Nissan has been making the GT-R since 2007 and it’s a potent beast. The car isn’t exactly cheap in its own right, but it punches much higher than its weight class costing significantly less than some of the cars it runs with on raw performance. Outright performance is a big deal for the GT-R, but it seems Nissan CEO Carlos … Continue reading
Fashionistas and socialites might soon have something to root for. Apple is now rumored to soon make available a gold option for the next generation iPad expected to be unveiled this October. This will give those with a love of gold an option that will be close enough to more luxurious gold plating without costing as much. This isn’t exactly … Continue reading
The Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke out yesterday about backdoors in consumer technology, claiming that they should be left open by technology firms so that law enforcement officials are never locked out during important investigations.
Norma, a 70-year-old widow, says she can’t wait to move to Ghana to be with her fiancé, “Richard Randall,” whom she met online two years ago but has never met in person. Norma’s daughter believes her mother is being scammed by a catfish.
Dr. Phil reviews the timeline of events and money Norma sent to Richard. “He’s driving a Mercedes, and you’re having to stay with relatives because you can’t pay rent,” he says.
On Dr. Phil on Wednesday, Norma learns the truth about her online lover. Is she being scammed? Check here for local listings.
Excited to take advantage of Deezer’s ad-free desktop streaming, but prefer the look of the service’s tablet app? You’re in luck: the company just gave its web interface a visual overhaul, conveniently inspired by its own tablet interface. The new…
The paper car tax disc has had a very good innings, but it’s finally come to the end of its life. Presented proudly by UK motorists for more than 90 years, those circular bits of paper have today officially been replaced by an electronic register….
Hoffmann is an entrepreneur who has successfully founded eight companies over the last 26 years in the fields of preventative medicine, health care, technology, mobile health and education. Her natural ability to lead and inspire has resulted in numerous awards and honors throughout her career. As CEO and Founder of TellSpec, the company behind the world’s first food scanner for consumers, she leads a team of researchers, mathematicians, software developers and designers towards their mission to power a social revolution for clean healthy food by empowering people to make informed choices about what they eat.
Hoffmann has embodied the entrepreneurial spirit from the age of 19 when she started her first company. She went on to receive her PH.D in Mathematics from the University of Toronto. She has founded eight successful companies, taking companies from $0 to $75 million, and has negotiated strategic investments with groups such as CBS Corporation and Mitsubishi International. Hoffmann has raised equity investment and convertible debenture notes in Wall Street, New York City, and Bay Street, Toronto. She was also the main strategic negotiator on several business acquisitions, including a US$28M acquisition of Corel Multimedia business division. More recently, she has shared her experiences as an entrepreneur by teaching MBA-level entrepreneurism courses at the University of Porto.
As a sought-after keynote speaker, she’s presented at conferences around the world. Her presentations have covered topics including Preventative and Predictive Health at the Sixth Annual International Congress on Anti-Aging SP Brazil, Delivering the Right Message at the Women of Influence Luncheon Series, Leadership at The Rotary Club, A New Vision of Aging at the CARP conference and Entrepreneurship and Innovation at TED City Toronto.
How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
I was born with a strong, type A grandmother as a role model who showed me how to make things happen on my own. Then, my daughter got sick when she was 14. She was plagued with hives, low blood pressure, tremors and light sensitivity so severe that she had to drop out of school. The doctors could not determine what was causing the chronic illness so I took matters into my own hands and made it my mission to identify the cause of her mysterious illness. We spent months in waiting rooms where we saw hundreds of others that also suffered from similar un-diagnosed illnesses – all seeking an answer to explain why they were sick. After dozens of specialist visits and exploring every possibility, my daughter was diagnosed with mold toxicity which causes severe allergic reactions and sensitivity to gluten, dioxins and other allergens. It took us a year for us to get an accurate diagnosis but we finally knew what we needed to do to make sure she could live her life free of her severe symptoms. That knowledge and information was truly empowering. I was overcome with empathy and thought, there must be something I can do to can help so that she and the others I saw in the waiting room don’t have to go through that experience, and thus TellSpec was born.
How has your previous employment experience aided your position at TellSpec?
I’ve always worked for myself, leading software and internet companies and also leading health and genetics companies. My experience in these two fields merged nicely for TellSpec. As an entrepreneur, I know I’d have the best chance to succeed if I drew from what I knew well, so I reached back to my experiences leading software companies and my work in the preventative health world. It didn’t come out of nowhere, I knew what questions to ask and the right people to ask them to and thus, TellSpec was born.
What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure at TellSpec?
One of the biggest challenges any entrepreneur faces is putting together the right team. We’ve made a concerted effort at TellSpec to form a solid mix of talent consisting of research professionals, software engineers, designers, writers and more. Everyone brings something unique to the table which has been truly imperative to the success of TellSpec. Their drive and belief in the company’s vision is spectacular. One of the most rewarding experience so far with TellSpec was being asked to deliver a TED talk about the future of the food industry + TellSpec at TEDGlobal in Brazil this October.
What advice can you offer women who are looking to start their own business?
Never hesitate to make a decision, indecision will kill a company. This was the first advice given to me by a father a friend of mine. He told me you only need to be right 51% of the time and to just keep moving forward.
How do you maintain a work/life balance?
It’s difficult. The key is to find someone who shares your passion and vision, respects what you do and supports your dreams no matter what.
What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
Childbearing. We haven’t successfully integrated it with the respect it deserves. When my first was born, maternity leave was only three months. There is much room to for improvement to ensure that women are able to have both a successful career and be able to grow their families.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
I never had a professional mentor but I’ve always been able to find the drive within myself and create my own thinking, likely thanks to having such a strong grandmother as a role model from a young age.
Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
I really admire Raquel Carson who wrote the Silent Spring. Her message is very similar to what TellSpec is aiming to do – if you continue to pollute, there will be nothing left. She was one the first ecologist and had a huge impact on my life. I also greatly respect Mother Teresa because of the compassion she bestowed upon others as well as Simone de Beauvoir who was largely regarded as an early feminist.
What do you want TellSpec to accomplish in the next year?
We are working to get into the hands of consumers to enable people with their to make better choices about what they eat. Since TellSpec provides information beyond the nutritional label, thereby we also hope to bring about transparency in produce farming and food manufacturing, and educate the consumer on the wellness implications of each ingredient in their food.
Osama bin Laden is the reason we’re fighting ISIS today and the reason we’ve wage two wars in the Middle East. His vision for chaos in the region was clearly stated even before he murdered 3,000 Americans and long before we entered Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. Our national amnesia fueled by the righteous indignation of watching Americans murdered on ISIS video plays right into the trap bin Laden set on 9/11 and mires us further into the sectarian and religious quagmire in Iraq and Syria. Actually, to be completely accurate, bin Laden’s terror and maniacal visions were only half of the problem. The other half rests with America’s penchant for being lured into never-ending counterinsurgency wars against an enemy who wears tennis shoes, hides in apartment buildings, drives pickup trucks with gun turrets, and makes horrifying videos to frighten the average American household into blindly accepting a forever war. After 4,486 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and 2,347 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, close to 1 million U.S. soldiers wounded in both wars, and a cost that will easily exceed $6 trillion, the last thing American soldiers and their families need is an electorate who willingly accepts perpetual war. Mind you, this blind acceptance is coupled with the fact that according to Forbes, over 900,000 Americans have had their lives altered fighting terror in the Middle East:
All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000.
While two beheading videos have made the majority of Americans completely forget about the human sacrifice and financial costs of two wars, it’s important to remember the words of the person responsible for this mess.
ISIS is an extension of bin Laden’s original plan to fan the flames of Shia/Sunni power struggles and rivalries, his belief that guerrilla and insurgent forces can defeat superpowers, and the terrorist’s belief in the gullibility and naivete of the West. A Frontline interview in 1998 highlights bin Laden’s foreshadowing of ISIS, the failures of two presidents, and the belief that “terror” will outlast the ambitions of any superpower:
Those who threw atomic bombs and used the weapons of mass destruction against Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the Americans…
In today’s wars, there are no morals, and it is clear that mankind has descended to the lowest degrees of decadence and oppression…
There is a lesson here. The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan late in December of ’79. The flag of the Soviet Union was folded once and for all on the 25th of December just 10 years later. It was thrown in the waste basket. Gone was the Soviet union forever…
We expect for the ruler of Riyadh the same fate as the Shah of Iran…
After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared.
With every drone strike that kills an innocent civilian in Yemen, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, bin Laden’s propaganda of equating Nagasaki with his terrorism is legitimized. Also, his evaluation of today’s wars having “no morality” is eerily reminiscent of how Americans could care less about civilian casualties after drone strikes, or even the killing of American citizens abroad if deemed necessary.
His cherry-picking of history is obvious since he blatantly forgets to state that Reagan helped fund and arm the mujaheddin against the Soviets, however the USSR losing this war is all a part of bin Laden’s ideology. We’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for his overall strategy of weakening America through perpetual war. The superpower is no longer a superpower if it fights a war against sheepherders, tribes, or insurgents. In fact, his terrorist propaganda and manipulation of Islam is warranted by us “bringing the fight” to him and other terrorists in the Middle East. Furthermore, drone strikes and other endeavors that cause civilian deaths (thus weakening our moral position in this fight) justify not only his vision of terrorism in the Middle East, but also furthers the notion that America is the new Soviet Union.
To ISIS, al Qaeda, and radical insurgents everywhere, we are the new Soviet Union and the Middle East is one giant Afghanistan of the 1980’s.
Is this analysis only hyperbole written by an author who wants this country to care more about its veterans and soldiers than the outrage elicited from an ISIS beheading video?
The answer lies in who we’re fighting today. According to a Vox article, ISIS used to have a different name:
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) used to have a different name: al Qaeda in Iraq.
…The US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, described the group in 2010 as down but “fundamentally the same.” In 2011, the group rebooted.
So, even though they’ve split, we’re still fighting remnants of al Qaeda and an enemy that simply regroups and fights under a different brand name.
Finally, I am all for arming every single enemy of ISIS, from the Kurds to the Iraqi Shia and moderate Sunni forces who fight against ISIS, to rebels in Syria. We should have done this for years. I’m all for funding their enemies on the ground and giving these forces the weapons needed (like Reagan with the mujaheddin) to defeat ISIS. However, a never-ending American fight against “terror” is exactly what bin Laden always wanted and exactly what ISIS needs to legitimize its propaganda and recruiting. If we’re serious about defeating this group, we should address the needs of the Kurdish forces, who in a recent CNN article stated they’re in dire need of funding and weapons:
…Brig. Gen. Hazhar Ismail at the Peshmerga Ministry in Irbil told CNN.
He complained that the Peshmerga’s budget, weapons and training must go through the central government in Baghdad and claimed that the Peshmerga “have not received one dollar from Iraq, even though Parliament has approved funds.”
No amount of American bombing campaigns is going to help defeat ISIS if the Peshmerga’s “budget, weapons, and training” must go through the dysfunctional central government in Baghdad.
Also, the United States can’t solve the Sunni/Shia rivalry through military might. According to The New York Times, before killing and slaughtering prisoners, ISIS asks questions of captive Iraqi forces to differentiate between Sunni and Shia:
Whether a person is a Shiite or a Sunni Muslim in Iraq can now be, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
As the militant group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has seized vast territories in western and northern Iraq, there have been frequent accounts of fighters’ capturing groups of people and releasing the Sunnis while the Shiites are singled out for execution.
What is your name?
Where do you live?
How do you pray?
What kind of music do you listen to?
The wrong answers to those questions will get you killed because ISIS, and bin Laden as well as al Qaeda, used the Shia/Sunni rivalry to terrorize local populations and gain support from local Sunni populations. Those Iraqi forces you hear about abandoning their equipment and fleeing from ISIS fighters do so because they are not only a part of a different sect, but also because the Iraqi government isn’t as important as your religious background in this sectarian and regional war.
The battle against ISIS and other terrorists should be waged by Iraqi, Kurdish, Syrian rebel, and regional armies intent on stopping its conquest. American soldiers have done enough and sacrificed enough in this fight. The longer President Obama, Congress, and the American people allow themselves to be lured into perpetual war, against an enemy that relishes this conflict, we end up falling even further into bin Laden’s trap. My latest Jerusalem Post article and my recent Times of Israel piece, in addition to all my other posts in The Huffington Post and elsewhere all highlight my viewpoint that America has done enough and this fight should no longer entail our soldiers, military, or further American sacrifice.
Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is set to announce a refresh of its iPad range later this month, including the addition of a gold color way—but the rumored 12.9-inch version apparently won’t appear until next year.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
