Game of Thrones

While “Game of Thrones” has its share of dragons, swordfights and sorcery, it’s the political maneuvering and shifting power dynamics that anchor much of the HBO television series and “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the George R.R. Martin series upon which the show is based.

From Jon Snow’s reluctant rise to become the lord commander of the Night’s Watch to Littlefinger’s backdoor machinations, characters take different approaches to leadership—with varying degrees of success.

Speakeasy talked with three experts in management and business—all familiar with the show—to see what can be learned from these styles when applied to a corporate environment: Aimee Cohen, an author and speaker who has been a career expert for more than 20 years; Waverly Deutsch, clinical professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; and Erich Dierdorff, professor of management at DePaul University’s Driehaus College of Business.

“What leadership is in its essence, at its core, is influencing others towards some goal, or to influence someone to do something,” said Dierdorff. In that sense, almost all the main characters in “Thrones” exhibit some form of leadership, he said, except for Jaime Lannister.

 “Jaime doesn’t want to be a leader, he wants to be an individual contributor,” said Deutsch. This conflicts with his father Tywin’s succession plan for House Lannister. “Succession-planning in business is so difficult,” she added. “We’re in a period right now where corporations are being led by baby boomers who are heading up towards retirement age, and they have Gen Xers and millennials behind them.” The Gen Xers came through during downturns in the —from the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 to the crash in 2008—where things like leadership training got cut at a lot of companies.
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There are moments that live on in business history.

One of them is the cry: "Mr Watson come here, I want to see you," spoken by Alexander Graham Bell back in 1876, in the world's first telephone conversation.

Another significant moment was the day in 1997 when the IBM computer called Deep Blue beat the then world champion Gary Kasparov at chess.

And then another IBM moment in 2011 when an even more intelligent computer called Watson -after the IBM founder Thomas Watson and his IBM chief executive son Thomas - won the TV game Jeopardy against human competition.

These last two IBM contests demonstrate - we're told - big advances in machine intelligence.

Foreigners have to take the most recent one on trust - Jeopardy is not a familiar game outside the USA, and how clever you have to be to win it is not understood globally.

Anyway, the Jeopardy win got the technology community excited that a threshold moment had been passed on the computing roadmap set out by the late British genius, Alan Turing.

His so-called Turing Test predicted that one day machines would be able to interact with human beings in a way that it would not be possible to tell whether the other party to the interaction was man or machine. At least on the screen.

Fonte : http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32588706

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Dangerous radioactive

Dangerous' radioactive material stolen in Mexico

A firefighter stands next to the radiation head in Hueypoxtla, Mexico on 5 December

In 2013, a truck carrying medical radioactive material was stolen in Mexico but was recovered days later. Mexican authorities have issued an alert for five states after the theft of potentially dangerous radioactive materials.

A container of Iridium-192 used for industrial radiography was taken from a truck in the town of Cardenas in Tabasco state. The states of Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz are also on alert.

Mexico's civil protection agency says that the material can cause death within hours or days if mishandled. "This source is very dangerous to people if it is removed from its container," the agency warned in a statement.

The unprotected material can cause burns and permanent injuries to those who have been in contact with it for just minutes or hours.

'Highly radioactive'

Luis Felipe Puente, head of Mexico's civil protection agency, urged whoever finds the source to keep it at a distance and call for help.

The robbery was reported by the company Garantia Radiografica e Ingenieria which said that the material had been stolen on Monday.

This is not the first time radioactive materials have gone missing in Mexico.

Fonte: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-32332271. Acesso em 16 de abril de 2015.

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#Atividade (07): Spain quarantines 3, plans to euthanize Ebola nurse's pet dog

MADRID – Health officials scrambled Tuesday to figure out how West Africa's Ebola outbreak got past Europe's defenses, quarantining four people at a Madrid hospital where a Spanish nursing assistant became infected. Determined to contain the spread of the deadly virus, they even announced plans to euthanize the woman's pet dog.

The first case of Ebola transmitted outside Africa, where a months-long outbreak has killed more than 3,400 people, is raising questions about how prepared wealthier countries really are.

The nursing assistant in Madrid was part of a special team caring for a Spanish priest who died of Ebola last month after being evacuated from Sierra Leone. The nursing assistant wore a hazmat suit both times she entered his room, officials said, and no records point to any accidental exposure to the virus, which spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of a sickened person.

The woman, who had been on vacation in the Madrid area after treating the priest, was diagnosed with Ebola on Monday after coming down with a fever, and was said to be stable Tuesday. Her husband also was hospitalized as a precaution.

Madrid's regional government even got a court order to euthanize and incinerate their pet, "Excalibur," against the couple's objections. The government said available scientific knowledge suggests a risk that the mixed-breed dog could transmit the virus to humans, and promised to use "biosecurity" measures to prevent any such transmission.

The afflicted woman, reportedly in her 40s and childless, was not identified to protect her privacy, but nursing union officials she had 14 years' experience. Spanish officials said she had changed a diaper for the priest and collected material from his room after he died. Dead Ebola victims are highly infectious, and in West Africa their bodies are collected by workers in hazmat outfits.

The Madrid infection shows that even in countries with sophisticated medical procedures, frontline health care workers are at risk while caring for Ebola patients. More than 370 health care workers in the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have died.

Disponível em: FOX News.
Acesso: 08 de outubro, 2014.

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