Today, to shame the slobs among us, we’re reading about the morning routines of CEOs. (Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO “rises at 4:30 a.m., spends an hour on email, reads most of the news online, and then does an hour of either cardio or resistance training each morning. This allows her to get her son ready for school and drop him off, and still get to work by 8 or 8:30 in the morning.”)
Also, in California, when budgets to monitor children in school get tight, what does the state do? Attach RFID tags to them. And debate endlessly about the implications (“If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, could she be tagged as hyper-active? If he doesn’t move around a lot, could he get a reputation for laziness? How long will this data and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it be stored in these children’s school records? Can parents opt-out of this invasive tracking?”)
Finally, how do you, a startup, turn your expensive-rental office into a money-spinner? (“We put together a one-day agenda, charged about $300 a person, and sold about 30 seats. Suddenly, we found ourselves with $9,000 in additional revenue. Our monthly rent at the time was $2,500. In one day, we just paid more than three months’ rent. That was a light-bulb moment. An office can be free — and even a profit center — if you start thinking about your company’s byproducts.”)
In non-tech, the IIM Kozhikode Director writes about the ‘untold’ story’ of an MBA (“Every day you may have to make critical multiple choice decisions about time management. One student describes this as follows: (a) have bath and breakfast both (becoming rarity in campus), (b) bath but no breakfast, (c) breakfast but no bath, and (d) neither (becoming an alarmingly regular option).” – there’s more to the article than this nugget, of course)
Also, an indignant column in the Guardian about Kabul’s bars for expats. This is scarily like the Shah’s Tehran in the years leading up to the ‘79 revolution. (“Congratu-effing-lations. We have just managed to isolate Afghans from us even more than before. Not only have we invaded their country and torn it to shreds, but we have also created a segregated, imperialistic society – one in which Afghans are third-class citizens in their own country, invalidating an already marginalised population further.”)
Finally, a slide show of spectacular traffic jams around the world. Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way. Except that it’s backed up. For miles.