Friday 2 November 2012

Working Rudely - Healthy Beginnings Magazine

Written By Ffjorren Zolfaghar ? Gen X?er?|

Over the years, with the onset of 20 and 30 something?s joining the workforce, workplace behavior has shifted. The overall attitude and general conduct of business rarely seems to be team or community-oriented. Unfortunately, the current buzz word ?entitlement? has a great deal to do with this movement.

Entitlement, which is defined as ?a right to benefits specified especially by law or contract,? goes beyond its generic meaning. It all started with good intention?Baby boomers were raised by parents who witnessed the great depression. Their parents wanted better for their offspring and brought them up with this belief. As the baby boomers?raised their children with a similar ideology, they often gave their children more, even if they did not deserve it, or already had ?enough? to lead a happy and healthy life. The children of the 80?s and 90?s also believed that they too should find more success than their parents.

The difference: work ethic. When baby boomers were children, their parents often struggled to give them a good home life; and with mom at home that meant long hours and overtime for dad. After the baby boomers grew up, cost of living exploded, technology shifted and the feminine movement created an entirely different view on the family structure. With this in mind, the hard working and responsible baby boomers voraciously joined the workforce with a deeply rooted need to succeed and offer their children even ?more? than what they had.

The children of baby boomers (gen X and Y) grew up in dual income homes, where a lot of them fended for themselves after school, leaving a residual ?latchkey syndrome? on their psyche. They were given responsibility at a younger age. They were given choices and decisions that their parents never had to make because their moms were generally home to take care of them, and keep them out of trouble.

Even though this model seemed to offer ?growth? opportunities for gen X and Y children, it could have actually stunted parts of their character that zone in on work. The responsibility that was passed on had to do with care-giving, not necessarily ?work.? They had to be alone, more often. They had to make meals and snacks, and watch their kid brother or sister until mom and dad were home from work. Given the choice, quick meals were the easiest. Given the choice, just making sure your sibling was alive seemed to be good enough in terms of baby-sitting. And, going outside was great and still safe back then, but MTV and the new video game console were frequently beckoning their attention.

Kids will often choose the easier route if left to make a decision on their own. Even if the baby boomer parents left behind chore lists, to-do?s lists, T.V. time instructions and a ?make sure to play with your brother? note, this generation seemed to find a way to work around those silly details. They also knew their parents were pretty much exhausted, all the time. So, they could generally get out of things by creatively pleading and making I.O.U?s regarding chores and such. And then, somewhere down the line, those promises would get forgotten by their over-worked and over-tired parents; resulting in gen X and Y?s amazing talent of bull-shitting.

Not only were they good at BS?ing, they were also operating from a false sense of security, a kind of ?me centric? psychological mode. When their parents let them walk home from school, get into the house with their own key and be the king or queen of the castle until the real ones got home, it fed into the child?s ego. It led kids to believe, ?I could do this by myself,? or ?I am totally grown up.?

Fueled with that kind of mentality, a knack for getting their way, a heck of a lot of stuff handed to them by their well-meaning parents and a cultural shift in consumerism, these kids were destined to feel a little entitled.

So, what does that have to do with working rudely? Everything. Not only do gen X and Y employees work from a very self-centered point of view, the older folks around them end up joining in. They either feel defeated, as they try to work from standards and ethics that have long been gone, or they let go of their better judgment and adjust to the new status quo. In either case, it seems the older generations find themselves lost in translation and wind up acting grumpy and resentful toward their younger counterparts.

Now, with this combination of gen X and Y ?me? focused employees, working alongside their disgruntled elders, most of the workforce uses ego to drive their work habits. It emanates from all generations, as they vie for the next proverbial rung on the ladder. It is a self serving way of doing business. It is also emotionally motivated, as our ego stems from the emotional view of our self.

Ego pushes us to compete. It calls us to make decisions that do not always effectively serve the team or community. It does not do well with compromise. In fact, ego strives for self satisfaction, not that of the greater good. And when our ego is running off of entitlement steam?it works quite rudely.

Source: http://hbmag.com/working-rudely/

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Thursday 1 November 2012

Supreme Court on Patent Law 2013 - Patent Law Blog (Patently-O)

The Supreme Court is scheduled to decide four intellectual property cases this term:

  • Bowman v. Monsanto (patent exhaustion in second generation of GM seeds)
  • Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (international copyright exhaustion)
  • Already, LLC v. Nike, Inc. (impact of limited covenant-not-to-sue on declaratory judgment jurisdiction in trademark law)
  • Gunn v. Minton (whether legal malpractice claims arising out of representation in a patent dispute should be heard by the Federal Circuit)

There are several more pending petitions for certiorari. The most notable of these is Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) v. Myriad Genetics (patentability of isolated but naturally occurring human DNA). A second important pending petition is Retractable Technologies, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson and Co. (de novo review of claim construction). More than a dozen other petitions have been filed or are likely within the next two months.

Source: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/10/supreme-court-on-patent-law-2013.html

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Louisiana ex-con executed for 2003 Texas killing

This handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety shows Donnie Roberts. Roberts, a Louisiana parole violator, is set to die Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, for killing his girlfriend Vicki Bowen at her home in Lake Livingston, Texas, in October 2003. (AP Photo/ Texas Department of Public Safety)

This handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety shows Donnie Roberts. Roberts, a Louisiana parole violator, is set to die Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, for killing his girlfriend Vicki Bowen at her home in Lake Livingston, Texas, in October 2003. (AP Photo/ Texas Department of Public Safety)

(AP) ? Donnie Lee Roberts, convicted in his girlfriend's 2003 slaying in Texas, was executed Wednesday for fatally shooting the woman and taking items from her home to sell or trade to support his drug habit.

Roberts, 41, became the 12th inmate to be put to death this year in the nation's most active capital punishment state. He was given a lethal injection for the killing of Vicki Bowen at her East Texas home.

"I'm really sorry. I never meant to cause you all so much pain," Roberts said to Bowen's father, who was seated in a chair close to a glass window in the death chamber viewing area. "I hope you can go on with your life.

"I loved your daughter. I hope to God he lets me see her in heaven so I can apologize to her and see her and tell her."

Roberts also asked two of his friends who watched through another window to tell his own daughter he loved her.

He repeated that he was sorry and took several deep breaths as the lethal dose of pentobarbital began taking effect. He snored briefly before slipping into unconsciousness, and was pronounced dead 23 minutes later.

Bowen's relatives, including some who sat on the floor where they were gathered as Roberts was put to death, declined to speak with reporters after the execution.

Roberts' punishment came after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his case earlier this week, and no additional appeals were filed to try to block the lethal injection.

At the time of his arrest for the October 2003 slaying of the 44-year-old Bowen, Roberts had violated his probation for a robbery conviction in Louisiana by fleeing to Texas after dropping out of a drug treatment program.

Authorities said he apparently met Bowen, a dental assistant, at a bar and moved in with her at her Lake Livingston home, about 75 miles northeast of Houston. Their relationship soured because Roberts wasn't working and was abusing drugs and alcohol, investigators said, and he shot Bowen after she refused his demand for money.

Roberts was arrested at a suspected crack house in the town of Livingston when a truck missing from Bowen's home was spotted there the same day Bowen's body was discovered.

"He was cooperative and confessed several times," District Attorney Lee Hon said. "He was saying he wanted the death penalty."

Roberts told authorities he made several trips from the house where Bowen was shot, collecting property that he took into town to sell and trade for crack.

He also surprised detectives by confessing to the shotgun death of a man that happened a decade earlier in Natchitoches Parish, La. Louisiana authorities initially believed the victim, Al Crow, had died of asphyxiation in a fire at the camper trailer where he was living but reopened the case following Roberts' disclosure, found shotgun pellets and determined it was a homicide.

Roberts was charged with murder but not tried for Crow's death.

Stephen Taylor, one of Roberts' lawyers at his Texas capital murder trial, said the confessions complicated his trial defense.

"It's almost like somebody saying he was a serial killer, that he's killed before and he killed again," Taylor said. "It's one thing to say you have the right to remain silent. Use it!

"It's always sad for someone to lose his life, especially for something so stupid."

Bowen didn't show up for work on Oct. 16, 2003, and a co-worker who went to check on her found her body wrapped in a blanket and lying in a pool of blood. A medical examiner determined Bowen was killed with two gunshots to her head.

Roberts took the witness stand and tried to blame Bowen for the gunfire, saying he was acting in self-defense by grabbing a .22-caliber rifle after seeing her reach down inside a couch to locate a pistol that was kept there.

Evidence at trial showed Roberts had a record for battery while being held in jail in Fulton County, Ga., that he'd threatened his wife to give him money for drugs, and that he warned there would be another killing if he didn't get a single-person cell in Polk County when he was jailed for Bowen's murder.

His robbery conviction in Louisiana was for a Mother's Day 2001 convenience store holdup in Baton Rouge, La., where the knife-wielding Roberts threatened to slice the throat of the female clerk.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice Polunsky Unit, where the state's male death row is housed, had been Roberts' home since his capital murder conviction in 2004. The prison is just outside Livingston and not far from where Bowen was killed.

Earlier Wednesday, Roberts was moved about 45 miles west to the Huntsville Unit, the prison where the execution was carried out.

Three more Texas prisoners are set to die in November, including one next week.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-10-31-Texas%20Execution/id-18020594903d4c69b96b21dc473f3b1a

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