Our integrated world

According to a study from Brookfield Global Relocation Services, the number of employees on foreign assignment rose in 2011 for the first time since 2006. While expats have long been valued for their skills and global acumen, businesses are also beginning to recognise that expatriates can also bring a fresh perspective from which local employees can learn.

Rennie Sweeney says similarities, differences and funny surprises have been fascinating to learn from. “They always end up affecting our own attitudes towards our work,” she said, adding, “The world is so internationally integrated that we can’t afford to live in a culturally isolated society, and I think that’s a big benefit of expatriates and locals working together.”

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20141015-why-locals-should-embrace-expats

Where is an expat's real home?

According to Pico Iyer, home for those who live abroad, sometimes from birth, is really a work in progress. They have one home associated with their parents, another with their partners, a third connected with the place they are in, a fourth with the place they dream of being in, and many more besides. Their whole life, he says, will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. They constantly add upgrades and improvements and corrections. What comes out is an almost unprecedented blend of cultures.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript?language=en

All I have to do is dream

This Glen Campbell song continues, through the years, to be among my fave list. Hits like "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Wichita Lineman" are immortal.

Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2011.

The Country Music Hall of Fame member  is out with the video for the final song he'll ever record -- "I'm Not Gonna Miss You." It was recorded in 2013 with producer Julian Raymond.
"I'm still here but yet I'm gone/ I don't play guitar or sing my songs," the tune begins as it details his struggles with the disease.

In his own words: "I just take it as it comes, you know. I know that I have a problem with that (forgetfulness), but it doesn't bother me."

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/14/showbiz/glen-campbell-final-song/index.html

Russia's Bob Dylan

Boris Grebenshikov (known in Russia as BG) prefers poetry to protest. He is still one of the most important figures in Russion rock. But recent events in the country have caused the singer a change of heart. As violence broke out in Ukraine in March, Boris Grebenshikov called a film crew to his St Petersburg studio. There, he held an emergency recording session for one of the new songs. “I feel how the shadows become thicker, the river’s on fire, but the bridges are up,” he sings, from behind his dark glasses, in the video he immediately posted for Love in the Time of War.

Window faces the sky, but there’s a dark spell on the house

     Morning is still far away

     That’s alright, we’ll wait.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20141013-meet-the-bob-dylan-of-russia

Female programmers who created modern tech

They may now be forgotten, but decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming. Sadly, now that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know.

So who started it?

Ada Lovelace, also known as the Countess of Lovelace, was born in 1815. She was the daughter of Lord Byron. Lady Byron didn't want her to turn out a romantic poet like her father, so she had her tutored almost exclusively in mathematics. Lovelace, though, saw the poetry in Math.

At 17, she met Charles Babbage who showed her plans for a machine he believed would be able to do complex math calculations. Lovelace envisioned that "a computer can do anything that can be noted logically. Words, pictures and music, not just numbers. She understands how you take an instruction set and load it into the machine, and she even does an example, which is programming Bernoulli numbers, an incredibly complicated sequence of numbers."

Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbage.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/345799830/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

"She just thought there wasn't anything we couldn't do

"We were going around the country living wonderful lives. Not depending on any men. We were earning our own living. Doing what we wanted to do and doing it very well too. Men tried to put us down, but we wouldn't have it and Ivy wouldn't have it," says Joyce Terry, nee Clark, who was a singer in Ivy's band from 1943 to 1946.

Ivy Benson was a gutsy and glamorous woman. Before the idea of girl power became a reality, Ivy and the members of her all-girl band were risking their lives entertaining Allied troops in war-torn Europe, and fighting the battle of the sexes back at home.

We are talking 1939...

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29557015

Iris Halmshaw

This little five-year-old girl is autistic and unable to speak. Her parents did a lot of research on autism and finally decided to try art therapy.  It clicked. The little girl picked up painting techniques astonishingly quickly and could spend two hours at a time, painting in consistent concentration. Her mother says, "From the first painting, she filled the paper with color and it wasn't random -- it was considered and thought out."

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/09/world/the-extraordinary-art-of-autistic-five-year-old-monet/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Greening of a desert

Yi Jiefeng lost her son, Yang Ruizhe, in a traffic accident in Japan in 2000. Yi almost succumbed to grief. Something held her back and she decided to devote her life to living out her son's dream of planting trees in the deserts of Inner Mongolia,

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/10/world/asia/greenlife-yi-jiefang-profile-above-and-beyond/index.html?hpt=hp_c4