September 1, 2000

"The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage."

John Galsworthy
Over the River, 1933

September 5, 2000

"Perhaps one of our great roles as leaders is to ensure that the people we lead and coach find their calling; that they do not die with their music still inside them. One of the legacies of great inspirational leaders is the degree to which they helped people to learn, grow, flourish, and discover their true selves...."

Lance Secretan
"Spirit at Work -- Follow Your Calling"
Industry Week, September 4, 2000

September 6, 2000

Facts about women on the Web:

American women Internet users now outnumber men.

Women aged 25 to 44 account for more than 20% of Web surfers.

Women tend to spend less time online than men, so "you have to provide a compelling online experience to capture both their mindshare and their dollars."

Iconocast, August 10, 2000

September 7,2000

"America is the envy of the world for creating more than 50 million new jobs in the past three decades. The real challenge is that wage disparity, based on different levels of education, is getting wider. The solution is to manage our human capital as well as weīve managed financial capital. We can do that if we make education and training a greater national priority."

Michael Milken
The Wall Street Journal
September 5, 2000

September 8, 2000

Facts about the "frame of reference" of this yearīs entering college students:
- Most were born in 1982.
- Elvis has always been dead.
- A "45" is a gun, not a phonograph record.
- MASH and The Muppet Show have always been in reruns.
- The year they were born, 164 deaths were attributed to AIDS.
- There have always been ATM machines.
- Toyotas and Hondas have always been made in the USA.
- 24/7 cable news, weather reports, and rock videos have always existed
- "Spam" and "cookies" are not necessarily foods.

Source: Beloit College
Class of 2004 Mindset List

for September 11, 2000

"The true test of whether a company is committed to diversity is whether or not it requires its high performers who behave in ways that are contradictory to diversity best practices to improve or get out."

Stephanie Ernst
DiversityInc.com
September 7, 2000

September 12, 2000

"Scientific revolutions may start with dry, objective data, but their ultimate impact depends on human interpretation in a societal context. Scientific milestones set off a search, often a struggle, for the metaphors and images that will be used to connect the findings with our daily lives."

Eric S. Lander
The New York Times
September 12, 2000

September 13, 2000

"It wouldnīt be right if you built a store without wheelchair access -- and youīd probably be breaking the law. But most Web sites are designed with little or no accommodation for the disabled, effectively locking out millions of people."

Jeffrey Graham
"Making the Web Accessible to Everyone"

September 14, 2000

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but abolutely present and alive."

Bernhard Schlink
The Reader, 1995.

September 15, 2000

"The hook. The cliff-hanger. The hairpin plot turn. The serial has its own built-in marketing tool that makes it as appealing to bottom-line-oriented publishers today as it was 150 years ago, [in Charles Dickensīs day]....The fact that novels are back in serialization is yet another sign that the Internet has made the written word a pop medium once again."

Jade Chang
FEED Daily, 08.30.00

September 18, 2000

"Does ivy work as a symbol of e-learning?

"Itīs associated with a feeling of intoxication. It grows almost too fast to keep up with, threatening to smother the structure that supports it. It often isnīt what it claims to be. Some folks think it destroys bricks and mortar. And if it werenīt for things that people have built over the years, it couldnīt get off the ground at all."

"Vine Inspiration"
University Business, September 2000

September 19, 2000

English is "increasingly becoming the language of higher education and science around the world. . . .Not even Latin, the European scholarly language for almost two millennia, or Greek in the ancient world before it, had the same reach. For the first time, one language, English -- a bastard mixture of old French dialects and the tongues of several Germanic tribes living in what is now England -- is becoming the lingua franca of business, popular culture, and higher education across the globe."

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Septebmer 8, 2000

September 20, 2000

Statistics about the American electorate:

In the 1972 Presidential election, 63% of all adults voted.

In the 1996 Presidential election, 54% of adults voted.

In the 1998 Congressional elections, 42% of adults voted.

Voter turnout in the United States is among the lowest of any democracy in the world.

Source: Take Your Kids to Vote

September 21, 2000

Finding just the right person to review a book is "like fixing books up on blind dates. You hope that magic happens."

Charles McGrath, Editor
The New York Times Book Review

September 22, 2000

A new study says that a single-parent family of two would need about three times the official poverty income of $14,150 just to "squeak by" in New York City. Since "the cityīs official poverty rate hovers around 25%, itīs not outlandish to estimate that over half of New Yorkers actually live in poverty."

While New York is "famously crowded with poor people" and "famously expensive," experts estimate that real poverty rates nationwide range "from a quarter to nearly twice as high as the official numbers. . . . By focusing on our most expensive city, the new study highlights the simple fact that living costs vary from region to region, making a single poverty line inadequate, no matter where itīs set"

Doug Henwood
FEED Daily, 09.19.00

September 25, 2000

"Businesses have spent way too much time and money in monitoring people. A business has a choice: It can either spend lots of money blocking websites, recording keystrokes, running algorithms to detect inappropriate use of corporate assets, or it can assume that most people want to do the right thing most of the time."

Daryl Koehn, Director
Center for Business Ethics
University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX
Darwin, August, 2000

September 26, 2000

"You can speed up the companies. You can speed up the machines. You can speed up the people. But there are a huge number of people who feel that the future is arriving so fast that theyīre hanging on by their fingernails. That the world has become so fast that there isnīt time to think through the complexities of the decisions they need to make."

Alvin Toffler
Business 2.0, September 2000

September 27, 2000

From a recent survey by Pitney Bowes:
- 84% of American workers use the Internet on the job at least once a day.
- 75% of American workers use an intranet several times a week.
- US workers rely on an average of 7 communications tools daily.

CyberAtlas, August 7, 2000.

September 28, 2000

"The companies that succeed will be the ones that make their ideas real, that stand for what is true, and that employ great metaphors and analogies to define their businesses and tell their stories. After all, cash and coin notwithstanding, money itself is merely an agreed-upon representation of that other great truth: value. And I can assure you, value is real."

Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems
Forbes ASAP,10/02/00

September 29, 2000

"The secret to being able to do mathematics is to think of math as a soap opera.

"Iīm not talking about the love lives of mathematicians here -- itīs math itself that constitutes the soap opera. The characters are not fictitious people but mathematical objects: numbers, geometric figures, topological spaces, and so on. The facts and relationships of interest are not births, deaths, marriages, love affairs, and business deals, but mathematical facts and relationships. . . .

"Mathematicians think about mathematical objects and the relationships among them using the same mental abilities that most people use to think about physical space or about other people."

Keith Devlin
"Finding Your Inner Mathematician"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 29, 2000

 

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