Union organizer

A union organizer (or union organiser in Commonwealth spelling) is a specific type of trade union member (often elected) or an appointed union official. A majority of unions appoint rather than elect their organizers.
In some unions, the organizer's role is to recruit groups of workers under the organizing model. In other unions, the organizer's role is largely that of servicing members and enforcing work rules, similar to the role of a shop steward. In some unions, organizers may also take on industrial/legal roles such as making representations before Fair Work Australia, tribunals, or courts.
In North America, a union organizer is a union representative who "organizes" or unionizes non-union companies or worksites. Organizers primarily exist to assist non-union workers in forming chapters of locals, usually by leading them in their efforts.
Methodology.
Organizers employ various methods to secure recognition by the employer as being a legitimate union, the ultimate goal being a collective bargaining agreement. The methods can be classified as being either top-down organizing or bottom-up organizing.
Top-down organizing focuses on persuading management through salesmanship or pressure tactics. The salesmanship may include offering access to resources such as to a well-trained and skilled supply of labor or access to union cartels. Pressure tactics may include picketing with the intention of embarrassing management or disrupting business, as well as assisting the government in investigating employment law and labor law violations. A strict enforcement of these laws might result in fines and might serve to hurt the violator's chances in a competitive bidding process. Top-down organizing is generally considered easier than bottom-up and is practiced more in the construction industry.
Bottom-up organizing focuses on the workers and usually involves a certification process, normally overseen by a labor relations board such as the NLRB in the U.S. The process entails either a secret ballot election or, in some cases, a card-signing effort (called card check). In either case, should a majority of the employees agree to union representation, the results bind the company to recognize and negotiate with the union. Normally, both sides are given a chance to campaign for or against unionization, though management has a decided advantage due to their greater access to the employees, as well as management's inherent ability to discipline or terminate employees. It is in this electioneering model where the organizer really organizes: arranging meetings, devising strategy, and developing an internal structure known as an organizing committee. It is from the pool of activists recruited to the organizing committee that the union typically later draws its shop stewards. Though some mistake organizing as strictly being a recruitment effort, numerous obstacles emerge which require more than simple enlistment and promotion of the union. During organizing, management has greater means to reward or punish workers, far overshadowing methods available to the union. For this reason, in most countries, laws such as the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, guarantee the rights of workers to seek union membership and forbid management's use of undue influence such as bribes or threats. Nonetheless, such charges are hard to prove and the labor movement believes the entire process to be slanted against them in enforcement and interpretation of labor laws. Sometimes, organizing involves legal wrangling over issues such as voter eligibility. In such cases, issues are often settled by appeal to the Labor Board who serves, essentially, as a referee during the process. Intrigue during heated campaigns is not uncommon. In various cases, one or both sides have used spying and information-gathering techniques tantamount to industrial espionage.
Personality.
Organizers must be determined, charismatic, and persuasive individuals able to sway groups to action under trying circumstances when jobs are on the line. Organizers must be strong enough to stand up to constant confrontation and must be willing to take big risks. Since failure rates of organizing campaigns are high, "burn-out" among organizers is prevalent. Organizers frequently work under the constraints of limited resources (see sections on organizing as cause and controversies).
Cause within a cause.
Within the labor movement, organizing is the cause within the cause. In most industrialized nations, there has been a steady decline in union membership and in the influence of organized labor since the 1950s. A response to this decline has been a renewed organizing effort. The heads of unions are well aware of the problem. In the U.S., many labor activists have blamed John Sweeney, the former (1995–2009) President of the AFL-CIO, for not doing enough to organize. In fact, this has been cited as the genesis of the split within the American labor movement that led to the formation of the Change to Win Federation (a rival umbrella organization of North American unions set up as an alternative to the AFL-CIO in 2005), by Change to Win advocates at least. Many unions see organizing as a way to ensure the future of their organization. Unions who emphasize organizing and are expansionist are said to have the "organizing model." By contrast, other unions are said to have the "servicing model," spending most of their resources on providing services to the existing membership (i.e., non-expansionist).
Controversies.
Within the labor movement, there is some resistance to organizing, though more in deed than in word. Organizing can be seen as a drain on scarce resources with insignificant returns and with results tenuous. Most unions in the U.S. adopt a service model and eschew organizing. In transient industries such as construction, an increase in the supply of labor from newly organized shops may cause the supply of jobs to dwindle below what an increased membership can absorb.
Most disputes between unions are jurisdictional (territorial). Union jurisdiction is based on geographic scope, craft, industry, historical claim, and compromise. Unions have overlapping jurisdictions. Critics within the labor movement have blamed the movement itself for the fractious effects of union-on-union competition and perceived issues of raiding. Expansionism and the scramble for members in organizing programs bring to light these border issues.
Opponents of organizing, mainly in management and business, argue that unionization divides employees against their employer and results in increased costs. Such accusations are not entirely without foundation: Indeed, a successful organizing campaign usually demonstrably benefits the labor at the expense of management. Critics will often circulate horror stories about plant closures and retaliatory firings to discourage union activity and uptake among the workers. Real or imagined, such horror stories are taken as warnings and have a chilling effect on voting. Though illegal, retaliatory terminations remain a problem for organizers to overcome. Fear is the leading obstacle to organizing.
Counter organizing.
In bottom-up organizing, management and labor are pitted against each other and management often schedules retaliatory, aggressive tactics in an effort to break the chapter, called "union-busting." The intention of such union-busting may be to "nip it in the bud" before getting locked into a costly collective bargaining agreement. Management may feel that the organizing campaign encourages and capitalizes upon worker disobedience and perceived disloyalty. For this reason, management may hire anti-union consultants or lawyers known as "union-busters" or "union avoidance consultants." With the goal of thwarting organizing, union-busters typically have a two-pronged approach: firstly, management will cut deals with individual workers to betray the union and secondly, to exploit loopholes in labor law in an effort to derail or sandbag the election process. The emergence of union-busting as an industry is a relatively new phenomenon and is described in Martin Levitt's book "Confessions of A Union Buster." Prior to the emergence of the union-avoidance industry, practitioners were mainly "goon squads" also used for strike-breaking. In the U.S., the largest and most well-known "goon squad" for hire was the Pinkerton Detective Agency, still active today, though in a different capacity. William W. Delaney's "My Father Was Killed By Pinkerton Men" is a song about the violence that often surrounded early American labor strife.
Organizing in popular culture.
The most famous movie about organizing is the 1979 factually-based film "Norma Rae", the story of a Jewish organizer from New York City who came to the American South to organize a textile mill. He recruits Norma Rae, played by Sally Field. Norma becomes a key union activist who defies management at great personal risk.
The 1987 production of "Matewan" is another factually-based story of an organizer who visits a small mining town in West Virginia and who is able to unite rival ethnic groups against a common enemy: the company.
Both of these stories feature outsiders entering rural company towns and stirring workers up against exploitative management. This is a common theme in organizing. The workers are cast as simple commoners being oppressed by powerful managers cast in the role of villains. The organizer is portrayed as a liberator. There is some truth in these stories since companies did, in fact, historically hire armed thugs to break up organizing drives through unethical and oppressive means. Modern unions work within the existing system, rather than against it, through sophisticated political action programs. Most unions have reinvented themselves as streamlined, professional machines.
"10,000 Black Men Named George", released in 2002, is a movie based on the true story of A. Philip Randolph, the famous black organizer who organized the railroad company's largely black Pullman Porters.
The film "Bread and Roses" (2001) depicts the Service Employees International Union's "Justice for Janitors" campaign to organize cleaners. The story is also a love story between an idealistic young organizer and a female Hispanic immigrant among those he is organizing.
Both of these stories incorporate pro-union messages with ethnic determination. In the case of the Pullman Porters, Randolph is remembered as a civil rights hero. The Justice for Janitors campaign is about immigrants' rights, as many of the organized janitors are from Spanish speaking or Slavic countries. The status of the characters as minorities paints a picture of them as being outside of, or on the margins of, the American Dream, thus further casting workers and activists as underdogs. The underdog theme is an inspirational archetype in myth.
In the 2005 action movie "Four Brothers", one of the characters is a former union activist who turns the bad guy's henchmen against him by informally organizing them against their boss based on the common organizing themes of a greater share in the profits and respect on the job.
In the 1997 action movie "Grosse Pointe Blank", Dan Aykroyd's villainous character pursues fellow assassin John Cusack in order to include him in a ridiculous assassins' union.
These latter two movies use organizing as a plot device, though they involve black market businesses and are far-fetched for this reason. Nonetheless, they demonstrate how, absent a union's presence, the same issues arise in any vocation. Also, both of the movies take place in the Detroit, Michigan area, a city which has produced some great organizers.
The 1992 production "Hoffa", starring Jack Nicholson as famed labor leader Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, begins the story where Hoffa's career began: organizing truck drivers and warehouse workers in and around Detroit. Jimmy Hoffa went on to become one of the most powerful labor leaders in U.S. history.
The 1978 movie "F.I.S.T", tells the same story of Hoffa's beginnings as an organizer and of his rise to power, albeit with more liberties taken. Sylvester Stallone plays Hoffa as a man with good intentions, dogged on both sides, by both sides of the law.
Both Hoffa stories feature Hoffa as a tough "man of the people" and chronicle how his organizing swelled the ranks of the Teamsters. Hoffa was notorious for taking an "ends justifies the means" approach to organizing. Hoffa's legacy remains: his son, James P. Hoffa, is the current General President of the Teamsters.
In an episode of the popular American sit-com "The Office", the characters hold an organizing meeting which ends with a manager threatening to fire everyone involved. The character played by comedian Patrice O'Neal tells the boss, "This isn't over."
The Fred Savage sitcom "Working" had an episode where the main character organizes his fellow workers into a union and tells management it’s because he really cares about the well-being of his coworkers, exhibiting solidarity.
The song "Solidarity Forever" by Ralph Chaplin has become the anthem of large parts of the labor movement such as those in North America.


Harold Stanley

Harold Stanley (October 2, 1885 – May 14, 1963) was an American businessman and one of the founders of Morgan Stanley in 1935. For 20 years, he ran Morgan Stanley until he left the firm in 1955.
Early life.
Stanley was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of William Stanley, Jr. and Lila Courtney Stanley. William was an inventor with General Electric for whom the Stanley Works building was named in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Hotchkiss School in 1904 and Yale University in 1908. He was a member of the Skull and Bones secret society.
Career.
He became a vice-president of the bond department of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York in 1916, eventually spinning the division off into a separate and subsidiary securities company, the Guaranty Company, where he worked in cooperation with J. P. Morgan, Jr. In 1927, Morgan invited Stanley to become a partner in his firm, replacing Dwight Morrow, who became the United States Ambassador to Mexico. He made his name as a leader of the investment banking industry at J.P. Morgan, making the firm a strong player in securities offerings and especially the bond market, particularly after the Glass–Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking.
In 1935, along with Henry Sturgis Morgan, J. P. Morgan's grandson and J. P. Morgan Jr.'s son, he helped found Morgan Stanley to take up the securities business that had to be given up by J. P. Morgan, and became the firm's senior partner when it was reorganized from a corporation to a partnership in 1941. Stanley was influential in his testimony in the 1940s successfully defending the industry against government charges that it was anti-competitive.
Personal life.
He married Edith Thurston, daughter of William Harris Thurston, in 1914. She died in 1934, and he married Louise Todd, widow of Seymour Parker Gilbert, in 1934. He had stepchildren, but no children from either of his marriages. He resided at 4 East 72nd Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City and died in Philadelphia in 1963.
Activities and interests.
He was a member of the Links Club of New York, the National Golf Club, the Racquet and Tennis Club, and the Yale Club. He was a director of many companies including the Shell Caribbean Petroleum Corporation.
Stanley played ice hockey at Yale University between 1906–1908 and later on the St. Nicholas Hockey Club in the American Amateur Hockey League.
Philanthropy.
In 1940, he led the New York campaign to raise $1.5 million () for the United States Commission for the Care of European Children, a private organization providing relief to young war refugees.


Ellen Hancock

Ellen Mooney Hancock is a technology manager from the United States who has worked for IBM and Apple, among others.
Early life and education.
Hancock was born in 1943 in the Bronx, New York City, and raised in New York's Westchester County. She graduated from the College of New Rochelle and earned a master's degree in mathematics from Fordham University.
Career.
IBM.
Hancock spent 29 years at IBM, where she rose to senior vice president in charge of network hardware and software. She ran the networking hardware division through the first half of the 1990s, at a time when it saw double-digit losses in market share year after year. (The division was ultimately sold to Cisco in 1999.) She was also a member of the IBM Corporate Executive Committee and the IBM Worldwide Management Council.
National Semiconductor.
In September 1995, she was hired away from IBM by Gil Amelio to become National Semiconductor's Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO). She worked closely with Amelio to move National Semiconductor to profitability. During that time, Hancock worked with National's CompactRISC architecture, which was a forerunner to the successful ARM7 architecture.
Apple.
Not long after that Amelio left to take the CEO position at Apple Computer, and in July 1996 he hired her to join him there.
At Apple, she took over the Chief Technology Officer role in the midst of the floundering next-generation Copland operating system (OS) project. She was largely responsible for the decision to cancel Copland. To replace it, Hancock had favored Sun Microsystems's Solaris operating system over NeXT Inc.'s NeXTSTEP, and was against the eventual purchase of NeXT. Even after the deal was done, she wanted to use at least the kernel of Solaris. With NeXT came Steve Jobs, who publicly lampooned her on several occasions calling her a "bozo". When the Apple board of directors fired Amelio, Jobs reorganized the company leaving her with a much reduced role in charge of quality assurance as former NeXT executives took over many positions in Apple. She soon resigned.
Exodus Communications.
After Apple she took a CEO position with Exodus Communications in March 1998 and became chairman of the board in 2000. Exodus set a Nasdaq record of 19 consecutive quarters of 40 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth. In 2000, the $29 billion market cap exceeded even that of her former employer, Apple Computer. However, in 2001 the company became part of the dot-com crash, the stock plummeted and Hancock stepped down as CEO in September 2001. The company filed for bankruptcy that same month, followed by an asset purchase by Cable & Wireless in February 2002. Savvis Communications purchased the related assets from C&W in November 2004.
Acquicor.
Hancock served as President, COO, and secretary to the board of Acquicor, a company she co-founded with former Apple-CEO Gil Amelio and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The company was a 'blank check' holding company, or "SPAC". Acquicor acquired Jazz Semiconductor in February 2007 and Hancock resigned on June 7, 2007.
Memberships.
Hancock is a member on the boards of several companies and academic and nonprofit institutions, including Aetna, Colgate-Palmolive, Electronic Data Systems, Ripcord Networks, Marist College, Santa Clara University, and the Pacific Council on International Policy.


John Hanke

John Hanke (born 1967) is an American technology executive. He is the founder and current CEO of Niantic, Inc., a software company spun out of Google and the creator of "Pokémon Go".
Hanke previously led Google's Geo Product division, which includes Google Earth, Google Maps, StreetView, SketchUp, and Panoramio.
Early life and startups.
Born in 1967, Hanke was raised in the small central Texas town of Cross Plains and graduated from Cross Plains High School in 1985. He attended the University of Texas, Austin and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1989.
In his first post-college role, he spent four years with the United States Foreign Service in Washington, DC and overseas in Myanmar working on foreign policy issues.
He moved across the country to attend the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Steve Sellers and his video game design startup Archetype Interactive, which was developing Meridian 59, one of the first commercial massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). They sold the firm to The 3DO Company on the day he graduated from Berkeley with an MBA. Hanke and Sellers created another entertainment startup, The Big Network, which was acquired in 2000 by eUniverse for $17.1 million.
Keyhole.
Hanke became the co-founder and CEO of geospatial data visualization firm Keyhole in 2001. Early funding was provided by the corporate venture group within Sony, and the startup was able to garner significant attention from the use of their mapping technology in media reporting overlays during the early parts of the Iraq War. Keyhole's mapping technology was also noted by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 in a deal worth $35 million in stock.
Google.
Hanke joined Google as a part of Keyhole's acquisition, and he became the Vice President of Product Management for Google Geo division. During this period, he oversaw the transformation of Keyhole's technology into Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005. He also negotiated an agreement with Apple to include Google Maps on the iPhone. Other significant products followed, including StreetView, SketchUp, and Panoramio. During this period, he shaped the team he would later use to found Niantic.
Niantic.
In 2010, Hanke was given resources to staff an augmented reality gaming unit within Google and the new internal startup was dubbed Niantic Labs. Returning to his gaming roots, the company crafted an augmented reality location-based multiplayer game called "Ingress". The game had a million players within a year of its 2013 release, and seven million by 2015.
Hanke led Niantic's split from Google in late 2015 and raised $30 million from Google, Nintendo and Pokémon. He stayed as the company's CEO and guided the firm through the release of the much-covered "Pokémon Go" in July 2016, which has now generated over $4.2 billion in revenue.


Brazier (name)

Brazier is an occupational surname of French origin, meaning "a worker in brass". It is the anglicised version of the French surname Brasier. The surname may refer to:


Lazarus Angbazo

Lazarus Angbazo (born 1962) is a Nigerian-American Industrialist and business leader. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric in Nigeria. He is also the Chief Executive Officer of General Electric Grid Solutions Africa Before assuming his role in Nigeria where he has doubled the GE revenue in the country by over $1billion, he led GE's regional operations between 2008 and 2012 as President & CEO, West, East & Central Africa. He is also the President of the American Business Council in Nigeria.
He is also the President of GE Energy Connection Africa.
Early life & education.
Lazarus Angbazo was born in Keffi, Nasarawa State of Nigeria into the royal family of Angbazo. He is a native of Eggon, from Awayi community of Wakama Development area of Nassarawa Eggon, Nasarawa State, Nigeria. His father, His Royal Highness (Dr.) Bala A. Angbazo is the Aren Eggon, the traditional ruler of the Eggon people and his mother Mrs. Polina Angbazo was the queen.
He attended Government College Keffi. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria with a First Class Honors Degree in Mathematics in 1982. From there he studied Industrial Engineering and Operations Research for his master's degree at the University of Iowa before taking a PhD in Corporate Finance at the New York University.
Career.
General Electric.
Angbazo joined GE from JP Morgan Chase & Co in 2004 where he was the Vice President, Corporate Treasury and Development. He started off as the Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer of GE Commercial & Industrial Finance. He became the MD, Industry Client Coverage Team at GE Capital in 2006 before he was redeployed to head the West, East and Central Africa operations as the pioneer GE executive in the region. In 2012, Angbazo became the Chief Executive of GE business operations in Nigeria where he doubled revenues to over $1 billion. He was responsible for facilitating GE investment of $1 billion for the creation of a multi-modal manufacturing and service hub for Africa including a service plant for power turbines in Calabar, Cross River state.
Rail Concession.
General Electric signed an interim concession agreement with the Federal Government of Nigeria for the operation of Nigeria's narrow-gauge railway system. The consortium deal which was led by GE Nigeria CEO, Angbazo was worth $45million for the interim jphase of the project and $2.9billion for the entire phase of the project.
Employment.
Angbazo tripled GE employment in Nigeria from about 200 to 500 employees within 3 years with about ninety percent of Nigerian National employees occupying eighty percent of leadership positions in the organisation. General Electric Nigeria was also ranked by job matching portal, Jobberman as the best Nigerian company to work for in 2016.
Academic and Public Sector.
Angbazo was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Purdue University, Indiana between September 1992 to May 1997. During this time, he took a sabbatical leave for one year and joined the Fannie Mae, as Director-Housing Finance Research from 1995 to 1996. He has authored several research articles in corporate finance and capital markets published in "Journal of Fixed Income", "Journal of Banking and Finance, European Finance Review, Journal of Risk and Insurance," and "Management Science Journal." He is a speaker at the Krannert Executive Forum at Krannert School of Management, Purdue University.
Board memberships.
Angbazo currently sits on the boards of several universities and business schools in Nigeria including the Lagos Business School of the Pan-Atlantic University, the Africa-America Institute and Bingham University.
Presidential appointment.
Angbazo was appointed as a member of the Nigeria Industrial Policy and Competitiveness Advisory Council inaugurated by the chairman, Nigeria's Vice President Professor Yemi Osinbajo. Other businessmen on the council include Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote who is its vice-chair. The council is expected to spearhead Nigeria's industrial agenda to raise the contribution of manufacturing to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Personal life.
He is married to Joyce Lin and they have two children; Saraya, a daughter and Jonathan, a son. They live in Abuja.


Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (born Sukhinder Singh in 1970) is a technology executive and entrepreneur. Currently the president of StubHub, she has worked at various tech and media companies including Google, Amazon and News Corp, Yodlee (YODL), and Polyvore. In 2011, she founded JOYUS, the video shopping platform for women, and served as CEO then Chairman until 2017. Singh Cassidy is also Founder of theBoardlist.
Early life and education.
Cassidy was born in 1970 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to parents of Sikh descent. Her family moved to Ontario, Canada, when she was two years old. She grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, in the Niagara Region. Cassidy graduated from the University of Western Ontario and earned her H.B.A. from the Richard Ivey School of Business in 1992.
Cassidy was raised in an entrepreneurial family. Both of her parents were doctors and ran a medical practice for thirty years.
Career.
Early career.
Cassidy started her career in investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York. She moved to the Merrill Lynch London office 1994. She then worked as an analyst for British Sky Broadcasting.
In 1998, Cassidy moved to Silicon Valley and joined ecommerce startup Junglee (company) as Head of Business Development. Junglee was acquired by Amazon in 1998. Following the acquisition, Cassidy joined Amazon, where she led merchant business development for the first generation of Amazon marketplace. According to Bloomberg Business, she helped create "one of the company's first programs designed to deliver shoppers to merchants that carried what the buyers were looking for."
Cassidy co-founded financial services platform Yodlee in 1999 with five engineering co-founders, including Schwark Satyavolu. and served as SVP of Sales and Business Development from 1999 to 2003. In 2014, Yodlee went public, trading under the ticker YODL.
In 2003, Cassidy joined Google as the first General Manager for Google Local & Maps, and Head of Content Acquisition for Books, Library, Scholar, Shopping and Video. There she launched Google Local and Maps, with product manager Bret Taylor and a team of engineers. In 2004, she became head of Google's international operations in Asia Pacific (APAC) and Latin America (LATAM), becoming VP in 2005 and then President of APAC and LATAM in 2008. Singh-Cassidy is credited with building Google's presence across 103 countries in Asia Pacific and Latin America.
In 2009, Cassidy left Google to become CEO-in-Residence at venture capital firm Accel Partners. Singh Cassidy was named CEO of Polyvore in 2010.
Joyus.
In October 2010, Cassidy had the idea for a new platform aimed at converging content and commerce through online video as a way to increase consumer engagement with products and drive direct purchases via the video. She founded JOYUS in January, 2011 in San Francisco, CA. Joyus.com launched to the public in August, 2011. Singh Cassidy raised $7.9 million in seed funding from Accel Partners, Harrison Metal, Joel Hyatt, Venky Harinarayan & Anand Rajaraman. In 2012, JOYUS raised a second round of funding totaling $11.5 million from Interwest and Time Warner, as well as existing investors.
JOYUS was ranked one of the "Hot 100" e-retailing websites by Internet Retailer in 2012; and one of the "Top 25 Ecommerce Companies to Watch" by Brand Innovators in 2013. JOYUS was a winner of the 2013 Brightcove Innovation Awards and a winner of the 2013 L’Oreal Next Generation Digital Awards. JOYUS was featured by Apple as one of the best Lifestyle shopping apps for the 2014 holiday season.
JOYUS was acquired by StackCommerce in September, 2017.
#ChoosePossibility Project and theBoardlist.
In May 2015, Cassidy published an open letter, titled "Tech Women Choose Possibility", challenging the tech community to increase the rate of progress for women in the industry by leveraging its wealth of existing female talent. The letter was co-signed by 59 female entrepreneurs and investors. Singh Cassidy based the letter on her own experiences as a tech entrepreneur and research she conducted on 230 female founders and CEOs of tech companies.
Cassidy launched theBoardlist, the first initiative of the #ChoosePossibility Project, on July 15, 2015. theBoardlist is an online marketplace that connects CEOs who are looking for board candidates with women who are peer-endorsed for private and public tech company boards. When it launched, theBoardlist included the names of over 600 women who had been endorsed by 50 investors and CEOs in the tech industry, from companies including Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Twitter, Lyft and Box.
On October 20, 2015, theBoardlist announced that it had facilitated its first placement of a woman to the board of a private tech company.
As of late 2017, theBoardlist had attracted over 1,400 executives to nominate over 2,100 women for board service, and influenced over 100 board placements.
In April 2018, Singh Cassidy was named the president of StubHub.
Personal life.
Cassidy is married to Simon Cassidy, a fellow Canadian and former hedge-fund manager who runs an independent investment firm. The couple has three children and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Board member and advisor.
Cassidy serves as a public board director at TripAdvisor (TRIP), Ericsson (ERIC), and Urban Outfitters (URBN). She previously served on the boards of J. Crew Group, Inc.(JCG), StitchFix, and as an advisor to Twitter.
Angel Investor.
Singh Cassidy is an angel investor whose investments include:


List of humorous units of measurement

Many people have made use of, or invented, units of measurement intended primarily for their humor value. This is a list of such units invented by sources that are notable for reasons other than having made the unit itself, and that are widely known in the anglophone world for their humor value.
Systems.
FFF units.
Most countries use the International System of Units (SI). In contrast, the furlong/firkin/fortnight system of units of measurement draws attention by being extremely old fashioned and off-beat at the same time.
One furlong per fortnight is very nearly 1 centimetre per minute (to within 1 part in 400). Indeed, if the inch were defined as 2. cm rather than 2.54 cm exactly, it would be 1 cm/min. Besides having the meaning of "any obscure unit", furlongs per fortnight have also served frequently in the classroom as an example on how to reduce a unit's fraction. The speed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight (or megafurlongs per microfortnight).
Great Underground Empire ("Zork").
In the "Zork" series of games, the Great Underground Empire has its own system of measurements, the most frequently referenced of which is the bloit. Defined as the distance the king's favorite pet can run in one hour (spoofing a popular legend about the history of the foot), the length of the bloit varies dramatically, but the one canonical conversion to real-world units puts it at approximately two-thirds of a mile (1 km). Liquid volume is measured in gloops, and temperature in degrees Q (57 °Q is said to be the freezing point of water).
Potrzebie.
In issue 33, "Mad" published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of "Mad" issue 26, or 2.263348517438173216473 mm.
Volume was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass in blintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn of halva, which is "a form of pie [with] a specific gravity of 3.1416 and a specific heat of .31416"), and time in seven named units (decimal powers of the average earth rotation, equal to 1 "clarke"). The system also features such units as "whatmeworry", "cowznofski", "vreeble", "hoo", and "hah".
According to the "Date" system in Knuth's article, which substitutes a 10-clarke "mingo" for a month and a 100-clarke "cowznofski", for a year, the date of October 29, 2007 is rendered as "Cal 7, 201 C. M." (for Cowznofsko Madi, or "in the Cowznofski of our MAD"). The dates are calculated from October 1, 1952, the date MAD was first published. Dates before this point are referred to (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) as "B.M." ("Before MAD.") The ten "Mingoes" are: Tales (Tal.) Calculated (Cal.) To (To) Drive (Dri.) You (You) Humor (Hum.) In (In) A (A) Jugular (Jug.) Vein (Vei.)
Quantity.
Sagan.
As a humorous tribute to Carl Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a "sagan" has been defined as a large quantity – technically at least four billion (two billion plus two billion) – of anything.
Length.
Altuve.
In the sport of baseball, the Altuve is an informal measurement of distance equal to 5 feet 5 inches or 1.65 m. This is a reference to Houston Astros player José Altuve, who stands 5 feet 5 inches tall, making him one of the shortest players in Major League Baseball.
Attoparsec.
Parsecs are used in astronomy to measure interstellar distances. A parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years or about 3.086×1016 m (1.917×1013 mi). Combining it with the "atto-" prefix (×10−18) yields attoparsec (apc), a conveniently human-scaled unit of about that is used only humorously.
Beard-second.
The beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light-year, but applicable to extremely short distances such as those in integrated circuits. It is the length an average beard grows in one second. Kemp Bennett Kolb defines the distance as exactly 100 angstroms (10 nanometres), as does Nordling and Österman's "Physics Handbook". Google Calculator uses 5 nm.
Jimmy Griffin Snow Index.
Television station WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York developed the "Jimmy Griffin Snow Index" to measure the potential severity of a snowstorm. It is named after former Buffalo mayor James D. Griffin, who in 1985 earned the nickname "Six Pack Jimmy" after suggesting residents grab a six-pack of Genesee beer to wait out an upcoming snowstorm. The index is measured in cans of beer, with roughly one can for every of expected snowfall (the index is not perfectly linear at its lower levels as originally introduced); thus, Griffin's six-pack would be recommended for a storm bringing two feet of snow.
Mickey.
One mickey is the smallest resolvable unit of distance by a given computer mouse pointing device. It is named after Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoon character. Mouse motion is reported in horizontal and vertical mickeys. Device sensitivity is usually specified in mickeys per inch. Typical resolution is 500 mickeys per inch (16 mickeys per mm), but resolutions up to 16,000 mickeys per inch (600 mickeys per mm) are available.
Sheppey.
A measure of distance equal to about , defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque. The Sheppey is the creation of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, included in "The Meaning of Liff", their dictionary of putative meanings for words that are actually just place names. It is named after the Isle of Sheppey in the UK.
Smoot.
The Smoot is a unit of length, defined as the height in 1958 of Oliver R. Smoot, who later became the Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and then the president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The unit is used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. Canonically, and originally, in 1958 when Smoot was a Lambda Chi Alpha pledge at MIT (class of 1962), the bridge was measured to be 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear, using Mr. Smoot himself as a ruler. At the time, Smoot was 5 feet, 7 inches, or 170 cm, tall. Google Earth and Google Calculator include the smoot as a unit of measurement.
The Cambridge (Massachusetts) police department adopted the convention of using Smoots to measure the locations of accidents and incidents on the bridge. When the original markings were removed or covered over during bridge maintenance, the police had to request that someone reapply the Smoot scale markings. During a major bridge rebuild, the concrete sidewalk was permanently divided into segments one Smoot in length, as opposed to the regular division of six feet.
Wiffle.
A Wiffle, also referred to as a WAM for Wiffle (ball) Assisted Measurement, is equal to a sphere 89 millimetres (3.5 inches) in diameter – the size of a Wiffle ball, a perforated, light-weight plastic ball frequently used by marine biologists as a size reference in photos to measure corals and other objects. The spherical shape makes it omnidirectional and perfect for taking a speedy measurement, and the open design also allows it to avoid being crushed by water pressure. Wiffle balls are a much cheaper alternative to using two reference lasers, which often pass straight through gaps in thin corals.
A scientist on the research vessel is credited with pioneering the technique.
Area.
Barn, outhouse, shed.
A barn is a serious metric unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei. One barn is equal to 1.0 m2. The name derives from the folk expression "Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn", used by particle accelerator physicists to refer to the difficulty of achieving a collision between particles. The outhouse (1.0 barns) and shed (1.0 barns) are derived by analogy.
Nanoacre.
The nanoacre is a unit of real estate on a Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chip equal to or the area of a square of side length . VLSI nanoacres have similar total costs to acres in Silicon Valley.
Volume.
Barn-megaparsec.
This unit is similar in concept to the attoparsec, combining very large and small scales. When a barn (a very small unit of area used for measuring the cross sectional area of atomic nuclei) is multiplied by a megaparsec (a very large unit of length used for measuring the distances between galaxies), the result is a human-scaled unit of volume approximately equal to of a teaspoon (about 3 ml).
Hubble-barn.
Similar to the barn-megaparsec, the Hubble-barn uses the barn with the Hubble length, which is the radius of the visible universe as derived by using the Hubble constant and the speed of light. This amounts to around 13.1 litres (3.46 US gallons, 2.88 Imperial gallons).
Power.
Donkey power.
This facetious engineering unit is defined as 250 wattsabout a third of a horsepower.
Pirate-ninja.
A pirate-ninja is defined as one kilowatt-hour (3.6 MJ) per Martian day, or sol. It is equivalent to approximately 40.55 watts. Andy Weir, author of "The Martian", revealed in a 2015 interview with Adam Savage that the Curiosity rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory references milli-pirate-ninjas in their meetings.
Time.
Friedman.
The Friedman is approximately six months, specifically six months in the future, and named after columnist Thomas Friedman who repeatedly used the span in reference to when a determination of Iraq's future could be surmised.
Jiffy.
A jiffy is a unit of time used in computer operating systems, being the interval of time between system timer interrupts. This interval varies from system to system, but is typically between 1 and 10 milliseconds.
Microcentury.
According to Gian-Carlo Rota, the mathematician John von Neumann used the term microcentury to denote the maximum length of a lecture. One microcentury is 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds – one millionth of a century.
Nanocentury.
A unit sometimes used in computing, the term is believed to have been coined by IBM in 1969 from the design objective "never to let the user wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response". A nanocentury is one-billionth of a century or approximately 3.156 seconds. Tom Duff is cited as saying that, to within half a percent, a nanocentury is π seconds.
New York Second.
The New York Second ("the shortest unit of time in the multiverse") is defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind one honking. The idiomatic expression "in a New York minute", used in various contexts to mean an instant or a very short time, is of similar origin, referring to the busyness of New York and impatience of its residents.
Onosecond.
British YouTuber Tom Scott defines the onosecond as the second after one makes a terrible mistake, such as deleting the wrong file or sending a text message to the wrong person, where the person in question can do nothing but say "oh no".
Shake.
In nuclear physics, a "shake" is 10 nanoseconds, the approximate time for a generation within a nuclear chain reaction. The term comes from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", meaning quickly.
Tatum.
A tatum is the "lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events." It is named after the jazz pianist Art Tatum, who was notable for his high-speed playing.
Radioactivity.
Banana equivalent dose, the amount of radiation exposure gained from eating an average banana.
Non-conventional.
These units describe dimensions which are not and cannot be covered by the International System of Units.
Beauty: Helen.
Helen of Troy (from the "Iliad") is widely known as "the face that launched a thousand ships". Thus, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship. Other derived units such as the negative helen (the power to "beach" ships) have also been described.
Bogosity: Lenat.
The unit of bogosity, i.e. how bogus a person, claim, or proceeding is, derived from the fictional field of Quantum Bogodynamics, is the Lenat. The Lenat is seldom used, as it is understood that it is too large for normal conversation. Its most common form is the microLenat.
Coolness: MegaFonzie.
A MegaFonzie is a fictional unit of measurement of an object's coolness invented by Professor Farnsworth in the "Futurama" episode, "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV." A 'Fonzie' is about the amount of coolness inherent in the "Happy Days" character Fonzie.
Media coverage of earthquakes: Rictus scale.
Tom Weller suggests the Rictus scale for earthquake intensity (a takeoff of the conventional Richter scale), measuring media coverage of the event.
Fame: Shortz.
This is a unit of fame, hype, or infamy, named for the American puzzle creator and editor, Will Shortz. The measure is the number of times one's name has appeared in The New York Times Crossword Puzzle as either a clue or solution. Arguably, this number should only be calculated for the Shortz Era (1993– ). Shortz himself is 1 Shortz famous.
Fame: Warhol.
This is a unit of fame or hype, derived from Andy Warhol's dictum "everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes". It represents fifteen minutes of fame. Some multiples are:
First used by Cullen Murphy in 1997.
Also used simply as meaning 15 minutes; as the Warhol worm, that could infect all vulnerable machines on the entire Internet within 15 minutes.
Information flow: Dirac.
Physicist Paul Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise yet taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit of a dirac which was one word per hour.
Irritability: gkB.
The Swedish video game magazine "Sega Force", nr 1, 1994, measured irritation in "gram knäckeBröd", or grams of crispbread crumbs per cm² in a bed where you've just laid down to sleep.
The Sega Genesis game "T2 The Movie" had an irritation level of 8.6 gkB, which, according to the magazine: "is so high that you'll need an oxygen mask, and is dangerously close to the 'berzerk' limit, which in Sweden is just over 9 gkB if the summer has been nice".
Nausea: Garn.
The Garn is a unit used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused by space adaptation syndrome. It is named after astronaut Jake Garn, who was frequently sick during tests and on orbit. A score of one Garn means the sufferer is completely incapacitated.
Obstruction: Pouter.
During World War II, scientists working for the British Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development encountered a particularly obstructive Royal Navy officer called Commander Pouter, for whom the unit of Obstruction was named, due to his implacable opposition to any work being carried out in the field for which he was personally responsible.
Subsequently, the micropouter was used, as it was hoped that no individual of a similarly difficult disposition would be encountered, and the pouter was too large a unit for everyday use.
Odor: Blatt.
In Steven Levy's book "", Levy mentions how Richard Greenblatt prioritized his work over bathing, leading to a strong stench. Therefore, Greenblatt's coworkers conceived of the blatt as a joke, though the milliblatt was used as the blatt was so powerful it was "just about inconceivable".
Quality: Lovelace.
The Lovelace (Ll) is the unit of the lack of quality of an operating system, i.e., a measure of system administrators' opinions about how badly implemented it is. The unit has been coined by members of the system administrator profession who hold a basic tenet that "software that does not suck does not exist". According to the Usenet alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ, one Lovelace is considered a rather large quantity. Similar to other large units like the Farad and the Henry, SI prefixes are commonly used to denote practical quantities.
Quackery: Canard.
The canard is a unit of quackery created by Andy Lewis in the need for a fractional index measuring pseudoscience. It is proposed as an SI unit to replace the old "Crackpot Index" that was presented in 1998.
The scale is from 0 to 10, with 0 being 'no quackery' and 10 being 'complete quackery'.
Reading: Hawking Index.
The Hawking Index (HI) is a unit given as a percentage, of how many people will finish a book they start. Invented by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, books with a lower HI are less likely to be completed. It is named after Stephen Hawking, whose book "A Brief History of Time" scores 6.6% on the scale.
Twitter followers: Wheaton.
The Wheaton is a measurement of Twitter followers relative to celebrity Wil Wheaton.


Robert Swannell

Robert William Ashburnham Swannell (born November 1950) is a British businessman and former banker, and the chairman of Marks & Spencer from 2011 until September 2017.
Early life.
Swannell was born in November 1950.
Career.
Swannell worked in investment banking for 33 years with Schroders and Citigroup.
He has been the chairman of Marks & Spencer since January 2011. In September 2017, he was succeeded by Archie Norman.
He was recognised in the 2018 New Year's Honours List where he was made a CBE.
Personal life.
Swannell lives in England.


Ric Holt

Richard Craig Holt (February 13, 1941 – April 12, 2019) was an American-Canadian computer scientist.
Early life.
Holt was born on in 1941 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to Vashti Young and C.P. Holt, but later moved to Toronto, Canada. As a teenager, he competed in track and field. He graduated from Cornell University in 1964 in Engineering Physics. He spent a year in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and then worked for IBM. He went back to Cornell and obtained a PhD in computer science in 1970 under Alan Shaw.
Career.
He joined the faculty of the University of Toronto from 1970 to 1997, and the faculty of the University of Waterloo from 1997 to his retirement in 2014.
Holt's main research areas were operating systems, programming languages and software engineering, contributing many seminal results to each. His work includes foundational work on deadlock, development of a number of compilers and compilation techniques. His Turing programming language was used in universities and high schools in Canada and internationally. He also participated in the development of the Grok, Euclid, SP/k, and S/SL programming languages.
For many years, he ran a software company, Holt Software Associates (HSA), which created the Ready to Program environment still widely used in Canadian High Schools to teach programming.
Holt served as president of Gravel Watch Ontario from 2003 until 2015.
In the fall of 2005, he was named #16 on Computing Canada's list of top 30 IT movers and shakers in the country for the last 30 years. In 2017, Holt was awarded the OS-CAN/INFO-CAN Lifetime Achievement Award.
Death.
Holt died on April 12, 2019 on Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada at the age of 78. He had Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia in his later years.


Herbert Edward Andrewes

Herbert Edward Andrewes (1863, Reading – 1950, Highgate) was a stockbroker and an English entomologist who specialised in beetles of the order Coleoptera.
Herbert Andrewes was one of four sons of engineer and mayor of Reading Charles James Andrewes and his wife Charlotte Parsons. His elder brother was the pathologist and bacteriologist Sir Frederick William Andrewes.
Andrewes' initial training was at the forestry school in Nancy, France, now INRA. In 1885, he entered the Indian Forest Service. His next post was at the British Museum (Natural History) where he specialised in Carabidae. He was a prolific author, writing over 120 short scientific papers in addition to catalogues, taxonomic works, faunal monographs and identification manuals. Andrewes was a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society from 1910 until his death (Council 1920-22). The society holds his library.
Collection.
Most of Andrewes' personal collection is in the Natural History Museum, London, together with beetles from Sikkim collected by Herbert Stevens.
Further collections including syntypes and a collection from India, Burma, New Guinea, Natal, Tennessee, including syntypes of Martin Jacoby, Walther Hermann Richard Horn, and Maurice Auguste Régimbart (1900), is in Oxford University Museum.
Other parts of Andrewes' collection are in the Natural History Museum of Giacomo Doria, Genoa.


Peter Young (banker)

Peter Young is the President and Managing Director of Young & Partners LLC, a boutique investment bank that specializes in the chemical and life sciences, working with companies for chemistry, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices.
He has served as president of the Société de Chimie Industrielle (American Section), and is the 2017 recipient of the Richard J. Bolte Sr. Award for supporting industries.
Education.
Peter Young earned his M.B.A. at Harvard Business School, where he was named a Baker Scholar with Highest Distinction. Prior to that he received his M.S. in Accounting from New York University and a B.A. in Economics from Yale University. He is a Certified Public Accountant, a Chartered Global Management Accountant and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants.
Career.
Young worked with the management consulting firm Bain & Company where he advised on corporate strategy and restructuring, before moving to venture capital firm J.H. Whitney & Company. In 1986, he moved to Salomon Brothers, where he was in charge of the Chemicals section. He went on to lead the chemical section of Wertheim Schroder & Co. (later Schroders). In 1993 he was hired to lead the global chemical industry group at Lehman Brothers.
In 1996, Peter Young founded Young & Partners, which he manages.
Awards and honors.
Mr. Young serves on the board of the Société de Chimie Industrielle (American Section) and has been a board member since 1993. He was elected president of the board on December 16, 2015.
Young serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of "Pharmaceutical Executive Magazine".
Young received the Commercial Development and Marketing Association Executive Excellence award in April 2006.
He is the 2017 recipient of the Richard J. Bolte Sr. Award for supporting industries.


Frank Partnoy

Frank Partnoy is a Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. He was a George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance and the founding director of the Center on Corporate and Securities Law at the University of San Diego, where he taught for 21 years. He is a scholar of the complexities of modern finance and financial market regulation. He worked as a derivatives structurer at Morgan Stanley and CS First Boston during the mid-1990s and wrote "F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street", a book about his experiences there.
Biography.
Since 1997, he has been a law professor, and writing and speaking about markets to Congress, regulators, academics, and investors. He has written opinion pieces for "The New York Times" and the "Financial Times", and more than two dozen scholarly articles published in academic journals including "The Journal of Finance".
His books include "Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets", a corporate law casebook, and "The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals", about the 1920s markets and Ivar Kreuger, who many consider the father of modern financial schemes, which was a finalist for the "Financial Times"/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year in 2009. His most recent book is "WAIT: The Art and Science of Delay", published by PublicAffairs in June 2012.
Partnoy also has been a consultant to many corporations, banks, pension funds, and hedge funds regarding various aspects of financial markets and regulation.


Keith Stattenfield

Keith Stattenfield is a senior Apple Computer software engineer. He started at Apple Computer in 1989 in the Information Systems & Technology group. Then worked on the Macintosh operating system starting in 1995, from the Mac OS 7.5 release on. He led the Netbooting project starting in Mac OS 8.6, and then served as the overall technical lead of Mac OS 9. His California license plate reads "MAC OS 9".
In 2001, he was ranked 14 on the MDJ POWER 25, a list of the most influential people in the Macintosh community.
He has often presented at conferences such as Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference and MacHack (convention).
Keith has a Public-access television show and web site called Keith Explains. He is also a frequent guest on the show John Wants Answers.
References.
Knaster and Rizzo (2004) "Mac Toys: 12 Cool Projects for Home, Office, and Entertainment"


Don Eigler

Donald M. Eigler (March 23, 1953) is an American physicist associated with the IBM Almaden Research Center, who is noted for his achievements in nanotechnology.
Work.
In 1989, Eigler was the first to use a scanning tunneling microscope tip to arrange individual atoms on a surface, famously spelling out the letters "IBM" with 35 xenon atoms. He later went on to create the first quantum corrals, which are well-defined quantum wave patterns of small numbers of atoms, and nanoscale logic circuits using individual molecules of carbon monoxide. He shared the 2010 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with Nadrian Seeman for these breakthroughs.
Eigler's 1989 research, along with Erhard K. Schweizer, involved a new use of the scanning tunneling microscope, which had been invented in the mid 1980s by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, also of IBM. The microscope had previously been used for atomic-resolution imaging, but this was the first time it had been used as an active technique, to precisely position individual atoms on a surface. The technique requires vacuum conditions and ultra-cold temperatures achieved by liquid helium cooling, and was featured on the cover of the journal "Nature". At the time, it was seen as a potential first step towards applications in mechanosynthesis, where chemical reactions could be manipulated one molecule at a time. Eigler's 2002 research, along with Andreas J. Heinrich, used a cascade of collisions of carbon monoxide molecules to perform logic operations.
Eigler graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and a doctoral degree in 1984. He was postdoctoral staff at AT&T Bell Labs for two years, and then moved to IBM where he was appointed IBM Fellow in 1993. He retired from IBM in 2011.


Resignation

Resignation is the formal act of leaving or quitting one's office or position. A resignation can occur when a person holding a position gained by election or appointment steps down, but leaving a position upon the expiration of a term, or choosing not to seek an additional term, is not considered resignation.
When an employee chooses to leave a position, it is considered a resignation, as opposed to involuntary termination. Whether an employee resigned or was terminated is sometimes a topic of dispute, because in many situations, a terminated employee is eligible for severance pay and/or unemployment benefits, whereas one who voluntarily resigns may not be eligible. Abdication is the equivalent of resignation for a reigning monarch, pope, or holder of another similar position.
Political examples.
A resignation is a personal decision to exit a position, though outside pressure exists in many cases. For example, Richard Nixon resigned from the office of President of the United States in August 1974 following the Watergate scandal, when he was almost certain to have been impeached by the United States Congress.
Deliberate manoeuvre.
Resignation can be used as a political manoeuvre, as in the Philippines in July 2005, when ten cabinet officials resigned en masse to pressure President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to follow suit over allegations of electoral fraud. Arroyo's predecessor, Joseph Estrada, was successfully forced out of office during the EDSA Revolution of 2001 as he faced the first impeachment trial held in the country's history.
In 1995, the British Prime Minister, John Major, resigned as Leader of the Conservative Party in order to contest a leadership election with the aim of silencing his critics within the party and reasserting his authority. Having resigned, he stood again and was re-elected. He continued to serve as prime minister until he was defeated in 1997 elections.
However, ascertaining whether an employee had an intent to resign depends on all the circumstances. As the Ontario Supreme Court noted, an employee's storming off may not legally be a resignation.
When criticised.
Although government officials may tender their resignations, they are not always accepted. This could be a gesture of confidence in the official, as with US President George W. Bush's refusal of his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's twice-offered resignation during the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
However, refusing a resignation can be a method of severe censure if it is followed by dismissal; Alberto Fujimori attempted to resign as President of Peru, but his resignation was refused in order that Congress could impeach him.
Delivery.
For many public figures, primarily departing politicians, resignation is an opportunity to deliver a valedictory resignation speech in which they can elucidate the circumstances of their exit from office and in many cases deliver a powerful speech which often commands much attention. This can be used to great political effect, particularly as, subsequent to resigning, government ministers are no longer bound by collective responsibility and can speak with greater freedom about current issues.
"Spending more time with family" is a common reason credited during public resignations, especially as a euphemism when receding from scandal.
Other organisations.
In academia, a university president or the editor of a scientific journal may also resign, particularly in cases where an idea which runs counter to the mainstream is being promoted. In 2006, Harvard president Lawrence Summers resigned after making the provocative suggestion that the underrepresentation of female academics in math and science could be due to factors other than sheer discrimination, such as personal inclination or innate ability.
In a club, society, or other voluntary association, a member may resign from an officer position in that organization or even from the organization itself. In Robert's Rules of Order, this is called a request to be excused from a duty. A resignation may also be withdrawn.


Vladimir Sangi

Vladimir Mikhailovich Sangi (; 18 March 1935) is a Nivkh writer and publicist. He writes in Nivkh and Russian.
Biography.
Sangi was born 18 March 1935 in the nomadic settlement Nabil (now a village in Sakhalin Oblast). He graduated from Herzen University in 1959 and became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1962. In 1965 he completed upper literature courses. In 1967 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
He settled in Moscow in the mid-1960s, and since 1975 has been a chairman of the Union of Russian Writers. After perestroika he moved back to Sakhalin, where in 1993 he was elected chief of the tribes of Ket Eastern Sakhalin and the basin of the Tym River. He is also a member of the International League for Human Rights under the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
A speaker of the East Sakhalin dialect of Nivkh, Sangi is the founder of Nivkh literature, one of the creators of the reformed Nivkh alphabet (introduced by an act of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on 29 June 1979), and the author of the rules of Nivkh orthography, a Nivkh language primer, a Nivkh language textbook, textbooks for Nivkh schools, and books for reading in Nivkh, as well as a publisher of Nivkh translations of Russian classics.
In his work it's clear that a connection is preserved in myths between man and nature, the world of animals and the spiritual forces that define material existence.
At the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 18 March 2015 there was a round table discussion entitled "Protection and Promotion of the Cultural and Linguistic Heritage of the Indigenous Peoples of Northern Sakhalin (Nivkhs)." The event was timed to coincide with Vladimir Sangi's eightieth birthday. By the decision of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, the event proceeded under the auspices of the Commission of the Russian Federation for UNESCO. The organizers of the event were Sakhalin Energy, the government of Sakhalin Oblast, and the Permanent Delegation of the Russian Federation to UNESCO.


Udi Manber

Udi Manber () is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. After a career in engineering and management, he worked on medical research.
Education.
He earned both his bachelor's degree in 1975 in mathematics and his master's degree in 1978 from the Technion in Israel. At the University of Washington, he earned another master's degree in 1981 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1982.
Career.
He has won a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, 3 best-paper
awards, and the Usenix annual Software Tools User Group Award software award in 1999. Together with Gene Myers he developed the suffix array, a data structure for string matching.
He was a professor at the University of Arizona and authored several articles while there, including "Using Induction to Design Algorithms" summarizing his textbook (which remains in print) "Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach".
He became the chief scientist at Yahoo! in 1998.
In 2002, he joined Amazon.com, where he became "chief algorithms officer" and a vice president. He later was appointed CEO of the Amazon subsidiary company A9.com. He filed a patent on behalf of Amazon. In 2004, Google promoted sponsored listings for its own recruiting whenever someone searched for his name on Google's search engine.
In 2006, he was hired by Google as one of their vice presidents of engineering. In December 2007, he announced Knol, Google's project to create a knowledge repository.
In October 2010, he was responsible for all the search products at Google.
In October 2014, Manber was named the vice president of engineering at YouTube.
In February 2015, Manber announced that he was leaving YouTube for the National Institutes of Health. He left the role in 2016.
In February 2017, Manber went to work for the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a technical advisor to UCSF's Institute for Computational Health Sciences.
In October 2018, it was reported that Manber was joining Anthem as its chief AI officer.
Manber serves on the board of directors for Twiggle and is an advisor to Amino Health.
In 2020, Manber announced a new venture called Weekly Medical News.


Fyodor Burtsev

Fyodor Ivanovich Burtsev (; 27 June 1923 4 May 2003) was a decorated test pilot of the Gromov Flight Research Institute. A recipient of the titles Hero of the Soviet Union and Honored Test Pilot of the USSR for his career as a test pilot, he went on to serve as head of the Fedotov Test Pilot School from 1974 to 1988.
Early life.
Burtsev was born on 27 June 1923 to a working-class Russian family in Kazaki village, located within present-day Tula oblast. In 1932 he moved to Moscow, where in 1940 he graduated from his eighth grade of school in addition to the local aeroclub named after Lenin before joining the military in January 1941. Upon graduating from the Borisoglebsk Military Aviation School of Pilots in November that year, he went on to serve as a flight instructor at the school until March 1942, and subsequently until June 1943 he served as an instructor pilot in the 2nd Separate Training Aviation Regiment, based in the Moscow Military District. Later he was briefly deployed to the frontline of the war, during which he flew 57 sorties on the La-5 fighter and gained one solo aerial shootdown, having been assigned to the 32nd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment in September to October 1943 and then the 111th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment until November that year. Until 1947 he served as an instructor pilot at the Higher Officer's School of Aerial Comber, although he briefly left in mid 1944 for combat training with the 322nd Fighter Aviation Division. Then from March 1947 to May 1948 he worked as an instructor pilot at the Air Force Training and Methodological Center in Volodarsk.
Test pilot career.
Upon graduating from test pilot school in 1950, Burtsev became a test pilot at the Gromov Flight Research Institute. From 1951 to 1952 he took part in manned tests of the KS-1 Komet, an anti-ship air-to-surface missile along with Amet-khan Sultan, Sergey Anokhin, and Vasily Pavlov, for which they each received the Stalin Prize 2nd class in 1953. After the Komet tests he went on to test a variety of fighter jets, and in February 1955 he became the first to take off in the MiG I-370/I-1; he went on to conduct a numerous aerodynamics tests on the MiG-15, MiG-17, MiG-19, MiG-21, E-4, E-5, and E-6, in addition to refueling system tests on the MiG-15 and MiG-17, and stability tests on the MiG-15 at supersonic speed. He also participated in tests of prototype engines on Tu-4LL and Tu-16LL flying laboratories as well as tests of an automatic approach system on an Il-18. For his work as a test pilot he was awarded a variety of high honors including the title Honoured Test Pilot of the USSR in 1964 and Hero of the Soviet Union in 1966.
Later life.
Having had a successful career as a test pilot at the Gromov Flight Research Institute, Burtsev went on to serve as head of the Fedotov Test Pilot School from 1974 to 1988, although he formally retired from active duty in the air force with the rank of colonel in March 1980. In 2001 he moved to Moscow from Zhukovsky, where he died on 2 May 2003 and was buried in the Danilovskoye cemetery.


John Platt (computer scientist)

John Carlton Platt (born 1963) is an American computer scientist. He is currently a Principal Scientist at Google. Formerly he was a Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research Redmond Labs. Platt worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015. Before that, he served as Director of Research at Synaptics.
Life and work.
Platt was born in Elgin, Illinois and matriculated at California State University, Long Beach at the age of 14. After graduating from CSULB at the age of 18, he enrolled in a computer science PhD program at California Institute of Technology.
While a student at Caltech under astronomer Gene Shoemaker, he discovered two asteroids, 3259 Brownlee and 3237 Victorplatt at Palomar Observatory on 25 September 1984. The latter he named after his father Victor Platt, while the former was named by Gene Shoemaker. Shoemaker allowed Platt to name one of his discoveries, 3927 Feliciaplatt, which he named after his mother.
In August 2005, Apple Computer had its application for a patent on the interface of the popular iPod music player rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The reason appears to be that Platt had submitted a patent application for a similar interface design five months prior to Apple's claim.
Platt shared a 2005 Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Demetri Terzopoulos for their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures.
Platt invented sequential minimal optimization, a widely used method for training support vector machines, as well as Platt scaling, a method to turn SVMs (and other classifiers) into probability models.


T. G. H. James

Thomas Garnet Henry James, (8 May 1923 – 16 December 2009), known as Harry James, was a British Egyptologist, epigrapher, and museum curator. He is best known for his career long association with the British Museum, serving with the Department of Ancient Egypt from 1951 to 1988, including 14 years as Keeper. He also had a large number of outside scholarly interests and wrote a large number of important research works on the subject of Ancient Egypt.
Life.
James was born in 1923 in Neath, Glamorganshire and attended Neath Grammar School before joining the Royal Artillery during the Second World War, reaching the rank of captain. After the end of the war he attended Exeter College, Oxford and there studied under Sir Alan Gardiner and Battiscombe Gunn, two of the most significant Egyptologists of the twentieth century. In 1951 he took a position in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum in London and there worked on a number of specialised research projects, focusing on translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs and publishing extensively on a wide variety of topics. In 1972 he worked with Eiddon Edwards on the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibition at the British Museum, which remains the most popular museum exhibition ever staged in Britain. In 1974 he replaced Edwards as Keeper of Ancient Egypt and ran the department successfully until 1988, redeveloping the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery to acclaim in 1981.
Outside his museum work and individual research, James edited the "Journal of Egyptian Archaeology" for ten years and was active in the Egypt Exploration Society which organised British fieldwork expeditions in Egypt. In retirement he continued to perform research and publish, most notably with a biography of Howard Carter in 1992 and held a number of scholarly positions including the chairmanship of the Freud Museum. He was also made a Fellow of the British Academy and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He died in December 2009 and was survived by his son Stephen, his wife having died seven years earlier.


Will Shu

William Shu (, born December 1979) is a UK-based American businessman, the co-founder and CEO of Deliveroo, an online food delivery company with operations spread across more than 200 cities in 12 countries.
Early life and education.
He was born in December 1979, in Connecticut, to Taiwanese parents. In 2001, Shu received a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University. His first job was with Morgan Stanley in New York City as an investment banking analyst in 2001. Shu returned to the United States in 2010 to attend business school and received an MBA from Wharton Business School in 2012.
Career.
Before founding Deliveroo, Shu worked as analyst for S.A.C. Capital Advisors and ESO Capital, and as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He founded Deliveroo in 2013 with childhood friend and software engineer Greg Orlowski. Shu had the idea to start Deliveroo while working in Morgan Stanley's London office and seeing the lack of delivery options while working late nights. Shu worked as the company's first delivery person, delivering food every day for the first eight months in order to understand the customer experience.
Deliveroo operated in London for the first two years, growing via word of mouth. In 2015, the company expanded internationally to Paris, Berlin and Dublin. Deliveroo reached a valuation of more than £1.5 billion in November 2017, operating in 12 countries and more than 150 cities.
In February 2016, Orlowski, who had been working as Deliveroo's chief technology officer, left "to spend more time with his wife in Chicago after the birth of their daughter".
Shu famously continues to work shifts as a Deliveroo driver, delivering food around London every few weeks.
Controversy.
Shu received criticism for raising his personal salary to £125,000 a year, a 22.5% increase, amidst a dispute over riders' status and company losses in 2016. Administrative expenses, such as hiring new staff and a new London office, multiplied from £28.8m to £142.2m, resulting in a large loss. In addition, Shu gave out close to £4.5m in share bonuses to directors and hundreds of other head office staff.
Deliveroo was one of many gig economy companies facing legal challenges over their business models in Britain. The case against Deliveroo involved 45 riders.
Personal life.
Shu lives in Notting Hill, London.


Sanjay Ghemawat

Sanjay Ghemawat (born 1966 in West Lafayette, Indiana) is an Indian American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close collaboration with Jeff Dean, has included big data processing model MapReduce, the Google File System, and databases Bigtable and Spanner. "Wired" have described him as one of the "most important software engineers of the internet age".
Education and early career.
Ghemawat studied at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He obtained a PhD from MIT in 1995, with a dissertation titled, "The Modified Object Buffer: A Storage Management Technique for Object-Oriented Databases." His advisors were Barbara Liskov and Frans Kaashoek.
Before joining Google, Ghemawat worked at the DEC Systems Research Center. There he began his long-time collaboration with Jeff Dean, who worked at another DEC research lab nearby. Their work at DEC included a Java compiler and a system profiling tool.
Career at Google.
After DEC was acquired by Compaq, many of its researchers left the company. Dean took a position at the newly founded search engine company Google, and was joined by Ghemawat in 1999. The two began working on Google's core infrastructure, making improvements to cope with the search engine's rapid growth in users in the early 2000s.
Ghemawat's work at Google includes:
Awards and honors.
Ghemawat was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. In 2012, he and Dean received the ACM Prize in Computing for their work on internet infrastructure, and the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.


Duncan L. Niederauer

Duncan L. Niederauer is an American businessman. He served as the chief executive officer of the New York Stock Exchange until September 2014.
Early life.
Niederauer graduated from Colgate University with a bachelor of arts degree. He received a master in business administration from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.
Career.
Niederauer joined Goldman Sachs in 1985, and became a Partner in 2000. From 2002 to 2004, he served on the Board of Manager of Archipelago Holdings. He served on the board of directors of the Eze Castle Software since 1981 and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation until 2008. He has served as President and Co-chief operating officer of NYSE Euronext since April 9, 2007, and as its CEO since December 1, 2007.
Niederauer is a member of G100, a private group of chief executives from the world's largest companies, and the British-American Business Council International Advisory Committee.
In 2019 he became President of Venezia FC.
He is a founding Partner of Communitas Capital
Philanthropy.
Niederauer is a member of Partnership for New York City, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, the Shanghai International Financial Advisory Committee, the American Ireland Fund, the Museum of American Finance, and Fundação Dom Cabral in Brazil. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of his alma mater, Colgate University, where he gave the Commencement speech in 2013. He also serves on the Boards of Operation HOPE and the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation.
Personal life.
Niederauer is married with three children. They reside in New Jersey.


Eric Neustadter

Eric Alan Neustadter, also known by his Xbox Live Gamertag e, is the former Operations Manager for the Microsoft gaming network Xbox Live. Neustadter is frequently a co-host of Larry Hryb's "Major Nelson Radio" Xbox-related podcast. Neustadter has been with Xbox Live since 2002. He attended the University of Oregon.
According to Microsoft, "e" is the first Gamertag ever created on Xbox Live, having been created on August 13, 2002. Neustadter picked the Gamertag in the early stages of Xbox Live as an abbreviation for his first name.
On October 23, 2015, Neustadter announced via Twitter that after 14.5 years, he was leaving Xbox. In August 2016, he announced via Twitter that he'd joined The Pokémon Company International as VP of Technology.
Other media.
Identifying himself only by his Xbox Live gamertag "e", Neustadter briefly appeared in the video at the end of the Xbox 360 viral marketing campaign OurColony. In his role as Director of Xbox Operations for Xbox Live, Neustadter appeared in a video which was included with all consoles of the Xbox 360 when it was originally released.
Neustadter is also credited as contributing to Halo 3 in the role of "Platform & Xbox Live: Microsoft Xbox".
He has also appeared on the Rooster Teeth Podcast and a Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter series called "Game Time with Burnie Burns".
"Swatting" Hoax.
On August 29, 2011, the King County Sheriff Department responded to a 911 call in response to a text message received by AT&T's emergency cell phone service. The text message, apparently from Neustadter, indicated that several armed "Russian" gunmen were invading his home.
The text messages included
Police initially responded with a SWAT team, only to discover the threat was a hoax. No one was injured in the incident. As a result, the King County Sheriff Department sent a memo to other agencies alerting them to the hoax.
Disgruntled members of Xbox Live apparently are pranking Microsoft Employees who are tasked with enforcing rules on that on-line service. The Deputy report read, in part,
“He (Neustadter) informed me that he is XXX for Xbox Live Operations and one of his primary duties is to head up teams whose job it is to find and shut down hackers who hack the system to locate cheats for Xbox and try and sell them. The hackers become extremely upset when this occurs and have been known to retaliate for it."


Robert Menschel

Robert B. Menschel (born c. 1930) is an American investment banker and philanthropist. He is a (retired) senior director of Goldman Sachs, the author of a financial book, and the winner of the 2015 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.
Early life.
Robert Menschel was born circa 1930. His father was a real estate investor. He has a brother, Richard, who is also a Goldman Sachs senior director and philanthropist. His nephew-in-law, E. W. Priestap, is the assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division.
Menschel graduated from Syracuse University in 1951.
Career.
Menschel began his career at Goldman Sachs in 1954. When it became a public company in 1999, Menschel earned $20 million in shares. He is now a (retired) senior director.
Menschel is the author of "Markets, Mobs & Mayhem: A Modern Look at the Madness of Crowds", prefaced by William Safire. While presenting historical examples of societal hysteria, Menschel suggests picking stocks by focusing on "value investing, [...] a strong franchise, a defined strategy that focuses on a core competency, and consistent sales and earnings."
Philanthropy and political activity.
Menschel is an honorary trustee of his alma mater, Syracuse University. Since 1977, he has served on the Committee on Photography at Museum of Modern Art, where he has donated 162 photographs. He serves on the board of trustees of the NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital. He is the namesake of The Robert B. Menschel Economics Symposium at the Council on Foreign Relations.
With his brother, Richard, Menschel won the 2015 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. They are also large donors to the Democratic Party. For example, Menschel and his wife donated over $700,000 to Democrats in 2010.
Personal life.
Menschel has a wife, Joyce, who is the namesake of the Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


Farzad Nazem

Farzad Nazem () (born 1961), also known as Zod Nazem, was Yahoo!'s chief technology officer and one of its longest-serving executives. On May 30, 2007, at age 46, he announced that he would retire and leave Yahoo! in June of that year. Since retirement, Nazem has spent most of his time on investments, philanthropy, and professional mentoring of young entrepreneurs in the technology field.
Early life.
Nazem began working at the young age of 13 and paid his way through college. At the age of 19, he graduated with a B.S. degree in Computer Science with highest honors from the California Polytechnic State University. Upon graduation, he was recruited by Rolm Corporation, a revolutionary technology company of the time.
Career Highlights.
Nazem started his technical career in the VLCBX Division at Rolm Corporation, producing large, computer-based telephone switches. He was soon recruited to join Sydis Inc., a spin-off of Rolm, as a senior engineer. Sydis was positioning itself to become the leading provider of hybrid telephony and computer platform of the early 1980s.
In 1985, Nazem joined Oracle Corporation, what was then a small pre-IPO company. He spent a little over 10 years at Oracle working closely with its CEO, Larry Ellison, on strategic projects like the creation of the “Information Super Highway.” This effort of the early 1990s was meant to bring information and entertainment to consumers’ homes by providing the software platforms for Video Serving and other services to Telcos. By the time Nazem left Oracle, the company had grown from 350 to around 35,000 employees.
When Nazem was recruited by Yahoo! in 1996, the company was less than a year old and had yet to go public. At the time, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite were considered established and more popular internet search engines while Yahoo! was better described as an internet directory. Nazem was brought to Yahoo! to build the engineering organization, take over site operation, and complete the executive team in preparation for the company's public debut.
Under Nazem, Yahoo! became an internet giant. Nazem led several initiatives that helped Yahoo! grow rapidly and distinguish itself from competitors including a very scalable infrastructure composed of farms of small generic servers with a free operating system (FreeBSD). The cost effectiveness and the scalability translated to a more reliable user experience while having the highest profit margins in the industry. In 1997, Yahoo! entered the crowded email market and quickly added hundreds of millions of users, becoming the most popular mail server. Additionally, through all the innovations, Yahoo! became a web portal and originator of the personalized web experience, My Yahoo.
Throughout Yahoo!’s surge, Nazem spearheaded over 50 company acquisitions, which helped in building out the different services offered by Yahoo!. Almost all of the acquisitions were technology companies and he was in charge of the integration of the people and the services.
Because of its dedication to innovation and Nazem’s strong and effective leadership, Yahoo! was one of three companies (the other two being eBay and Amazon.com) that survived the internet bubble burst of 2000 and 2001. Collectively these companies were dubbed the “3 horsemen of the Internet.” Particularly significant, Nazem was the only remaining executive from the first phase who remained through the burst and into the second phase of Yahoo!’s growth. As such, he provided stability and continuity and set the groundwork for continual innovation.
Post-Yahoo!
Upon his retirement from day to day operations at Yahoo!, Nazem released an official statement on Yahoo’s corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal. In this statement, he wrote “After spending the last 26 years in this fast-paced technology industry, I’ve finally decided it's time to slow down. I'll be retiring in early June. After joining tiny little start-ups like Oracle and then Yahoo!, I never imagined things would take off the way they have. And looking back on my eleven years here at Yahoo!, I’m amazed at all that this company has accomplished. Yahoo! has played such a significant role in building the Internet into what it is today and I’m incredibly proud to have been a part of such a talented team.”
Nazem's dedication to Yahoo and the technical community, as well as his influence and impact, continued long after his retirement. While at Yahoo!, Nazem mentored many Yahoo! alumni who have gone on to found, lead, and invest in numerous companies. Now, Nazem spends his time coaching entrepreneurs on technical architecture, market strategy, fundraising, talent development, and mergers and acquisitions. Since 2010, he has invested in more than 60 technology-driven companies in the areas of big data, cloud, health, and medical. His investments have yielded several successful exits, including acquisitions by Google, Yahoo!, Apigee, Twitter, and Cisco.
Other Activities.
In 2003, Nazem and his wife, Noosheen Hashemi, co-founded a private family foundation, The HAND Foundation. He serves on its board of directors.
Nazem is also on the Board of Trustees of The Nueva School.
Personal life.
Nazem, his wife and two children live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Patents.
Nazem currently holds five patents in the area of information technology.


John Francis Mitchell

John Francis Mitchell (January 1, 1928 – June 9, 2009) was an American electronics engineer and president and chief operating officer of Motorola.
Mitchell led the pioneering development and implementation of Motorola's mobile phone technology producing the first portable transistorized pager and cell phone. He was the driving force behind building quality into engineering, and the establishment of the Motorola University and Six Sigma Institute; and launched the global Iridium satellite constellation.
Family and early years.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Catholic Irish immigrants, William Mitchell of Sligo and Bridget Keane, of Listowel. He was married to Margaret and had three children.
Radio telephony and the cell phone.
Mitchell became Motorola's chief engineer for its mobile communication products in 1960. Prior to the development of the cell phone, Mitchell and his team of engineers produced and marketed the first transistorized pager and obtained a patent for the concept of portable cell telephony, including small antennae used to help free mobile phone units from car trunks where they were typically installed.
Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products and Martin Cooper's boss in 1973, played a key role in advancing the development of handheld mobile telephone equipment. Mitchell successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use anywhere and participated in the design of the cellular phone.
Other initiatives.
In 1983, Mitchell was appointed to U.S. President Ronald Reagan's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. He was a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and was a chairman of the Electronic Industries Alliance. He was a recognized expert on world trade, serving as director of the National Association of Manufacturers, and an expert on federal fiscal policy. Mitchell was a director of Bell & Howell Company, a trustee of the Engineering Advisory Council, Marquette University, and an active participant in the Easter Seals (US) Campaign and a member of the Presidents Council of the American Lung Association. Mitchell was a trustee at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Dublin City University and the University of Limerick Foundation. He was one of the architects, which also included Chuck Feeney, of the huge expansion of the University of Limerick during the 1990s and 2000s through his work on the University of Limerick foundation. As a philanthropist and member of IIT's Philip Danforth Armour Society, Mitchell established endowed scholarship funds for the Camras Program, the Leadership Academy and electrical engineering students. To date, the John F. Mitchell scholarship funds have supported more than 70 students at the university.
Awards.
Mitchell was awarded honorary degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology in humane letters and science, 1995; an honorary doctorate of business administration from Iowa Wesleyan College, on May 18, 1985, and from Dublin City University (Ollscoil Chathair Bhaile Átha Cliath) on October 25, 1996. He was a recipient of the 2003 Chicago Innovation Award. He received from the IIT Alumni Association its award for Professional Achievement in 1985, Alumni Medal in 1994 and Lifetime Achievement Award (posthumous) 2010.


Brewer (surname)

Brewer is a surname, meaning "a person who brews beer". Notable people with the surname include:


Sean Vanaman

Sean Vanaman (born June 16, 1984) is an IrishAmerican video game designer, writer, and podcaster. He was the co-project leader and lead writer of "The Walking Dead", and "Puzzle Agent 2". He also wrote the third episode of "Tales of Monkey Island", and was the designer of "Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures", and the writer of the third episode, "Muzzled". He was one of the regular hosts of the Idle Thumbs podcast and is one of the co-founders of Campo Santo, the company that produced "Firewatch".
Early life.
Vanaman was born and raised in Cork, Ireland. He and his family moved from Ireland to the United States.
Career.
While studying at University of Southern California, Vanaman interned at Buena Vista Games (later renamed Disney Interactive Studios) in their creative development group. This group put together the initial concept and pitch for "Epic Mickey" in 2003. After graduation, he worked as an associate creative development producer at Disney Interactive. In 2008, Vanaman took a position at Telltale Games as a writer and game designer. He worked on "Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures", "Tales of Monkey Island", and "" before becoming project lead on "Poker Night at the Inventory" and "The Walking Dead".
In September 18, 2013, he and Jake Rodkin left Telltale and joined with Olly Moss and "Mark of the Ninja" lead designer Nels Anderson to found Campo Santo.
Recognition.
"Tales of Monkey Island", for which Vanaman co-wrote, was nominated for "Best Artistic Design" and won for the award for "Biggest Surprise" at IGN's Best of PC E3 2009 Awards. After release, it won the PC Gamer 2009 "Adventure Game of the Year", was nominated for the IGN "Best Adventure Game of the Year" for PC and Wii, won the Adventure Gamers "Best Adventure of 2009", and was named the "Best Series Revival" by OC Weekly.
"Puzzle Agent 2" was nominated at IGN's Best of E3 2011 Awards for "Best iPhone/iPad Game". "The Walking Dead also" won over 90 "Game of the Year" awards since release.
Vanaman won "Game (Original Adventure)" and "Writing in a Drama" at the 2017 National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards for his work on "Firewatch".
Controversies.
In September 2017, after known YouTuber PewDiePie said the racial slur "nigger" while live-streaming the game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds", Vanaman called him "worse than a closeted racist". He then said on Twitter that he would be issuing DMCA copyright takedowns on PewDiePie's videos that contained footage of Vanaman's game "Firewatch", and urged other game developers to do the same.
This led to backlash and review bombing of "Firewatch" on Steam.
In November 2020, a Reddit post accused Vanaman of abusing his administrative privileges as a Valve employee, by manually penalizing a fellow "Dota 2" player for not following his recommended playstyle. Vanaman responded by apologizing on behalf of Valve and stating that employees from thereon out would be stripped of their in-game administrative tools - leaving actions explicitly to respondents of formal player reports.


Lois Haibt

Lois Mitchell Haibt (born 1934) is an American computer scientist best known for being a member of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language. She is known as an early pioneer in computer science.
Education and career.
Haibt studied mathematics at Vassar College with an academic scholarship. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1955. While at Vassar, Haibt worked at Bell Laboratories during the summer.
Immediately after graduating from Vassar, Haibt began working at IBM. She started with an annual salary of $5,100, despite her lack of prior programming experience. This sum was almost double the amount that she would have made at Bell Laboratories. Haibt inferred that any job with such a high salary would be difficult, but fascinating. She was part of an academically diverse team of ten young people with varying academic degrees and unrelated areas of expertise, such as crystallography and cryptography. Experience with mathematics was their one common connection. Haibt was the only woman on the team.
According to Haibt, the team worked well together: "No one was worried about seeming stupid or possessive of his or her code. We were all just learning together." The FORTRAN team worked nontraditional hours so that they could have unlimited access to the IBM 704 computer. They frequently rented rooms at the nearby Langdon Hotel in order to sleep during the day and work at night.
In 1957, Haibt attended Columbia University.
Haibt is a member of the Mathematical Association of America.
Research contributions.
The IBM team spent almost three years creating the programming language FORTRAN, which reformed the way people communicate instructions to computers.
Haibt was in charge of section four of the FORTRAN project. She analyzed the flow of programs produced by other sections of the compiler. Her estimates of flow in high-traffic areas of the computer were obtained by calculating how often basic blocks of the program would execute. Haibt employed Monte Carlo methods (statistical analysis) for these calculations. Through this process, she also created the first syntactic analyzer of arithmetic expressions. Haibt planned and programmed the entire section.
Haibt was also part of an eleven-person team to develop and release the first reference manual for FORTRAN in 1956.
Personal life.
Lois Haibt was married to Luther Haibt (May 4, 1929 – December 3, 2000), a systems analyst at IBM in Thornwood, NY. The Haibts spent their adult lives in New York state. Haibt's daughter, Carolyn, attended Princeton University for her bachelor's degree and went on to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Haibt's hobbies include interior decorating and reading.


Andrew Brandler

Andrew Clifford Winawer Brandler is the Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong utility company CLP Group, and Chairman of Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.
Biography.
Professional career.
Brandler holds an MA degree from the University of Cambridge and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant.
His background is in Investment banking, having served as Head of Asia-Pacific Corporate Finance of Schroders, in Hong Kong prior to his appointment as Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong listed utility company CLP Group in 2000.
In May 2008, following the fraud investigation into Lily Chiang, Brandler was elected to replace Chiang as Chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.