how does one add pic?

Colonel Sanders
There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery. You can't do any business from there.

Roseanne Barr
Experts say you should never hit your children in anger. When is a good time? When you're feeling festive?

W.C. Fields
I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.

Milton Berle
They've finally come up with the perfect office computer. If it makes a mistake, it blames another computer.

George Gobal
If it weren't for electricity we'd all be watching television by candlelight.

Groucho Marx
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Voltaire
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Oscar Wilde
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.

Ellen DeGeneres
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.

Tommy Cooper
You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said 'Parking Fine.'


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What do you think is the most serious problem facing our world today?..... What local issues do you face in the town or city you live in?

Thank you Ms Bonny ...well for India the medium-term agenda should include: First, reforming the financial architecture, including by strengthening the International Monetary Fund’s capacity to respond to crises and enhancing its legitimacy through radical governance reform to give greater say to the emerging powers. Second, securing the future openness of the trading system, which would require a commitment to go beyond completing the current Doha agenda in two ways: deepening rules in existing areas (especially services) and developing rules in new areas (to deal with undervalued exchange rates, cartelization of oil markets, investment restrictions and environmental protectionism). Third, reforming the makeup of the bodies involved in global decision-making, including the creation of a more representative membership than the G-7. Hope this clarifies your doubt.

Anymore questions from the audience?

Great analysis. In my opinion all outsourcing tech \ non tech companies should stay in the US. You just save yourself and your company so much hassle. Dont come running after china and India to sell your products. Stay there.

Good thought... but why when i disagree it seems to be shoving down your neck? You can ignore and move on...

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened

Amazing ... all turned true?

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do

Amen

The United States seems to be caught up in measurement mania when it comes to literacy. The No Child Left Behind law calls for extensive testing of children's reading abilities in different grade levels. For adults, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has developed adult literacy tests, while Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of the WorkforceInvestment Act of 1998 calls for accountability measures that the DOE has implemented in a national reporting system that makes extensive use of adult literacy tests.

The actual measurement instruments and procedures for measuring reading/literacy and comparing states suffer from major flaws. They all follow different procedures in their development, which renders them incomparable, hence interpretations of data produced by comparing the various tests are essentially meaningless.

Testing children's reading achievement

Last year, on page 39 of the June 4, 2008 issue of Time magazine a graph was presented showing differences between the percentage of fourth graders in each state who are deemed "proficient" in reading based on each state's different standardized test. The graph also shows the percentage deemed "proficient" on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a standardized test given in all states. There are some very significant differences between the state and national test results. For instance, Mississippi reports that nearly 90 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading on the state-developed test, while on the NAEP only about 19 percent score as proficient. This is a whopping 71 percentage points difference.

The Time article reported that when using state test data the average percentage of fourth graders considered proficient is 70%. On the national NAEP tests only 30% of U.S. fourth graders score as proficient. This is a 40-point average gap between state and national estimates of fourth-grade reading proficiency. The state and national tests use different procedures to determine if children are proficient readers; hence they are not commensurate. This raises these questions. Which tests should be considered valid indicators of the reading achievement level of the nation's fourth-graders? Should it be, the state or the federal tests - or perhaps neither?

Testing adult's literacy levels

Jumping ahead to when fourth graders have grown up, the 2008 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) presents data for prose and document literacy that indicate that in 1992 15% of adults over the age of 16 scored as proficient on these tests. In 2008, 6% of adults scored as proficient, a drop of 9%. Surprisingly, only 20% of adult college graduates scored as proficient in literacy.

This suggests a tremendous loss of proficiency as children grow into adulthood!

Measuring literacy for accountability

The problem of assessing literacy also shows up in the accountability system of the nation's Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS), which is made up of some 3,000 programs funded jointly by federal money from Title 2 of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and state and local funds.

The National Reporting System (NRS) which prepares reports on how well adults are learning to read in the AELS, has acknowledged that different states use different standardized tests, with differing amounts of time between pre- and posttests to assess growth in literacy learning. But despite the acknowledged lack of comparability in the tests and procedures used in various states, the NRS computes averages of the percentage of adults making learning gains throughout the 50 states. Of course, the lack of comparability in measurement tools and their administration renders these data totally meaningless and useless to Congress (or anyone else for that matter) in deciding whether or not states are using their federal funds responsibly and productively.

The debacle of testing literacy ability

Despite the faults of testing for literacy skills, there is apparently no hesitancy in using the test results to reward some educators and punish others for what they are doing to teach literacy, whether to children or adults. Despite extensive use of standardized tests of various sorts by the 50 states, 30-year reading trend data with the NAEP show minimal if any improvement for 9-, 13-, or 17-year-old children since the early 1970s.
Further, the testing of adult literacy in 1992 and again in 2007 shows little or no improvement in literacy at the lowest levels and a decline at the highest levels.

To date, then, the great literacy testing debacle has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, threatened teachers and administrators, subjected children to hours of drill and practice in test taking rather than engaging in learning important content and skills, and cast aspersions on the literacy skills of America's workforce, thus advertising to the world that the U. S. workforce is incompetent. This cannot be good for the health and welfare of the nation or its international competitiveness in the global economy.

Even if we could get literacy testing right - which we have not done up to now - there is no way we can test ourselves out of the serious educational problems that afflict our K-12 and adult literacy education systems.

There is a word for the obsessive repetition of utterly foolish, unreasonable, and failed practices: insanity.

*Published USA Govt article

When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent

The villains of the outsourcing saga are a) the Americans (natch!), b) the British (they ran India for a couple of centuries, remember, so colonialism has got to have something to do with it), and c) the capitalists who set the outsourcing system in motion. The result: wage-exploited, culturally rootless (because they're semi-Americanized) Indians, jobless Americans (although that's not so true anymore in the current surging economy), and a lot of air that's unfit to breathe and water that's unfit to drink--if you can find it.

But I thought: What about American white-collar workers themselves, who are often so maleducated these days that they can't, or won't, do the jobs that Indians are supposedly taking from them for a tenth of their salaries? The outsourcing company that is the focus of Kate's story, a firm called Office Tiger in Chennai, was set up only six years ago by a pair of Harvard Business school grads with investment-banking jobs on Wall Street who noticed that their firms’ lackadaisical Manhattan-based clerical workforces couldn't turn out the letter-perfect documents that Wall Street operations typically need to produce at top speed. Kate writes:

"It had become apparent to [Office Tiger's eventual founders] that not every typist and copyist working the midnight shift in their investment banks--the moonlighting actor, the artist with the ring in his nose--was putting his heart, soul, and syntactical memory into completing the PowerPoint presentations that needed to be done, perfectly, by morning."

Kate also describes a typical U.S. end-user of Office Tiger services: a 43-year-old man with a bachelor's degree who lacks the basic writing skills to enable him to update his resume! The guy has to go to a copy shop, which in turn outsources the work to a Hindu "document specialist" in Chennai for typying, formatting, and proofreading.

Once, of course, American clerical workers equipped with a few business and English courses from high school knew how to turn out crisp, perfectly spelled and punctuated documents that satisfied the most exacting of bosses. But now, high school (and grade school) English teachers see their mission as helping their students be "creative." Students work on their inner poet when it might be more useful for them to work on their inner sentence-diagrammer.

India, however, thanks to those dreadful British colonialists, has a superb, old-fashioned, English language-based education system in which students still learn the essentials of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And it turns out that those skills are highly marketable--as they would be in the United States if anyone still had them. India is also a desperately poor country, which America is not, so it is not surprising that job-starved workers there covet and strive to excel at low-paying clerical positions that many Americans today disdain and perform poorly.

Kate's article is replete with nostalgia for lost village ways in India. That's all well and good--I think traditional Indian culture is wonderful in many ways myself, and the price of modernity for any society is high--but a viable economy based on simple ways and agriculture disappeared years ago in India, just as it did in the West. The options for a place like India are two: a xenophobic command-society folk-museum in which the inhabitants tend their quaint looms and grind along in poverty (a favorite modus operandi of India's socialist governments past and present), or to have what India has now, which at least gives the inhabitants a chance to work at jobs whose wages look good to them. A few years ago I saw one of the famous Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's last movies, made during the 1970s. Its protagonist was a highly educated young man whose sole source of income was peddling packages of typing paper on the street. Is this what we really want for India?

In any event, outsourcing to India may look cheap because the wages there are rock-bottom by U.S. standards. But when you factor in the set-up costs and what you have to pay to keep a middleman like Office Tiger profitable, it may not be so cheap after all.


Nonetheless, given the way the American education establishment has both failed to prepare a competent U.S. workforce and taught it to look down its nose at clerical jobs, outsourcing may be the only way that U.S. businesses, from investment banks to humble copy shops, can get the work done.

For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please

In order to develop a career that really suits you, it’s important to have a basic knowledge of your key strengths. Unlike skills or knowledge you can acquire through education, your strengths are more basic talents. For the most part you were born with them. You can certainly continue to develop new talents, but in the area of your strengths you have an almost unfair advantage.

Your strengths are things that come naturally and easily to you. Your brain is just wired to be good at them. You couldn’t really teach someone to be as good as you are unless they’re predisposed to have a strength in that area.

Assess your strengths

There are many tests you can take to help assess your personal strengths. The one I recommend most is the Strengths Finder Test, which can be accessed online with a key from the books Now, Discover Your Strengths or Strengths Finder 2.0. The test helps you identify your top 5 strengths with an emphasis on career-related abilities.

I took this test more than a year ago. The results for my top 5 strengths were, in order:

1. Strategic - good at strategic thinking and planning.
2. Input - can efficiently process and integrate large amounts of information.
3. Learner - good at acquiring new knowledge and skills.
4. Focus - able to concentrate well and tune out distractions.
5. Significance - drawn to work on important things and avoid succumbing to trivialities.

I wasn’t surprised by these results. My strengths are predominantly mental as opposed to social or emotional.

Understand your strengths

Once you assess your strengths, it’s important to understand what they mean on a practical level. What kinds of tasks are well-suited to you? What kinds of tasks are a struggle for you?

Because of my strengths, I’m very good at understanding and working with abstract concepts. Contradictory or ambiguous information doesn’t faze me. I see patterns where others see only complexity. I’m also very good at making intelligent, strategically sound decisions. This way of thinking comes naturally to me. I don’t really know how I do it.

Apply your strengths

You’ll be happiest working in a career that allows you to take advantage of your strengths on a daily basis. This will enable you to make a significant contribution to your field.

Based on my strengths, an ideal career for me would be one that leverages my strategic thinking ability and has me working on complex and meaningful challenges, especially in a field that people find complicated or confusing. This suggests I could perform well as an entrepreneur, business consultant, writer, psychologist, designer, criminal profiler!, and many other possibilities.

Similarly, my core strengths also allow me to rule out careers that wouldn’t fit me too well, such as a professional athlete or nightclub manager.

I suggest you take at least one assessment test to gain clarity about your in-born strengths. Working from your strengths will help you (1) be far more productive, (2) get better results, (3) contribute more value, (4) attract higher compensation, (5) enjoy your work, and (6) experience greater fulfillment.

If you’d like to share other strength assessment tests you’ve found helpful, please share them in the forums.

How do you balance self-acceptance vs. the drive to grow and improve yourself?

On the one hand, it’s a good idea to accept yourself for who you are… faults and all, right?

But on the other hand, isn’t it also a good idea to set goals and aim for something even better than what you already experience now?

How do you resolve this conflict?

Any thoughts?