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Yesterday, I joined eleven Champions of Change at the White House to honor their achievements toward making science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) industries more inclusive for underrepresented communities.

The Champions of Change are an amazing group of ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things. They are sparking imaginations, and captivating young minds, all across the country.

From teaching computer science to high school students, to encouraging young women, and urban teens to code, to writing children’s books, to providing low-income students with programming classes—they are doing phenomenal work for our country’s youth, and their futures.

President Obama cares deeply about making sure that our young people have the opportunity to dream big. Whatever their background, our children deserve the chance to reach for the sky, pursue whatever they put their minds to, and live up to their fullest potential—including working in STEM.

I saw this potential firsthand in April, when I had the opportunity to visit the White House Science Fair. What an experience that was—I visited several of the 30 exhibits, and spoke with students about their projects—they were so excited to be in the White House, and I learned a lot too.

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You’ve been told that getting the most from your team depends on rewarding and recognizing them collectively. But it’s tough to do that, especially when most management systems are so focused on individual performance, undermining the very teamwork you’re hoping to encourage. Luckily, you don’t have to overhaul your company’s evaluation process or pay structure. As a team manager, you can support the right behaviors with things that are in your control.

What Experts Say
A few decades ago, companies were struggling with how to measure and reward individual performance. But in their quest do so, many overreached, says Michael Mankins, a partner at Bain & Company and coauthor of Decide and Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization. “The pendulum has swung too far, and now those measures are getting in the way of forming good teams,” he explains. At the same time, compensating people for collaboration can be tricky, says Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and coauthor of X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed. “The boundaries are often blurry and people work on multiple teams at the same time, making it hard for the manager.” Still, both she and Mankins agree, it’s worth the effort to get it right. “Rewarding a team dramatically improves not only the team performance but also the individual’s experience,” says Mankins. Here’s how to do it effectively.

Set clear objectives
Team members have to understand and agree on what success looks like. “You need to have some way of assessing the group’s performance — a common set of objectives or aspirations,” says Mankins. He advises bringing everyone together to discuss goals and metrics. Have them answer the question: What would it take for us to give ourselves an A? “Having this sort of dialogue can be motivational and lays the groundwork for collaboration in an objective way,” he says.

Check in on progress
Once the team knows what it’s supposed to do and how the work will be evaluated, check in regularly. Pose questions that help the group assess its progress: How are we performing as a team? What obstacles can we remove? You can have this conversation in a meeting or do it anonymously. “Use a service like SurveyMonkey and ask team members to give themselves a collective grade. If everybody agrees that it has been a C week for the team, then you can discuss how to improve,” Mankins says. “If you give yourselves an A, it’s something worth celebrating.”

Use the full arsenal of rewards
Most managers don’t have the power to change how salaries or bonuses are handled at their organizations. If you do, be sure to tie a portion of the discretionary compensation to team or unit performance — the bigger the percentage the better. But if you don’t control the purse strings, don’t fret. There are lots of non-monetary rewards at your disposal. “Think beyond team dinners and social events. Those are just table stakes,” says Mankins. Ancona has studied hospitals where administrators put pictures of groups that have drastically lowered infection rates on prominent display to recognize them for a job well done. You can also give your team exposure to senior leaders. “Teams like to be seen as part of a project that contributes at a high level,” Ancona says.

Get to know your team
Of course rewards are only motivating if you give the team something it wants. This can be challenging because what makes one person feel appreciated may have no effect on another. Spend the time to get to know your team members and look for things they all value. If you’re at a loss, ask them for input.

Focus discussions on collective efforts
Ancona says that many companies include teamwork as a core competency in their leadership development models. As a manager, you can further encourage your people to collaborate by talking about them as a team, not as a set of individuals. Be sure to celebrate successes and discuss setbacks collectively. “The less you talk about individual contribution the better,” says Mankins. Instead, praise the behaviors that contribute to the team’s overall success such as chipping in on others’ projects and giving candid peer feedback.

Evaluate team performance
In addition to completing individual performance reviews, consider conducting a team review as well. Mankins says that companies like Apple and Google have made this part of their formal processes, but you can do it on your own too. Every six months or so, take a close look at the group’s progress, noting its accomplishments, where it has succeeded, and how it can further develop. Don’t mention individuals in this appraisal but focus on what the team has done — and can do — together.

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Agree on what success looks like
• Bring the group together to discuss progress against goals and how to improve
• Consider doing a formal evaluation of the team

Don’t:

• Only think of rewards as money — there are lots of non-monetary perks that people appreciate
• Focus on individual performance — emphasize the team’s accomplishments
• Reward your team with something they don’t collectively value

Case study#1: Set a team purpose and measure against it
To help launch PfizerWorks, a productivity initiative that allows employees to outsource boring parts of their jobs, Jordan Cohen put together a small team including his two direct reports, Tanya and Seth, and started by devising a collective purpose. Following the advice of David Collis and Michael Rukstad in “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?” the group worked together to come up with a strategy statement of no more than 35 words. “These were the words we were going to live by and we struggled over every clause,” he says. Next, they developed metrics tied directly to their strategy. “We had measures for inputs, outputs, and customer satisfaction, all of which we agreed to,” he says. Meeting those goals was a reward in itself because team members could see how their actions contributed. “It was a source of great pride. It made them feel like they could win everyday,” he says.

Jordan also found ways to make sure his team members were publicly recognized for their work. When PfizerWorks launched, he stopped going to meetings with senior leaders and let Tanya and Seth handle them instead. They became the face of the program. At a meeting with Gary Hamel, just before the famed management thinker was about to give a speech referencing PfizerWorks at the World Business Forum, Jordan asked if he’d be willing to mention the team by name. He did, leaving Tanya and Seth “somewhere between paralyzed and over the moon.”

Case study #2: Let them improve their skills
When Christopher Lind worked at a software company, he led a team of eight people who were responsible for training the company’s sales force. Most of them had been with the company for a while, but many didn’t have formal skills in instructional technology and design. Still, “I was fortunate that everyone on the team had a strong desire to learn,” Christopher says. “They wanted to grow their skillset and familiarize themselves with new technology.”

The team made great progress, exceeding every goal Christopher set and then asking for new ones, so when it came time to reward them as a group, more advanced training seemed to be an obvious choice. He purchased a multi-license agreement to instructional design software. “I had spent enough time with my team to know they were eager to expand their experience and technical abilities,” he explains. “I knew it could lead to them moving on to more senior jobs,” he says. But “I ultimately decided that providing them with a valuable development opportunity outweighed that risk.” In fact, he hoped it would give them a reason to stay. And he was right. Several team members told him that his investment, of both money and time, made them feel valued. It also gave the team something extra to work on together.

Reinventing corporate IT requires recognizing deep differences between what we have today and what we need in the future. These differences go to the foundation of the modern corporate IT department — the infrastructure — which includes the software, hardware, communications, facilities, data centers, operations, and other technical resources a corporation operates. This infrastructure sits on top of a publicly available substructure of assets and resources — telecommunications and the Internet, for example. Infrastructure and substructure support the information, processes, applications, rules, and channels that are the face of corporate IT.

Infrastructure largely determines the IT organization’s structure, its budgeting, how the corporation goes to market, its legacy, and its capacity to change. It embodies the long tail realities of major business and technology decisions, resulting in an IT department struggling to manage multiple costly and incompatible infrastructures.

The days of seeking a single, one-size-fits-all, one-price-feeds-all IT department are numbered. Infrastructures are under assault technically, functionally, and financially. New digital technologies like mobile, big data, analytics, cloud, social, and sensors represent fundamentally different types of solutions than the proprietary transaction technologies such as Enterprise Resource Planning. Consider:

• Standards-based (rather than proprietary) technologies in mobility, Internet protocols and open API’s demand shorter application and infrastructure development cycle times. Standards reduce not only the amount of technology but also the risk associated with bringing new and legacy technologies together.
• Functionally, digital technologies are front-office, customer-facing, and demand-generating. They’re the business’s brand. Digital demands move at the pace of the market, competition, and customer expectations rather than the upgrade cycles of IT vendors.
• Financially, infrastructure is simply too expensive and consumes too much in its present form. CIOs need to provide infrastructure at a lower cost and with more agile capability. Even current cloud and virtualization technologies, which often lower unit costs, don’t change the drivers and structures of those costs. It is only a matter of time before growing digital transaction volumes overwhelm these technologies in their current form.

Increasing needs for speed, creativity, low cost, and flexibility demand that we move beyond infrastructure to platforms. A platform is the collection and integration of common resources that support multiple business operations. Financial services companies have platforms that allow them to release new products without having to replace their infrastructures. Facebook, Google, and other digital companies invest in similar capabilities giving them a seemingly endless stream of innovations and experiments from a single platform.

“Plures ex uno” — or many out of one — is the goal of a digital platform. Note this is the opposite of the motto of the United States — “e pluribus unum” or one out of many. The comparison is apt as corporate infrastructure is federated in nature with limited viability in the digital future.

A platform is more than service-oriented architecture on steroids. Platforms look at technology with a business view organizing around specific business actions like one-click sales, search, description presentation, and pricing. These common actions treat information rather than business logic or code as the source of specialization. This enables platform companies to add new features and functions once that are available to all or just a part of their customers giving them the flexibility and adaptability required in modern business.

Platforms reflect the heterogeneity of digital technology, allowing each part to change without disturbing the peace across all components. Platforms are critical for a world of consumer-driven technology, multi-vendor competition, and standards wars fought in the marketplace rather than the lab.

Platforms fit the economics of digital business. They provide a means to gain scale efficiencies from across the enterprise rather than trying to drive them across individual infrastructures. This is essential in a world where IT transaction volumes grow faster than business purchases. Consider online banking where many transactions are free of charge but have a real cost to the bank. Platforms provide a way to drive down transaction costs and preserve company margins.

Platforms require more than stitching together existing infrastructures. More interfaces, more integration and more condition-specific logic may be an interim step, but it only adds cost, complexity and core rigidity in the corporation.

Achieving the functional and financial benefits of a platform involve going back to basics of business — not transactions. Yes, the devil is in the details. And yes, we have tried service-oriented architecture and virtualization before with mixed results. Reinventing corporate IT requires more than changing the role of CIOs and IT in a digital age. Reinvention at scale must extend down into the fundamental drivers of IT cost, quality of service, and future flexibility. That starts with reinventing the foundation of IT and abandoning the infrastructure model.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center

• The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google
• Today’s CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
• The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms
• Are We Asking Too Much of Our CIOs?

As we implement the Affordable Care Act, we continue listening to the needs of the business community. Based on our many conversations with leaders of our nation’s businesses, large and small, today we are launching Business.USA.gov/healthcare, a one-stop-shop where employers of all sizes can go for information on the Affordable Care Act.

The new site includes a web-based tool that allows employers to get tailored information on how the health law may affect them based on their business’ size, location, and plans for offering health benefits to their workers next year. From tax credits for small businesses to help make coverage affordable, to measures to help slow the growth of health care costs, there are a variety of ways that the Affordable Care Act can help businesses expand health care coverage and compete.

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One of the very bad things about the Great Recession is that those who were not doing well already got hurt the worst, and that also seems to be the case for the economic recovery. Hiring has picked up, but not for the long-term unemployed, those out of work for more than more than 26 weeks. We’ll get a new look at the data when July jobs numbers are released Friday.

The revelation last year that many job requirements for open positions mandated that candidates already be employed seemed a bit like a joke, but the evidence that employers screened out unemployed applicants was so widespread that the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission began investigating it.

A couple of interesting studies examined the extent of discrimination against the unemployed. These studies are unusual in that they involved real efforts to find real jobs. One created 3,000 pretend candidates and sent their resumes to a random sample of job openings. They varied one item among otherwise identical applications: whether the individual was currently unemployed and, if so, how long they had been unemployed.

Only about 4.5% got callbacks, which suggests that the typical unemployed applicant has to apply to a little more than 20 jobs to just get a positive response from an employer indicating that they are still being considered for the job.

Surprisingly, the call-back rate was slightly higher for those who had just been laid off than for those who currently had a job. What happens after you are unemployed for more than a month? At that point, the probability of getting any positive response from employers falls sharply and declines further with each month, hitting a plateau after about eight months. A person with an otherwise identical set of skills and experiences is about half as likely to get a positive response from employers after eight months of unemployment as compared to a person just being laid off.

The other study (PDF) is similar, with an important twist. They compared applicants on two dimensions: How long they were unemployed and whether they had relevant job experience. This study also found a sharp drop-off in employer interest for candidates with around six months of unemployment, but it also found that recently unemployed candidates with no relevant experience for the position were more likely to get employer interest than were those with relevant experience who were unemployed for six months or more.

What’s going on here? At least at present — and perhaps because of the depth of the recession — there doesn’t seem to be much stigma associated with being unemployed per se. But there is a really big reluctance to hire those who have been unemployed for a while. It’s so big that it trumps the concern about having the relevant skills, which news reports constantly suggest is the big challenge employers face.

Here’s the point: Hiring managers are only human. They don’t have much support in doing their jobs. If you think hiring decisions are based on careful evidence about what attributes make the best hires, think again. Few employers have the time or resources to do any studies of what predicts a good hire, let alone looking at the specific evidence concerning prior unemployment. There is no evidence that I have seen anywhere suggesting that the long-term unemployed make worse candidates.

Hiring managers are going with their gut feel or what they think are “sensible” ideas about what makes a good candidate when the resist hiring the long-term unemployed. We know that going with your gut in hiring decisions means going with all kinds of unstated and in many cases unconscious prejudices. That’s what kept women and minorities out of many jobs and now keeps older workers out of them as well. How about these sensible ideas? “If they were good, someone else would have hired them” — not when other employers think like you do and when there are so few jobs to go around. “Their skills are rusty” — one doesn’t forget how to do a job in six months, and all new hires require some time to learn how your operation works.

What we do know about job candidates who are long-term unemployed, which is related to job success, is that they are persistent. Millions of other unemployed facing this job market gave up looking and dropped out of the labor force. We also know that they will likely be very grateful to have a job, and gratitude is associated with many aspects of good job performance. They are also likely to be cheaper and easier to hire because you don’t have to woo them away from their current employer.

The way to get hiring of the long-term unemployed started is to recognize that there is no objective case in this economy for not considering a candidate who has been out of work for a while. Therefore, excluding them out of hand is a form of prejudice. The people at the top of organizations need to point out that excluding such candidates is likely costing us money because we are ignoring potential good hires, just as it costs us money to exclude women, minorities, older individuals, and anyone else who has the potential to do the job.

It’s the right thing to do in terms of our social impact, it’s the right thing to do to make our organization inclusive and looking like our society, and it’s also the financially sensible thing to do.

America has always been a nation of immigrants, and throughout the nation’s history, immigrants from around the globe have kept our workforce vibrant, our businesses on the cutting edge, and helped to build the greatest economic engine in the world. But our nation’s immigration system is broken and has not kept pace with changing times. Today, too many employers game the system by hiring undocumented workers and there are 11 million people living and working in the shadow economy. Neither is good for the U.S. economy or American  families.

Commonsense immigration reform will strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs. Independent studies affirm that commonsense immigration reform will increase economic growth by adding more high-demand workers to the labor force, increasing capital investment and overall productivity, and leading to greater numbers of entrepreneurs starting companies in the U.S.

Economists, business leaders, and American workers agree –  and it’s why a bipartisan, diverse coalition of stakeholders have come together to urge Congress to act now to fix the broken immigration system in a way that requires responsibility from everyone —both from unauthorized workers and from those who hire them—and guarantees that everyone is playing by the same rules. The Senate recently passed a bipartisan, commonsense immigration reform bill would do just that – and it’s time for the House of Representations to join them in taking action to make sure that commonsense immigration reform becomes a reality as soon as possible.

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This January, we met Shantha Ragunathan, an illiterate woman from Kodapattinam, a remote village in Tamil Nadu, India. Her story is at once heartbreaking and inspiring, showing that game changers can come from all walks of life, all over the world.

At six, Shantha lost her parents. By her twenties, she was stuck in a seemingly dark pit without a glimmer of hope: with two children and little financial support from her husband, she could not afford even one square meal a day. Although she was poor in resources, she possessed the innovation mindset shared by many game changers: they see and act on opportunities, use “and” thinking to resolve tough dilemmas and break through compromises, and employ their resourcefulness to power through obstacles. Innovators maintain a laser focus on outcomes, avoid getting caught in the activity trap, and proactively “expand the pie” to make an impact. Regardless of where they start, innovators persist till they successfully change the game.

Hopeless as her situation was, Shantha engaged in “and” thinking. She imagined a future when her family would be out of poverty AND her kids would start their adult life educated. Unimaginable as it may seem, she had no real-life role models in her village for this dream. Some of her neighbors had given up all hope and fallen into alcoholism; others exploited their kids with child labor to earn money; still others sacrificed their entire lives in an attempt to get their children out of the vicious circle of poverty—with few successes, despite their sacrifices and heroic efforts.

Shantha’s “and” thinking powered her dream and kept her alert to opportunities. When Ms. Sasikala, a Block Development Officer (BDO), talked to the Kodapattinam villagers about microfinance, only Shantha, of all the villagers, saw the opportunity and took action.

To participate in a microfinance campaign, the village had to form a Self Help Group (SHG) of about 20 people, with each member contributing a certain amount of money every month. To keep the math simple, let’s say $10 (although in this case the currency was Indian rupees): 20 people x $10 each = $200. The bank (in this case Indian Bank) would then loan a matching amount, bringing the available funds to $400. Any member of the SHG, either individually or as a team, could pitch a proposal to use the available funds to a microfinancing committee of bank officials and village elders.

For example, a member could propose to use the money to buy an income-producing asset, such as a cow. Selling the cow’s milk would create an income stream, a portion of which would repay the loan; the remainder would lift the cow-owning entrepreneur out of poverty. The microfinancing committee decided which proposal to fund each month, giving out $400 month for approved proposals: $200 from the SHG contributors and $200 in matching loans from the bank.

While most folks who heard the Block Development Officer’s presentation thought that microfinance was too much work and gave up, or froze into inaction not knowing what to do, Shantha’s resourcefulness kicked into high gear. She went door to door, pleading and pitching. In her own words, “I had to go back over 50 times knocking on the same door because they wouldn’t trust me enough to even give ten rupees [about 20 cents]. I talked to them about how we can work together to solve our problems.” Undeterred, Shantha persisted until she persuaded the required number of people to sign up for the microfinance project.

Shantha formed the SHG and went to the bank, assuring the loan officers that her SHG would start fruitful businesses, like buying cows and selling milk, with the loaned money. She was awarded the bank’s matching micro-credit loan. Then Shantha made her pitch to the microfinancing committee, describing how, with traditional bank loans, they would borrow at very high interest rates and get stuck in a poverty cycle, barely making enough money to repay the interest. The committee, moved by her courage and business acumen, approved her funding.

Shantha was driven, focusing on outcomes. She started with one cow, and with the income from the cow’s milk she repaid the loan and also bought more income-producing assets: sheep, goats, small corner stores, sewing machines, and audio systems rented out for village events. Over a 14-year period, Shantha converted that first, tiny microfinance loan to wealth, including her own house and a college-level education for both of her children. (Her daughter is now a teacher and her son an engineer.) She was so successful that she was appointed by the BDO as a mentor and a consultant to rehabilitate unsuccessful SHGs.

Although she had no formal education, Shantha had strong business acumen and innate leadership qualities. When asked how she learned to manage a business, she said, “I watched the shops in my village. I noticed that those that had sales revenues more than their costs, succeeded. Those that had costs more than their sales revenues, failed. I knew I wanted to succeed. So I made sure revenues exceeded costs.” She trained six other villagers to lead the SHG in her absence—clearly understanding the importance of building a leadership pipeline, without the benefit of an MBA education.

Shantha expanded the pie. She helped other villagers form SHGs and found ways for SHGs to grow. For example, when she heard that a tissue manufacturer was having productivity problems because of constant power cuts, she convinced the company to invest in an SHG that manually assembled the tissue boxes. This resulted in jobs for many villagers as well as cost savings for the company: the tissue boxes were assembled for far lower cost than the machines, but at the same quality.

Shantha Ragunathan is truly a game changer. Shantha’s success spread in a ripple effect from her family and her village to dozens of neighboring villages, ultimately affecting thousands of individuals. From the edge of society, unable to be a consumer, she got “into the game” by acquiring wealth. She brought along with her thousands of people, who also became active participants in the game. Even more important, by serving as a role model, she created the foundation for many more such leaders and game changers to emerge.

We can all make a difference in areas in which we are “poor.” Shantha was poor in money, but others of us are poor in business, health, relationships, career, respect, relationships, or time. We can lift ourselves out of this poverty the way Shantha Ragunathan did: by applying the innovation mindset and changing the game.

Prepublication Now Available

The past several decades have been a time of rapid globalization in the development, manufacture, marketing, and distribution of medical products and technologies. Increasingly, research on the safety and effectiveness of new drugs is being conducted in countries with little experience in regulation of medical product development. Demand has been increasing for globally harmonized, science-based standards for the development and evaluation of the safety, quality, and efficacy of medical products. Consistency of such standards could improve the efficiency and clarity of the drug development and evaluation process and, ultimately, promote and enhance product quality and the public health.

To explore the need and prospects for greater international regulatory harmonization for drug development, the IOM Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation hosted a workshop on February 13-14, 2013. Discussions at the workshop helped identify principles, potential approaches, and strategies to advance the development or evolution of more harmonized regulatory standards. This document summarizes the workshop.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

Ride-sharing services such as Lyft ask for “donations” that run about 20% less than cab fares in Los Angeles, says The New York Times. The services, which have ignored city regulators’ orders to shut down, appeal to younger riders as a cheaper and more fun way to get around. Cab companies point out that ride-share services can charge less because their cars don’t have to be accessible to the disabled or include safety partitions protecting drivers from riders.

Lioness at dawn, Ruaha. Picture: Ian Attfield/DFID

Returning from a couple of wet and windy June weeks on holiday in the UK was actually quite a relief from the heat of Dar Es Salaam, but now Tanzania in mid winter is unusually a degree or two colder than the current British heatwave. It’s the best time to travel being both cooler and drier, I took my children to Ruaha National Park, down the never ending 100km dirt road and was totally taken aback by the sheer size and beauty of Africa. Ruaha is relatively quiet and certainly unspoilt, we managed a great couple of days spotting lions in the long grass and elephants cooling in pools along the sandy river bed.

Driving back, a distance equivalent of Edinburgh to London, one realises the sheer challenges Tanzania is facing to provide services to it’s rapidly growing population. In the early morning children as young as 5 trudge along the side of roads in the loneliest locations. James Stone (Plan International) graphically illustrates the challenges faced by one little girl who walks over an hour and a half a day to get an education, braving traffic and predators, both human and wild.

Picture: Village Voices 2008

Returning to Dar I thought it important that my children understand more about the vast interior of Tanzania and the people who often live in such difficult circumstances.  The Village Voices documentary films made by Laurance Price make ideal, if at times uncomfortable, viewing. They chronicle over 5 years the lives of remote villagers from the Lindi coast to the Northern plains and give a detailed insight into the cycles of grinding poverty and simple wishes for just a slightly better life. Teenagers lament their lost opportunities to go to secondary school for the want of $50 school fees due to a lost harvest.

Thankfully since these films were made in the middle of the 2000s, secondary enrollment has tripled and now over a million extra teenagers attend Forms I-IV, partly due to budget support funding pumped in from UKAID and other donor partners. However the majority still drop out young and as I’ve chronicled recently a crisis of demotivated teachers and inadequate schools means that for many, secondary school is a frustrating, unrewarding experience.

Boy ploughing. Picture: Village Voices

Supporting education in Tanzania involved some difficult choices in the coming years, how to improve quality and make complex systemic reforms whilst extending the school network for both remote villagers and the marginalised in more prosperous areas?

Some of the most rewarding work I ever did over a decade ago in Ethiopia was to make maps of the mountainous North, that were used to select sites and reduce walk time to new school locations. The Tanzanian government’s Big Results Now! Initiative has also established a geographic interface to show district exam pass rate changes graphically. This is being extended with individual school locations and data to drive transparency and accountability, with improving schools being rewarded with additional grants and funding. Whilst the technology has moved on and the internet has come of age, Tanzania is poised to benefit from this approach to improve its network and reduce journey times for young learners. I hope meaningful learning opportunities will reward those who conquer the long and dusty roads.

primary exam pass rates map. Graphic NECTA

North Carolina does not produce oil and natural gas, even though there are potential offshore natural gas plays and the potential for onshore shale gas plays. Instead of producing some of its own energy resources, North Carolina imports oil …

Today in the East Room, President Obama honored the 2013 NCAA Division I women's basketball champion UConn Huskies as a part of his commitment to celebrate sports teams that inspire their communities on and off the court.

The trip was a familiar one for the Huskies, who won the tournament and visits to the White House in 2009 and 2010. President Obama joked that eight-time NCAA champion UConn Coach Geno Auriemma "spent more time than some Presidents in the White House."

While the Huskies have a new trophy to tout, President Obama called attention to their positive impact on those around them.

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It’s that time of the week again, time for BlackBerry World Wednesday; and in this part of the world, summer is in full swing! I don’t know about you, but my weekend planning always starts on Wednesdays with a little mid-week daydreaming. And with summer weekends coming to an end, the heat is on to fill them all with summer adventures. BlackBerry World to the rescue! This handy list of sizzlin’ summer apps and games is the lifeguard you need to save your remaining summer weekends.

For easy browsing, the full list of apps is below, but for the real adventurer, exploring BlackBerry World is the only way to go.

Apps for BlackBerry Z10:

Photography:

• 360 Panorama (by Occipital, Inc.)

Apps for BlackBerry Z10 & BlackBerry Q10:

Books:

• Kindle for BlackBerry10 (by Amazon Services, LLC)

Movies and Events:

• Flixster (by Flixster Inc.)
• StubHub (by StubHub)

Games:

• Beach Buggy Blitz (by Vector Unit)
• Frisbee Forever (by Unity Games)
• Plants vs. Zombies for BlackBerry 10 (by Electronic Arts, Inc.)
• Super Stickman Golf (by Noodlecake Studios Inc.)

Music:

• SoundHound (by SoundHound Inc.)
• Songza (by Songza Media, Inc.)

Sports:

• Endomondo Sports Tracker (by Endomondo)
• MLB.com At Bat 13 (by MLB Advanced Media, LP)
• PGA Tour (by PGA Tour)

Travel:

• BlackBerry Travel for BlackBerry 10 (by Research In Motion Ltd.)
• GasBuddy–Find Cheap Gas Prices (by GasBuddy Organization Inc.)

Weather:

• AccuWeather for BlackBerry (by AccuWeather International)

With these apps and games, nothing can stand in your way. Get ready for the perfect summer.

Yesterday, President Obama visited the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee to discuss his plan to create jobs and grow the economy from the middle out, not the top down. Just before speaking to a crowd of Amazon employees, the President sat down for a "Kindle Singles Interview," a new long-form interview series for Amazon's e-reader.

During the conversation with Kindle Singles editor David Blum, the President explained how his past has informed his policies as President, and discussed his plans to spur growth for middle-class families and create more ladders of opportunity. You can download the interview now at www.amazon.com/kindlesingles. 

The Kindle Singles Interview with President Obama is available on Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and phones, Windows Phone, Blackberry, PC and Mac. Get the reading apps at www.amazon.com/kindleapps.

Two researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been selected for the rank of Fellow in the American Chemical Society.

Sam Bryan and Dave Koppenaal join the 2013 class of Fellows being recognized by ACS for “outstanding achievements in and contributions to science and the profession of chemistry.”

Sam Bryan

Bryan is an internationally recognized expert on environmental contamination monitoring processes and controls. His research focuses on the development of methods to identify radioactive and non-radioactive components in flowing liquids, resulting in the development of new sensors as well as the adaptation of existing technologies for use in monitoring highly radioactive environments, such as waste storage tanks on the Hanford Site in Washington state. Additionally, he has been recognized for significant educational outreach and is active in developing technical programs for ACS meetings.

Bryan has twice won the ACS ChemLuminary Award that recognizes members’ efforts to promote chemistry and the chemical sciences in local areas. He earned a doctorate and a master’s degree in inorganic chemistry from Washington State University in Pullman, and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Boise State University.

Dave Koppenaal

Koppenaal is a PNNL Laboratory Fellow and the chief technology officer for EMSL, DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory located at PNNL. He is responsible for directing the development and scientific application of new, transformational instruments and tools for EMSL. His research has focused on low-level, ultra-trace detection and analysis of metals and radionuclides for environmental or nonproliferation purposes. He is also active in the new field of metallomics, which details the collective role and function of metal and metalloid species in biological systems.

Koppenaal has been active in ACS and is completing a four-year rotation on the Executive Council of the Analytical Division of the organization. He was chair of the division in 2012 and is currently completing his role as past chair. Koppenaal also holds the rank of Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Missouri and bachelor’s degrees in both environmental chemistry and mathematics from Southwest Missouri State University — now Missouri State University.

The 2013 ACS Fellows will be honored at a special ceremony during the ACS National Meeting in Indianapolis in September.

Prepublication Now Available

The Standing Committee on Defense Materials Manufacturing and Infrastructure (the DMMI standing committee) of the National Materials and Manufacturing Board of the National Research Council (NRC) held a workshop on December 5 and 6, 2012, to discuss new and novel processes in industrial modernization. The participants of the workshop provided their individual opinions but no recommendations were developed as a result of the workshop. The workshop focused on Additive manufacturing, electromagnetic field manipulation of materials, and design of materials.

Additive manufacturing is the process of making three-dimensional objects from a digital description or file. The workshop addresses different aspects of additive manufacturing including surface finish and access to manufacturing capabilities and resources. Electromagnetic field manipulation of materials is the use of electric and/or magnetic fields to change the mechanical or functional properties of a material or for the purposes of sintering. The workshop examined research prioritization in this area as well as other objectives. “Design of materials” refers to the application of computational and analytic methods to materials to obtain a desired material characteristic; the workshop features a discussion on materials genomics in this area and more. Novel Processes for Advanced Manufacture: Summary of a Workshop presents a summarization of the key points of this workshop and includes outlines of the open discussions on each area.

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Topics: Engineering and Technology

Prepublication Now Available

Disasters and public health emergencies can stress health care systems to the breaking point and disrupt delivery of vital medical services. During such crises, hospitals and long-term care facilities may be without power; trained staff, ambulances, medical supplies and beds could be in short supply; and alternate care facilities may need to be used. Planning for these situations is necessary to provide the best possible health care during a crisis and, if needed, equitably allocate scarce resources.

Crisis Standards of Care: A Toolkit for Indicators and Triggers examines indicators and triggers that guide the implementation of crisis standards of care and provides a discussion toolkit to help stakeholders establish indicators and triggers for their own communities. Together, indicators and triggers help guide operational decision making about providing care during public health and medical emergencies and disasters. Indicators and triggers represent the information and actions taken at specific thresholds that guide incident recognition, response, and recovery. This report discusses indicators and triggers for both a slow onset scenario, such as pandemic influenza, and a no-notice scenario, such as an earthquake.

Crisis Standards of Care features discussion toolkits customized to help various stakeholders develop indicators and triggers for their own organizations, agencies, and jurisdictions. The toolkit contains scenarios, key questions, and examples of indicators, triggers, and tactics to help promote discussion. In addition to common elements designed to facilitate integrated planning, the toolkit contains chapters specifically customized for emergency management, public health, emergency medical services, hospital and acute care, and out-of-hospital care.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

Credit to Alden Jewell, Auto Historian for the photo!

Auto technology has come a long way since the Model-T, but in the same way early vehicles required mechanical tune-ups, today’s modern cars—with 30 to 100 computers—need software maintenance and optimization. Using the same technology it uses to keep the software in its smartphones updated, BlackBerry is now working with car manufacturers to update vehicle software via wireless networks, known as over-the-air (OTA) communication.

Auto makers around the world are eager to adopt OTA technology as it can truly transform the vehicle experience—enabling and simplifying the delivery of new, compelling features to their customers long after the initial sale. Software updates can refresh a vehicle with new features and services as they become available, keeping the car up to date with the latest upgrades and capabilities. Drivers will also save time as system updates are delivered seamlessly and securely without the need to schedule maintenance appointments. And vehicle owners are just as enthusiastic. Last year, a Gartner survey revealed that 40 percent of owners would “definitely want to get” or were at least “likely to get” the ability for wireless software updates in a new car.

Read more on the Inside BlackBerry Business Blog