As the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Hurricane Sandy made quite the impact, costing an estimated $20,000,000,000 US in damages (That’s right, 20 billion dollars…).  Aside from flooding streets, damaging homes, causing fatalities, preventing household electricity and blowing down structures, however, she also caused the first closing of US stock markets since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  For a brief moment, upon hearing this fact, my rather uneducated knowledge of the stock market lead me to imagine the terrible consequences of such an economic closure.

Forgive me though, it really was just a brief moment.

This closure obviously did not have any large-scale ramifications in the stock market domain, as internet trades and online activity is unpreventable, but it does make for a milestone.  According to an article written in The Telegraph by Richard Blackden on October 29th, “Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, whose main New York offices are in an official evacuation zone, recommend[ed] employees work from home.”  The amount of times this has happened in history can be counted on one hand, and as far as the amount of work these employees really got up to during these few impromptu days off; I’m willing to bet it could be measured in a similarly small manner.

Source Article(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9639808/Hurricane-Sandy-US-stock-markets-close-for-the-first-time-since-911.html

I remember back in High School, when faced with the choice of which courses to take for my final year, my school councilor asked me (the cliche): “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?”  I remember thinking to myself, “I have no idea, this sucks that I have to make this decision now, how should I know?”  The funny thing is, I still don’t know the answer to this question; but that’s okay.

     As I recently was introduced to a man named Tom Dobrzanski, I was able to witness firsthand that I am not the first to be in this state of career-choosing-limbo.  Tom is a Sauder School of Business alumni, who demonstrated that the path to where you want to end up is not clearly marked or easily decided.  He went through the standard 4 years of undergraduate schooling, and he enjoyed his stay, but as he approached the time of seeking employment, he instead chose to follow his heart to music.  Tom and some of his then-current bandmates (a band called Lotus Child) opened up a recording studio.

     I have realized that it is 100% possible to advance through post-secondary schooling with only a general idea of where you want to end up, and also that this idea may change very quickly.  Tom is now involved with his more recent band, The Zolas, and his profession stimulates both his musician side as well as his business-background orientation.  I hope that wherever I end up, I can find myself both passionate about my job and satisfied by its integration of my education.

(The Zolas – The Great Collapse ^)

From an idea to an invention, from invention to implementation, and from implementation to innovative multi-million dollar business, Urthecast has weathered the storm.  This is a Canadian based company that, in a nutshell, is putting high-definition, adjustable cameras on orbiting space-satellites.  But what does this really mean? How is it so unique?  This concept, so simple, is absolutely revolutionary.  With the fusion of social media and the world’s population, anyone can view what is going on in the world from a completely untouched perspective.  They can see what people are tweeting in an area, and they can literally watch the planet as the satellite makes its way around the world.  As a business, this basic idea also has a vast amount of revenue-producing opportunities such as advertisement sales, the marketing of exclusive government viewing rights, public viewing prescriptions, partnerships with companies such as Twitter, and many more.  Wade Larson, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of the company, presented Urthecast to my classmates and I, and looking around the room during his demonstration I could visibly see looks of bewilderment among the crowd; no one was going to try to sleep through this presenter’s speech.  As ‘[T]he world’s first high-definition video platform of Earth, streamed from space,” I have never witnessed a product with as many possibilities as Urthecast.

(For more information, follow this link)

-Ever since I was a young child I knew that I wished to get a post-secondary education.  Being so young, I’m not sure why I felt this way; I can assure you that as an 8 year old I didn’t know any facts on how having a degree impacts your career possibilities, or that financing a university experience could be very costly.  I think that the pursuit of higher education just naturally seemed to mean going to university, I don’t think it ever crossed my mind not to attend.  However, as we discussed in class recently, what is the actual cost/benefit of pursuing a degree? Philip Finkelstein, a fellow classmate, recently also wrote on this subject, blogging that if he solely had to finance a 4 year university degree, he would not do it in the first place.  If one can get a job right out of high school, and progress their way to a position within 4 years that trumps the starting position they would have received coming out of university with a bachelors degree, which path do you think they would take?  One must take into account that this 4 year degree represents a large investment of time and capital.  I don’t believe there is a concrete answer to this question, as either option cannot be considered ceteris paribus.  So many factors remain variable, and it depends greatly on where the individual wishes to end up.  Personally, I think a degree is the right option, but I cannot confidently advise certain people to make the same judgement.

It is a sobering thought to remember that only 8 years ago there was no such thing as ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’.  Prior to February of 2004 and March of 2006 respectively, these titles literally had no meaning in the modern world.  Over the last 15 or so years, technology and social media have literally been born, raised, adapted and developed, eventually transforming into the giant industry it is today.  But how does this relate directly to businesses?  As you can likely imagine, in the past firms had to implement product or service feedback surveys of some sort in order to try and grasp their effect on consumers.  In order to maximize a companies profit and effectively provide what the consumer is looking for, they need up to date, accurate information on how their product is being bought, used, for what price, etc.  With new technology, trends and social media, an unimaginably vast utopia of raw data is available to anyone with a computer and an email address.  Thanks to recent years’s technological growth rates, almost any sized company can now properly conduct their business, with a heightened awareness on how the public will respond to a product.

(Image taken from http://www.openforum.com/infographics/social-media-for-business-2012-a-history-of-the-business-of-social-media/)

-As we have been learning more and more about social entrepreneurship and have been exposed to several real-life examples, I cannot help but realize that having the title of “social entrepreneur” is good for business.  Almost everyone I can think of enjoys doing something kind for someone else.  That warm feeling we all get inside makes us feel good, knowing we have done something we didn’t necessarily need to do, for reasons that are unselfish.  As with the examples we have studied, people are more likely to promote one’s business if they get these feelings from doing so.  For example, Save On Meats in Vancouver, British Columbia, employs struggling individuals who need employment in order to stay clean.  People from the local area are much more likely to contribute to Save On Meats’s business knowing this, in contrast to the store having more ‘regular’ employees.  Social entrepreneurs are typically genuine people with intentions of making positive contributions to society.  The fact that a new spectrum of potential customers appears to social entrepreneurial-based businesses is an added bonus.

Enbridge Inc.’s controversial Northern Gateway Pipeline can be considered a fish with it’s belly up.  After months of political discussions, debate, public protest and heated arguments, the obstacles facing the company and its project have formed a mountain not even the North American energy giant can climb.  According to an article written in The Globe and Mail newspaper on October 5th 2012 by Jeffrey Simpson, regardless of the companies efforts form this point onward, the fight is over.  Even though the National Energy Board hearings and last-ditch efforts will be continue, it just simply isn’t going to happen.

   The project would have supposedly created 300 new jobs, 560 of which would be long-term employment, and bring in $318 million in local goods and services to the coast of British Columbia.  It sounds nice, I know, but the risk involved and the other side of the issue are also convincing, as displayed by the loud protesters of the project.  Will this outcome be a missed opportunity for the West-Coast market?  Would the environmental risks have been worth it?  Or would there have been another ‘technical failure‘?  I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I value our beautiful BC setting greatly and any threat avoided can be seen in a positive light.

The United States Government has, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, progressively ramped up security measures at borders and airports across the nation.  Some 250 “high-powered, ultra-revealing and potentially dangerous backscatter x-ray machines,” have been implemented at stations that scan the human body, and it has perked the ears of more than a few private-sector experts. 

The testing for these “safe” machines is done by in-house and government professionals – who perhaps are not the most impartial of people.  Dr. Russell Blaylock, M.D., a board certified neurosurgeon, with reference to several other medical doctors, states that in order to fully prove these machines safety, they must be subject to a panel of third-party experts – something that the government has no intention of doing.  In letters written by experts, it is said that “[the radiation] would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, [but] the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.”

The greatest issue in regards to ethics that comes out of this story is that in some cases, according to allgov.com, “[the government is] sometimes using them on people without their knowledge or consent.”  When it comes to potentially harming innocent people without their approval, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has crossed a serious line, especially for a government business.

Full Article @: http://www.naturalnews.com/037181_body_scanners_radiation_health_risks.html