Varna’s Mind

Reality Breakdown: Raises on Lowered Budgets?

Michelle Burleson | February 3rd | Your Job

Got a job? Great! The layoff sword spared and screwed you at the same time. Just because your co-workers went away doesn’t mean their workloads did. On top of your own responsibilities, you’re now wearing many hats, possibly a few wigs, and hopefully hip, sensible shoes that say, “I’m sassy, yet you’ll respect me in the morning.”

In any other circumstance, this would give you just cause to march into your boss’s office and ask for a compensation adjustment. The reality breakdown: for most organizations, the money isn’t there. Cash may be king, but it’s currently a king in exile. Ok, hold on. It’s not all bad news. Don’t leave and start Googling the next random thought that pops into your head. There are other things you can request in lieu of a raise.

Have you considered asking for…

• A more flexible schedule? I’m not a scientist and I don’t even play one on TV, but I bet your outlook on the workday would be rosier if you didn’t arrive with road rage. I appreciate the employers who give leeway around rush hour and so does the Department of Transportation.

• Telecommuting? Would they be willing to let you work from home a day or two a week? If you got to be around the house more often, your dog would stop mistaking you for an intruder. You could also save thousands on your kids’ therapy abandonment issues if you were able to appear on the sidelines of some of their sporting events before Junior starts growing a beard. I’m puzzled by places that don’t allow at least some telecommuting. I tend to get more work done from home because I want to show my accountability when I’m not physically in the office. I’m also more relaxed and creative. Companies don’t have to lease as much commercial space and it keeps cars off the road. Come on! Wake up! Don’t make me get all An Inconvenient Truth on you.

• An additional or earlier performance evaluation? It will get better. I promise. And when it does, have the proof on paper about what a team player you were during the “economic crisis.”

• A job title change? Remember that you want it to sound sexier than the one you have now. For instance, don’t go from “Product Marketing Manager” to “Queen of Potted Plants.” Seriously, this is one way to create the role, and possibly the salary, you want for when things right themselves. Also, if you find yourself channeling Anne Boleyn with your head on the chopping block, at least you enter the workforce with an upgraded title for your resume.

• Additional vacation days? If you’re helping keep the company fires burning on a shoestring budget and no extra hands, you’re going to need time off before they start sizing you for a rubber suit. You don’t want that. They make your butt look big and don’t breathe like other fabrics. This is about quality of life. Even an extra day to spend with friends, loved ones, or even recharging alone can make a huge difference. A survey from the Aon Loyalty Institute revealed that the top thing a company can do to inspire employee commitment is “recognize employees’ need for time off with family.” Salary increases didn’t even make the top ten.

If you find yourself in this type of situation, take a stab at some of these suggestions. I hope you have an employer that’s open to a few. Unfortunately all of my other ideas for you would result in a restraining order and a decline in global ball-gag inventory.

If you have other ideas about how to pad the non-monetary compensation in this economy, post them below.

Michelle Burleson

I shot out of my poor mother's womb ready to write The Great American Novel but ended up writing lots of corporate copy instead. The novel idea is sexier but starvation isn't. So in between surfing and keeping clients chock full o'content, I'm determined to return to the writing that made me pick up the pen and peck at the qwerty board in the first place.Of all the senses, my twisted humor is the most important. I also like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens... and not because they taste like chicken.

• Raising the Bar in Rain or Shine
• The 4 Top Concerns of An Older Worker
• How to Win the Work-Life Balance Battle

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Does the aid world exaggerate the benefits of microloans? How much do they help? Here’s a thoughtful, evidence-based analysis by three economics professors: Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo of M.I.T, and Dean Karlan of Yale. Their work is sometimes cited in critiques of microlending, so here’s their take:

Microcredit is undoubtedly the most visible innovation in anti-poverty policy in the last half century. In the three decades since Mohammed Yunus gave his first loan to a group of Bangladeshi women, the number of microcredit borrowers has crossed 150 millions. The majority had no access to credit from banks before microcredit came to them. When they needed to borrow, and most people do at some point or the other–to pay for an illness or a wedding, to grow a business or to fix their roof—they would go to money lenders and pay rates that have, justly or otherwise, accounted for the universal unpopularity of moneylenders (they can be over 20% per month). Now they borrow from MFIs at significantly lower (though often high by US standards) rates. At the same time MFIs have managed to find ways to be financially sustainable and to keep growing fast.

This is itself is a remarkable achievement. Very little works in many of these countries in terms of delivering to the poor; previous attempts to deliver credit, through state-run banks, for example, collapsed in the face of widespread corruption and defaults. Many microcredit institutions are led by dynamic entrepreneurs who have mastered quality service delivery on a large scale, a tough challenge in many developing countries.

However, many see microcredit as much more than a financial instrument: it has been suggested that it has the potential to be entirely transformative. There is an influential view that argues that, by putting more spending power in the hands of poor families, and, perhaps more importantly, in the hands of women, microcredit can expand investment in child health and education, empower women and reduce discrimination against them. There is even the suggestion that, by making people feel that their lives could be better and giving women independent access to capital, microcredit could fight the AIDS epidemic.

There are, of course, others who are skeptical or even hostile. They see MFIs as old-fashioned money-lenders, preying on the inability of people to resist the temptation of a new loan. One self-described expert, in a recent letter to the Financial Times, goes as far as to suggest that microcredit leads to the “death of the local economy”.

Unfortunately, till very recently, there was little rigorous evidence on either side—is microcredit transformative or ruinous? However this is changing now, thanks to the courage and vision of a few leading MFIs (including Spandana in India, Al Amana in Morocco, First Macro Bank in the Philippines, Compartamos in Mexico) that have allowed researchers (each of us was involved in one or more of these) to evaluate rigorously the impact of their programs. We now have results from two (Spandana and First Macro Bank).

The two programs evaluated are very different. First Macro Bank provides loan to existing business owners, male or female, on an individual basis. Spandana uses the classic group-lending model and lends only to women.
Yet at one level the results are remarkably similar. The effect on businesses is not dramatic but some clearly benefit. In the Philippines, male-owned businesses increase profits, although female-owned businesses do not. In India, borrowers who already own a business buy assets for their business. One borrower out of eight starts a business they would not have started otherwise. Others buy durables for their homes.

However, there is no evidence that microcredit has any effect on health, education, or women’s empowerment, at least right now, eighteen months after they got the loans. On the other hand, there is also no evidence that people are behaving irresponsibly. Indeed in India we have evidence of people giving up some of the little daily pleasures of life (like tea, snacks, betel leaves and tobacco), to pay for bigger things that they could not previously afford (carts for their business, televisions for their homes).

Many seem to think that this is not enough. However, as we see it, microcredit seems to have delivered exactly what a successful new financial product is supposed deliver—allowing people to make large purchases that they would not have been able to otherwise. The fact that some people expected much more from it (and perhaps they are right, may be it will just take longer), is perhaps inevitable given how eager the world is to find that one magic bullet that would finally “solve” poverty. But to actually blame microcredit for not promoting the immunization of children is no different from blaming immunization campaigns for not generating new businesses.

Google Focused Research Awards

Google research › University Relations

On Tuesday February 2nd, we announced the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards. These awards are for research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community.

These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:

Machine Learning

• William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson, and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring

• Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA

Energy efficiency in computing

• Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
• Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
• David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
• Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
• Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
• Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton

Privacy

• Ed Felten, Princeton
• Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
• Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory

As we continue to identify key areas of research that are of mutual interest to both university researchers and Google, we will provide awards to support these collaborations.

©2010 Google

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mathematics, numbers

I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them.

In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

So, let’s begin with pre-school.

Read more…

It happened last year, around the first of July. In my experience, the switch was just about that abrupt.

All last spring, most senior business leaders I met shrugged off the business applicability of Web 2.0. Allowing access to social networks in the workplace was something they were willing to consider only if it was absolutely necessary to keep younger employees from complaining. Twitter? What was that?

But by summer, the conversations I was having with senior executives about the use of these new technologies took on a very different tone. Recognition grew that 2.0 technologies could be used to change the way work gets done in fundamental ways. Interest in exploring these new ways of working, of sharing information, of collaborating to enhance productivity and meet business goals, was here.

Advances in our ability to communicate always change the way we live and work — the two are inextricably linked. The advent of writing facilitated the development of a complex, stratified Egyptian society as rulers were able to document their holdings and express their wishes; the printing press spurred democracy as information spread among the populace; the telex allowed the growth of major cities as headquarters became physically separated from the factories.

And, like the hesitant adoption of 2.0, these advances in communication capabilities have almost always met significant resistance. Early assessments of the telephone predicted that it would be used primarily for social, non-business applications. What business would want to use a technology that provides no permanent record of a conversation, when the telex was available as a dependable alternative? Initial assessments of what became the core technology for Xerox completely missed the mark — no one could imagine why any business would need copies of a document. It's hard to envision the usefulness of new ways of communicating, and easy to dismiss new technologies as frivolous.

But each time our communication capability expands, several predictable things occur: An increase in the scope (distance and speed of reach) and richness of our interactions affects the way we organize, shifts the balance of power, and influences how we get things done.

Ronald Coase, a professor at the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work showing how transaction costs influenced institutional structures. In "The Nature of the Firm," published in 1937, Coase explored how the cost of communication influenced the size of organizations. He found that high communication or transaction costs encouraged bringing as many functions as possible inside the organization — explaining, for example, the push toward vertical integration as a strategy in the mid-1900's — a strategy since largely discarded as communication costs have decreased.

Harold Adams Innis, a professor at the University of Toronto, outlined several predictable results that occur whenever there is a reduction in the cost of communications in his 1951 work, The Bias of Communication. Although Innis was writing well before Web 2.0, note how many of his predictions accurately reflect the major trends of today:

• Redistributing knowledge and, in doing so, shifting power
• Making it easier for "amateurs" to compete with "professionals," because access to knowledge substitutes for mastery of complexity
• Allowing individuals and minorities to voice ideas
• Reducing the advantages of speed that formerly accrued because some had knowledge before others
• Reducing the advantages of size that are based on the ability to afford high costs.

I believe the impact of the combined technologies of the past decade, of Web 2.0, will have as powerful an impact on the ways we live and work as many of the blockbuster steps of the past — the printing press, telex, Internet — have had. Today's new technologies allow people to interact without specifying how they should do so, cause patterns and structure to appear over time, and allow activities to occur asynchronously and virtually. Even more importantly, the sophisticated search algorithms allow us to find what we're seeking in a sea of information. Together they offer significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, letting people find helpful resources, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the "wisdom of crowds."

Today, the frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration — the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups using the new tools of collaboration.

This train has left the station. Social media is on track to become an integral part of the way we work — a core tool of serious business. The story of how businesses use technology is in the midst of becoming a lot more interesting.