WOULD YOU HIRE THESE FAMOUS PEOPLE BASED ON THEIR FORMER JOB APPLICATIONS?

COULD YOU BE PASSING OVER THE NEXT HUNTER S. THOMPSON OR MADONNA? THESE FAMED ARTISTS AND WRITERS HAD TO START SOMEWHERE.

BY JANE PORTER

Everyone has to start somewhere. Even the rich and famous often come from humble beginnings. Jennifer Hudson worked at Burger King. Jon Bon Jovi made Christmas decorations. Demi Moore was a debt collector. Before they were famous, they were just trying to make a buck.

Without the credibility of success, one can't help but wonder what the best and brightest minds might have looked like to potential employers. Would you have hired them? You be the judge.

Below are excerpts from four job applications from famous people before they made it, with some hiring expert insight into what they're doing right and wrong.

Image: JoJan via Wikimedia Commons

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Our first job application dates back to the 1480s. A 32-year-old Leonardo da Vinci was trying to get a job working for Ludovico Sforza, the then ruler of Milan.

"My Most Illustrious Lord," he begins--not exactly the kind of language you'd find on a cover letter these days. But da Vinci goes on to offer a numbered list of 10 skills ranging from: "plans for very light, strong and easily portable bridges with which to pursue and, on some occasions, flee the enemy" to " methods for destroying every fortress or other stranglehold unless it has been founded upon a rock or so forth" to "means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages constructed completely without noise, even if it should be necessary to pass underneath moats or any river."

Only after his exhaustive list of 10 almost superhuman skills, does da Vinci mention his biggest strengths: "I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be."

Da Vinci was hired and eventually commissioned by Sforza to paint "The Last Supper." But what can we learn from his job application?

"The problem with it is that it's not targeted," says Dan Schawbel, author of the book Promote Yourself and managing partner of the New York-based consulting firm, Millennial Branding. Still, adds Schawbel: "Bullet points and numbering is actually pretty effective," especially since people spend about eight seconds on a resume.

Even 500+ years ago, da Vinci was onto something when it came to resume writing.

EUDORA WELTY

In 1933, an inexperienced 23-year-old Eudora Welty wrote to The New Yorker asking for a job. She would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, but at the time she was just another hopeful looking to break into the magazine world. From her cover letter:

"I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most," she opens the letter. She then offers a rundown of her background and time in New York – "six weeks on the loose."

Welty goes on to list some of what she's got to offer:

"As to what I might do for you--I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works--quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards."

And a shot of her enthusiasm for the job:

"How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning--little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting."

The New Yorker didn't hire Welty. What did she do wrong? "She talks about herself too much and not enough about the employer," says Schawbel.

Of course, The New Yorker did go on to publish Welty's stories down the line and she won much recognition for her work, including a 1973 Pulitzer Prize.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

In 1958, Hunter S. Thompson applied for a newspaper job at the Vancouver Sun. If you've read any of his work, the brazenness of his cover letter should not surprise you. Still, is it the kind of thing that could score him (or anyone for that matter) a job?

Thompson's cover letter is unabashed in its frankness:

"Since I haven't seen a copy of the 'new' Sun yet, I'll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn't know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I'm not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.

By the time you get this letter, I'll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I'll let my offer stand. And don't think that my arrogance is unintentional: it's just that I'd rather offend you now than after I started working for you."

What's more, he isn't afraid to fess up to his bad rep with former employers:

"I didn't make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he'd tell you that I'm "not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person." (That's a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references. Of course if you asked some of the other people I've worked for, you'd get a different set of answers. If you're interested enough to answer this letter, I'll be glad to furnish you with a list of references--including the lad I work for now."

He's also not afraid to badmouth the industry:

"As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you're trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I'd like to work for you."

From the perspective of a hiring manager today? "There's too much rambling," says Schawbel. "He put down the industry he wants to get into, which comes down as very negative."

Of course it's that very attitude that earned Thompson his writing fame. But for a first impression job applicant--maybe not the best approach.

MADONNA

Before she made it to icon status, Madonna Ciccone was a drummer from Detroit. When she was 20, she handwrote a three-page letter, applying for a role in the low-budget erotic thriller A Certain Sacrifice.

"Please excuse the informal resumé," she wrote in her bubbly cursive. "I have been out of the country for several months and upon returning discovered many important papers misplaced. My resumés included."

She then goes on to detail the story of her life from birth to fifth grade to being a college dropout. And ends:

"After 2 months of restaurants & nightclubs everyday, being dragged to different countries every week and working with business men and not musicians I knew this life was not for me. I hung out in Paris for one more month, feeling miserably unproductive, but I couldn't bear the Parisian sterility or my homelessness any longer, so I came back to N.Y. I've been here 3 weeks now, working with my band, learning to play the drums, taking dance classes and waiting for my 20th birthday.

Is this all?"

Good thing for her career, the answer was a resounding, "No."

HOW TO BUILD A FEMINIST WORKPLACE

THESE COMPANIES ADAPT TO THE NEEDS OF WOMEN, SO EMPLOYEES AREN'T REQUIRED TO LEAN IN TOO FAR.

BY ELIZABETH SEGRAN

Jane Park, CEO of the Seattle-based cosmetics company Julep, is fired up about the recent Hobby Lobby ruling.

I can tell it’s on her mind because one minute we’re talking about the design of nail polish bottles and a second later, she shifts gears, taking us in an unexpectedly political direction. “Last month, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that companies are people but I really don’t think that’s true," Park says, out of the blue. "A company is not one human being; if anything, it’s a mini-society. There are many ways that rules of a company impact our lives more than the rules of a government."

Park has spent decades thinking about the policies that affect women’s lives--it was the focus on her public policy degree at Princeton and her law degree at Yale--and today, as a businesswoman, it remains one of her biggest concerns. "As a head of a company, I see a huge opportunity to create the kind of society we want," she tells me.

Her timing is great--we're in a moment when company heads such as Sophie Amoruso of the online retailer Nasty Gal are proving that strong female leadership can be good for both morale and the bottom line.

It's been a little over a year since Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In hit bookstore shelves, sparking a nationwide discussion about gender in the workplace. While many praised the book, calling it an invaluable manual for women keen to assert themselves at work, critics argued that Sandberg was urging women to adapt to a broken system rather than demanding that corporate America adapt to women's needs. The good news for Sandberg detractors is that business leaders across the country are busy building a feminist workplace that allows women to thrive in their careers without having to lean in too far.

The nuts and bolts of building a feminist workplace can be complicated, as Julie Falk, executive director of the feminist magazine Bitch, based in Portland, Oregon, tells me. It often involves financial gymnastics that can be particularly challenging for a small organization like hers. Still, Bitch manages to give full-time and part-time employees--all of whom are women--health care, maternity leave, and the "Bitch minimum wage" of $15 an hour. "If Bitch can do it, why can’t you?" Falk asks.

While these policies benefit employees of both genders, they are particularly pertinent to women who, at a national level, earn only 77% of what their male counterparts do and have far more health care needs. "As a business leader, you get to create the model then organize your financial planning around it. Most organizations don’t think twice about paying the rent, but if you wanted, you could require all your staff to work from home so that you could afford to give them health care," she says.

Falk says it is crucial to put policies into writing whenever possible, but many aspects of workplace culture are difficult to codify. "Culture has to do with all those small and incremental messages you get as an employee," she says. For instance, she points out that tackling the gender gap means making a habit of supporting young female employees so they can rise through the ranks. This is crucial in male-dominated fields like journalism, where women are still underrepresented on mastheads and in newsrooms. (The coverage of Jill Abramson’s firing from the New York Times threw this problem into stark relief.) Falk says that part of her company's culture involves helping Bitch interns launch their careers in the media industry by writing them recommendation letters and preparing them for interviews.

There are also policies that cannot be generalized because they can only be applied on a case-by-case basis. Julep's Park points out that women’s concerns vary at different life stages--from breastfeeding to looking after sick children--which makes it difficult for them to conform to a fixed work schedule. If companies are inflexible, they risk losing these employees altogether. In her book, Sandberg points to the statistic that 43% of highly qualified women with children drop out of the workforce. She encourages women to be more ambitious and stick with their careers, painful though it might be; conversely, Park suggests that companies make it easier for women to balance their work and family responsibilities. And she has firsthand knowledge of exactly how taxing pregnancy and motherhood can be, since she has had two children while balancing a high-powered career.

"One of the biggest pieces to retaining women in the workforce is thinking of them as individuals," she says. If fact, her experiences as a mother have helped her fine-tune this part of her management philosophy: “You can do the same thing for two kids but get completely different results because they are just different people.”

On an organizational level, Park encourages managers to clearly communicate with their team members about what their goals and priorities are, then give them the autonomy to manage their own time and take time off as necessary. Lise Quintana, founder of the San Francisco tech startup Narrative Technologies, has a similar approach with her workers. "If an employee needs to leave early to take care of a child or a parent or their own self, they should do that,” she says. “It is about treating them like grown-ups and trusting that they will complete their work.” Quintana also makes the case that it is downright sinister for employers not to accommodate the particular situations of their workers. “That’s treating your employees as products,” she says. "If your employee is suffering some kind of personal crisis, it is not acceptable to get rid of her and replace her with a shiny new employee."

However, it is not enough to tell employees they have these rights. Falk says that workplace culture will not change if women do not feel like they can take advantage of these benefits without managers thinking poorly of them. "If no one is taking vacation, then of course you are going to think twice before taking family leave," she says. She argues that business leaders should reinforce the culture by speaking up, urging employees to go home when they are unwell or have family issues. “This feeds into the idea that the organization cares about you as a person; the little steps build up to making employees feel more comfortable taking advantage of those bigger policies." Park says that senior management also has a responsibility to serve as role models and take advantage of these policies themselves. When Park’s co-founder and COO gave birth to twins, she had to take extended maternity leave and currently works part time. “We’re making it clear that we are keen to hang on to our employees during tricky periods in their life,” she says.

But perhaps the hardest part of creating a feminist workplace is ensuring that women’s perspectives are respected. In many offices, women’s voices are undermined in subtle ways that are hard to address. Quintana tells me that she worked for several large technology firms where she was one of a very small number of female employees. "It felt like I was working two jobs: doing whatever work I already had to do, then playing the 'token girl' role in PR efforts," she recalls. In meetings away from the public eye, meanwhile, her comments would often be ignored; when a male employee made the same point five minutes later, senior management would be all ears. She started her own company, in part, to escape this ongoing marginalization.

Quintana is not alone in her desire to launch her own business after a lifetime of unsatisfying experiences in workplaces where men set the culture. A report last month noted that one in 10 women in the U.S. is starting or running her own company and that these women entrepreneurs are three times happier than women who work for someone else. This bodes well for women desperate to escape staff meetings where they might as well be invisible.

For her part, Park deliberately chose feminine language to describe the corporate culture at Julep, defying the conventions of male-dominated business speak. She has built the company’s messaging around "girlfriends" and the power of female friendships. "I am inspired by what girlfriends can do for one another," she says. "I’m not expecting my employees to be best friends, but I want to infuse our culture with the best parts of female friendships: the sense of supporting each other, taking risks and ongoing growth." With this kind of female vernacular, Park sets the tone for her organization, making it clear from the outset that the female point of view--which is so often dismissed as silly--is valid and worth taking seriously.

Ultimately, Park wants to shift the conversation away from how businesses can help women, because she says that retaining female employees helps businesses even more. By having a corporate culture that is welcoming to women, organizations have the opportunity to find and hold on to the best talent on the market, regardless of their gender. “I am interested in how we become a fantastic and enduring company,” says Park. "Our goal has always been to find phenomenal people who are making a great impact and doing whatever it takes to retain them. In the practice of doing this, we have come up with strategies to hold on to women longer."

Inside NYC's $20 Billion Quest To Build A Neighborhood From Scratch

CAN YOU CREATE THAT BUZZY NEIGHBORHOOD FEEL IN 17.4 MILLION SQUARE FEET AND 28 ACRES? MANHATTAN IS ABOUT TO FIND OUT.

WRITTEN BY Karrie Jacobs

A motley group of journalists is clustered in a conference room on the far west end of 33rd Street in Manhattan, about to embark on a press tour of Hudson Yards, the $20 billion plan to build a neighborhood from scratch. Before we don our hard hats and day-glo orange vests, we’re shown an inspirational video. The spot, made by the creative agency Visual House, starts by evoking the essence of New York as a series of quick cuts --skyline shot with sun glinting off building, weary man sipping coffee, jogger on bridge--cued to inoffensive music. It could be an ad for American Express. The voiceover comes in: “They say you can tell you’ve become a real New Yorker the minute you stop looking up.”

As the video progresses, we discover that looking up is actually a good thing. Looking up is for “anyone wide eyed enough to believe that New York still lives up to its namesake, as someplace new.” Then, as the music quickens, we suddenly catch a glimpse of the exotic, oddly jaggy office towers that will eventually rise from a platform constructed above Penn Station’s westside rail yards. Hudson Yards, the “largest private real estate development in the history of the United States,” with more than a dozen towers, a seven-level shopping mall, and a kunsthalle called the Culture Shed that’s supposed to expand and contract like a Slinky, is cast as a “neighborhood to explore” (like Nolita or Sunset Park) or “a place to get lost in.” Or as Jay Cross, former president of the New York Jets, who heads the project for The Related Companies, asserts, “It’s much more than a real estate project.”

Well, yes and no. It’s very much a real estate project, but with 17.4 million square feet stretched over 28 acres, it's so ambitious that it makes other notable undertakings shrink in comparison. The World Trade Center, after all, covers only 16 acres and Rockefeller Center, 22. (On the other hand, it’s modest in comparison to Asia’s built-from-scratch areas like South Korea’s Songdo, covering 1,500 acres reclaimed from the sea or Business Bay in Dubai, a district consisting of hundreds of new buildings, not just a dozen.)

The site is currently a sunken 30-track rail yard completed in 1987 as a holding area for the Long Island Railroad’s commuter trains. Below those tracks are three active train tunnels carrying commuters in and out of Penn Station, one of New York's central transit hubs, two blocks east. Since the 1990s, the yards have been in play as a potential development site. Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the area was viewed as a likely site for a football stadium, and a potential venue for the 2012 Summer Olympics, should New York be selected. This passion transferred from Giuliani to his successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The Hudson Yards project had the misfortune of being shackled to the huge stadium until 2005, when, after endless controversy, the state legislature denied approval on the project and the International Olympics Committee balked. Today, the Western Yard is more reasonably reserved for a cluster of residential towers, a public school and one office tower, all of which will be mapped out later.

What’s currently underway is the Eastern Yard, master-planned by Kohn Pedersen Fox, an architecture firm headquartered on West 42nd street, known lately for Asian mega projects such as the 101 story Shanghai World Financial Center and the master plan for Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills. A 52-story, KPF-designed tower, with Coach as the anchor tenant, is scheduled for completion next year with the rest rising over the next five years. The Eastern Yard consists of towers, mostly commercial, that have been liberated, architecturally speaking, by the fact that they’re not in midtown or the financial district, shoehorned between other buildings. Towers by KPF, David Childs of SOM, and Diller Scofidio Renfro with the Rockwell Group are distinguished by irregular angles, spikes, and bulges. In renderings, they look like the skyscrapers that the firms in question would crank out for their clients in Dubai.

The funny thing about the tour was that there wasn’t much reason to look up. We picked our way through a very active construction site, keeping a close eye on the detritus underfoot. We encountered some of the 300 massive steel caissons being sunk to support the platform and towers, and we looked down at the impressive $180 million concrete tube Amtrak is burying beneath the development (in the hope that New Jersey will someday agree to building new rail tunnel under the Hudson). We rode a construction elevator up to the highest completed floor of 10 Hudson Yards (roughly the 10th of 52 stories) and took in the panorama: in the foreground was a tantalizingly complete stretch (scheduled to open in the fall) of the High Line, the abandoned rail line turned phenomenally popular elevated park, and, way to the north, was the transparent, biosphere-like entry of a new station (designed by Dattner Architects) for the extension of the 7 subway line. In between, it’s all rail yards. Not much else to see yet. Whether this will someday be, as Cross promises, a “buzzy” neighborhood with “appeal to the millennial worker” is impossible to determine.

The funny thing about the tour was that there wasn’t much reason to look up. We picked our way through a very active construction site, keeping a close eye on the detritus underfoot. We encountered some of the 300 massive steel caissons being sunk to support the platform and towers, and we looked down at the impressive $180 million concrete tube Amtrak is burying beneath the development (in the hope that New Jersey will someday agree to building new rail tunnel under the Hudson). We rode a construction elevator up to the highest completed floor of 10 Hudson Yards (roughly the 10th of 52 stories) and took in the panorama: in the foreground was a tantalizingly complete stretch (scheduled to open in the fall) of the High Line, the abandoned rail line turned phenomenally popular elevated park, and, way to the north, was the transparent, biosphere-like entry of a new station (designed by Dattner Architects) for the extension of the 7 subway line. In between, it’s all rail yards. Not much else to see yet. Whether this will someday be, as Cross promises, a “buzzy” neighborhood with “appeal to the millennial worker” is impossible to determine.

Your Brain On 6 Hours Of Sleep A Night

MIGHT AS WELL JUST GET DRUNK.

You've heard it before, probably from your mom: Make sure you get enough sleep.

But if you need a more scientific justification to turn in early (or give that night-owl neighbor a piece of your mind), AsapSCIENCE has you covered. The popular YouTube channel has a new video that explains the effects of lack of sleep, from decreased brain function to increased risks of heart disease and obesity. In one study, researchers found that subjects who slept just six hours a night for 14 days had the cognitive wherewithal of someone with a .1% blood alcohol level. That's legally drunk.

The good news: You can make up modest amounts of "sleep debt" over time. The bad news: If you suffer from chronic sleep deprivation, over time you lose your ability to judge your own reduced cognitive abilities.

[H/T AsapSCIENCE]

What The Future Looks Like To North Koreans Who Have Never Left

What does a future imagined by someone living in a place that's been cut off from the rest of the world since 1948 look like? Approximately 1958.

North Korea is the least visited country in the world, but Koryo Tours, one of the only companies to bring foreign travelers there, is trying to change that. One of its latest projects: Inviting a North Korean architect to imagine the future of local design for travel.

The Jetsons-style results include hovercraft hotel rooms and cone-shaped mountain villas connected by ski slopes. Nothing looks like it would be that out of place in a 1950s magazine, down to details like an old-fashioned rotary phone. This is what the future looks like to someone living in a place that's been cut off from the rest of the world since 1948.

Every architect in North Korea is educated at a state-run school, without access to the Internet or other global media, and has little sense of how the field is changing. Koryo Tours tries to help by occasionally bringing some new design books from the outside world.

"We have developed an architectural tour to North Korea, and take in books on contemporary architecture when we go, which is one way that the architects there get to see new works," says Nick Bonner, founder of the company. A small number of North Korean architects are also allowed to study abroad, though the anonymous architect who worked on this project has never left the country.

At Bonner's request, each of the designs aimed for sustainability, though the architect also had limited knowledge of current sustainable design techniques. "They are not aware of the latest technology, which shows in some of the designs," Bonner says. "However, the designs using wood and traditional construction methods do show great imagination of reusing natural products in a traditional way--like making use of natural cooling."

One design, for a "silk cooperative," an artisans' commune that travelers would visit, uses solar power, wind turbines, and traditional Korean spinning wheels. Another, the Birds' Nest Villa, focuses on building North Korean-style community. "We all are in the nest together and have to learn to be together harmoniously," the architect writes.

Though the designs were meant to be speculative, Bonner says he's interested in the possibility of building a set of the villas. "I would very much like to construct the Birds' Nest Riverside Guesthouse, with its cantilevered rooms giving three-sided views to the woodland," he says. "If anyone wants to work on them, and send over models, we would be happy to pass them on."

This fall, Koryo will give a tour of some of Pyongyang's existing architecture, including the uber-kitsch Chongnyon Hotel, built for a "world festival of communist youth" in the 1980s, and the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum.

"It is not just the individual architecture there that is remarkable," Bonner says. "Pyongyang was totally reconstructed following the Korean War. It's not only individual buildings that are of interest, but the ‘master plan’ for the city’s reconstruction as a modern socialist utopia."

India, a lo grande: 100 'smart cities' y 2.000 millones de árboles nuevos

·        

El país quiere resolver sus futuros problemas de superpoblación y contaminación

·         Las ciudades inteligentes contarán con redes de fibra óptica y tasas 'especiales'

Siguiendo los pasos de China. India quiere ser China. El país vecino es el espejo en el que se mira, para todo, como en el urbanismo. Entre ambos suman más de 2.540 millones de habitantes, un población que está abandonando el campo para vivir en las metrópolis. Hace tiempo que China puso en el centro de sus estrategias de planificación urbana a las ciudades inteligentes. India ha respondido ahora con el anuncio de la creación de ¡100 nuevas 'smart-cities' a lo largo del país! «En el pasado, las ciudades se construían en los márgenes de los ríos, ahora se levantan junto a las autovías, pero en el futuro se asentarán en función de la disponibilidad de las redes de fibra óptica y de las infraestructuras de última generación ['i-ways']», afirmó el primer ministro indio, Narendra Modi.

Antiguas y nuevas. La inversión, pública y privada, se realizará tanto en ciudades que ya existen (que se actualizarán con nuevas tecnologías) como de nueva edificación. De hecho, India ya está levantando algunos proyectos de 'smart cities' como el del estado de Guyarat. Un buen número de ciudades también se están construyendo en el corredor que une Delhi con Bombay, la capital política india con la económica. La mayoría de estas ciudades incluyen (e incluirán) zonas económicas especiales, con tasas reducidas y facilidades de inversión para las empresas extranjeras.

Sin olvidar los árboles. El anuncio de este ambicioso plan coincide con otra propuesta del gobierno indio dirigida a solventar dos problemas en uno: el desempleo juvenil y la polución. El Ministerio de Desarrollo Rural desveló la semana pasada un plan por el que plantará 2.000 millones de árboles a lo largo de todo el país, contratando a 300.000 jóvenes en paro. «La longitud de las autovías nacionales en el país es de 99.999 kilómetros, he pedido a los oficiales que elaboren un plan para plantar 2.000 millones de árboles junto a estos tramos que, a cambio, creará puestos de trabajo para los desempleados y protegerá al medio ambiente», afirmó en un comunicado el ministro indio de Desarrollo Rural, Jairam Gadkari.

28-07-2014

http://www.elmundo.es/economia/2014/07/28/53d2904b22601d95528b458f.html

¿Cuáles son las cinco ciudades más inteligentes de América Latina?

28.07.2014 09:39 | Fuente: Red Innova

Cuando se escucha hablar de Smart Cities, lo primero que se piensa es en ciudades con tecnologías súper desarrolladas. Pero allí no termina todo. Hay, además, un sinfín de características y aspectos que determinan qué tan inteligente es una ciudad: el acceso a los servicios públicos, los planes de contaminación, la gestión de recursos naturales, las instancias de participación ciudadana y más. Afortunadamente, el mundo entero está hoy trabajando en estas cuestiones y buscando eficiencia, más limpieza, más innovación y nuevas formas de sortear las adversidades y enfrentar los desafíos urbanos que el siglo XXI presenta. ¿Cómo? A través de iniciativas que favorezcan la calidad de vida de sus ciudadanos.

Fomentar un ecosistema sostenible, impulsar y apoyar actividades innovadoras, facilitar un territorio conectado y promover la cohesión social son algunas de las cuatro condiciones principales de las Smart Cities. En otras palabras, utilizar todos los recursos que posee de forma coordinada y prudente para desarrollar centros urbanos integrados, habitables y sostenibles.

Estas son las cinco ciudades más inteligentes de Latinoamérica según la revista nortamericana Fast Company:

1. Santiago de Chile

De un tiempo a esta parte, la capital chilena se viene caracterizando por su lucha contra la contaminación del aire y la congestión vehicular. El sistema de metro de Santiago tiene el mayor uso per cápita de América Latina y hay varias iniciativas de bikesharing. Por otra parte, los programas de Startup Chile están entre los mejores 20 del mundo y se destaca el proyecto Smart City Santiago.

2. México D. F.

Esta ciudad se diferencia por las investigaciones en gobierno digital y por las iniciativas de datos abiertos. Sus calles fueron las primeras en ver nacer edificios inteligentes, ecológicos y tecnológicos que permiten absorber smog. Además, hay iniciativas y startups que buscan mejorar la situación de movilidad en la metrópoli, ya sea por medio de transporte público, evitando el tráfico o promoviendo el uso de un vehículo alternativo: Carrot, Aventones, UrbanDF o Wikicleta son algunos ejemplos.

3. Bogotá

La capital colombiana tiene el sistema de buses rápidos (BRT) más extenso y utilizados en el mundo, además de uno de ciclorutas que se conectan con el sistema TransMilenio y un programa dedicado a la promoción de la bicicleta como medio alternativo de movilidad. En asociación con la compañía BYD, es la primera ciudad de América Latina que comenzó a utilizar una flota de taxis eléctricos.

4. Buenos Aires

Una de las características principales de esta ciudad es su renovación urbana, donde se han creado polos para la tecnología y el diseño, el entretenimiento y el arte. Además, se destaca la expansión de sistema de buses para mejorar la movilidad y conectividad, la mejora en infraestructura para ciclistas y la creación de amplios espacios verdes dentro de la ciudad y calles con árboles, lo que permiten bajar la huella de carbono.

5. Río de Janeiro

Cámaras y mapas digitales que hasta Google ha declarado innovadores son dos de las iniciativas que se pusieron en marcha en 2010 de la mano de IBM y hoy el Centro de Operaciones de la Ciudad es la más grande zona de monitoreo. Además, sus sensores en las laderas –combinados con datos meteorológicos y las nuevas herramientas de comunicación- pueden predecir deslizamientos de la tierra y, en consecuencia, advertir a la población.

The Brands With The Best Global Reputations Are The Ones That Make Our Gadgets

Among the world's most valuable companies, consumer awareness is highest for tech brands like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung.

Google may be mired in debates over privacy, but it's still the world's top company brand, according to the latest FutureBrand Index. As a top-ranked "future brand," the company is also likely to succeed going forward because of its strong visions of purpose, user experience, and sustainability, according to the index.

Created by global brand consultancy FutureBrand, the index gauges the "brand strength" of the world's 100 most valuable companies. Its scoring is based on a survey of more than 3,000 people in 16 countries.

These are the top 20 brands:

Many of the top brands are in the tech sector--in fact, Silicon Valley has a strong presence overall in the top brand rankings. It's not too surprising to see consumer-facing brands like Google, Apple, and Disney ranking at the top, but companies like SABIC and AbbVie, which don't sell directly to the general public, somehow still manage to round out the top ranked organizations.

Here are the bottom 20 brands among the world's most valuable companies:

No big surprises here. Lots of oil companies, banks, and a couple tobacco companies wedged in for good measure.

In addition to the top 100 rankings, FutureBrand also picked out 22 companies to be labeled as future brands because of respondents' desire to buy products and work for them--a sign that they will succeed in the future. These companies include many of the top-ranked brands overall, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Disney, Intel, IBM, and Toyota. If these rankings are to be believed, tech companies will have the strongest brands for the foreseeable future. That should be obvious to anyone who has seen the way people clamor for jobs at places like Google and Apple.

While energy and financial organizations struggled in the rankings, FutureBrand believes that the companies that become known for their good ethics in these sectors will do well in the future. The report explains:

Those companies that can demonstrate they are leading change in their industry in relation to obvious areas like the environment and corporate social responsibility, will not only better attend to stakeholder needs, but also will differentiate from their competition. This is not least because the sectors still seem to be hampered by broadly weak or negative perceptions in the wake of the global financial crisis and concerns about the viability of our dependency on fossil fuels: hence the larger negative disparity between market cap and FutureBrand Index ranking for most of the organizations in these sectors.

Check out the full report here.