Ten Components of Effective Team Problem Solving:

When problems arise in your organization they need to be dealt with immediately and with a collectively developed problem solving process. Those affected by both the problem and its solution need to be a part of the team that goes through the process and develops solutions to resolve the underlying issues that cause it. The following are ten components of any such problem solving process that, if observed, will lead to effective and lasting solutions to the problems you face.
1. Team members readily contribute from their experience and listen to the contributions of others.
2. Disagreements arising from different points of view are considered helpful; they are seen as the crucible out of which unambiguous and honest solutions can flow.
3. Team members challenge suggestions they believe are unsupported by facts or logic but avoid arguing just to have their way or to be noticed for their own individual input.
4. Poor solutions are not supported just for the sake of harmony or agreement.
5. Differences of opinion are discussed and resolved. Coin tossing, averaging, straw-drawing, majority vote and similar cop-outs are avoided when making a decision.
6. Every team member strives to make the problem solving process efficient and is careful to facilitate rather than hinder discussion; each member strives to encourage and applaud individual efforts to contribute as well as the contributions themselves.
7. Team members encourage and support co-workers who are reluctant to offer ideas or to offer differing views from those already expressed.
8. Team members understand the value of time and work to eliminate extraneous and/or repetitious discussion.
9. Team decisions are not arbitrarily overruled by the leader simply because he/she doesn’t agree with them; each member is committed to respecting each other’s views and to honoring the sources of these views as being legitimate and sincere.
10. The team understands that the leader will make the best decision he or she can if a satisfactory team solution is not forthcoming; they each agree to support and promote the decision that results from the problem solving process whether it is made collectively by the team or individually by the leader of the team.

Barcodes:

A barcode (also bar code) is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, bar codes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1D (1 dimensional) barcodes or symbologies. They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2D (2 dimensional) matrix codes or symbologies. Although 2D systems use symbols other than bars, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well.
The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task in which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread to many other roles as well, tasks that are generically referred to as Auto ID Data Capture (AIDC). It costs about US$0.005 to implement a barcode compared to passive RFID which still costs about US$0.07 to US$0.30 per tag.
Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers, or scanned from an image by special software. In Japan, most mobile phones have built-in scanning software for 2D codes, and similar software is becoming available on smartphone platforms.
In point-of-sale management, the use of barcodes can provide very detailed up-to-date information on key aspects of the business, enabling decisions to be made much more quickly and with more confidence. For example:
• Fast-selling items can be identified quickly and automatically reordered to meet consumer demand,
• Slow-selling items can be identified, preventing a build-up of unwanted stock,
• The effects of repositioning a given product within a store can be monitored, allowing fast-moving more profitable items to occupy the best space,
• Historical data can be used to predict seasonal fluctuations very accurately.
• Items may be repriced on the shelf to reflect both sale prices and price increases.
Besides sales and inventory tracking, barcodes are very useful in shipping/receiving/tracking.
• When a manufacturer packs a box with any given item, a Unique Identifying Number (UID) can be assigned to the box.
• A relational database can be created to relate the UID to relevant information about the box; such as order number, items packed, qty packed, final destination, etc…
• The information can be transmitted through a communication system such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) so the retailer has the information about a shipment before it arrives.
• Tracking results when shipments are sent to a Distribution Center (DC) before being forwarded to the final destination.
• When the shipment gets to the final destination, the UID gets scanned, and the store knows where the order came from, what's inside the box, and how much to pay the manufacturer.
The reason bar codes are business-friendly is that bar code scanners are relatively low cost and extremely accurate compared to key-entry– only about 1 substitution error in 15,000 to 36 trillion characters entered.

Facts about Indian Railways:

First Passenger Train Ran On: 16th April 1853 (between Bombay to Thane)
First Railway Bridge: Dapoorie Viaduct on the Mumbai-Thane route
First Rail Tunnel: Parsik Tunnel
First Ghats Covered by the Rail lines: Thal and Bhore Ghats
First Underground Railway: Calcutta METRO
First Computerized Reservation System started in: New Delhi (1986)
First Electric Train ran on: 3rd Feb' 1925 (between Bombay VT and Kurla)
Toilets on Trains were introduced in: 1891 (1st Class) & 1907 (lower classes)
Shortest Station Name: Ib (Orissa)
Longest Station Name: Sri Venkatanarasimharajuvariapeta (Tamil Nadu)
Busiest Railway Station: Lucknow (64 trains everyday)
Longest Run (Time): Himsagar Express (3751 km in 74 hrs and 55 min)
Shortest Run: Route between Nagpur to Ajni (3km)
Longest Run for Daily Train: Kerala Express (3054 km in 42.5 hrs)
Longest Non-Stop Run (Distance): Trivandrum Rajdhani (528 km in 6.5 hrs)
Longest Railway Platform in the World: Kharagpur (2,733 ft in length)
Longest Railway Bridge: Nehru Setu on Sone River (10044ft in length)
Longest Tunnel: On Konkan Railway between Monkey hill & Khandala (6.5 km)
Oldest Preserved Locomotive: Fairy Queen (1855), still in working order
Gauges of Track: 4 Gauges; BG (5'6"), MG (1 metre), NG (2)
IR Daily Runs: About 14,000 trains
IR Daily Carries: More than 11 million passengers & 1 million tonnes of freight
IR's only line with Rack & Pinion system: From Mettupalayam to Conoor
IR's Fastest Train: Bhopal-Shatabdi (runs at a speed up to 140 Km/ph)
Railway Station with all the Three Gauges: Siliguri Railway Station
Route Kilometers of Track: More than 62,000 kms
People Employed in IR: About 1.6 million people
Train with Maximum Number of Halts: Howrah-Amritsar Express (115 halts)
Trains without Commercial Halts: Sampoorna Kranti Express, Howrah Rajdhani, Bombay Rajdhani, Pragati Express and Pune Shatabdi
Stations across State Lines: Navapur (Maharashtra and Gujarat), Bhawani Mandi (Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan)
Classes of travel on Indian Railway: Ist AC, 2nd AC, 3rd AC, AC Chair Car IInd sleeper & IInd ordinary

Continuous Data Protection:

Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. It allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time.
CDP is a service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location. There are multiple methods for capturing the continuous changes involving different technologies that serve different needs. CDP-based solutions can provide fine granularities of restorable objects ranging from crash-consistent images to logical objects such as files, mail boxes, messages, and database files and logs.
Continuous data protection is different from traditional backup in that you don't have to specify the point in time to which you would like to recover until you are ready to perform a restore. Traditional backups can only restore data to the point at which the backup was taken. With continuous data protection, there are no backup schedules. When data is written to disk, it is also asynchronously written to a second location, usually another computer over the network. This introduces some overhead to disk-write operations but eliminates the need for scheduled backups.
In some situations, continuous data protection will require less space on backup media (usually disk) than traditional backup. Most continuous data protection solutions save byte or block-level differences rather than file-level differences. This means that if you change one byte of a 100 GB file, only the changed byte or block is backed up. Traditional incremental and differential backups make copies of entire files.

Electric Cars:

A car can be a wonderful thing. It can take you where you want, when you want -- even when those places aren't served by public transportation. In fact, much of modern life would be impossible without cars. They help us get to our jobs, schools, grocery stores or even just to the local shopping mall. Unfortunately, as wonderful as cars are, they also have some serious drawbacks. Two of these drawbacks are that they often cost a lot of money to maintain and they pollute the atmosphere with noxious gases. Air pollution has become a serious problem in many urban areas, and with gasoline prices at record highs, the internal combustion engine may soon be a luxury that society simply can't afford.
Few people would advocate giving up cars altogether, but is there a way we can have the power and convenience of an automobile without the pollution and expense caused by burning gasoline? Fortunately, there is. Many people think that the cars of the not-so-distant future will be powered not by gasoline, but by electricity. In fact, these electric cars -- also known as EVs or electric vehicles -- aren't futuristic at all. Electric vehicles have been around since the first half of the 19th century; however, even now in the 21st century, internal combustion engines still rule.
The heart of an electric car is its battery. Unlike the batteries in most cars, which primarily serve to start the engine and run accessories like the radio or air conditioner, the battery in an electric car runs everything. Most importantly, it runs the electric motor -- or, more precisely, it runs a controller which in turn runs the electric motor -- so it needs to be powerful and long-lasting enough to take drivers where they need to go with a minimum of recharging. Until recently, no reliable, mass-producible batteries have been manufactured that could make electric cars competitive with gas-powered cars. However, that's beginning to change. Electric cars have not only become feasible, but they're now expected to start rolling off the assembly lines of major automobile manufacturers.
Perhaps the greatest problem associated with electric car batteries is recharging them. The best solution to the recharging problem is to take the car home in the evening and plug it in, similar to the way you might plug in a laptop computer or digital music player, so that it can recharge overnight. EVs will come with charging systems that allow them to recharge from a standard electric socket so that the next morning you'll be ready to hit the road again. Although at least one company claims to be developing systems that can recharge an electric car in 10 minutes, existing rechargers take between 3 and 10 hours to bring an electric car battery up to full strength using normal home electricity.
Once an EV has been recharged, how far will it go before it needs to be recharged again? This depends on a number of factors, including the type of battery in the vehicle. EVs using lead-acid batteries have the shortest range -- around 80 miles (128.7 km) on a single charge. NiMH batteries turn in a better performance, with a range of about 120 miles (193.1 km) per charge. This is where lithium-ion batteries excel, with a range of more than 220 miles (354.1 km) per charge -- using the Tesla Roadster as an example. If driving distance is the most important consideration, lithium-ion batteries are the ones to choose.

The range of an EV can be extended even further with a technology known as regenerative braking, which uses the kinetic energy of the car's brakes to recharge the battery on the fly. Under optimum driving conditions, regenerative braking can extend the car's range up to 50 percent, though in most situations the gain in driving range will be smaller.
EVs will be best suited for commuting to work or school and for local travel and shopping trips. The most obvious advantage of electric car batteries is that they don't produce the pollution associated with internal combustion engines. Another important advantage of battery-powered motors over gas-powered engines is the lower cost of the fuel -- that is, electricity for EVs and gas for the internal combustion engines. The United States Department of Energy has calculated that a typical EV can run for 43 miles on a dollar's worth of electricity. Yet another advantage of these rechargeable batteries is that they recycle well. Almost 100 percent of these batteries can be recycled, which keeps old batteries from becoming a disposal problem.

Work on two Excel Worksheets at once:

When you have two workbooks open at the same time, select Window, Compare Side by Side With. After you select this command, a floating Compare Side by Side toolbar will open in Excel.