Compréhension orale

- Internet damaging 20000 UK stores
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1309/130903-retail-chains.mp3 

- De manière générale, le site "Breaking News English" (les CO sont à présent classées par niveau de difficulté de 1 à 6). En plus ancien :
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/0910/091016-arctic_ice.html (lien vers le fichier son sur la page)

- UK Visas for Chinese "easier to get" (extrait utilisé de 1:05 à 2:50) : mis sur le compte mail

- Children 'confused about food' (les deux premières minutes): mis sur le compte mail

Where Have All the Secretaries Gone?

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Where Have All the Secretaries Gone?

By Sheelah Kolhatkar on April 04, 2013 – Business Week, 687 words

 

“He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they’re looking for something between a mother and a waitress,” says office manager Joan Holloway to new recruit Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men. The show, which returns to AMC for its sixth season on April 7, revels in the ghosts of offices past: drinking on the job, racist jokes, typewriters. Mad Men’s advertising agency is built around a charmingly retro (if gallingly sexist) division of labor. Secretaries screen calls, arrange meetings, manage calendars—and often make great wives—allowing their bosses to create life-changing ad campaigns and go out for boozy client lunches. Those were the days.

Fifty years later, as a result of changing technology and cost-cutting, assistants are disappearing from corporate life, along with their cousins, executive assistants, office managers, and clerks. “There’s absolutely no question that fewer people have secretaries now,” says Pat Cook, a corporate recruiter who places executives at blue chip companies. “People at the C level, the chief marketing level, and so on, probably still do have an assistant. But when you get below that level, it’s free fall.” This does reduce head count, but, she adds, “everybody agrees that they could be so much more productive if they had an assistant.”

A 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review, “The Case for Executive Assistants,” points out that surfing Expedia to book business trips and itemizing expense reports is hardly an efficient use of a senior executive’s time. For someone earning close to $1 million a year, an $80,000-a-year assistant needs to help the boss become only 8 percent more productive for the company to break even. “When workers see the boss loading paper into the copy machine, the theory goes, a “we’re all in this together” spirit is created,” writes the article’s author, Melba Duncan. “But as a management practice, the structure rarely makes economic sense. Generally speaking, work should be delegated to the lowest-cost employee who can do it well.”

Ted Childs Jr., a former top executive in IBM’s human resources department, describes the awkward transition that followed when he lost his assistant and began to share an admin with his entire team. “My assistant used to screen my e-mail—I probably got 200 or 300 messages a day. Without that, I had to read them all myself and sort out the garbage from the important people,” he says. “I had to set aside time in the evenings to do it, because I had meetings during the day.”

Childs’s situation is now the norm. In Women Laid Off, Workers Sped Up, a paper for the Roosevelt Institute, authors Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal note that women lost 925,000 jobs in “office and administrative support” occupations between 2009 and 2011. And they point out that the continuing “speedup” within the economy has workers taking on ever-increasing burdens, often without extra compensation. In a 2011 survey, 52 percent of assistants said they supported three or more people, and they reported a median salary of $45,000. “This trend has been going on over the last 20 or so years,” says Childs. “There’s been a steady change in culture and management practice and a need to reduce costs,” he says. “A gatekeeper is nice. I don’t know if a gatekeeper is affordable.”

In industries where assistant jobs often had functioned as apprenticeships, younger workers have seen entryways into careers shut down. Rachel Hooper, now an analytic consultant at Truven Health Analytics, started out as a secretary for the Tennessee Department of Health. “I used my downtime there to learn about databases, and when one of my colleagues left for another company, she knew my skills and essentially took me with her,” Hooper says. “My secretary job allowed me to network and learn new skills for climbing the ladder.”

The assistant-free mentality is especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, where part of the high-tech CEO machismo entails bragging about “flat” organizations and self-reliance. However, a recent blog post by Chad Dickerson, the CEO of online retailer Etsy, suggests a backlash against the assistant-purge in corporate America may be imminent.

 

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Self-driving cars

Clean, safe and it drives itself

The Economist, April 20th, 2013 – 657 words

SOME inventions, like some species, seem to make periodic leaps in progress. The car is one of them. Twenty-five years elapsed between Karl Benz began small-scale production of his original Motorwagen and the breakthrough, by Henry Ford and his engineers in 1913, that turned the car into the ubiquitous, mass-market item that has defined the modern urban landscape. By putting production of the Model T on moving assembly lines set into the floor of his factory in Detroit, Ford drastically cut the time needed to build it, and hence its cost. Thus began a revolution in personal mobility. Almost a billion cars now roll along the world’s highways.

Today the car seems poised for another burst of evolution. One way in which it is changing relates to its emissions. As emerging markets grow richer, legions of new consumers are clamouring for their first set of wheels. For the whole world to catch up with American levels of car ownership, the global fleet would have to quadruple. Even a fraction of that growth would present fearsome challenges, from congestion and the price of fuel to pollution and global warming.

Yet stricter regulations and smarter technology are making cars cleaner, more fuel-efficient and safer than ever before. China, its cities choked in smog, is following Europe in imposing curbs on emissions of noxious nitrogen oxides and fine soot particles. Regulators in most big car markets are demanding deep cuts in the carbon dioxide emitted from car exhausts. And carmakers are being remarkably inventive in finding ways to comply.

Granted, battery-powered cars have disappointed. They remain expensive, lack range and are sometimes dirtier than they look—for example, if they run on electricity from coal-fired power stations. But car companies are investing heavily in other clean technologies. Future motorists will have a widening choice of super-efficient petrol and diesel cars, hybrids (which switch between batteries and an internal-combustion engine) and models that run on natural gas or hydrogen.

Meanwhile, a variety of “driver assistance” technologies are appearing on new cars, which will not only take a lot of the stress out of driving in traffic but also prevent many accidents. More and more new cars can reverse-park, read traffic signs, maintain a safe distance in steady traffic and brake automatically to avoid crashes. Some carmakers are promising technology that detects pedestrians and cyclists, again overruling the driver and stopping the vehicle before it hits them. A number of firms, including Google, are busy trying to take driver assistance to its logical conclusion by creating cars that drive themselves to a chosen destination without a human at the controls. This is where it gets exciting.

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predicts that driverless cars will be ready for sale to customers within five years. That may be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff along Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be accepted by drivers, in stages.

As sensors and assisted-driving software demonstrate their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving it. Computers never drive drunk or while texting.

Some carmakers think this vision of the future is bunk. People will be too terrified to hurtle down the motorway in a vehicle they do not control: computers crash, don’t they? Carmakers whose self-driving technology is implicated in accidents might face ruinously expensive lawsuits, and be put off continuing to develop it. Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually.

 

Lessons from California

California offers a warning to voters all over the world

The Economist Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition – 674 words

CALIFORNIA is once again nearing the end of its fiscal year with a huge budget hole and no hope of a deal to plug it, as its constitution requires. Other American states also have problems, thanks to the struggling economy. But California cannot pass timely budgets even in good years, which is one reason why its credit rating has, in one generation, fallen from one of the best to the absolute worst among the 50 states. How can a place which has so much going for it—from its diversity and natural beauty to its unsurpassed talent clusters in Silicon Valley and Hollywood—be so poorly governed?

It is tempting to accuse those doing the governing. The legislators, hyperpartisan and usually deadlocked, are a pretty rum bunch. The governor, Jerry Brown, who also led the state between 1975 and 1983, has (like his predecessors) struggled to make the executive branch work. But the main culprit has been direct democracy: recalls, in which Californians fire elected officials in mid-term; referendums, in which they can reject acts of their legislature; and especially initiatives, in which the voters write their own rules. Since 1978, when Proposition 13 lowered property-tax rates, hundreds of initiatives have been approved on subjects from education to the regulation of chicken coops.

This citizen legislature has caused chaos. Many initiatives have either limited taxes or mandated spending, making it even harder to balance the budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that they achieve the opposite of their intent: for all its small-government pretensions, Proposition 13 ended up centralising California’s finances, shifting them from local to state government. Rather than being the curb on elites that they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of special interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are often bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications.

They paved paradise and put up a voting booth

This has been a tragedy for California, but it matters far beyond the state’s borders. Around half of America’s states and an increasing number of countries have direct democracy in some form. Next month Britain will have its first referendum for years (on whether to change its voting system), and there is talk of voter recalls for aberrant MPs. The European Union has just introduced the first supranational initiative process. With technology making it ever easier to hold referendums and Western voters ever more angry with their politicians, direct democracy could be on the march.

And why not? There is, after all, a successful model: in Switzerland direct democracy goes back to the Middle Ages at the local level and to the 19th century at the federal. This mixture of direct and representative democracy seems to work well. Indeed, in some cases referendums are good things: they are a way of holding a legislature to account. In California reforms to curb gerrymandering and non-partisan primaries, both improvements, have recently been introduced by initiatives; and they were pushed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a governor elected through the recall process. But there is a strong case for proceeding with caution, especially when it comes to allowing people to circumvent a legislature with citizen-made legislation.

Proper democracy is far more than a perpetual ballot process. It must include deliberation, mature institutions and checks and balances such as those in the American constitution. Ironically, California imported direct democracy almost a century ago as a “safety valve” in case government should become corrupt. The process began to malfunction only relatively recently.

All this provides both a hope and a worry. The hope is that California can right itself. The worry is that the Western world is slowly drifting in the opposite direction. Concern over globalisation means government is unpopular and populism is on the rise. Europeans may snigger at the bizarre mess those crazy Californians have voted themselves into. But how many voters in Europe would resist the lure of a ballot initiative against immigration? Or against mosque-building? Or lower taxes? What has gone wrong in California could all too easily go wrong elsewhere.

article: "A Nation of Shoppers"

Bagehot : A nation of shoppers

A new wave of supermarket-bashing is elitist and muddle-headed

May 19th 2011 | from the Economist print edition

EVEN armed with a product as popular as dried pigs’ ears (for dogs to chew), Steve Staddon struggles to make money at the weekly market in Stalham, an ancient town in the watery flatlands where East Anglia meets the North Sea. Mr Staddon sells pet food; a decade ago Stalham market was so busy it took two people to man his stall. In good weeks more than a hundred stalls used to fill the town’s auction ground. This week just eight traders turned up. “Basically,” charges Mr Staddon, “Tesco has killed this market.”

The supermarket firm—the country’s biggest—opened in Stalham in 2002. Tesco’s car park displaced the market, now relocated to a small, sad site on the edge of town. On Stalham high street, locals grumble, businesses such as a greengrocer, fishmonger, bakery, butcher and a convenience store have closed, to be replaced by charity shops, Chinese takeaways and (prompting mordant jokes) a funeral parlour. Stalham has become a case study for critics of Tesco and other big chains.

Such criticism is in vogue. The charge sheet against supermarkets is lengthening, moving beyond longstanding allegations that they bully suppliers, run rings round town planners and harm the environment (all that packaging, all those air-freighted mangos from Brazil and car journeys to out-of-town stores).

Increasingly, supermarkets have become proxies for modernity itself, and not in a good way. Eager to soothe anxious, recession-hit voters, as well as those squeezed by globalisation, politicians have turned nostalgic, talking up old traditions as a response to the anomies of 21st-century British life. They pledge to look beyond economic growth and worry more about well-being and the survival of small shops. There is much talk of family life, and of resetting the work-life balance. The promise hovers, just over the horizon, of a Britain in which parents and children stroll from their homes with wicker baskets to pick up homely, local goods from storekeepers who know them by name.

On May 17th the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government commissioned a television shopping guru, Mary Portas, to report on ways to protect independent shops, prevent the proliferation of “clone towns” and, in the words of David Cameron, “bring back the bustle to our high streets”. Meanwhile, after a new Tesco store was smashed up by rioters in Bristol, the Labour leader Ed Miliband called for tighter controls on store-openings, opining: “people think the character of their local high street is being changed and they have no power against big corporations.”

Strip away the pieties and this is illiberal stuff. It implies that the British need protecting from their own consumer choices.

The nostalgics don’t even have their history right. A big research project at the universities of Surrey and Exeter is currently studying shopping in post-war England. For one thing, high streets were not as quaint as politicians think. As far back as 1939, chain stores and co-operative retail societies already controlled about half of the grocery market. It was middle class matrons, the sort who dressed up to go shopping, who missed the deference shown by traditional grocers. Supermarkets were often welcomed by younger and working-class women. A retired secretary interviewed by the project recalled, as a young bride, asking the butcher for a tiny amount of mince. “Oh, having a dinner party, madam?” he sneered. A woman who bought anything expensive or unusual risked disapproving gossip, spread by shop assistants. The project found press advertisements promoting the anonymity of supermarkets, as well as their convenience.

Giant supermarket chains wield great power: it is legitimate to demand that power is wielded fairly. Not every shopper at a Tesco loves that company: some use such shops through gritted teeth. But others might have spotted that supermarkets, thanks to late opening or online ordering, actually buy working families time. From the first, the British have been ambivalent about supermarkets. It is wrong and elitist for politicians to dismiss their success out of hand, just because it clashes with some sepia-tinted vision of how society should be run.

NPR News - Fundraising at Stanford University

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