Not a good career move by Jamie Oliver here I think!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23860811
Bit of a generalisation saying that young people in Britain are lazy. Plus these young people may end up being his core audience on TV in a few years, so as well as disagreeing with his sentiments I also think it is a rather silly thing for basically a TV performer to be saying.
Tata are now having to rebrand and reposition the Tata Nano – the world’s cheapest car:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23792196
Another great article about an inventor with a simple but revolutionary idea that changed the world. Yet he is still poor.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23536914
Pertinent to read this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23667965
especially after today we watched an excellent presentation by John Franklin, our PT Support for Learning who illustrated the difference in mindset between fixed and growth. Added to a pupil receiving poor exam results it could certainly crush a young person or knock the stuffing out of them for a while.
I like to think of the sporting analogy. Yes Tiger Woods may be an excellent talent with superb eye hand coordination but he still practiced well over the 10,000 hours which is now accepted as the norm in order to become an Elite Performer.
The old adage is true: practise does make perfect.
So if any pupil or student has not done as well as they hoped this year, please don’t give up. You may just need to keep trying and I am sure it will happen for you.
In life there are very, very few overnight successes. So keep your spirits up.
Often mentioned in Business class, here is Inflation explained from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322
Another great article from the BBC about the history of two of the UK’s most famous low cost airlines.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22888304
Worrying times ahead for India’s currency as it falls to a record low against the US dollar.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22981979
Our school have been invited to send a group of pupils to Russia’s Space Master Class in Korolev, near Moscow. Here is a video of the activities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EszAcJqnqWU
The future of flying:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22874991
Includes concept art from Airbus.
Good article asking questions managers should ask when visiting a factory in China.
http://www.globalsources.com/NEWS/SIC-What-can-you-observe-in-a-Chinese-factory.html
Bayern Munich are now the world’s leading football brand.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22704180
Looks like the intervention of High Street guru Mary Portas has had little effect on the downward trend in high street shopping.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22693403
This also comes as Little Chef are also in serious trouble. They famously had superchef Heston Blumenthal to address their concerns and create a new menu for the 21st century. However, it failed also. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/may/26/little-chef-bids
Personally I don’t think it is just online shopping that is killing the high street – but crucially transport links. Perhaps the UK should copy the French, as Jeremy Clarkson advocated, and remove all the double yellow lines to allow people to park in town and city centres. Controversial? Perhaps. But how else will we save our high streets?
There is a growing trend for people to substitute ‘C’ with ‘K’. Wayne Rooney’s new boy is called Klay rather than Clay.
"Most English words which begin with K are borrowed from German or Japanese, like karate or karaoke. So by using K or Z, it could be that we are suggesting something exotic in some way," Ian Brookes from the Collins Dictionary.
But linguistics expert Prof Vivian Cook thinks it is quite the contrary.
"In the UK it has been used by businesses mostly at the cheap end of the market."
Budget airline Ryanair have posted record full-year profits and rising revenues. This comes despite soaring fuel costs. Profits after tax rose 13% to 569m euros (£481m) on revenues of 4.88bn euros for the year to 31 March.
Passengers who were carried by the airline rose from 5% to 79.3 million as Ryanair added 217 new routes, bringing the total to 1,600. However fuel costs rose by more than 290m euros, and now account for 45% of total costs.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22593246
First of all state what a budget is. It is a financial plan for the coming year.
A production budget is what it says. It is a budget which works out the number of units needed to be produced in order to satisfy the right quantity demanded by customers. i.e. BMW need to produce 40 cars a day at their Augsburg factory to meet demand. A production budget follows the sales budget, as you would need to know the predicted sales in order to then plan how to allocate resources such as raw materials, machinery and labour.
A sales budget is more like what we normally look at. It is a budget which plans the predicted number of customer sales over the year. Sales can be divided into cash (upfront) and credit (paid for later).
There are generic similarities for both (and indeed any budget).
· Budgets allow you to compare the real or actual figures with the planned ones.
· Budgets are also used as a motivational tool for employees to help reach targets.
· Budgets can help highlight areas where high costs are being incurred and have to be reduced.
· Budgets are normally stuck to religiously so if a department is heading over budget they will have to control their expenditure.
Sir Alex Ferguson is retiring after a glittering career in British football. Fergie started his career at East Stirling before being sacked by St Mirren. He then led Aberdeen to break the Old Firm dominance in Scotland and led the club to a famous Cup Winners Cup victory over mighty Real Madrid in Gothenburg – perhaps still his greatest achievement. A short spell as temporary Scotland manager followed before he became manager of Manchester United. At United he broke Liverpool’s hold on the English title and has won it a record 13 times.
He also won another CWC and led United to 4 European Champions League finals, winning two in dramatic fashion.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/22447018
Fergie is one of the best examples of a great leader in sport. He could always motivate his team and had the ability to blend youth with experience as well as superstars with home grown talent. He was also infamous for the ‘hairdryer’ technique, which involved Fergie setting his players straight on what went wrong.
He has achieved everything in domestic football, however it would have been a fitting end to his career if he had taken the Scotland job and led our small nation back to a World Cup. At 71, that seems to be gone. Fergie will now look forward to enjoying his other interests as well as retaining ambassadorial roles at Old Trafford. The big question for that famous club is who will replace the irreplaceable? Now that could be a poisoned chalice.
Sir Alex Ferguson sits at the top table in the pantheon of football’s great managers.
Science teachers and English teachers may unite in loving/hating this novel idea:
http://www.geekosystem.com/lotr-periodic-table/?q5634665=1
Unsure whether this may catch on, but I am sure there must be may novel Periodic Tables online. I will try and find some. Would like one for Business and also one for Travel.
Looks like Google’s Project Glass (which now just seems to be called Glass) may have really opened a whole can of worms as many more organisations and businesses have banned them from their premises.
As you can see here, there are a whole range of privacy issues also.
Personally, I think the concept of Glass has amazing and revolutionary opportunities for the way we shop, communicate and navigate. But as always there are always the negatives and the potential for abuse and harm which always seems to surround new technology, especially one such as this which could record people’s movements without any hint of such an action being undertaken.
So perhaps if Google’s Glass does fail, it won’t be due to the technology at all, but rather legislation.
What happens when businesses find out that downsizing isn’t all that it is cracked up to be:
Here is an NY Times article on the effect of pollution on kids in China’s megacities.
Here is a fun quiz about famous quotations. You have to work out whether the author of the said quotations is from the Bible or Shakespeare. When I did it I scored 16, which I thought wasn’t too bad. See if you can beat me.
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/04/bible-or-bard/
An interesting article on how to avoid stress in the workplace and life.
http://addicted2success.com/success-advice/50-ways-to-de-stress-your-way-to-success/
I am sure our pupils who are ready to go off on exam leave will take heed.
A warning from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder on the future of online education.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22160988
What is your opinion? Do you agree or not?
This is an interesting article about a novel way to keep call centre support 24/7.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-22370334
Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins, predicts that tablet PCs will soon be a thing of the past and will be taken over by smartphones.
Personally I am unsure as smartphone screens are still too small and give many people (me included) eye strain. So personally, I think his argument may be flawed.
