In Brief – November 2017
A Silicon Valley CEO, Eileen Carey, who runs a software company and is a blonde, said she dyed her hair, wore loose-fitting clothes and switched her contact lenses for glasses “to look older and be taken seriously” in the workplace. She told BBC News she first dyed her hair on advice “given by a woman in a venture capital”, who said that brunette women CEOs would be taken more seriously by investors. Many women said on Twitter that this kind of pressure is “nothing new”.
When dairy giant Amul tweeted a business proposition to Indian Railways that said: “@RailMinIndia, Amul is interested in using refrigerated parcel vans to transport Amul Butter across India. Request to please advise”, the Indian Railways quickly responded with the tweet, “IR will be utterly butterly delighted to get the taste of India to every Indian”. The reply, using the dairy brand’s tagline, was greatly enjoyed by the twitterati. The refrigerator van was introduced by the Railways a few years ago to transport perishable goods. The senior divisional manager of Ahmedabad Division will meet Amul’s authorities for further discussion.
With the ambient levels of air pollution on the rise, Dhruv Suri, an aeronautical engineering student of the Manipal Institute of Technology, along with batchmates Rahil Nayak and Priyanshi Somani, have conceived a billboard that incorporates an air purifier. The GreenBoard looks like any other billboard but has an internal purification system that draws air in through a large fan, absorbs the carbon dioxide in the air and gives out clean air. The trapped CO2 is pressurised and turned into pellets to be eventually used in greenhouses that use the gas. A 15×21 feet billboard will cost about Rs 10 lakh and the air purifier can be customised to fit billboards of any size.
A letter written by Alexander Oskar Holverson, a passenger aboard the Titanic, was sold for $166,000 at an auction in England. Holverson, who was on the doomed liner, had penned the letter on embossed Titanic ‘on-board’ paper to his mother, describing his impressions of the ship, the food and music and rubbing shoulders with celebrities. He had mentioned in the letter about the American financier John Jacob Astor, one of the world’s richest men at that time. “If all goes well we will arrive in New York Wednesday A M,” said the letter dated April 13, 1912, a day before the ship’s fateful encounter with an iceberg.
Singapore will stop adding new cars and motorcycles to its roads from February 2018 owing to limited land area. With more than 600,000 cars plying on its roads, the government has been gradually reducing the vehicle growth rate from 0.25 per cent a year to zero per cent. This policy will be reviewed in 2020. With 12 per cent of the total land area taken up by roads, Singapore tightly controls its vehicle population, mandating car owners to buy permits, called Certificate of Entitlement, to own a car for ten years. However, the city-state is investing heavily on improving its public transport system.
