterns.
But the Max environment provides this whole alternate way of thinking, a whole different flow. Suddenly your own ways of thinking about time and harmony and melodies and everything, expands completely. Music kind of changes shape, you see it from this whole different side. So it's really, really, really, worth putting in the effort!
Text interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74.
by Marsha Vdovin on
Oct 6, 2011 4:07 PM


text:
Celebrity News July 20, 2014
'The Patriot' Actress Skye McCole Bartusiak Dead at 21
Skye McCole Bartusiak, best known as Mel Gibson's youngest daughter in the 2000 film "The Patriot," has died. She was only 21.
The young woman died in her home in Houston on Saturday. Investigators have not determined the cause of death, but CNN.com reports she was suffering from epileptic seizures in the last few days.
Her mother told CNN, "We lost our girl. She was a kind and really beautiful girl."
Along with "The Patriot," Bartusiak also appeared in several other films as a child actor including 1999's "The Cider House Rules" and 2001's "Don't Say a Word," opposite Michael Douglas. She also appeared on TV with roles in "24," "Lost," "House M.D." and "CSI."
Her mother said that her daughter had been preparing to produce and direct her first feature film.
Fellow former child actor Abigail Breslin was a close friend with Bartusiak and tweeted on Sunday, "One of my very good friends and someone who was like a sister to me, Skye McCole Bartusiak passed away today. So devastated."
Breslin also posted an Instagram pic of the two of them as little girls, writing, "Found this today. ❤ sisters forever. RIP Skye."


text:
Accu-Weather released its winter weather forecast for 2011-2012 and it doesn't look good for those in the northern half of the US. Record cold temps and abundant snowfall are forecast for the region.
Worst hit will be the Midwest and Great Lakes which are expected to have a harsher than normal winter. Chicago, which normally receives 39 inches of snow, is predicted to receive a hefty 52 inches.
And that's not the worst of it. Forecasters predict this snow will be accompanied by extreme cold temperatures. You can blame this awful weather on the jet stream whose position will dump the snow and cold arctic air on this part of the US.
While Chicago becomes the City of Brotherly Snow, New York City will fare much better this season. The Northeast region will avoid the blizzards it endured last year and, along with the Northwest, will have a typical winter season.
The best place to live, according to Accu-Weather's forecast, will be the Southwest and Florida. Texas and surrounding areas will continue to be warm and dry, while Florida will have its usual mild temperatures. Sounds lovely for those who live down South. [Accu-Weather via Scientific American]


text:
Lenovo plans to extend its ThinkPad line with business-friendly Windows 8 hybrid laptops similar to the convertible, flippable IdeaPad Yoga.
Making tablet PCs is nothing new to Lenovo. The company currently offers a convertible model of the ThinkPad X220. Instead of the screen swiveling and folding like typical tablet PCs, however, the new Windows 8 ThinkPad hybrids will likely flip back on its hinge, just as the IdeaPad Yoga does, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
This fold-over design would enable users to make use of the touchscreen in a few different positions for the laptop. The fresh, unusual design might also help these convertible laptops stand out–an important task, as many more hybrid Windows 8 laptops are expected this year.
Windows 8's touch-friendly Metro interface promises a better experience than ever before on a convertible tablet. However, since Windows 8 isn't expected until at least the summer, we likely won't see these new ThinkPad hybrids any time soon. Peter Hortensius, president of Lenovo's product group, told the WSJ's CIO Report that the tablets will be released sometime in the next 12 months.
As business-oriented laptops, the Lenovo ThinkPad hybrids will likely offer enterprise-friendly features like TPM security chips for data protection and additional expansion and connectivity options. We might not be able to count on a matte screen, however (Lenovo went with a glossy display for the ThinkPad X1) or the classic ThinkPad keyboard.
Signs that the laptops will probably get your IT Department's blessing: Hortensius did say the laptops will better handle Windows-based corporate applications, come with custom pre-loaded software suites, and allow CIOs to control which apps are installed.
For road warriors, the convertible ThinkPads might eliminate your need to carry both a laptop and a tablet around.
Follow Melanie Pinola (@melaniepinola) and Today@PCWorld on Twitter


text:
World Contraception Day: Myths, Rumors, and Rubbish
More than 20 different methods of long-acting and short-acting hormonal and barrier contraception are now available, many of which are 99-percent-plus effective. But strange superstitions live on.
Published in partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) Live blog.
Crocodile feces, honey, dates, hot mercury, fish, opium, half a lemon, disinfectant, cola, animal intestines, weasel testicles, a hare's anus, and the toxic sludge from a blacksmith's workshop. Sounds like the contents of Heston Blumenthal's kitchen cupboard.
In fact, these ingredients, in various combinations, have all been ingested, inserted, digested, or applied as contraceptive measures over the years. Few of them worked. Many resulted in death.
Wednesday, September 26th, is World Contraception Day. This is a day of campaigning for a world in which "every pregnancy is wanted." Its mission is to improve awareness of contraception among young people, so that they can make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health (SRH).
Times have moved on since the days of such weird concoctions. More than 20 different methods of long-acting and short-acting hormonal and barrier contraception are now available, many of which are 99-percent-plus effective.
But strange superstitions live on. Take the pill, and you'll gain weight, grow a beard, become infertile, and smell funny. HIV and STI cells are so small, so the story goes, that they can slip through the walls of a condom.
You can't get pregnant if the girl's on top, if you jump up and down afterwards, if you don't have an orgasm, or if you have sex in a hot bath. (How hot? What size bath?) Plastic wrap works as well as a condom, toothpaste is an effective spermicide, and, of course, no one gets pregnant the first time.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, of course. But if your only access to information is peer-group-led Internet chat and street-corner gossip; if your mom, dad, and teachers consider sex totally taboo; if your doctor doesn't approve; and you can't get advice or supplies … well, basically, you're stuffed.
There are people who say young people shouldn't have sex until a relationship is seen to have some kind of social or religious legitimacy. There are people who say, whether you like it or not, many young people will have sex regardless of such strictures.
Either way—whether sex takes place on a wedding night, or before—it seems sensible to take the simple precautionary measure of ensuring that young people (or any people for that matter) know what they're doing and are aware of the possible complications that attach. That applies whether people see it as a procreational duty, as a way of expressing love, or as something that is simply fun. Whatever way people choose to look at it, sex is an essential, enjoyable, and rewarding aspect of being alive. (Well, isn't it?)
Look at it like driving. You can't suddenly jump in a car one night and drive off safely if you don't know the rules of the road, you've got no insurance, and you haven't got the foggiest idea what the different pedals, switches, and controls are all designed to do, or where they are. So, why do we expect anyone (whether on his or her wedding night or not) to suddenly jump into a sexual union and head off safely into the sunset?
The earliest known illustration of a man using a condom is in a cave painting in France. It's reckoned to be 12,000 to 15,000 years old. Clearly, this is where Stone- Age students gathered to take part in the world's first comprehenisve sexuality-education program.
Have we moved on from the Stone Age?


text:
Fourteen years ago we selected the paint colors for the public areas. (Actually, my brother selected the paint colors due to circumstances that revolved around an innkeeper's leg broken in a fall from a dumpster, a second innkeeper too stressed to make a choice, and major deadline pressure. That's a story for another day.) Over the years the furniture and decorations evolved but the paint stayed the same. The living room and dining room are fairly traditional without being overly fussy or Victorian. They are pleasant rooms, IMHO, but to be honest, the pinkish beige wall scheme has always bored me to tears.
So, call it my middle age crisis or a late seven year into innkeeping itch or just pure insanity but a former-innkeeper-girlfriend and I just tore the dining room apart and started painting two days ago. On a spur of the moment, hey we have a stage let's put on a show, we don't have any reservations for a few days, the time is now plan. It was such a sudden, serendipitous, convergence of schedules that I forgot to tell Dave that it was going to happen.
So stay tuned for the big reveal. There's a three toned color scheme: Behr Rhythmic Blue over Rainstorm with white trim. The dividing line is a new chair rail at the level that chairs actually hit the wall. We are playing with possible furniture rearrangement and the window valance is going on to another stage.
If anyone has any suggestions for other changes, feel free to chime in. For instance, I'm really not sure what I what to do to window treatments.
Innkeeper Seely


text:
Movie: The Intern
I watched the movie "The Intern" by a recommendation from a friend and did not feel sorry even for a second. The movie is a very refreshing experience, it feels very light-footed, so to say, with an interesting story told expertly by good artists in a very convincing way. The current movie landscape is almost all "bigger than life" and this movie stands out being "just right".
Interestingly, the story has come at just the right time for me. The CEO of an Internet start-up is being pushed by venture capitalists into accepting a downgrade and hiring another CEO to actually lead the business. I had this discussion twice this week with potential business leaders. It seems all the hype nowadays is to get money from venture capitalists or investors and get going real quick. What people forget is that this way they give up the essential control of their own business. It's not theirs anymore and they would have to accept some decisions by the real owners – the financial owners of the company. That's a bad idea, don't do it unless you absolutely must. Make your own company on your own terms with your own effort. What's the hurry? And a large part of the movie's plot is also about that – make your own company your own way.
But, of course, there is more than that. A love story, a get back into the action story, a dad going astray under the pressure of being in a woman's role in the family, a woman going psychologically ruined under the pressure of a man's role in the society – it's all there, all greatly shown, without excesses, without too much hype, but very much life-like. And, yes, it's great when you are accepted as never being too old for the job if you know how to do.
Anyway, the story is great, Robert De Niro is still wonderful, Rene Russo is splendid and it's definitely a worthwhile movie to watch.
… -->continue reading →


text:
|Page tools: Print Page
For the purpose of House of Representatives elections each state or territory is divided into single-member electorates corresponding in number to the number of members to which the state or territory is entitled. In Senate elections the whole state or territory constitutes a single electorate.
Redistributions of House of Representatives electorates must be held in each state and territory at least every seven years, though a change in the population of a state or territory may see them held more frequently. A redistribution must take into account current and projected enrolments, community of economic, social and regional interests, means of communication and travel, physical features and area, and existing electorate boundaries. Within each state and territory the electorates must, as far as possible, be equal in numbers of electors. There is usually a variation in size of electorates from one state or territory to another.
The Electoral Commissioner determines the representation entitlements of the states and territories during the 13th month after the first meeting of a new House of Representatives. Determinations are based on the latest population statistics as provided by the Australian Statistician. The representation entitlements of the states and territories following the 2003 determination are shown in table 2.5, which also shows the total size of the House of Representatives at the time of the next election. Tasmania has a constitutional entitlement to five members of the House of Representatives based on it being a state at the time of Federation in 1901. The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory have gained representation since 1901, and current legislation provides a minimum representation of one member of the House of Representatives for each.
For the next election, which must be held by 16 April 2005, Queensland will gain an extra member, while South Australia and the Northern Territory will each lose a member. The House of Representatives will therefore number 149 members.
2001 election
The House of Representatives was dissolved on 8 October 2001 and an election called for 10 November 2001, for the House of Representatives and half the Senate. At that election the Liberal-National Party coalition was returned to office.
The number of electors enrolled for the 2001 election is shown in table 2.6.
The state of the parties in the Commonwealth Parliament at November 2002 is shown in table 2.7.
First preference votes cast for the major political parties in each state and territory at the 2001 election for each house of the Commonwealth Parliament are shown in tables 2.8 and 2.9.


text:
Ubic - polymorphic service manager
version 1.60
Configure ubic:
$ ubic-admin setup
Write the service config:
$ cat >/etc/ubic/service/foo.ini
bin = /usr/bin/foo.pl
Start your service:
$ ubic start foo
Enjoy your daemonized, monitored service.
This module is a perl frontend to ubic services.
It is a singleton OOP class. All of its methods should be invoked as class methods:
my $status = Ubic->status('foo');
Ubic is a polymorphic service manager.
Further directions:
if you are looking for a general introduction to Ubic, see Ubic::Manual::Intro;
if you want to use ubic from the command line, see ubic;
if you want to manage ubic services from the perl scripts, read this POD;
if you want to write your own service, see Ubic::Service and other Ubic::Service::* modules.
All methods in this package can be invoked as class methods, but sometimes you may need to override some status dirs. In this case you should construct your own Ubic instance.
Note that you can't create several instances in one process and have them work independently. So, this constructor is actually just a weird way to override service_dir and data_dir.
Constructor options (all of them are optional):
Name of dir with service descriptions (which will be used to construct root Ubic::Multiservice::Dir object).
Dir into which ubic stores all of its data (locks, status files, tmp files).
See LSB documentation for init-script method specifications.
Following methods are trying to conform, except that all dashes in method names are replaced with underscores.
These methods return the result objects, i.e., instances of the Ubic::Result::Class class.
Start the service.
Stop the service.
Restart the service; start it if it's not running.
Restart the service if it is enabled.
Reload the service.
This method will do reloading if the service implements reload(); it will throw an exception otherwise.
Reload the service if reloading is implemented, otherwise restart it.
Does nothing if service is disabled.
Get the service status.
Enable the service.
Enabled service means that service should be running.
Watchdog will periodically check its status, attempt to restart it and mark it as broken if it won't succeed.
Check whether the service is enabled.
Returns true or false.
Disable the service.
Disabled service means that the service is ignored by ubic.
Its state will no longer be checked by the watchdog, and ubic status will report that the service is down.
ubic status
Get cached status of the service.
Unlike other methods, it can be invoked by any user.
Execute the custom command $command for the given service.
Get service object by name.
Check whether the service named $name exists.
Get the list of all services.
Get the list of all service names.
Get the root multiservice object.
Root service doesn't have a name and returns all top-level services with services() method. You can use it to traverse the whole service tree.
Get the list of autocompletion variants for a given service prefix.
Write the new status into the service's status file.
Get the data dir.
Set the data dir, creating it if necessary.
Data dir is a directory with service statuses and locks. (See Ubic::Settings for more details on how it's chosen).
This setting will be propagated into subprocesses using environment, so the following code works:
system('ubic start some_service');
system('ubic stop some_service');
Deprecated. This method got renamed to set_data_dir().
Set default user for all services.
This is a simple proxy for Ubic::Settings->default_user($user).
Get the ubic services dir.
Set the ubic services dir.
You shouldn't call these from a code which doesn't belong to core Ubic distribution.
These methods can be changed or removed without further notice.
Get the status file name by a service's name.
Get the status persistent object by a service's name.
It's a bad idea to call this from any other class than Ubic, but if you'll ever want to do this, at least don't forget to create Ubic::AccessGuard first.
Get the readonly, nonlocked status persistent object (see Ubic::Persistent) by a service's name.
Get an access guard (Ubic::AccessGuard object) for the given service.
Acquire lock object for given service.
You can lock one object twice from the same process, but not from different processes.
Run any code and wrap any result or exception into a result object.
Run $cmd method from the service named $name and wrap any result or exception in a result object.
Run a $callback in a subprocess and return its return value.
Interaction happens through a temporary file in $ubic->{tmp_dir} dir.
Andrei Mishchenko <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Yury Zavarin <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Dmitry Yashin
Christian Walde <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Ivan Bessarabov <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Oleg Komarov <email@example.com>
Andrew Kirkpatrick <email@example.com>
Most Ubic-related links are collected on github wiki: http://github.com/berekuk/Ubic/wiki.
Daemon::Control and Proc::Launcher provide the start/stop/status style mechanisms for init scripts and apachectl-style commands.
Server::Control is an apachectl-style, heavyweight subclassable module for handling network daemons.
ControlFreak - process supervisor, similar to Ubic in its command-line interface.
There are also App::Daemon, App::Control and Supervisor.
Our IRC channel is irc://irc.perl.org#ubic.
There's also a mailing list at firstname.lastname@example.com. Send an empty message to firstname.lastname@example.com to subscribe.
Vyacheslav Matyukhin <firstname.lastname@example.com>
This software is copyright (c) 2016 by Yandex LLC.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
To install Ubic, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm Ubic
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Ubic
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.


text:
© 2010 ESCO Industries. All Rights Reserved.
(All other company, brand, product, and service names are used herein for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks, service marks, or trade names of their respective owners.
There is no affiliation or sponsorship between these other companies and Esco Industries Inc® unless expressly stated.)


text:
Count Yourselves Before You Are Counted
Here is something very nice, and good to read at Fajr insha Allah. Let this be a reminder to us.
Islamic daily life
- Have you prayed Fajr, every day with the group, in the Masjid? (for men) women should have a special place at home.
- Did you perform all of the prayers daily inside the Masjid, with the group? (for men)
- Did you read the Book of Allah (Quran) today?
- Did you mention Allah and Glorify Him after each prayer?
- Did you keep the extra prayers (Sunnah) before or after each prayer?
- Were you concentrating daily on your prayers by meditating on what you said in your prayers?
- Have you remembered Death and the Tomb today?
- Have you thought about the Day of Judgment and its overwhelming hardship?
- Have you asked Allah three times to permit you into Paradise? Because if you say: Oh Allah, permit me into Paradise- three times, the Paradise will reply: Oh Allah, allow him/her to enter me. (Tirmidhi)
- Have you asked Allah to protect you from the Hellfire today, three times? If you did the Hellfire will say: Oh Allah, protect him/her from me. (Tirmidhi)
- Did you read a Hadith about the Prophet (p.b.u.h.) today?
- Haven't you thought about being away from those who are evil doers?
- Have you tried to avoid laughing and joking too much or too often?
- Did you thank Allah for bestowing on you hearing, sight, good heart, and all the other gifts?
- Did you pay charity today to the poor and needy?
- Did you get angry for your own sake or for the sake of Allah?
- Did you avoid arrogance and self-admiration?
- Have you cried today out of the fearness of Allah?
- Did you mention Allah after Fajr or Isha prayer?
- Have you asked Allah to forgive you for the sins and transgressions that you have committed, by making (astaghfirullah) seeking forgiveness from sins?
- Did you ask Allah sincerely and honestly today to grant you Shahadat (martyrdom)? The Prophet (p.b.u.h) said: "The one who asks Allah sincerely to grant him/her Shahadat, Allah will grant it to him/her
even though he/she dies in his/her bed. (Muslim)
- Did you ask Allah to stabilize your heart and your religion?
- Did you take the opportunity to make dua (supplication) in the hours that Allah accepts them?
- Did you buy a new Islamic book for the sake of learning from it the knowledge of the religion?
- Did you seek forgiveness for the Believers, men, and women, alive or dead, because if you did, Allah will reward you for each of them?
- Did you thank Allah for His Blessings on you, by making you Muslim and for the Blessings of Islam?
- Did you visit a brother or sister for the sake of Allah?
- Did you invite people to Allah, your family, your brothers, sisters, neighbors, or those whom you have been in contact with?
- Were you kind to your parents today?
- Have you faced a problem and did you say: Inna lellaahi wa innaa ilaihir raaje'oon (By Allah we are created and to Him, we shall return)?
- Have you made dua by saying,"Oh Allah, I seek refuge in You, from the things I have committed wrongfully and knowingly. And I seek forgiveness for the things that I have committed without my knowledge." If you say this, Allah will wipe off the big sins and the small sins.


text:
Removing a Fax Thru Email Security Code
If you have set a security code for Fax Thru Email, you can remove it at any time.
To Remove a Fax Thru Email Security Code
- Log in to your Buydomains.com.ph account.
- Click Fax Thru Email.
- Next to the account you want to use, click Manage.
- From the Settings menu,select Security Code.
- On the Security Code tab, select Do not require a security code to send faxes.
- Click Save.