What are the advantages of outsourcing and who benefits?

There’s been a lot of heated debates out there about the outsourcing of work and technology from America to foreign countries. Looking strictly from the perspective of the average American, it can hardly be said that we, the people, reap benefits from corporate advantages of outsourcing. On the other hand, the large corporations and even some of our State governments who are outsourcing, do benefit from this practice.

For example, perhaps you’ve noticed that when you call your ISP’s 800 number to resolve a problem, the person you end up speaking with is not a native English speaker. Quite likely, this telephone operator lives in India, where he or she attempts to answer your query. The corporation who hires this individual needn’t worry about minimum wage laws here in the U.S., paying just a fraction of what an American worker would require by law. This results in larger profits for the corporation and a larger unemployment rate here in the U.S. Again, the advantages of outsourcing come to the corporate coffers.

When it comes to technology, the corporations have shot themselves in the foot, although you’ll not hear them saying so. When the outsourcing concept initially took off, the corporations went crazy, figuring they could outsource almost everything, including engineering and programming systems. Again, these projects were handed off to foreign nationals who were willing to work for a pittance compared with an American engineer.

It took several years for the supposed advantages of outsourcing to be proven deleterious to the corporations’ profits, as well as the now unemployed American engineers. Another stunningly catastrophic effect of this outsourcing was the loss of America’s technological edge in the world market. Prior to the outsourcing of technology, better than 50% of America’s GDP derived from IT. In the final analysis, a few corporations admitted that outsourcing such work ended up costing them 20% more than if they had retained Americans for the same project. The loss of technological advances through piracy and copy-cat technology is immeasurable and the effects will be felt well into the future.

So it seems that a solid argument can be made in favor of corporate greed breeding the advantages of outsourcing for a very few people to the detriment of many working people here in the U.S. Ironically, this greed backfired and the corporations lost as well.

A final comment on the advantages of outsourcing must be made. Bill Gates recently announced an investment of $200 million into the Indian economy for the purpose of bettering the lives of Indian IT workers and thus, their families. In light of the actual results, perhaps Mr. Gates protesteth too much. Perhaps the real advantage of outsourcing lies in a fatter bottom line and not an altruistic motive.

Your Free Online Library

Do you remember when writing a school paper meant spending a day at the library, making notes with pen and paper. As a kid, my Saturdays were often spent at the library, researching, writing and being quiet. At home, drafts, rewrites and citations concluded the day. Hmm.

This was long before we had the net. I must admit to a certain nostalgia, remembering the marble steps leading to the second floor of the downtown San Francisco library and the beautiful polished oak cabinets filled with paper index cards, organized in Dewey decimal format. The bad news was that it surely did take a lot of time.

Today, the net is the most gigantic library on the planet and entirely accessible from home. You can conduct extensive research at any time of the day or night. If you’re an avid researcher, your browser will not accommodate the number of bookmarks you’ll need to mark your favorite sites. However, this doesn’t mean you cannot assemble your own customized and, best of all, free online library with a small investment of your time.

Let’s say your passion is antiques. You may now spend hours sifting through pages of search engine links to find out what your latest flea market find is and what it’s worth. Take a different approach. Instead of spending those hours to locate one specific item, begin by developing your free online library of antique resources.

Search engines are key. While your favorite search engine provides a mix of generalized results, some of which are informational or commercial, there are specialized search engines with databases that pertain to specific categories of information or subject matter. Type ’search engines antiques’ and hit enter. These results are the starting point for your free online library. Read through the synopsis of each link and follow those most pertinent to your interests. First, go through the first page of results to determine which search engines you like best.

Inspect the various sites each of these search engines turns up, for quality of information that you can use. Be choosy. You could, after all, end up with millions of entries. Pick the best search engines and sites for your purpose.

Create an HTML document in your word processor and copy and paste the url of the site into your document. To make your personal free online library user-friendly – to you – create categories of information on antiques and paste each url into your document accordingly. For example, your categories might include 18th century European, 17th century French, antique shows, appraisers and so on. In HTML format, each link is clickable. No more cutting and pasting.

After you’ve gone through one page of search engines, end your session for the day. Review your url’s and categories to see how you might refine your new free online library contents. Believe me, it won’t be long before you’re an expert. The net rocks.

Choosing Great Business Furniture

What could be more important to your business than getting customers in the door? You may have a great product and a great service, but you can’t keep customers that feel uncomfortable in your business, or that feel things are just too out of date. When they see those things, they lose faith in what you do and what you sell. They may not even realize it consciously, but they will suddenly feel as if they should go somewhere else for what you have to offer. You may not know it, but your choice in business furniture may be sending them the other way.What you have to know about business furniture is that it should look modern, unless the entire décor of your business suggests otherwise. If you are going for a retro look, it would always make sense that your business furniture reflects that. You can get away with old pieces when you do that, but be sure they are solid, clean, and in as good of a condition as you can get. Don’t go with anything broken, or that has visible repairs. If your furniture fits with an older theme, you can go with what works best.For the most part, however, business furniture is going to be new and modern. You have a lot from which to choose, and depending on your business, you can get some pieces that are meant for the home rather than a business. That means you have more from which to choose, and that you can get the very best look for what you want. Modern does not have to mean space aged, but it does mean that you don’t want to have a set of business furniture that looks like it was born in the late 80s and has been sitting in someone’s garage for a decade or more.Just as important as it is for your business furniture to look new and to match your business, you also want to be sure you have matched sets. You can go through a store and pick out things that you love, but you have to be sure you have some type of theme so things match and make sense. If you, like many others, have a problem with this, that is easy enough to fix. You can find an interior decorator that specializes in helping businesses. They can help you with your business furniture, and any other décor issues that you may have. You will be glad you got the help when you see what they can do for you.

Canon Power Shot

You can’t re-live the past. No matter how badly we sometimes want to, it’s simply too difficult to recreate those special moments. Take your honeymoon for example. It was probably one of the greatest adventures of your life. Everything was perfect and you were with the one and only person you wanted to spend the rest of your days with. Now, you can always take a second honeymoon with your spouse, but it won’t be exactly like the first. It can still be amazing, but just in a different way. The time is different and so are the two of you to some extent. Okay, so we’ve established that the past is the past and it can’t be recreated. No big deal. The key is to preserve those outstanding memorable moments. And to accomplish this you need a Canon Power Shot digital camera.

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I’ve made it a habit to take oodles of pictures. Why you might ask? Because so many things are lost forever if we don’t. Just take your average day with your family and/friends. Maybe you want to snap a few shots with your Canon Power Shot digital camera in the midst of things. Record those priceless moments. They’re the one thing we can’t buy back. Time won’t allow it. We naturally age and move on. Yesterday I spotted my daughter in the backyard, swinging on her swing-set and laughing as she leaped off to the grass below. I snapped a few pictures of her in mid-flight. They’re awesome, and I know she’ll enjoy looking at them when she’s older. Seeing yourself play and go wild at the tender age of eight when you’re now 28 is a blast. I do this sort of thing now with the old photos my parents took of me.

The trick is finding a camera that you enjoy and know works well. I chose the Canon Power Shot for simple reasons. It takes wonderful pictures. It has great clarity with 5 mega pixels. It’s compact to I can store it in my pocket. It allows me to record clips. And it only cost me 150 bucks. That’s a low price considering all the memories it helps capture over the years. I take my Canon Power Shot digital camera virtually everywhere. I’ve made it a habit to ensure that i don’t miss anything grand. I suggest you do the same.

Online Learning

I got involved in online learning about a year ago as a teacher. I’m actually more of a technical guy, but in my company everyone wears lots of different hats. In this case, we had a training video for some of our offices. You see, it was necessary for a lot of our people to learn Spanish online. We work with so many Hispanic clients that knowing a little bit of conversational Spanish is simply indispensable in this area. My job was to make an online learning course that would teach them the basics.

It was just my kind of project. It combined a little bit of this and that into what was actually a fairly technologically sophisticated undertaking. I needed to us my knowledge of Spanish, my ability to integrate web cams and interactive software, and sophisticated PowerPoint presentations. It took me several months, but it was worth it. I was pleased by how well the project turned out, and the big bonus I got for completing it didn’t hurt either.

It also got me interested in taking online learning courses myself. I have a friend recently got an MBA online and I had never really thought much about her program until I got involved in designing my own online education program. After that, I realized that you can learn practically anything over the Internet. I started to do some investigation myself.

I don’t really need any more certification. I have all the degrees and titles I need for my job. I simply wanted to take online courses in something that interested me. I got involved in an online philosophy group where, for a small fee, a local expert leads a group discussion over web cam once a week. It has been very educational and I have even met some interesting people on it. All in all, online learning has been a good experience so far. I would not say it’s for everyone – some people really need to be face-to-face in order to get the most out of an educational experience. Nonetheless, it seems to work well for me and for most of the people in my company. If you’ve never tried it, you should give it a shot. Usually the technology is pretty straightforward and easy to use, and it allows you to go at your own pace in your spare time. All in all, online learning is a pretty winning combination of convenience and content.

Teaching Astronomy For Kids

As an elementary school science teacher, I always have a lot of fun teaching kids astronomy. It is natural to want to look up at the sky with a sense of wonder and ponder the nature of the whole universe around you. This is just the desire that astronomy for kids caters to. It is a great place to use a child’s natural curiosity to inspire a lifelong passion for the study of science.

One of the things that a lot of adults do not understand is that kids want to learn. It is all just a matter of making things seem accessible and important to them. That is why I usually start my astronomy for kids classes with a field trip. Rather than looking for the things they have already studied, they go in with fresh minds, ready to record details about the celestial bodies. I let them look at stars and planets through the telescope and make observations. Then, the next day in class, we use these observations as a starting point.

Of course, astronomy for children is not all just looking at neat pictures from the Hubble telescope or gazing through our own telescope (although there is a fair bit of both of these activities). Once we get back from the field trip, the class launches right into a lesson. The students make a list of questions they have. Usually, they want to know why the stars twinkle, why Mars is red, what the moon looks like up close, and things like that. Once they ask these questions, we can begin the class.

The great thing about starting my astronomy for kids class this way is that it is driven by student interest. They want to know about the moon so, when I tell them about the moon, it does not come across as just a bit of boring lecturing. The same goes for all the other subjects. They are motivated to learn, and that makes the learning happen.

At the end of the astronomy for kids class, I usually take them out to look at stars again. This time, however, we know a lot more about the heavens. When the children look out through the telescope, they can make meaningful observations about the universe around them. By comparing how they felt the first time they looked through telescopes to how they felt the second, they can see the importance of learning.

Animal Planet: why kids love it

Kids are born curious. Everything is new to them and all of life is a mystery waiting to be solved. Nature is of particular fascination to them. Kids play outside and find every living creature and plant for subjects of their personal investigation and inspection. Kids have pets, too. Frogs, cats, rabbits, birds and dogs become family members. As parents, we try to teach kids how to take good care of their pets, but unless you’re a vet, pet store owner or animal trainer, many of us don’t know much more about these creatures than our kids do!

Learning about the animal world is valuable knowledge, especially in today’s world of vanishing species amidst growing expanses of cement in urban America. Learning about the natural habitats and life cycles of the animal world makes children more sensitive to all living things.

Now, the current controversy among educators and child psychologists has parents in a tizzy over what’s the right amount of television watching to allow their kids. A common sense approach surely must lead you to consider that quality programming contributes much to a child’s education and personal development. Animal Planet is one channel that earns the highest accolades in this respect. Kids absolutely love Animal Planet presentations. Johnny’s pet frog is happy and thriving in its 10-gallon aquarium home, but watching his pet’s shenanigans may not satisfy Johnny’s curiosity. One program on Animal Planet may teach Johnny more about every type of frog from around the world than he’d learn in a year at the library.

Animal Planet productions do, indeed, cover the planet. Kids can learn all about creatures they may never see in real life. Kangaroos in Australia, Manta Rays in the Caribbean or Bengal tigers in India are all topics of previous Animal Planet programming.

Once kids start watching these informative programs, they’re hooked – on learning and caring – two commodities in danger of extinction among humans! Did you know that global warming, causing the melting of Arctic ice floes, now threatens the polar bear with extinction? Did you know that Oregon may be closing the salmon season before it ever begins this year because the Pacific salmon population, some 1.6 million in 2005, has shrunk to an estimated 35,000 this year?

These facts are all of great concern to our children’s generation. When these kids grow up, the animal world may be greatly diminished unless people start paying attention now. Animal Planet’s audience of today may well make the difference for a better planet for our kids. Watch with your kids. You, too, may become an avid fan.

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