From: Toronto woman dies on Mount Everest - Josh Tapper - Toronto Star - May 22, 2012 (edited)
Shriya Shah-Klorfine dreamed of scaling the world’s tallest peak. On Saturday, she unfurled Canada’s flag at the summit of Mt Everest.
A few hours later she died from exhaustion.
She was remembered by friends for her perseverance and relentless work ethic. Her training regimen included daily 19-kilometre runs carrying a 20- kilogram pack.
“She never let her dream be lost,” said friend Bikram Lamba. “She transferred the dream into reality.”
About 150 climbers attempted to reach the summit over the weekend.
“With the traffic jam, climbers had a longer wait for their chance to go up the trail and spent too much time at a higher altitude. Many of them are believed to be carrying a limited amount of oxygen, not anticipating the extra time spent.”
80% of Everest deaths occur in the final stretch because of its low oxygen level.
Bruce Klorfine said: “My wife was someone who lived life to its fullest, with irrepressible energy and vitality."
In 2011, she participated in a five-day hunger strike to protest skyrocketing auto insurance premiums. She collapsed after four days but returned to the strike after her release from hospital.
For the last two years, she squeezed in seven hours of training each day before running her business in the late evening.
She also mortgaged her home to cover climbing costs.
Priya Ahuja, a close friend, said nothing could hold her back.
“She would say: Life, you’ve just got one, just try to live it. ”
Of course, some might say: Life, you've just got one. Don't throw it away.
From: The Globe and Mail, May 22, 2012 (edited)
The Canadian woman who died over the weekend was urged by her sherpas to turn back because she was tiring, but she was determined to pursue her climb.
The agreement Ms. Shah-Klorfine signed with Utmost Adventure Trekking gave the expedition team the authority to call off the climb if she wasn’t well, Dr. Lamba said.
“If they decided she wasn’t fit to go, why did you permit the sherpas to accompany her?”
Delays in getting to the summit, worsening weather and limited oxygen-tank supplies are all good reasons to turn around but it is not a decision that is easy to make for climbers for whom Everest is “the trip of a lifetime,” said Dr. Semple.
“At that altitude, you can’t pull somebody off. All you can do is recommend to them.”
“There are so many people now on the top of Everest.... So there are huge delays and people stand around … It takes a lot longer, they run out of oxygen on the way down. Once you stop climbing, you get very cold very quickly,” Dr. Semple said in an interview.
The study found that foreign climbers died at more than six times the rate of sherpas during the descent from the summit.
Sherpas are accustomed to the thin air. When they do die on the mountain, it’s usually at lower levels from avalanches or falls, Dr. Semple said.
From: Gary James' Interview With Helen Shapiro
Q - What did you think of The Beatles when you first saw them? Did you think "this is the future of Rock 'n' Roll"?
A - Well, they were fairly un-disciplined in the very early days, which was nice. I enjoyed them. I'm a big fan.
I would stand at the side of the stage and watch every performance. I really loved them. It was interesting to see them kind of polish up their act during the run of the tour. They learned to be a bit more professional in terms of presentation without losing that raw stuff that they had, which was great and which everybody enjoyed.
We had a lot of fun together on the road. We would sing on the bus, everybody on the tour. We would all sing like Beach Boys songs and a lot of the early Tamla / Motown stuff, which they knew before any of us did because Brian Epstein used to import stuff from the States to his record shop in Liverpool. So, we used to do all that. We just got on really well.
The other day I saw a posting by Greg Savage on Recruitingblogs.com. It was called: The Golden Rule of Cold Calls. Don't.
That prompted me to post a transcript of my interview with James Bowmer on Recruitingblogs.com. It's called Hot Tips From A Cold Call Machine.
Ironically, both of these guys are CEO's of successful recruiting firms and both of them are Australian. There is one difference though: Greg's article got a number of approving comments and Jimmy's got none - until Cora Mae Lengeman came along.
Cora is a very successful solo headhunter. Her comments (slightly edited) are below:
From: Recruitingblogs.com, Cora Mae Lengeman, May 18, 2012
You simply have to pick up the telephone and make the calls, knowing that each no is getting you closer to a yes.
Cold calls for finding new clients are fun. I love sorting the companies that will be my sourcing companies and the companies that may become my clients.
I don't do it as often now but the exercise is a good one to get you back into the excitement of recruiting. It keeps the edge (and fun) in the recruiting process.
Yeah, it's interesting that when you write about someone that is successful doing something that most recruiters don’t like or want to do that it gets no comments.
They are probably embarrassed to admit someone can be successful doing it because that means they could also if they stepped out of their comfort zone. Scary!!
Work safe = not as much success
From: How To Grow Up, Pam Weintraub, Psychology Today, May 1, 2012
Being an adult means:
- standing on your own two feet
- pursuing your own goals
- soothing your own bad feelings without the help of another person
- not caving in to pressure to conform from people who are important to you
From: Psychology Today, Why Do the Wrong Men Feel So Right? - Vinita Mehta, May 16, 2012 (edited)
Women face a vexing choice between two types of men.
Mr. Good Dad is typically more commitment-oriented, warm, faithful, and reliable. Yet he is usually less handsome, less charismatic, and less dominant.
Mr. Sexy Cad may be better-looking, he also tends to be flashy and exploitative of others. Such men also display a host of traits that lean toward Machiavellianism, psycopathy, and narcissism.
There's a problem, however.
When a woman is near ovulation she comes under the sway of hormonal fluctuations that make the attractive, charming, unreliable men irresistible.
Their deep voices, symmetrical and masculine faces, competitiveness, and social dominance have the power to make ovulating women swoon.
Here's why.
Greater facial symmetry, masculinity, and social dominance tell her that a man has good genes which can be passed down to their offspring. So, nature blinds her to the high costs involved in mating with a man who is likely to desert his children.
The ovulating woman actually believes that with her as the wife, this guy will be a good dad.
Read about the experiments used to demonstrate this here.
Not Like This
From: American's Nastiest Blood Feud - Gary Wills, NYRB
It began with their very first recorded meeting, in 1953. Lyndon Johnson came into the Senate cafeteria for his customary breakfast there. He was trailing his entourage, radiating his power as minority leader.
He passed the table of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was sitting near the entrance with three or four staffers, including a newcomer to his team, twenty-seven-year-old Robert Kennedy, who had just got this job through the influence of his father, a McCarthy supporter.
Johnson knew about that arrangement, as he did all the things that went on in “his” Senate. Johnson had mocked Joe Kennedy all over town and despised Joe McCarthy as a loose cannon in the Senate. He also did not think much of the newly elected senator John Kennedy, whom he would soon be calling a sickly absentee from the Senate and “not a man’s man.”
Yet McCarthy, with his coarse affability, leaped to his feet when Johnson approached, greeted him as “Leader,” and shook his hand. His aides followed suit, all but one, who remained seated, with an expression of distaste. Bobby knew what Johnson had been saying about his father and his boss, and he always bristled at slights directed at his own revered family. He refused to get up, or even to look at Johnson.
Johnson, whose own history of humiliations Caro has traced in earlier volumes, was just as quick to sense contempt, and determined to crush it if he could. He was a bully and a sadist, and he took the earliest opportunity to force Kennedy to submit to the dreaded handshake.
He went right up to him, towering over him (he always put his height to use) and crowded at him with a half-extended hand. Finally, in the embarrassment of a growing silence, Kennedy rose and, with averted eyes, shook Johnson’s hand. Johnson felt he had made this lowly staffer crawl. It would prove to be a costly victory.
From: All Hands On Deck: How Can We Make More Heroes - Erin Anderssen - Globe and Mail - Jan 16 2012 (edited)
Heroes are born risk-takers and thrill-seekers. They have adventurous personalities.
They are more likely to go mountain-climbing on vacation than lounge around the pool.
Often, their parents modelled compassion and altruism; that's why they say they acted instinctively as if they had no other choice. That reflexive behaviour is run by the brainwashing of childhood.
In 2008, when terrorists attacked a hotel in Bombay many employees risked their lives and died trying to keep the guests safe.
Why? The hotel didn't hire the people with the highest marks. It hired people who showed the most optimism when confronted by adversity and had the most respect for others.
Rohit Deshpandé is an ethics professor at the Harvard. He sez people can be trained to be heroes. But the training has to start early.
Phil Zimbardo, the reciprocity guy from Stanford says 20% of people are heroes.
To program heroism into children, parents and teachers have to brainwash them to believe that they have the power to change a situation.
They also have to teach kids how to build up social influence among their peers because many acts of heroism require people working together.
Zimmy has students go to school with a big spot drawn on their foreheads, so that they experience peer pressure to wipe it off during the day.
"A hero is a positive deviant,” he says. “How do you resist that pressure?”
Why is a hero a deviant? Because she'll do what other people won't. For instance, a whistle-blower, according to Zimbardo, is a hero.
When the Costa Concordia cruise ship went down people fought over life jackets; men pushed their way ahead of children and the elderly; and people tried to launch the lifeboats before they were full.
However, crew member, Manrico Giampedroni, 57 years old, went looking for trapped passengers until he fell in the in the dark and broke his leg.
When he was rescued 36 hours later, his mother told reporters, “If they had told me he was dead, I would have died too.”
From: Forward.com - May 9, 2012 - Ben Ivry and Wikipedia
Vidal Sassoon was famous in the 1960s for creating a short, angular hairstyle that was a recreation of the classic bob.
He had a tough childhood.
At age 5, he was sent to an orphanage in London, after his father, a womanizer, abandoned his mother.
Seven years later, his mother remarried and he was able to rejoin his family.
At 14, he was apprenticed to a wigmaker.
"This Dickensian beginning instilled a fierce fighting spirit in him, as well as a sense of commercial realities."
Although passionate about architecture, he resigned himself to shampooing the hair of the wigmaker's clients as his only realistic career option.
After the news of the Holocaust reached London he went to Palestine to join the predecessor to the Israeli army.
Returning to London, he trained under Raymond Bessone, in his salon in Mayfair. "He really taught me how to cut hair.... I'd never have achieved what I have without him."
Sassoon opened his first salon in 1954 in London.
Comment: I doubt that the Dickensian childhood was the source of Sassoon's fighting spirit. It might have brought him face to face with practical realities at an early age but I suspect that the fighting spirit was inborn.
Also, noteworthy, is his acknowledgement of the importance of good training.
Note: A good story often seems better than the truth. Dickensian childhood brings to mind the world of Oliver Twist. Yet, an article on Tablet.com describes a visit by Sassoon to the Portuguese Synagogue that housed the orphanage. He said that he enjoyed it there.
By his own account, Sassoon’s years at the orphanage were happy ones. (Sassoon, unlike his younger brother Ivor, was never bitter toward [his mother] Betty, with whom he remained close.)
You value an heirloom more than a costly new object
Why:
We have a general rule of thumb that properties can be transmitted through contact.
Hot things transmit heat. Dirty things transmit dirt. So we assume that even psychological properties can be transmitted through contact.
How it helps:
It can be a good thing if it acts as inspiration for you, if you have an item that was owned by an idol or someone you admire.
Or it can act to comfort you if it was something that was owned or touched by a family member. It’s like having that person with you.”
From: Globe and Mail, Wency Leung, April 29, 2012 (edited)
From: Myth of Decline, Danny Gross, Newsweek, Apr 30, 2012 (edited)
In the fall of 2008, the US suffered its deepest longest economic contraction in 80 years. Its markets were cut in half.
The numbers: Annual deficits over $1 trillion, 8.75 million jobs lost, $4-per-gallon gasoline.
Declinism quickly emerged as the chic intellectual pose.
All agreed that the U.S. had a very slim hope of recovering from self-inflicted blows.
In fact, March 2009 marked the beginning of a recovery.
The US economy went from shrinking at a 6.7% annual rate in the 1st quarter of 2009 to expanding at a 3.8% annual rate in the 4th quarter of that year — a turnaround unprecedented in modern history.
The stock market has doubled since March 2009. Corporate profits and exports have surged to records.
The economy has regained its 2007 peak and is now growing at a 3% annual clip — more than any other developed economy.
A rapid, decisive policy response was the precondition for a return to growth.
It took the US 18 months to conduct the required fiscal and monetary actions. Japan waited 12 years for after its credit bubble burst.
Since then the recovery has been fueled by the private sector as US companies restructured operations and debt.
Business bankruptcy filings spiked from 28,322 in 2007 to 60,837 in 2009 — an increase of 115% in 2 years.
In 2009 a record 191 US companies, with a combined $516 billion in debt, defaulted on their bonds.
But financial failure in the U.S. gets worked out much more quickly than it does elsewhere.
GM and Chrysler each spent 40 days in Chapter 11 after filing for bankruptcy in the spring of 2009.
In their brief sojourns in Chapter 11, they ripped up contracts, shucked benefits, lopped off $109 billion in liabilities, and established new, profitable business models.
Ford, was more impressive. Eschewing a bailout, Ford ground out a recovery by embracing foreign markets, aggressively cutting costs, investing for growth, and paying down billions of dollars in debt.
After hitting a nadir of $1.59 in February 2009, its stock rallied to $18 in January 2011.
By the end of 2011, Ford reinstituted its dividend and stood on the cusp of regaining an investment-grade rating.
The American private sector emerged better equipped to meet obligations, to save, to invest, to spend, and grow.
Pretax corporate profits rose from $1.25 trillion in 2008 to $1.8 trillion in 2010, and to $1.94 trillion in 2011.
Rather than surrender to Chinese competitors, US companies figured out how to get more out of existing resources.
From the 4th quarter of 2008 to the 4th quarter of 2009, productivity rose 5.4% and 4.1% in 2010.
At businesses big and small, memos went out about using fewer paper clips, printing on both sides of the paper, and canceling newspaper subscriptions.
UPS squeezed more deliveries out of existing resources by eliminating left turns from trucking routes.
The typical passenger car sold in 2010 averaged 33.9 miles per gallon, up from 30.1 in 2006.
Companies that made a business of helping other people save money thrived during the recession.
BigBelly Solar, a startup in Newton, Mass., manufactures solar-powered trash compactors that send text messages when they’re full.
They enable cities and colleges to cut costs on garbage collection by up to 75%.
Sales of the $4,000 units, which are made in the U.S., doubled every year between 2008 and 2010.
Declinists believe the new global economy is working against the US but it often works in America’s favor.
The US remains the largest, richest, most secure market in the world. That’s why it continues to lead the world in foreign direct investment (FDI).
In 2010, FDI rose to $194.5 billion from $135 billion in 2009. It stood at $155 billion in the 1st 3 quarters of 2011.
Declinists claim that the US doesn’t make anything -- except for the $180 billion in goods and services Americans export every month.
Since bottoming in April 2009 at $124 billion, monthly exports have risen nearly 50%.
In 2010, when the economy added 1.03 million new jobs, the number of jobs supported by exports rose by 500,000, from 8.7 million to 9.2 million.
Agricultural exports hit a record $115.8 billion in 2010. In 2011 soared to $136 billion—nearly double the 2007 total.
The US ships soybeans to China ($9.19 billion in 2009 alone). Total exports to China soared from $41.2 billion in 2005 to $104 billion in 2011.
“Every unit that gets manufactured in this site this year is going to be exported,” GE CEO Jeff Immelt told employees at the company’s gas-turbine plant in Greenville, S.C., in the spring of 2011.
The 2011 production schedule called for 90 such electricity-generating units, at about $25 million each.
Small companies have transformed into export powerhouses, as well.
Wallquest, a family-owned high-end wallpaper company outside Philadelphia, saw exports rise from 35% of sales in 2009 to 65% in 2010.
Foreigners also buy education.
Since 1972 the number of foreign students has risen every year, with the exception of the three years after 9/11.
A record 690,923 foreign students enrolled in the 2009–10 academic year.
Tourism has boomed too. In 2010, a record 59.8 million international visitors came to the U.S., up 8.7% from 2009. That year, tourism was a $134.5 billion export industry.
Increasingly, U.S. companies are meeting global consumers where they live.
Whether it is Starbucks in Turkey, Mary Kay in China, Taco Bell in India, or an American medical school in the Persian Gulf, U.S. business concepts travel well.
In 2010, for the firms in the S&P 500 stock index that broke out such results separately, 46.3% of revenues came from outside the U.S., up from 43.5% in 2006.
A car plant in Shanghai is a joint venture of GM and the Chinese car company SAIC. They make Buicks.
In the 3rd quarter of 2011 GM sold 620,000 vehicles in China, compared with 555,000 in the US.
At Davos where American decline is a perennial theme, the most significant presences were U.S. companies.
Apple and Google are the nation’s 2nd- and 9th-largest companies by market capitalization, with a combined value of nearly $600 billion.
Facebook has been valued at more than $100 billion.
Yet in 2002, none of these companies existed in anything like their current form.
Their combined market cap was a few billion dollars, consisting mostly of Apple, an also-ran pc maker. Google was a piece of code. Mark Zuckerberg was just entering Harvard.
All three gained mass and scale during the long expansion of the 2000s, but took off in the years after the Lehman crash.
Today, they represent American economic dynamism the way Chevrolet and McDonald’s once did.
They employ modest numbers of people but they’ve created platforms for other businesses, industries, and entrepreneurs to create new economic arrangements.
Think of what iTunes has done for the publishing, music, and entertainment industries.
The US has a long way to go to make up for lost ground in housing and jobs.
The resurgence of the corporate sector hasn’t translated into new positions for the legions of unemployed. But there’s positive news.
Since February 2010, the private sector, which accounts for 83% of all employment added nearly 4.1 million jobs.
It’s a sign that the jobs machine is working again.
The public sector has been the sole source of job loss: austerity-minded government entities cut a million jobs since 2010. But the sharp reductions have come to a halt.
There’s no reason the expansion that started in July 2009 can’t go on as long as the previous three, which lasted 73 months, 120 months, and 92 months, respectively.
This post-bust era will go down not as a time of economic decline, but as one of regeneration.