In April 2013, when the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh crumbled and killed more than a thousand garment workers, Western clothing executives were chastened. They were the ones, after all, who’d been pressuring Bangladesh’s apparel factories to cheaply reproduce runway trends for consumers in the U.S. and Europe who’d grown used to $10 dresses. Following the accident, H&M, Zara, Walmart, Gap, and other major brands announced they’d fund and oversee factory inspections in Bangladesh, demanding improvements from facilities that fell short and cutting off business with those that didn’t get better. Bangladesh, with the help of the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO), created its own inspection program and vowed to shut down unsafe facilities. Better vigilance, everyone figured, would be central to preventing similar accidents from happening again.
Author: knjohn
4 Lessons About Handling Stressed Customers That I Learned From Being a Mover | Entrepreneur
A recent study on easing anxiety for stressed-out customers looked at “high-emotion services” (the purchase of a new home or car, computer repair or airline travel, for example) that elicit intense feelings even before the product is purchased or the service begins. The problem the researchers found? These types of companies often fail to sufficiently address emotional triggers in their business models.
Certain product and service providers, it seems, make enduring impressions on distressed customers. If you’re such a provider and you can’t adequately respond to those buyers’ concerns and feelings, your customers will remember (and share) that your service left them feeling overwhelmed, helpless, neglected or, even worse, frightened. Those notions don’t exactly add up to top customer satisfaction scores.
So, what can you do?
Here’s why scientists keep changing their minds about this year’s potential La Niña | WIRED
CLIMATE PREDICTIONS—KIND OF like romantic comedies—are full of will they/won’t they suspense. Like this year’s La Niña. In September, the National Weather Service cancelled its months-long lookout for the climate phenomenon—which, as a counterpoint to El Niño, is associated with cooler overall global temperatures. Then, last week, the agency reversed. Its Climate Prediction Center predicted a 70 percent chance of La Niña forming, and folded that prediction into its Winter Weather Outlook. If true, that means the next few months will be warm and dry in the southern half of the US; wet and cool in the north.
SPONTAN Laptop Rack | IKEA Hackers
This is a modified Spontan magazine rack. We attached them to the walls outside the bathrooms at work so that you have somewhere safe to leave your laptop (rather than on the basin inside!).
The Spontan is made of metal (with an enamel coating). While it is designed for magazines and newspapers, it is quite strong, and can hold a laptop fairly easily. One of the problems though is that the metal surfaces may scratch the body of our precious laptops. We needed a padding solution.
For the “inside” of the rack, the part that you can’t see, we cut pieces of high density foam to size. It has self adhesive on one side. We stuck it on the “inside” surfaces of the rack. This must extend down to where the bottom edge of the laptop will rest.
31 Days to Financial Independence (Day 11): Trimming Your Spending – Food | The Simple Dollar
“31 Days to Financial Independence” is an ongoing series that appears every Thursday on The Simple Dollar. You might want to start this series from the beginning!”
Last time, we started looking at the average American family budget, going through each category and examining how one could trim the cost of typical expenses in that category.
Today, we’re going to take a look at food spending. As you can see from the budget above, the average American family spends $6,602 per year on food. That averages out to $550 per month. Remember, however, that this “average American family” includes single adults, married couples without children, and families with children, too. In other words, a single person is probably coming in below that, whereas a large family (like ours) is probably coming in above that.
Twitter to cut jobs as revenue growth slows | BBC News
Twitter is cutting 9% of its workforce – about 350 jobs – after reporting a sharp slowdown in revenue growth.
In the three months to September, revenues rose 8% to $616m. That was better than forecast, but lower than the 20% rise in the previous quarter.
The number of average monthly active users rose 3% to 317 million.
Last month, Twitter hired bankers ahead of a possible sale, but bids from potential suitors such as Google and Salesforce failed to materialise.
Shares in Twitter fell 7% earlier this month after Salesforce – considered to be the most likely bidder – said it had walked away from talks.
Jack Dorsey, chief executive, said he saw a “significant opportunity to increase growth” as the company improved the platform.
14 Online Tools That Help Your Team Stay Connected, Productive, and Happy | Life Hack
Being able to work remotely, or even build a company that’s remote, is not easy, but it’s possible today. Some of today’s most notable companies, including Basecamp, Buffer, Virgin, and WordPress are building companies with over 100+ employees all around the world. How did they do it?
They found the right ‘tools’. When your team members are living on opposite sides of the continent and in different time-zones, effective tools are vital to your team culture, productivity, and success. We’ve tested hundreds of online tools to maximize how we stay connected, productive, and happy. Here is a list of top 14 online tools that you will find useful for yourself and your team. The first four deal with connectivity while the last four help to make your team happier. The remaining six tolls help to increase your team’s productivity.
Study Shows That Artificial Intelligence Is Very Accurate in Predicting Trial Outcomes | Inc.com
Artificial intelligence robots have already acted like lawyers, helping 160,000 people escape fines from parking tickets. So it was only a matter of time before robots would also step into the role of judge.
As revealed in a study published Monday in the journal PeerJ Computer Science, a team of British and American researchers used an A.I. system to predict the outcomes of human rights trials. Of the 584 cases the system studied, it came to the same conclusion as the judges 79 percent of the time.
The cases dealt with Articles 3, 6, and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which entail torture, right to a fair trial, and right to privacy, respectively. The texts of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights are neatly broken down into several sections, with one containing the facts of the case, another containing summaries of the parties’ arguments, etc., which makes them great candidates to be studied by machines.
How to Pick a Safe and Secure Money Transfer Service | CoolBusinessIdeas.com
It is now possible to send money to the Philippines in minutes,or to transfer money to other far off locales while sipping coffee in your pajamas. But staying safe and secure while doing so has become an increasing concern. Increasingly, the number of total losses from financial fraud continues to grow. Money transfers are an area where one can easily fall prey to scammers. Therefore, it is vital to choose a money transfer servicewith many safety measures in place.
Here are 5 security elements to look for in a money transfer service:
Can Science Save the Banana? | Live Science
The banana is the world’s most popular fruit crop, with over 100 million metric tons produced annually in over 130 tropical and subtropical countries. Edible bananas are the result of a genetic accident in nature that created the seedless fruit we enjoy today. Virtually all the bananas sold across the Western world belong to the so-called Cavendish subgroup of the species and are genetically nearly identical. These bananas are sterile and dependent on propagation via cloning, either by using suckers and cuttings taken from the underground stem or through modern tissue culture.
Dispatches From The Front 