Surprising Signs You are an Entrepreneur

Some people say that entrepreneurs are born while others believe entrepreneurs are self made. This notwithstanding, some traits have been proven to be common among most of the entrepreneurs.

So, don't believe everything others say about you or how they label you. Maybe your supposed liabilities are really your assets. The following twelve signs many people might consider a liability, but which can actually be indications that you are meant to be an entrepreneur.

1. Hate the Status Quo
 It doesn't make sense to you that something has been done the time-honoured way with no explanation why. You are not someone who wants to just go through the motions or sit by idly. Nor do you like following the pack.

2. Easily Bored
You find yourself easily bored, and others start viewing you as a problem. But nothing is wrong with you except that you are bored with activities that aren't up to your abilities and aren't challenging. That's why you hated most of the classes you ever attended. Think Bill Gates who dropped out of college to become one of the richest men in the world.

3. Fired from Jobs
You're too creative for your own good when it comes to working for others, and you may have some history, as I do, of losing jobs. Being just a cog in wheel is very difficult for you because you want to create something others can be inspired by and contribute to.

4. Labeled a Rebel
You know that greatness resides outside the lines of conformity and don't think that policies, laws and regulations apply to you. You have been described as a rebel and rule breaker and would defy gravity if you could.

5. Resist Authority
You have a lifelong record of resisting authority from your parents, teachers and bosses. You don't go along with the agreed upon norms of the group or community you work and live in.

6. Ready to Improve Everything
You always see how you could do things better. In addition, you are opinionated and freely give your two-cents about your better way of doing things--even when you're not asked.

7. Bad at Making Small Talk 
You have difficulty making the kind of small talk that so many people get comfort from. This social pattern of relationship and rapport building seems like a waste of time to you and makes you uncomfortable.

8. Bullied in Your Youth
You may have been heavily criticized, picked on and even bullied as a child or teenager. This has caused you to be driven to excel and to prove to the world that you are indeed a force to be reckoned with.

9. Obsessive
You may have been labeled obsessive/compulsive because when you get started on something you have difficulty letting go. Don't let anyone convince you that this is a disease or deficiency. All of the great entrepreneurs become completely immersed in their vision. Howard Schultz stuck with Starbucks even when his family tried to persuade him not to.

10. Scared to Go Solo
The entrepreneur in you is scared of going out on your own—and also terrified of not doing so. This fear is so common in our society because we've been conditioned to think that entrepreneurship is much riskier than getting a "good job." The reality is there is instability in both.

11. Unable to Unwind
You can't go to sleep at night because you can't turn your thoughts off. An idea may even manifest itself in your dreams. The next morning you find yourself still consumed with that idea, distracting you from the job you're supposed to be doing.

12. Don't Fit the Norm 
You have always been a bit uncomfortable in your own skin. Until you get used to the idea that you are in fact different from most people, it could prove to be a problem--or exactly the motivation you need to acknowledge the entrepreneur screaming to get out
. . .  . So go out and set free your entrepreneurial spirit!

Born With Two Vaginas: Not So Rare

By Susan Donaldson James

Jan 12, 2012 12:10pm

 

Hazel Jones, 27, was born with double vaginas, cervixes and uteruses.

When British television aired a story about a woman who had been born with double the equipment – two vaginas, two cervixes and two uteruses – Internet commenters piped in and said, “Me, too!”

Hazel Jones, a 27-year-old from High Wycombe, has a rare, but not unheard of condition called uterus didelphys, which is not easily diagnosed until a woman’s sex organs develop as she enters puberty.
“It’s not that crazy at all, even though it sounds like a sci-fi thing,” said Vincenzo Berghella, director of maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “We see many couples, maybe one a month or more.”
Jones, who got her diagnosis at 18 after suffering for years from menstrual cramps, shared her story this week with ITV’s show “This Morning.” 
Adapted from:
 http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/12/born-with-two-vaginas-not-so-rare/ 
Follow this link for full story

Bibi Can't Lose - By Natan B. Sachs | Foreign Policy

 It's one of Washington's worst kept secrets: President Barack Obama's administration would prefer Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lose the Israeli elections in January 2013. Netanyahu is not only too hawkish on the Palestinian issue and Iran for the White House's comfort, he has the added burden of a fraught personal relationship with Obama -- cemented by his perceived public endorsement of Mitt Romney in the U.S. presidential election.

Bibi Can't Lose - By Natan B. Sachs | Foreign Policy

Gene That Predicts the Time of Death Discovered

A common gene variant separates early birds from night owls, and can even predict someone’s hour of death.

The findings—published in the November issue of the journal Annals of Neurology—could help people schedule anything from work to medical treatments, while offering clues to the conditions of vulnerable patients.

Andrew Lim, M.D., now an assistant professor in the division of neurology at the University of Toronto, noted in a statement that previous work in twins and families had suggested that people may inherit the lateness or earliness of their body clocks, while animal experiments suggested that specific genes affected the lateness or earliness of the biological clock.

Dr. Lim—then a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Chief of Neurology Clifford Saper, M.D., Ph.D.—and lab colleagues were studying why older people have trouble sleeping. He joined a research project based at Rush University in Chicago involving 1,200 people who signed on as healthy 65-year-olds and would receive annual neurological and psychiatric examinations.

The study’s original goal was to identify any precursors to the development of Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease. Subjects were undergoing sleep-wake analyses, and had agreed to donate their brains after they died to provide scientists with information on sleep-wake patterns within a year of death.

But when Dr. Lim learned that the same subjects had also had their DNA genotyped, he joined his colleagues and investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in comparing the sleep-wake behavior of the patients with their genotypes.

The study findings—later verified in a volunteer group—uncovered a single nucleotide near a gene called “Period 1” that varied between two groups that differed in their wake-sleep behavior. At this site in the genome, 60% of individuals have the nucleotide base termed adenine (A) while the other 40% have the nucleotide base termed guanine (G). Since people have two sets of chromosomes, in any given individual there’s about a 36% chance of having two As, a 16% chance of having two Gs, and a 48% chance of having a mixture of A and G.

“People who have the A-A genotype wake up about an hour earlier than the people who have the G-G genotype, and the A-Gs wake up almost exactly in the middle,” Dr. Saper, who is also the James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, said in the statement. He added that expression of the Period 1 gene was lower in the brains and white blood cells of people with the G-G genotype than in people with the A-A, but only in the daytime when the gene is normally expressed.

When investigators re-examined patients who died, they found that this same genotype predicted six hours of the variation in the time of death: those with the A-A or A-G genotype died just before 11 a.m., the average time, while those with the G-G on average died at just before 6 p.m.

Dr. Lim said future studies will look to determine the mechanisms by which this and other gene variants influence the body’s biological clock. The research, he said, could help people optimize their schedules, and yield new therapies against disturbances of this clock such as jet lag or shift work.

The study was supported by grants from NIH as well the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Bisby Fellowship, an American Academy of Neurology Clinical Research Training Fellowship, and a Dana Foundation Clinical Neuroscience Grant. Adapted from: http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/b-gene-b-b-predicts-b-b-time-b-of-b-death-b/81247651/

Antibodies in cows’ milk protect against HIV

New research from the University of Melbourne could hold the key to developing a cream that can prevent HIV infection. And the secret ingredient is cow’s milk.
Cows cannot contract HIV – the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. But like humans infected with the common cold, their immune systems develop antibodies against the foreign protein. Using this knowledge, Dr. Marit Kramski and her colleagues from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, together with Australian biotechnology company Immuron, have developed cows’ milk containing antibodies that protect human cells from the HIV.
The team did this by vaccinating pregnant cows with an HIV protein and then studying the first milk produced by the cows after giving birth. The first milk, called colustrum, is an ideal choice as it is naturally packed with antibodies to protect the calf from infections. The researchers found that the vaccinated cows produced milk containing HIV antibodies.
The research team then harvested antibodies specific to the HIV surface protein from the milk. Laboratory experiments show that the antibodies bind to HIV and inhibits the virus from entering and infecting human cells. The study’s results were published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in a paper titled “Hyperimmune Bovine Colostrum as a Low-Cost, Large-Scale Source of Antibodies with Broad Neutralizing Activity for HIV-1 Envelope with Potential Use in Microbicides”.
Producing HIV antibodies in cows’ milk to inhibit HIV is cheaper and easier than existing drug-based methods. Up to a kilogram of antibodies can be produced by a single cow. Dr. Kramski hopes to formulate an affordable cream or gel that can be used to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV. Adapted from:http://sciencematters.unimelb.edu.au

Best Management Lesson: Transformation of General Motors Plant in Fremort by Toyota

Fix the machine, not the person

This post is part seven of the series Raw Nerve.
The General Motors plant in Fremont was a disaster. “Everything was a fight,” the head of the union admits. “They spent more time on grievances and on things like that than they did on producing cars. They had strikes all the time. It was just chaos constantly. … It was considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States.”
“One of the expressions was, you can buy anything you want in the GM plant in Fremont,” adds Jeffrey Liker, a professor who studied the plant. “If you want sex, if you want drugs, if you want alcohol, it’s there. During breaks, during lunch time, if you want to gamble illegally—any illegal activity was available for the asking within that plant.” Absenteeism was so bad that some mornings they didn’t have enough employees to start the assembly line; they had to go across the street and drag people out of the bar.
When management tried to punish workers, workers tried to punish them right back: scratching cars, loosening parts in hard-to-reach places, filing union grievances, sometimes even building cars unsafely. It was war.
In 1982, GM finally closed the plant. But the very next year, when Toyota was planning to start its first plant in the US, it decided to partner with GM to reopen it, hiring back the same old disastrous workers into the very same jobs. And so began the most fascinating experiment in management history.
Toyota flew this rowdy crew to Japan, to see an entirely different way of working: The Toyota Way. At Toyota, labor and management considered themselves on the same team; when workers got stuck, managers didn’t yell at them, but asked how they could help and solicited suggestions. It was a revelation. “You had union workers—grizzled old folks that had worked on the plant floor for 30 years, and they were hugging their Japanese counterparts, just absolutely in tears,” recalls their Toyota trainer. “And it might sound flowery to say 25 years later, but they had had such a powerful emotional experience of learning a new way of working, a way that people could actually work together collaboratively—as a team.”
Three months after they got back to the US and reopened the plant, everything had changed. Grievances and absenteeism fell away and workers started saying they actually enjoyed coming to work. The Fremont factory, once one of the worst in the US, had skyrocketed to become the best. The cars they made got near-perfect quality ratings. And the cost to make them had plummeted. It wasn’t the workers who were the problem; it was the system.¹

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An organization is not just a pile of people, it’s also a set of structures. It’s almost like a machine made of men and women. Think of an assembly line. If you just took a bunch of people and threw them in a warehouse with a bunch of car parts and a manual, it’d probably be a disaster. Instead, a careful structure has been built: car parts roll down on a conveyor belt, each worker does one step of the process, everything is carefully designed and routinized. Order out of chaos.
And when the system isn’t working, it doesn’t make sense to just yell at the people in it — any more than you’d try to fix a machine by yelling at the gears. True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more often you’re just using them in the wrong way. When there’s a problem, you shouldn’t get angry with the gears — you should fix the machine.
If you have goals in life, you’re probably going to need some sort of organization. Even if it’s an organization of just you, it’s still helpful to think of it as a kind of machine. You don’t need to do every part of the process yourself — you just need to set up the machine so that the right outcomes happen.
For example, let’s say you want to build a treehouse in the backyard. You’re great at sawing and hammering, but architecture is not your forte. You build and build, but the treehouses keep falling down. Sure, you can try to get better at architecture, develop a better design, but you can also step back, look at the machine as a whole, and decide to fire yourself as the architect. Instead, you find a friend who loves that sort of thing to design the treehouse for you and you stick to actually building it. After all, your goal was to build a treehouse whose design you like — does it really matter whether you’re the one who actually designed it?²
Or let’s say you really want to get in shape, but never remember to exercise. You can keep beating yourself up for your forgetfulness, or you can put a system in place. Maybe you have your roommate check to see that you exercise before you leave your house in the morning or you set a regular time to consistently go to the gym together. Life isn’t a high school exam; you don’t have to solve your problems on your own.

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In 1967, Edward Jones and Victor Harris gathered a group of college students and asked them to judge another student’s exam (the student was a fictional character, but let’s call him Jim). The exam always had one question, asking Jim to write an essay on Fidel Castro “as if [he] were giving the opening statement in a debate.” But what sort of essay Jim was supposed to write varied: some of them required Jim to write a defense of Castro, others required Jim to write a critique of Castro, the rest left the choice up to Jim. The kids in the experiment were asked to read Jim’s essay and then were asked whether they thought Jim himself was pro- or anti-Castro.
Jones and Harris weren’t expecting any shocking results here; their goal was just to show the obvious: that people would conclude Jim was pro-Castro when he voluntarily chose write to a pro-Castro essay, but not when he was forced to by the teacher. But what they found surprised them: even when the students could easily see the question required Jim to write a pro-Castro essay, they still rated Jim as significantly more pro-Castro. It seemed hard to believe. “Perhaps some of the subjects were inattentive and did not clearly understand the context,” they suspected.
So they tried again. This time they explained the essay was written for a debate tournament, where the student had been randomly assigned to either the for or against side of the debate. They wrote it in big letters on the blackboard, just to make this perfectly clear. But again they got the same results — even more clearly this time. They still couldn’t believe it. Maybe, they figured, students thought Jim’s arguments were so compelling he must really believe them to be able to come up with them.
So they tried a third time — this time recording Jim on tape along with the experimenter giving him the arguments to use. Surely no one would think Jim came up with them on his own now. Again, the same striking results: students were persuaded Jim believed the arguments he said, even when they knew he had no choice in making them.³
This was an extreme case, but we make the same mistake all the time. We see a sloppily-parked car and we think “what a terrible driver,” not “he must have been in a real hurry.” Someone keeps bumping into you at a concert and you think “what a jerk,” not “poor guy, people must keep bumping into him.” A policeman beats up a protestor and we think “what an awful person,” not “what terrible training.” The mistake is so common that in 1977 Lee Ross decided to name it the “fundamental attribution error”: we attribute people’s behavior to their personality, not their situation.⁴

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Our natural reaction when someone screws up is to get mad at them. This is what happened at the old GM plant: workers would make a mistake and management would yell and scream. If asked to explain the yelling, they’d probably say that since people don’t like getting yelled at, it’d teach them be more careful next time.
But this explanation doesn’t really add up. Do you think the workers liked screwing up? Do you think they enjoyed making crappy cars? Well, we don’t have to speculate: we know the very same workers, when given the chance to do good work, took pride in it and started actually enjoying their jobs.
They’re just like you, when you’re trying to exercise but failing. Would it have helped to have your friend just yell and scream at you for being such a lazy loser? Probably not — it probably would have just made you feel worse. What worked wasn’t yelling, but changing the system around you so that it was easier to do what you already wanted to do.
The same is true for other people. Chances are, they don’t want to annoy you, they don’t like screwing up. So what’s going to work isn’t yelling at them, but figuring out how to change the situation. Sometimes that means changing how you behave. Sometimes that means bringing another person into the mix. And sometimes it just means simple stuff, like changing the way things are laid out or putting up reminders.
At the old GM plant, in Fremont, workers were constantly screwing things up: “cars with engines put in backwards, cars without steering wheels or brakes. Some were so messed up they wouldn’t start, and had to be towed off the line.” Management would yell at the workers, but what could you do? Things were moving so fast. “A car a minute don’t seem like it’s moving that fast,” noted one worker, “but when you don’t get it, you’re in the hole. There’s nobody to pull you out at General Motors, so you’re going to let something go.”
At the Toyota plant, they didn’t just let things go. There was a red cord running above the assembly line, known as an andon cord, and if you ever found yourself in the hole, all you had to do was pull it, and the whole line would stop. Management would come over and ask you how they could help, if there was a way they could fix the problem. And they’d actually listen — and do it!
You saw the results all over the factory: mats and cushions for the workers to kneel on; hanging shelves traveling along with the cars, carrying parts; special tools invented specifically to solve problems the workers had identified. Those little things added up to make a big difference.
When you’re upset with someone, all you want to do is change the way they’re acting. But you can’t control what’s inside a person’s head. Yelling at them isn’t going to make them come around, it’s just going to make them more defiant, like the GM workers who keyed the cars they made.
No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough. 
For more such articles, visit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/

Kenya's Massive Gas Find at Mbawa Deep-Water Exploration Well, By Australian Firm Pancontinental

Pancontinental Oil & Gas has discovered massive gas deposits at Kenya’s Mbawa prospect well in the Kenyan coast, the Australian joint venture partner has confirmed.

This is the first gas discovery offshore Kenya
The Mbawa-1 well operated by Apache hit 52 net metres of gas pay in the primary Cretaceous sandstone target, the company announced.
Pancontinental Oil & Gas with its strategic partners will drill the well to a planned depth of 3275 metres.
Pancontinental owns 15% of Block L8 in Kenya, and its joint venture partners are operator Apache (50%), Origin Energy (20%) and Tullow Oil (15%).
Apache has been operating the well with drillship Deepsea Metro 1 in a water depth of 860 metres.
Apache which is involved in the primary spudding says there is a secondary target reservoir along the way, meaning a new disovery could be made soon.
Pancontinental chief executive Barry Rushworth said Mbawa is “the first ever substantive hydrocarbon discovery offshore Kenya. We are delighted to prove that there is a working hydrocarbon system offshore Kenya.
“With drilling continuing to a deeper exploration target, these interim results may be the first part of the story in this well, and they are certainly just the beginning of the main story of oil and gas exploration offshore Kenya,” he said
The firms halted trading of their shares in the stock markets so that they could make the announcement.| FOR MORE CLICK: Energy Intelligence