Appunti Inglese

For a long time Nike was mostly perceived as a male brand, even it the brand was named after a

goddess, and nally at Nike HQ things started to change. Phil Knights, one of the founders, threw

di erent teams with di erent skills and backgrounds , and so on by each one of them doing what

they know together, the st Nike Goddess store come to life.

The goal was to make “male” clothes more suitable and likeable for women, by changing colors,

even if at rst, teams that designed clothes for male and female weren’t syncroed and it was a

turn o .

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Jackie Thomas thought that women didn’t need to be refered as a gender, because they don’t

need anybody permission. On the other side John Hoke thought that was useful to change

mindset inside the company.

Breaking into a new market

Mario Moretti is the creator of Geox, with a new special membrane that could be used in shoes to

prevent perspiration. Nike, Adidas and Timberland refused to work with him. Now his company

count 350 million $ in sales, and he is aiming for clothes with same materials.

The rewards of failure

People and their opinions can change and so things in companies. If shareholders did agree with

executives getting paid a lot, now they aren’t. And they voted against it, even it polls and purely

mandatory. The thing is that even if the company was failing, CEO’s and executives were still

paying themselves more but once shareholders started complaining that wasn’t possible. They

had to nd a situation as soon as possible or shareholders would’ve found legal ways.

Gas for per VS green imperialism

There’s a huge project called Camisea, with the natural gas from Peru as main source, for the

country and, after decades of negotiation, it seems that they have reached an agreement with the

government. Obviously, US environmentalist (also referred as “greens”) are trying to defend the

natural environment of Peru.

The project is divided into 2 parts, one that builds “an upstream” importer of petrol from Argentina

and the other one that builds “a downstream” pipeline around the cost, extending for over 700km.

Greens think that this huge problems causes a threat to natural environment and also tribes living

in the Amazon and they hardly care about Peru returning to its exporter status rather than a

importer one.

Camisea’s defenders claim that this project could be useful to bring new, cheaper and clean

energy for the country. Even if greens from US are speaking up about this problem, Peruvians

think that it should be their battle to ght and decide by themself the best use of these resources.

Money can buy you love

Brands faces numerous accusations, they are so powerful, they force us to look alike, eat alike

and be alike, forcing people to conform and limit choices.

(This perspective is articulated in a book entitled “No Logo”, despite the prevalence of powerful

brands and marketing theories).

Historically, building a brand was simpler, a logo was a symbol of quality. It was easy for Coca-

Cola, Kodak or Marlboro to become hugely powerful, because the competition was limited.

Consumers are now bombarded with choices, have more media to choose from.

The old marketing’s rules focused on the product and where to sell it, the newest marketing

approach is to develop a brand, not a product, and to sell a lifestyle or personality.

Saying ‘I do’ to the marketers

In the USA, honeymooners often receives a gift bag named ‘newly wed kit’. Many companies use

this new way to reach consumers. Marketers say that certain moments in life make people

vulnerable to marketing o ers.

One study shows that 70% of women wear the same perfume they wore when they got married,

and a Bride’s magazine study shows that after three years of marriage women were still

costumers of the same store they had shopped before the wedding.

On the other hand, some women start to buy in a new shop right before the wedding and they

buy there even after the event.

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The New Global Shift

The Bank of America has faced a problem called downsizing, since 15 engineering team have

been slashed out, telling that their work was redundant. These layo aren’t happening just

because the demand has dried o , but also moved to India, where the payo is 5 times higher

than America.

Its called the next phase of globalization, if twenty years ago companies moved their factories in

developing countries, now they’re doing it again with the administration part since any knowledge

work can be done almost everywhere, and its all due to the digitization and, above all, Internet.

Now it’s hard to tell if this new phase is going to have the same impact as the previous one, since

it just begun. But for sure, many states are already creating laws to stop the exportation of public

jobs.

Imitating property is theft

Counterfeiters are expanding their range of products. Once, they used only to copy ash-cards

and DVDs, nowadays they even reached food and mobile phones. Counterfeit products has

reached a precise level of succeed where its almost impossible to deceive the di erence between

real product and fake ones.

Counterfeiters now have also access to original products, due to ex workers of certain companies

handling them master disks to copy, without, obviously, the permission from the other side.

Of course, this event is causing brands to lose values and even customers, but thanks to the

internet, now it’s possible to recognize di erences and make the right choice. Also, companies

started to put anti-counterfeiters features in their products, to help them track their original

products to copied ones.

Of celebrities, charity and trade

In Uganda, women grow owers for export to Europe. Growing owers is hard work, but no more

than farming, which is the alternative. There’s some bene ts, for European that get roses in winter

and Ugandan rose growers eat better and put their children through school. All this allows poorer

countries to improve their economies. There are charities aiming to encourage governments to

support Africa must engage voters. The success of the “Jubilee 2000” campaign, which utilised

celebrities to draw attention to the problem, and they got 25m people signing for their campaign.

DATA, a lobbying group, claims that rich people must lift quotas on African exports.

That would be helpful but would lend poor Americans to spend the largest share of their income in

food.

“fair trade” is surely a good way to help, but it seems they’d rather making liberalisation not a

sacri ce, when it is.

The new networked lobbies

The internet has proved an essential tool in organising various groups of campaigners. Internet

has also played an important role in highlighting issues such as environmental conditions. It also

helped to increase the in uence of Oxfam who criticise tari barriers which restricts north - south

trade.

Many economists and governments agree that illegal will be bene cial to the north to do business

with the south. They also are willing to listen respectable face of protest, like Oxfam, rather than to

large groups of protesters who have sometimes used aggressive and even violent tactics to draw

attention to their cause.

Coping with infoglut

A British psychologist claims that receiving too much informations can cause mental disorders.

From a recent study found out that a worker receives an average of 190 messages a day, parted

between electronics and paper formats. De ning that amount of informations between workers is

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an hard work and can even cause stress, so more than ever having an organized knowledge is the

key.

Once, there was even fear between di erent level of workers when asking for simple questions,

nowadays emails have solved, which is less intrusive.

There’s also another event happening at the moment which is the message meltdown, where the

sender doesn’t stop at, for example, a voice message about their current work status, but even

informs colleagues via mail.

A tax counsel from Pitney Bowers claims that this new communications method have surely

increased the infos he gets, but the time it takes to read them all have also crept in his personal

life, precluding personal activities or even sleep hours.

Failure is glorious

Alessandro Alessi transformed his family’s housewares into a trendsetting design giant. He has

followed every single advice his family gave him and he succeeded. He did partnerships with

some of the best world’s designers and transformed his business in a design leader. He’s even

proud of his ops, since he published a book containing all the prototype that have never been

produced. He explains that walking in the borderline between “possible” and “not possible” is the

key. The possible part refers to products that costumers love and buy, the not possible instead

refers to products costumers “aren’t ready to comprehend”. His success his due to a very high

exibility, since he can sell 100k of a certain products while other in a very small number.

He sees his customers as a part of the company, telling that “customers seem happy to take risks

with us”, describing them as more progressive than marketing people or retailers think.

PARTE 2 - INFORMATICA

Computers make the world smaller and smarter

Tiny computers have transformed how tasks are performed, involving drastically changes even

from scienti c elds to the technological ones.

Nowadays, computers are able to do more sophisticated things that once required human

supervision and by doing so they make life a little easier (for example, an automatic computers

that controls health records).

Since now there’s something that controls things for us, we can dedicate our time at what we do

best, being creative! And computers can help with it too!

With our knowledge we can make computers think like experts, even with medical diagnosis.

Since the accessibility to every infos is more available, computers are becoming more personal

and adaptable to the user, with infos traveling all over the world, even if hundred miles away.

Power is still by our side, so its our duty to make not only computers used in a e cient way, but in

a responsible one too.

Cache Memory

Computers are held back by the time it takes to move data in and out, hat’s where memory cache

comes for help.

The idea is having a sort of memory with fast access between main memory and processor. Just

in case there is no cache, the computer will load the main memory, and take that info into the

cache.

One of the cache main jobs is ensuring that every change in the main memory is re ected into the

cache. That’s the safe solution but also the slower.

The fastest, but also with a more complex controller, way to solve this problems is the use of the

“write-back” method, which rewrite the cache and send the modi ed