Come fare?
La prima regola per non rovinarsi le feste è quella di non vivere i compiti come un supplizio, ma più come una pausa per recuperare le energie tra un gioco e l’altro.
Il periodo migliore della giornata in cui dedicarsi alle questioni scolastiche è sicuramente il mattino, quando le energie del bambino sono ancora al massimo e può dedicarsi senza distrazioni allo studio.

Se i tuoi bambini hanno difficoltà in alcune materie e tu non puoi aiutarli, l’ideale è richiedere l’affiancamento di persone di fiducia e in possesso delle competenze giuste.
In questo modo, non solo i compiti diventeranno più facili, ma i tuoi bambini avranno l’opportunità di essere aiutati nel colmare le loro lacune, chiarire i concetti più difficili e integrare le schede scolastiche con altri materiali o attività maggiormente tarate sulle loro necessità.

Se i tuoi piccoli hanno bisogno di un aiuto per i compiti di Inglese, contattami: sono a disposizione per lezioni di Inglese e affiancamento durante lo svolgimento dei compiti a casa anche a domicilio, a Modena, Bologna e Reggio Emilia.

Proofreading

Non ci sono solo le traduzioni e i corsi di lingua nel mio lavoro, una buona parte è costituita anche da richieste di proofreading o integrazioni e aggiornamenti di testi già tradotti da altri.
Quando si fa il proof di un testo ci sono alcune regole che secondo me vale la pena di seguire, e che permettono di organizzare al meglio il proprio lavoro.

La prima regola è avere un’idea, una lista, un elenco delle cose da controllare. In questo modo non ci scappa niente, dalla punteggiatura alla grammatica al lessico. Inoltre, se ci sono parti da integrare o ritradurre e dove si collocano.

La seconda azione da compiere a livello temporale è quella di dare una lettura di massima al testo che bisogna analizzare, per capirne la sequenza logica e ovviamente anche i macro errori che possono già essere individuati da una lettura veloce.

Si prosegue con il proofreading seguendo la checklist che ci siamo fatti all’inizio, quindi affrontando i problemi uno per volta: controllare tutto e subito ci porterebbe sicuramente a tralasciare qualche errore, mentre focalizzarsi su una categoria per volta permette di scremare sempre di più gli errori presenti nel testo.

Ovviamente non sono da trascurare le pause! Riposare gli occhi e esoprattutto la mente è la chiave per eseguire un buon lavoro, che altrimenti sarebbe di qualità sempre decrescente man mano che aumentano le ore accumulate chini sul testo.

L’ultima cosa da fare prima della conferma è quella di rileggere ancora una volta il testo nel suo insieme, come si era fatto all’inizio, per vedere se il testo fila con tutte le nostre correzioni e adattamenti, e capire se per caso non sia stato tralasciato qualche errore.

Mastering Languages

Mancano ormai un paio di settimane al ritorno a scuola, mentre gli esami di riparazione e i compiti per il recupero dei debiti sono già cominciati e occupano le mattine degli studenti più insicuri.

Giornali e telegiornali hanno già cominciato a parlare dei libri, del rincaro, del peso degli zaini che piegano le schiene dei nostri bambini, e a ben guardare nelle mailing list a cui sono iscritta iniziano ad arrivare anche le mail pubblicitarie che propongono corsi di riparazione su varie materie, dalla matematica all’inglese.

Quello che non ho potuto fare a meno di notare è stato il fatto che, mentre per i corsi di recupero delle materie scientifiche vengono proposti tutoraggi, accademie, scuole private di qualsiasi tipo, per i corsi e le ripetizioni di inglese (o di lingua in generale) vengono proposti corsi online, software che capiscono intonazione e pronuncia, dvd, software appositi… come se lo studio di una lingua non richiedesse l’assistenza di insegnanti qualificati.

The art of listening

Sono ormai giorni che si parla del brevissimo intervento di Julian Treasure sulle capacità di ascolto visibile su TED.

Studioso e consulente del suono e dell’ascolto, Treasure parla di come noi uomini moderni stiamo perdendo sempre più le nostre capacità di ascolto: viviamo in un mondo rumoroso, in cui è difficile e richiede sforzo estrarre le informazioni rilevanti dallo sfondo; siamo impazienti, vogliamo subito arrivare al succo, e in più non ci interessa tanto di quello che dicono gli altri, ma vogliamo che lo show sia concentrato su di noi; e come se tutto questo non bastasse possiamo registrate tutto, dalle conversazioni alle telefonate, per ascoltarlo successivamente, quindi perchè sforzarsi?

E questa perdita progressiva delle capacità di ascoltare con attenzione è un grosso problema, visto che l’ascolto è la nostra chiave per accedere alla comprensione. E non solo alla comprensione superficiale, ma a quella profonda, sia umana che spirituale, alla connessione con gli individui che ci circondano.

Occorre quindi compiere uno sforzo cosciente e regolare per migliorare le nostre capacità di ascolto, sia attraverso i pratici e veloci esercizi che sono consigliati alla fine dell’intervento, sia attraverso la messa in pratica di un motto: RASA. Rasa che in sanscrito significa essenza, ma che come acronimo diventa Receive, Appreciate, Summarise, Ask.

Quella di Treasure è una riflessione molto utile anche per noi interpreti, che a pensarci bene dobbiamo considerare l’ascolto attento e profondo come un requisito fondamentale del nostro lavoro, uno degli strumenti di base (insieme alla conoscenza linguistica) che ci permette di eseguire un lavoro in modo accurato e professionale.

From my short experience in the field (I am neither a professional conference speaker neither I aim at becoming one) which consists in a couple of public-speaking events per year, these commandments are precious suggestions everyone approaching to a conference speaking should consider.

1. Dream big. Strive to create the best talk you have ever given. Reveal something never seen before. Do something the audience will remember forever. Share an idea that could change the world.

2. Show us the real you. Share your passions, your dreams … and also your fears. Be vulnerable. Speak of failure as well as success.

3. Make the complex plain. Don’t try to dazzle intellectually. Don’t speak in abstractions. Explain! Give examples. Tell stories. Be specific.

4. Connect with people’s emotions. Make us laugh! Make us cry!

5. Don’t flaunt your ego. Don’t boast. It’s the surest way to switch everyone off.

6. No selling from the stage! Unless we have specifically asked you to, do not talk about your company or organization. And don’t even think about pitching your products or services or asking for funding from stage.

7. Feel free to comment on other speakers’ talks, to praise or to criticize. Controversy energizes! Enthusiastic endorsement is powerful!

8. Don’t read your talk. Notes are fine. But if the choice is between reading or rambling, then read!

9. End your talk on time. Doing otherwise is to steal time from the people that follow you. We won’t allow it.

10. Rehearse your talk in front of a trusted friend … for timing, for clarity, for impact.

http://www.google.com/events/smallbus_apps/

In just 12 years, Google has transformed itself from a tiny start-up into a giant with a $180 billion market capitalisation with a vast headquarters in Silicon Valley known as the Googleplex. Not only that, Google also stretches across the web like a giant spider, with a leg in everything from online search and e-mail to social networking and web-based software apps.

Now, the biggest challenge facing Google is how to find new sources of growth. The company is in effect still heavily dependent on search-related advertising, and also acquisitions such as YouTube and DoubleClick have deepened rather than reduced the firm’s dependence on advertising.
Investors’ biggest worry (causing the share price to stagnate) is that Google will end up like Microsoft, which has failed to find big new sources of revenue and profit to replace Windows and the Office suite. Another cause for concern is that firms such as Facebook and Apple are hoarding customer data, thereby making them inaccessible to Google’s search engine, and becoming data dead ends.
Lastly, there are problems inside the Googleplex itself. The company has lost a number of stars, that have recently moved to Facebook, complaining that it had become impossible to get things done at Google because of the bureaucracy at the company, which now boasts 23,000 employees.

However, this does not mean that Google’s glory days are over. The firm’s revenue growth slowed from 56% in 2007 to 9% last year, but that was still respectable considering the global economy trend.
Moreover, Google is ready to benefit from several important trends. One is the rapid growth in the amount of data being produced worldwide, which provide the raw material on which Google’s search engine works. For instance, YouTube only is now taking in 35 hours-worth of video content every minute of the day. That suggests there is still likely to be a big role for a general-purpose search engine, even if people do use apps and social networks more often to get the information they are looking for.

To keep winning, the firm will need to hang on to its remarkable talent pool. Google has been so successful also because it has created a kind of paradise for software engineers, which offers massages, free gourmet meals and the like. But competition for talent in Silicon Valley is now reaching fever pitch. Facebook, in particular, has been a merciless poacher from Google. Not only does it pinch some of Google’s best geeks; it even pinched one of its best cooks.
It is rumored that last month Google gave all of its workers a 10% pay rise plus a $1,000 bonus, and that it made multi-million-dollar counter-offers to keep especially valuable personnel from jumping to Facebook or elsewhere. This has sent a clear signal to rivals that the company intends to fight to keep its most valuable assets. But money and decision-making power alone won’t secure the services of the smartest software types, who want work not only to reward them but also to inspire them. People work for Google in part because it uses technology in cool ways that might make a real difference to humanity. “Ambition is a very important part of our culture,” says Mr Brin, “and the depth of science you can do at Google is [like] nowhere else in the world.”

Google’s quirkiness is embodied in a bronze replica of a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed Stan, which stands near the entrance to a building in the Googleplex. It might seem a bizarre symbol for a high-tech powerhouse. But Stan is a salutary reminder that the internet dynamo needs to keep evolving fast if it is to avoid becoming a digital dinosaur.

In an effort to bring children and literature back together, Dave Eggers, an American author of novels for kids, has opened after-school clubs across America where kids can turn up to develop their creative writing. The first club was founded in San Francisco in 2002 where the only venue the author could afford reminded him of a pirate ship: enriched by parrots and peg legs, the club house enticed the local kids in to develop their writing skills in informal workshops.
The San Francisco store was followed by a Superhero Supply Store in Brooklyn, New York; Seattle’s Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company and five more, for children aged six and up, all of them linked through the Once Upon a School website.
Popular author Roddy Doyle has done something similar in Ireland, having more than 11,000 children through his doors in just 17 months.

The bestselling novelist Nick Hornby has now decided to do the same thing for Britain, too. Tomorrow, Hornby, along with art entrepreneurs Ben Payne and Lucy Macnab, is going open his new Ministry of Stories – plus the world’s first supply store for monsters. This fantastical shop-front will hopefully lure children into literacy lessons. In the shop, Hornby will sell “fang floss” and “human snot”, while novelists including Zadie Smith, Roddy Doyle and Michael Morpurgo might, on the right day, be found teaching children aged from eight to 18 to learn to write a little like they do.
Hornby’s Ministry of Stories will open in a patch of real estate in Hoxton, east London, and is funded by the Arts Council. Downing Street is so impressed with the venture that next week it is throwing Hornby and colleagues a party at No 10.

A separate Ministry of Stories Facebook page said that the project was designed «to inspire a nation of storytellers» in Britain. It added that its new home in London would be offering free workshops and one-to-one mentoring to “both inspire and be inspired by” young people.

We think writing should be unrestricted by rules and regulations. In fact, we think you get the best results by keeping it seriously playful.
It’s not just about stories either: we get excited by all forms of writing, from song lyrics to play scripts, screenplays to journalism, blogging to games, and poems to graphic novels. You’ll be able to find the Ministry of Stories through a secret door inside the first shop in the world to supply the daily needs of monsters of all shapes and sizes.

Sources:
guardian.co.uk: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/18/nick-hornby-ministry-stories
Once upon a school: http://onceuponaschool.org/
Ministry of Stories: http://ministryofstories.org/

This study has found that people spend nearly half their time (46.7%) thinking about something other than what they are actually doing.

Psychologists at Harvard University collected information on the daily activities, thoughts and feelings of 2,250 volunteers to find out how often they were focused on what they were doing, and what made them most happy. In order to do this, doctoral student in psychology Matthew Killingsworth and his supervisor, Daniel Gilbert, developed a web application for the iPhone that contacted participants at random times during their waking hours. When they received a message, those taking part had to respond with information about what they were doing, by selecting from a list of 22 activities, such as doing housework, shopping, or watching TV. They went on to rate their happiness on a scale from zero to 100, and said whether they were focused, or daydreaming about something positive, negative or neutral.

More than 5,000 people have signed up for the happiness study and the researchers hope to attract more so they can look at mental wellbeing in different geographical regions and between the sexes with greater accuracy.

They found that people were happiest when having sex, exercising or in conversation, and least happy when working, resting or using a home computer. And although subjects’ minds were wandering nearly half of the time, this consistently made them less happy.

The results showed that happiness was more affected by how often people drifted off, and where they went in their imagination, than by the activity they were doing at the time. The researchers say they’re confident that being distracted was the cause of unhappiness, rather than the other way round.

The authors write in the journal Science: “A human mind is a wandering mind and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

The team concluded that reminiscing, thinking ahead or daydreaming tends to make people more miserable, even when they are thinking about something pleasant.

Resources:
guardian.co.uk
Daydreaming is a downer
Track your Happiness.org

The research was conducted beginning with conversations with several hundred business, nonprofit, philanthropic, and education leaders, who shared their thoughts about the skills they look for in candidates and potential hires.

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
To compete in the new global economy, companies need their workers to think about how to continuously improve their products, processes, or services. The heart of critical thinking and problem solving is considered as the ability to ask the right questions. The challenge new leaders will face is: How do you do things that haven’t been done before, where you have to rethink or think anew?

2. Collaboration and Leadership
Teamwork is no longer just about working with others in your building: thanks to technology, workers are not asked to share their thoughts and collaborate over virtual teams, that may be spread all over a country, or even all over the world. Furthermore, the greatest concern of CEOs today is that young people lack of leadership and collaborative skills.

3. Agility and Adaptability
Today’s hires have to think, be flexible, change, and use a variety of tools to solve new problems. Companies and duties change very frequently now: the job someone may be hired to do can change or may not exist in the future, so adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical ones.

4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
You’ll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed for not trying. One of the problems of a large company is risk aversion. The challenge companies are facing now is how to create an entrepreneurial culture in a larger organization.

5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
Verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills are unfortunately not to be taken for granted when hiring a new person. May people still have difficulty being clear and concise; it’s hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make. Although writing and speaking correctly are obviously important, the most common complaints among executives are about fuzzy thinking and young people not knowing how to write with a real voice.

6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
Employees in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of information daily, and if people aren’t prepared to process the information effectively they just get freezed in their steps. It’s not only the sheer quantity of information that represents a challenge, but also how rapidly the information is changing that poses a great challenge to the managers of the future.

7. Curiosity and Imagination
People who’ve learned to ask great questions and have learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in the company environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have the most impact on innovation.

However, are electric cars really the best ones?

The idea of recharging an electric car at home for only a few dollars and never again having to visit a filling station is indeed appealing. For most journeys, the limitations of battery capacity are irrelevant. The daily commute, trips to the shops and to pick up the children are well within the range of most electric cars.

And how about the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast? Not to mention that on a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range.

Carmakers are taking different approaches to these limitations. Some cars are powered only by a battery: once they have travelled 160km or so, the battery needs recharging, which can take up to eight hours. Others have a battery less than half that range, but carry a petrol generator giving the car another 480km. Micro cars with just two seats and ranges of only around 50km are also coming: they will charge quickly and work well in crowded cities.

And what of electric cars’ environmental credentials? Electric cars are being hugely subsidised by taxpayers on the ground that they are zero-emission vehicles. Makers of electric cars claim that this is an efficient way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. However, road transport accounts for a tenth of such emissions worldwide.

Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven. An electric car in Britain today, for instance, produces around 20% less in CO₂ emissions than a car with a petrol engine. Even if the generating mix gets greener, electric vehicles are so expensive to produce, that they will still be a relatively costly way of abating CO₂ emissions.

The only efficient way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax. If electric cars are a good way of reducing emissions, a carbon tax will enable them to flourish. Taxes, of course, are not as popular as subsidies. But subsidies are almost always a waste of public resources. At this particular time, throwing more taxpayers’ money at the car industry seems a daft thing to do.