Weekend Digest: The Beam Me Up, Scotty Edition

For our weekend business and political readers:

POPULAR FRANCHISES
Forbes ranks some of the best and worst franchises of 2014 in its annual survey of companies. Franchising has been a popular — and cost-effective — method for people from a variety of income ranges to go into business for themselves, writes Forbes.

   “Franchising has been the savior of free enterprise in this country,” Art Bartlett, the founder of the real estate chain Century 21, once told a reporter. “It has given the small businessman a way to survive.” That’s not as hyperbolic as you might think. For more than 150 years franchising–from the Middle French word franchir, “to free”–has given countless thousands a turnkey chance to become their own bosses.

   There’s no denying its extraordinary impact. This year an estimated 770,000 franchise establishments will employ 8.5 million Americans and create $840 billion in output, according to IHS Global Insight, which prepared a report for the International Franchise Association. That’s 3.5% of the total U.S. GDP.

Which franchises have the best and worst growth potential?  Click here to access.

POWER WOMEN
Another Forbes ranking takes a look at the most powerful and influential women in the world. This year’s list reaches business, media and philanthropy. A regular on the list includes: Oprah Winfrey.

   While still supporting the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, Winfrey has also guided double-digit growth for her OWN network so far this year. Bringing in $77 million in earnings for 2013, Winfrey still owes most of her income to her TV show and Harpo production company.

Who else is on the list and what are their stories that have earned them this unique position?  Click here to find out.

HOW WILL GOOGLE GLASS TAKE OFF?
Harvard Business Review probes the forthcoming potential for Google Glass, the revolutionary technology that 

   When professor Tom Eisenmann first taught his newly released case on Google Glass at Harvard Business School, he asked his students which of three scenarios was most plausible: that Glass would catch on first in the enterprise setting, followed by gradual consumer acceptance; that adoption would be limited to early adopter “digerati” consumers; or that mainstream consumer adoption would happen rapidly.

   Many students voted for the first scenario. They’re not alone.

   Firms like Deloitte have predicted robust consumer demand for smart glasses, with global adoption reaching “tens of millions by 2016 and surpassing 100 million by 2020.” But early reports suggest that professions from medicine to manufacturing are interested while consumers remain wary.

HBR’s article suggests that Google Glass is different, and in many respects, its developers are not for certain exactly what they’ve created. Read more here.

CULTURAL ECOLOGY
Fast Company offers a take on the transformation taking place in American culture, noting that there is a price to be paid for quality. 

   It may seem counterintuitive at a time of information overload, viral media, aggregation, and instant commenting to worry about our cultural supply. But we are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty. A decade ago few would have thought a book with a title like In Defense of Food was necessary. Food, after all, had never been cheaper or more abundant; what could be wrong with the picture? A similar shift of perception needs to happen in the cultural realm. Culture, even if it is immaterial, has material conditions, and free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.

Using the example of sustainability in the agricultural world, writer Astra Taylor argues that culture is an investment and society will get what it pays for if it doesn’t nurture certain efforts. Read more of her take at this link.

THE VA DOCTOR SHORTAGE
Much has been written in the past week regarding the Veterans Administration crisis. Culminated by the resignation of VA director Michael Shenseki on Friday, it’s time to explore what are the roots of the VA problem.

The New York Times examines the doctor shortage and how it complicated the VA crisis:

   Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, a primary care physician, took a job at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Jackson, Miss., in 2008 expecting fulfilling work and a lighter patient load than she had had in private practice.

   What she found was quite different: 13-hour workdays fueled by large patient loads that kept growing as colleagues quit and were not replaced.

   Appalled by what she saw, Dr. Hollenbeck filed a whistle-blower complaint and changed jobs. A subsequent investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs concluded last fall that indeed the Jackson hospital did not have enough primary care doctors, resulting in nurse practitioners’ handling far too many complex cases and in numerous complaints from veterans about delayed care.

Read more of this in-depth report at this link.

BIG MONEY
The Friday cover story for Politico magazine takes a look at Big Money in American politics, with an emphasis on how the Koch Brothers and other groups — from both sides of the political spectrum — have the power to control the election process.

In the wake of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, President Obama spoke candidly to big dollar donors in the Great Northwest. According to Politico:

   Obama, in a previously unreported riff, signaled surrender on one of the fights that had drawn him to politics in the first place: the effort to limit the flow of big money. 

   It was a remarkable concession, one that would have stunned the campaign volunteers who believed so deeply in his promise to change the way politics works. It wasn’t just that he was admitting that his own election prospects would be disproportionately influenced by super-rich donors like those he was addressing. He had already done that 11 days earlier, when he blessed a so-called super PAC collecting million-dollar checks to boost his reelection. 

   What really distinguished his remarks to [Bill] Gates and company from his carefully calibrated official position was the admission that the grassroots, people-powered politics he had long glorified might never again trump the swelling political buying power of the very richest donors.

Read more of this story at this link.

JFK PHOTO BRIGADE
Life magazine pulls together a collection of 37 photos of President John F. Kennedy. If you’re a political buff or a JFK fan, you’ll want to scroll through these archives.

‘CHARTERING’ A NEW COURSE
Ninety percent of New Orleans public school children attend charter schools now. Which begs the question: can traditional public schools compete?

The Washington Post looks at the response to the trend from the nationally prominent Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

   Jindal, who as of this week governs over the nation’s first public-school-free district in this city, stopped shy Thursday of saying the all-charter school approach is right.

   Jindal, who has made charter schools and education reform a centerpiece of his national portfolio and his gubernatorial tenure, said in his speech to the Republican Leadership Conference that he would like for parents to have all choices available — including traditional public schools.

Is this direction accomplishing what the school choice advocates hoped for?  Read more of Jindal’s comments here and read a more in-depth report here on the closure of traditional public schools in the New Orleans school district. 

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY
Remember when Captain Kirk and Spock were beamed from the starship Enterprise to a remote planet?  Dutch scientists have apparently made a breakthrough to bring this science fiction into science reality.

   The future has a way of becoming the past. Men on the moon? Check. Picture phones? Thank you, Skype. But teleportation? Not so much. The idea of breaking yourself down to your constituent molecules, beaming yourself across space and reassembling somewhere else sounds cool, but there are problems. For one, there’s The Fly. For another, it’s monstrously difficult.

   But teleporting information is another matter. And in a new study just published in Science, researchers at the Delft Institute of Technology in The Netherlands have revealed that they’ve done just that —- sort of.

Read more on the subject at this link and feel free to live long and prosper while you’re at it.

BLENDING THE DICTIONARY WITH TECHNOLOGY
Fast Company features a post on how the dictionary has moved into the 21st century thanks to technology and the efforts of a new iPad app.

   In 2007, lexicographer and dictionary editor Erin McKean gave a TED Talk calling dictionaries “the lossiest compression format,” because the English language is too big to be kept in a book and so much is lost. Her vision of mapping the English language to scale — a sort of linguistic genome project — inspired Elevation Partners founder Roger McNamee to fund McKean’s creation of Wordnik, the world’s largest online dictionary.

   Now that dictionary powers Reverb, launched as an iPad app in November and now available for iPhone, which uses a map of the English language to recommend news stories based on connections between words. Instead of relying on friends’ social media timelines, title-based RSS feeds, or recommendations on article pages that are usually part of paid content-sharing arrangements, users are pointed to articles based on topics and areas they’ve already expressed interest in, and led to new topics through text connections.

Read more here on how this project could change the way you surf the Internet at this link.