Image Source : womensrights.change.org

The greatest threat to healthy female body image might just be…a computer program. That’s right : Photoshop isn’t just manipulating the colors and shades of the sky in the background, it’s manipulating the way we think about female beauty. More specifically, reinforcing the aesthetic of the skinny, the skinnier, and the emaciated.

The program can be used to do all sorts of things, from inserting people of color into all-white spreads to shrinking the size of cheeks and hips to fazing out ex-boyfriends. And while not all of these things are necessarily bad, most of the connotations we have with Photoshop are negative, as The Guardian points out.

Why? Because, well, in a society cluttered with ubiquitous and constant media images of young, absurdly thin white women used to sell products, Photoshop is most frequently associated with the exaggeration and reinforcement of the unhealthy standards of beauty to which women are held. There’s the altered Demi Moore cover, where Moore’s hip had miraculously disappeared. The aforementioned Ralph Lauren photo, which spawned protests against Photoshop outside the Ralph Lauren store in New York. Then an even more hideous Ralph Lauren disaster in which the model looks so thin it’d almost be laughable if it weren’t so awful.

Image Source : Askmen.com

It’s frustrating that so often technology gets manipulated for the purposes of exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women (See: iPhone Apps). In this case, the manipulation is particularly egregious, because it is an outright but often believable lie that asks women to compare themselves to an ideal that’s been entirely fabricated by a few brushstrokes. Read more ……

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Dr Jeegajeeva, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, received the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Awards worth RM630,500 to pursue a doctorate in medicine.

UiTM vice-chancellor Datuk Prof Dr Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar said Dr Jeegajeeva, one of the university’s excellent service award recipients last year, had vast experience in his field in several countries including Malaysia, Britain, Indonesia and Australia.

“UiTM is proud of Dr Jeegajeeva’s achievement. He is one of 10 individuals in Asia chosen for the scholarship,” he said at the presentation of the scholarship here Wednesday.

Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia Penny Williams presented the award. Read more ……

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Image Source : www.siliconindia.com

Toronto: Indian-origin researcher Sanjeev John and his colleague Xun Ma of the University of Toronto have discovered new behaviour of light which could lead to cooler and faster computing.

The two quantum optics researchers have discovered “new behaviours” of light changes within photonic crystals that could lead to faster optical information processing and compact computers that don’t overheat.

“We discovered that by sculpting a unique artificial vacuum inside a photonic crystal, we can completely control the electronic state of artificial atoms (light) within the vacuum,” lead author Xun Ma was quoted as saying in a statement here Tuesday.

“This discovery can enable photonic computers that are more than a hundred times faster than their electronic counterparts, without heat dissipation issues and other bottlenecks currently faced by electronic computing,” said Ma.

“A vacuum experienced by light is not completely empty, and can be made even emptier. It’s not the traditional understanding of a vacuum.”

The researchers, whose original aim was to gain a deeper understanding of optical switching as part of an effort to develop an all-optical micro-transistor that could operate within a photonic chip, ended up discovering a new and unexpected dynamic switching mechanism.

Their research also led to the discovery of corrections to one of the most fundamental equations of quantum optics, known as the Bloch equation. Read more ……

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Source : Topnews.in

A family business is a business in which one or more members of one or more families have a significant ownership interest and significant commitments toward the business’ overall well-being. In some countries, many of the largest publicly listed firms are family-owned. A firm is said to be family-owned if a person is the controlling shareholder; that is, a person (rather than a state, corporation, management trust, or mutual fund) can garner enough shares to assure at least 20% of the voting rights and the highest percentage of voting rights in comparison to other shareholders.

Family businesses may have owners who are not family members. Family businesses may also be managed by individuals who are not members of the family. However, family members are often involved in the operations of their family business in some capacity and, in smaller companies, usually one or more family members are the senior officers and managers. Many businesses that are now public companies were family businesses.

Family participation as managers and/or owners of a business can strengthen the company because family members are often loyal and dedicated to the family enterprise. However, family participation as managers and/or owners of a business can present unique problems because the dynamics of the family system and the dynamics of the business systems are often not in balance.  Read more ……

Too often, the wrong person with the right last name gets the corner office.

What are the chances that, out of thousands of candidates for the CEO spot, the son or daughter of the company founder is the most competent of the bunch? Slim to none.

Say you are a member of the Ford family, and your financial security lay in family trusts stuffed with Ford Motor stock. Who would you rather bet on, William Clay Ford Jr. or Alan Mulally, the former Boeing exec now at Ford’s wheel? In this case, Mulally had the presence of mind to secure $24 billion in funding prior to the recent economic collapse and thus avoided becoming a ward of the federal government, like GM and Chrysler.

The same can be said of the Walton clan at Wal-Mart. When founder Sam Walton died, much ink was spilled over fears that the culture, and thus performance, of the giant retailer would deteriorate. In fact, transition to professional management has yielded relentless revenue growth and profitability.

To be clear, I have met many family-member executives who were excellent leaders. But to be fair, the odds are heavily stacked against them. Read more ……

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We all want to enable organizational velocity. We know that as we lead, we not only need to make right decisions ourselves, but we need to help our teams make good decisions as well. But how often do we step in, make the decision and then wonder why our team is not “engaged?”

Many a leader sees himself in this scenario: “Lucas,” a general manager at a major media services company, told me he wanted his team to step up and figure out how to tackle a huge growth opportunity for his business unit. He had the vague sense his people were somehow holding back. At the same time, he gave more specific direction than made sense, given the talent of the people reporting to him. Employees strive to understand the unwritten rules that their boss operates by. Lucas didn’t recognize how his actions signaled to the team that their ideas were not valued.

We often treat collaboration as the cherry on top of the cake, but a better metaphor is the yeast that lets innovation rise. Collaboration doesn’t work as an afterthought; it must be baked into the process for the organization to rise. It is just as important as the “what” of a big idea that garners so much focus. Both the “what” and the “how” are needed to create the vital organizational context that can enable the rise.

Nilofer Merchant, CEO, strategist and author, is a leading authority on creating business strategy to achieve success. She has honed her unique, collaborative approach to solving tough problems while working with and for companies like Adobe, Apple, Nokia,   HP and others.  A sample chapter from her book, The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy will be published in December. Read more ……

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Source : ListzBlog.com

Happier days are here again for India’s super rich, thanks to a rebounding stock market, up two-thirds in the past year, and a still buoyant economy that’s growing at least 6% a year. The nation is now home to 52 billionaires, up from 27 last year and only two short of what India had at the peak of its stock market boom in 2007.

The combined fortune of India’s 100 richest is $276 billion, almost one-fourth the country’s GDP. That is well below the total worth of $775 billion for the 100 richest Americans, but well ahead of the equivalent sum for China’s top 100. Although China has more billionaires–79 vs. India’s 52–India’s wealthiest are worth over $100 billion more than the $170 billion total net worth of their Chinese counterparts.

India’s wealthiest person, once again Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani, has a fortune of $32 billion, more than five times the $5.8 billion net worth of BYD’s Wang Chuanfu, China’s richest citizen at the time we published our China 400 rankings earlier this month. (Wang’s fortune has since dropped along with BYD’s shares.) Read more ……

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