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I was minding my business the other day, watching TV, when I came across what I thought was a funny (albeit stupid) commercial:

Haha, ?typical dad? can?t get away from his power tools and uses them to drill holes in the chicken. Funny. But then the tagline gave me serious pause. ?Ragu ? Mom?s Favorite For A Reason.?

Um. Wait a minute. The whole commercial was about a dad (and the mom, but primarily about the dad) getting his kids to eat dinner and then you close with that tagline. Does anyone else see what?s wrong with this?

And it?s not just Ragu. It?s everyone. I bought some applesauce the other day and it said, ?Trusted by Moms since 1912.? So Dads don?t trust it? What are we really saying when we exclude fathers from the parenting equation?

Society conditions us to think that caring for the family (and by extension, buying products for the household and making appointments and preparing dinner) is a woman?s job. Men, if they?re in the house, are supposed to make money. And that?s it. Even if the woman is making money as well, all that other stuff is still her domain.

Because I didn?t know I signed up to be in charge of everything. I really didn?t. We just kind of fell into these roles and we fell even harder when I decided to become a work-at-home mom.?Up until about a week ago, I felt bad that the house wasn?t always clean when my husband got home at 5:30. After all, I had been home all day, right? But I had to remind myself that 1) he lived here too and has functioning arms and hands to tackle the mess 2) these are his kids too who make endless messes all day long and 3) just because I work at home doesn?t mean I should be working on the home while I?m here.

We need to push for more father involvement and recognition. Stop saying ?Moms? when we mean ?parents.? Parenting magazine might as well be called Moms Monthly.

Today?s fathers are much more involved than their fathers (remember when most of them weren?t even allowed in the delivery room?), but I still feel like we have a long, long way to go before there?s equality between the two parents. Of course, I don?t think we?ll ever get to the point where things are 50/50 and stay that way forever. I understand there?s a natural ebb and flow to family life and at times Mom puts in more effort and at times Dad puts in more effort.

But when society treats fathers as optional or invisible beyond what they provide financially, is it any wonder that Dad isn?t hopping up off the couch trying to see what needs to be done around the house? Don?t get me wrong ? there are some outstanding dads out there who go above and beyond to provide their families both financially and emotionally. They?re on top of things. But they are viewed as the exception, not the norm. And that bugs me.

What do you think? Does it bother you the way society?both in popular culture and your day-to-day interactions?relegates fathers to the margin??

About the author

Tara Pringle Jefferson is managing editor of BlackAndMarriedWithKids.com. She?s also the author of Make It Happen: The Young Mommy Guide To Creating The Career You Crave. Follow her on Twitter or check out her blog for her insights on what it means to be a mom, wife, student, writer, and about three other labels she?s too tired to remember.

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11:40 AM Thursday May 17, 2012
by Matthew Bellows?|?Comments

For anyone running a sales organization, the 48 hours before a pipeline presentation are the worst days of the month. The pipeline meeting is where you tell management your team’s sales forecast for the next month, and no matter how good your numbers were last month, your work life is a mess.

In the days and weeks leading up to this point, you’ve had everyone send you their individual and team projections. You’ve told them, “Update me on the deals you’ve been working on, tell me about the new ones, estimate when they are going to close, and give me a percentage chance for each one.”

You have been diligent in managing your people and in creating compensation plans that reward consistency and predictability. You have stayed on top of the major deals. You have put in place sales training and a market-leading, cloud-based CRM system. Everyone on your teams spends hours each week typing updates, but for those 48 hours, none of it seems to help much.

Basically, you’re going into the pipeline meeting and giving your bosses your best guess, because you lack the tools to offer something more precise.

But how can forecasting sales data be such of a problem? The performance of the sales team has always been the most measurable in a company. At the end of every week, month, quarter and year, the result of sales activity is shown on the top line for all to see.

There are two reasons. First, the obvious: the higher you go in the organization, the less connected you are to the deals happening beneath you ? and the more vulnerable you are to individual reps or teams, either purposely or subconsciously, altering their pipeline projections to suit their needs. This is no different from how people in non-sales functions push to create budgets and targets they know they can beat.

The second reason for the sales manager’s pain is that when it comes to gathering data about upcoming sales possibilities, companies and CRM systems rarely measure anything real. For most kinds of business-to-business selling, your CRM database is an outdated collection of anecdotes and guesses. The fewer the deals, and the longer the sales cycle, the less your “data” matches reality. The stuff that does get accumulated in spreadsheets and CRM systems looks like data ? there are dollar signs and probabilities next to prospect names ? but it’s not. It’s really just the opinions, guesses, estimates and suppositions of your sales team.

Thus, the terrible two days. The number you present to your bosses will look definitive, and your reputation will be staked to it. You will have padded it, of course, and your boss will push back and demand that you raise it. You’ll settle on a compromise, but you’ll leave the room anxious, because you know that there’s nothing firm and reliable to back it up.

Why is this the best we, as sales leaders, can do? Because for the most part we are collecting and summing opinions instead of data.

Some innovative sales organizations are starting to move away from the old ways. The growth of inside sales teams and the increasing emphasis on more-measurable sales channels like phone calls and emails is a start. And while CRM systems have their shortcomings, the central repository of information and leads at least gives the harried manager a single pile through which to dig.

But there will be no end to the stress, the chaos and the cognitive dissonance of the 48 hours before the pipeline meeting unless we change. We have to start caring more about sales activities, the specific actions that salespeople and sales teams perform to close more business. We need to know how many phone calls, emails, demos and visits it takes for our teams to close a deal. Then we need to measure the underlying data for each team member without requiring them to report on themselves.

(Full disclosure: Although my company does make an email product to support the sales function, it doesn’t help with the problem of tracking sales activities.)

So this is a call to innovative sales leaders, sales operations people, technology and service providers, and the top companies of the CRM industry. Let’s build the processes, the services and the tools we need to collect data instead of opinions. Let’s learn to build forecasts based on what we do instead of what we say. And most importantly, let’s help our salespeople succeed instead of weighing them down with processes that waste valuable time and money.

It’s the only way to improve those awful 48 hours. And along the way, we’ll find ways to make a whole lot more money.

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Virgin Atlantic begins offering cell phone coverage on trans-atlantic flights. The pricey, and somewhat limited, service will use items found in space and in the home’s of outlying carrier customers to help passengers call in sick to work while flying to London.

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Warmer New York winters have a sting in the tail. The mosquito that carries chikungunya, a virus that causes joint pain, but isn’t fatal, is flocking to the city in increasing numbers.

The virus, which originates in Africa, is carried by the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) and could become endemic in New York within a few years. Until now the bitter winters have kept mosquito numbers down, says Laura Harrington at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Harrington estimates there is one Asian tiger mosquito for every five New Yorkers. Once that ratio flips to five insects per person, her model suggests that someone arriving in New York carrying the virus would have a 38 per cent chance of passing it on to another person through mosquito bites. The disease could become entrenched in the city at that level of infection, Harrington told the Inside Cornell event in New York City last week.

Isolated cases of chikungunya have already been reported in the US, but just like similar cases that showed up in Europe in 2007, seasonal changes in weather kept mosquito numbers down and the virus in check.

In Europe too, though, climate conditions are becoming more conducive for pathogen-carrying insects, including Asian tiger mosquitoes, suggesting chikungunya could become a problem there too (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2012.0138).

“It isn’t a question of if someone gets infected with the virus, but when ? and how many [cases],” says Scott Weaver, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who was not involved in the research.

Because there is no vaccine and no treatment for the virus, Harrington says US physicians should be looking for symptoms of chikungunya in their patients to prevent the disease from spreading.

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The hand-drawn sign in the photograph is fashioned from a circle of cardboard, and features a three-bladed wind turbine and the words “let’s go.” We can see a pair of hands grasping the sign, but not the person holding it — who appears to be standing on some sort of gantry or catwalk. Behind him or her, in the background, is a petroleum upgrading facility.

“I am an oilsands worker, and risked my job to take this picture,” says the caption on the image, which was taken in support of a recent global climate-change campaign, and which is now going viral on the web. “Myself, along with the majority of my co-workers are ready for a renewable energy revolution.”

It is an arresting image, capturing a quiet act of dissent and call for change direct from the roaring industrial heart of northern Alberta. What makes it even more poignant is the fact that the revolution the anonymous oil worker calls for is already underway.

Canada just hasn’t yet shown up.

A Bloomberg New Energy Finance report released last month reveals that worldwide clean energy investment continued a near-decade-long rally in 2011, rising 6.5 per cent to a record $263 billion. Last year, global investments in electricity for renewable electricity generation outpaced those of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

Canada increased its share of clean-energy investment in 2011, Bloomberg notes, boosting its stake by 4.4. per cent to $5.5 billion — largely the result of provincial policies such as the Green Energy and Economy Act, which is driving wind and solar build-out in Ontario.

But our country does not even crack the top 10 of G20 economies investing in the energy of the future. While others jockey for leadership spots in the ongoing global shift to energy that is clean, renewable, abundant, and largely locally available, we are trailing the pack behind Brazil and Spain.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Canada can and must leverage its oil wealth to ensure our country remains competitive in a world that is working to dramatically reduce its appetite for our fossil-fuel resources. By 2020, the global market for low-carbon goods and services is expected to crest two trillion dollars.

As an increasingly polarized pipeline debate dominates the airwaves and headlines, one common thread emerges: Canada needs a plan to capture a larger share of this new clean energy opportunity, and accelerate our transition to an efficient, prosperous low-carbon economy. More and more organizations, sectors, and leaders are calling for a more responsible and truly long-term approach to energy development and job creation.

Earlier this week, Canada’s environment commissioner confirmed that the federal government has no real plan to meet its Copenhagen Accord commitment. We agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will, at minimum, limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level. Now it is time to make good, and a Canadian energy strategy represents our best opportunity to do so.

Over recent months, my team has traveled the country, consulting with a wide range of environmental, business, academic, faith, and health leaders. They all told us the same thing: Any Canadian energy strategy must recognize that the world is changing rapidly around us. We either put in policies such as this that allow us to slowly but surely reinvent our economy for clean energy future, or face profound uncertainty and risk.

Speaking on behalf of his colleagues, the anonymous oil worker who bravely posted his snapshot on Flickr perhaps said it best: “We want jobs that provide long term economic, social and environmental sustainability for ourselves, our country and our planet.”

A plan to do so is within reach. Let’s go.

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This was probably a given, but there won’t be any freakishly detailed social profile overlay as you pass strangers on the street in the initial iteration of “Google Glasses.” Instead, current prototype functionality includes features like photo sharing (directly from the eyewear to Google+), and… well, that could be it. The in-your-face functionality that we saw in the original Google teaser could come “one day,” as the video title itself reveals, but we certainly won’t be creepin’ on random friends-to-be on sidewalks, trains and parties for some time to come. And just in case you’re curious to see what you won’t be doing with Project Glass this year, Google’s original teaser is after the break, with a popular parody vid tossed in below for good measure.

Continue reading Google’s Project Glass prototypes can transfer still images, do little else

Google’s Project Glass prototypes can transfer still images, do little else originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 May 2012 15:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today Puget Sound Sage released a new report on Transit Oriented Development (TOD) in the Rainier Valley. It? outlines changes seen in the Valley over the last decade, makes an environmental and social equity arguments for a greater emphasis on affordable housing and living wage jobs in TOD, enumerating racial justice principles for TOD,? and calls for urgent and aggressive actions and creation of tools necessary to achieve these principles. Tonight at 5:30 at the Filipino Community Center (5740 M.L. King Jr. Way South, Seattle, WA 98118) Puget Sound Sage will hold a panel discussion on their findings.

I have only had time to skim the document, but my first impress is that the report does a good job setting the context, honing in on specific problems of concern not usually focused on, and then proposing strategies to address these problems. Many of these strategies however, not surprisingly, require public money to get them off the ground as well as legislative changes on the regional and state level. I?m also very happy to see that the report is not a rebuke of TOD and development in the Valley, but rather in my reading, a call for TOD that more aggressively aims to benefit existing residents.

Below is a list of recommendations included in the executive summary.

• Prioritize implementing the non-zoning components of the recently completed Neighborhood Plan Updates.
• Preserve affordable land now for community TOD goals as gentrification occurs.
• Maximize creation of local, high-quality jobs in TOD projects in Rainier Valley ? including both short term construction jobs and long-term, on-site jobs.
• Encourage higher job quality for low-wage industries prevalent at regional job centers along the new light rail system, including Downtown Seattle, First Hill and SeaTac Airport.
• Connect low-income workers of color in Rainier Valley to high quality jobs throughout the rail corridor.
• Ensure affordable childcare near transit stations to increase job security for working parents.
• Encourage family-sized units (2+ bedrooms) in market-based housing policy.
• Encourage development of units affordable to households making 30% to 60% of area median income (AMI) to provide needed housing for low-wage workers.
• Bring the City of Seattle?s Incentive Zoning policy in-line with other US cities to generate more units and deeper affordability.
• Create a tax increment finance tool that generates revenue for low-income housing in TOD.
• Preserve existing, privately-owned multifamily buildings that serve low-income families.
• Use surplus property owned by Sound Transit to create affordable housing through joint development projects.
• Expand the City?s Neighborhood Equitable Transit Oriented Development (NET) Initiative to achieve scope and scale.
• Support and promote community-controlled development as a primary strategy to stabilize Rainier Valley residents.
• Include communities of color who are stakeholders in TOD planning and policy to be part of decision making in order to achieve racial equity outcomes.
• Local governments and elected officials should support and promote the use of stakeholder-led agreements with developers, such as Community Benefits Agreements and Community Workforce Agreements.

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