Stress as a Debilitating Medical Condition: How to Ease the Strain of Everyday Life

Despite the fact that stress is now officially considered to be a debilitating psychological illness, it is still viewed with suspicion by some employers. Unfortunately, stress remains a serious phenomenon in the UK and across the world, however, with a growing number workers forced to seek out counseling and medical assistance in order to restore their well being.

The total number of stress related medical cases reached a staggering 428,000 during 2011/2012, and this represented more than 40% of all work place illnesses. This figure has risen annually for the last 4 years, and it is expected to do so again by the end of 2013. While many may cite the global economic downturn as a key factor in this epidemic, however, each individual case has its own unique set of contributing factors.

Relieving Workplace Stress: 3 Steps Towards a Happier Life

With this in mind, it is important that employees are proactive and take steps towards cultivating a positive balance between their professional and personal lives.

Evaluate your Life and its Meaning:

Once the symptoms of stress have taken hold, it can be extremely difficult to redress the balance and restore your sense of calm. This is why it is important to regularly evaluate your life and its fundamental goals, as an unplanned deviation from your career path or in your personal life cause a great deal of angst, concern and stress. This exercise can also help you to ensure that you are able to focus on both the professional and personal aspects of your life, as an over emphasis on one over the other can create significant stress when things do not go according to plan.

Embrace Physical Well Being and Good Health:

The links between physical and mental health are well known, and you only need to look at the sport of golf to understand this further. The advent of fit and physically strong athletes such as Tiger Woods has helped to revolutionize the game, and created a generation of younger professionals who combine mental strength and fortitude with excellent physicality. Quite aside from the fact that vigorous exercise is known to stimulate feelings of joy and positivity, the cultivation physical well being also allows you to take control of your life and diminish the threat posed by stress and anxiety.

Take Regular Holidays:

Our mundane and relentless daily routines can be a significant trigger for stress related illness, especially when we experience issues at home or in the workplace. Having an escape from these routines is therefore critical to maintaining good mental health, whether you plan one or two large getaways or schedule a number of weekend breaks. Whether you visit a world renowned international resort such as the Sapphire Waters Motor Inn in Australia or select from one of the UK’s leading spa destinations, it is important to immerse yourself in a carefree and relaxing environment. Even those of you on a minimal budget should strive to break away from everyday routines, even if you take a drive to the coast and stay overnight in a peaceful bed and breakfast resort.

The Bottom Line

While stress remains underestimated in some quarters, its standing as a serious illness can no longer be disputed. You can take steps to avoid it, however, so long as you are proactive in your mindset and willing to change various aspects of your existing lifestyle.

www.hivehealthmedia.com

Young entrepreneurs share their early business goofs by Young Entrepreneur Council

What are some challenges you did not anticipate when deciding to start your own business?

Cash flow is a common struggle

"We started with clients from day one, so we've always been profitable, but one thing we didn't think about when we started was cash flow. Many profitable businesses experience famine and feast, due to invoice scheduling or higher sales during certain parts of the year. You must have a plan to spread profits from the most profitable times to cover times when cash flow is slower."

—Allie Siarto | Partner, Director of Analytics,Loudpixel

How much is insurance?

"Did you think about all the startup costs—all of them? Failing to anticipate the high cost of insurance for certain personal and operational ventures can be a killer to capital, as some vendors and potential clients require a large amount of insurance coverage. Therefore, I urge entrepreneurs to analyze the potential cost prior to raising capital and [write] elaborate business models."

—George Mavromaras | Founder and President,Mavro Inc. | Praetor Global LLC.

Everyone's a critic

"While our employees and many of our clients were excited about bringing a new brand to the community, there were many feathers ruffled. Through research, focus groups, and conversations, I was confident that the changes would be received well. I did not expect a note scribbled through my new logo with nasty feedback. Dealing with unexpected critics was emotionally draining but I stayed focused."

—Nancy T. Nguyen | President & CEO, Sweet T Salon

My own extreme emotions

"I didn't realize how emotionally volatile running a startup would be when I first began. I'm usually wavering between intoxicating highs when I enjoy successes, to very deep depressing lows when things get tough. Your business becomes a reflection of yourself, and you can't help but take running it personally."

—Eric Bahn | Founder, Beat The GMAT

Scaling takes time

"I'm a 'do it now' type of person, which means that I get pretty frustrated when I can't get going on something new. But scaling a bootstrapped business takes time. You've got to work on the right projects in the right order, and you can't just leap into the bit you want to be doing right away. That's been a tough lesson for me, and one I've had to relearn a couple of times."

—Thursday Bram | Consultant, Hyper Modern Consulting

What are my customers thinking?

"When you start a business, it's easy to assume you know exactly what people want to buy. But the truth is that understanding your customer and what they are looking for takes a lot of practice, and is a concerted effort that's going to improve your marketing and profitability like nothing else."

—Nathalie Lussier | Creator, The Website Checkup Tool

Support is a hot commodity

"I always assumed that starting your own business and going off on your own was seen as an honorable action. So I did not expect the lack of support I received from friends and family who told me I wasn't really a business owner. They said I wasn't making money yet, I was too young, I should take the safe route and continue working for someone else. They'd keep asking me how my job hunt was going."

—Steven Le Vine | CEO/President, grapevine pr

You can't be everywhere at once

"When it comes to scaling the business, knowing that 'no one can do it like I can' did more harm than good. As the owner who is pulled in a hundred different directions, it is imperative to teach my unique way of working to others so that the business can grow with team support. Before teaching the team, I was frustrated, felt unsupported and could not escape the business for even a day."

—Kelly Azevedo | Founder, She's Got Systems

A scheduled social life

"I've been told more than once that I'm not as fun as I used to be! When you have large goals, you have to carry a lot of weight on your shoulders. That can translate into a diminished social life, if you're not intentional about scheduling it. There is absolutely more time to be social, greater satisfaction, and success in the long term, but you will have to understand delayed gratification."

—Evan Kirkpatrick | CEO, Wendell Charles Financial

Constant industry changes

"My first business relied heavily on my network in the magazine journalism industry. That meant that when the industry started to contract, I needed to modify my client base and eventually start a second business to survive as an entrepreneur. Sometimes, industry changes completely outside your control can have a dramatic impact on your company."

—Elizabeth Saunders | Founder & CEO, Real Life E®

There are too many options

"Leaving the large law firm to go out on my own, I was inundated with possible revenue streams to chase and spread myself too thin. However, once I picked a few narrow customer bases and focused my marketing efforts, I really started getting traction."

—Peter Minton | Founder & President, Minton Law Group, P.C.

People aren't easy to manage

"One of the most challenging aspects of running a business is managing your employees. It is more difficult than I anticipated to keep a staff on track and make sure everything runs smoothly."

—Josh Weiss | Founder and President, Bluegala

Many mistakes will happen

"While running someone else's company, I had the chance to see great ways of doing things and also learned methods that did not work well. For some reason, I thought this would virtually eliminate mistakes when I opened my own. It reduced the mistakes, but did not eradicate them. In business, you will make mistakes—you can only hope you catch them early enough to keep them from being fatal."

—Vanessa Nornberg | President, Metal Mafia

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The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

upstart.bizjournals.com

Lean in, ladies? Try leaning back, says Arianna Huffington

For Arianna Huffington it took fainting from exhaustion on her desk, breaking her cheekbone and getting five stitches to make her slow down at work and to learn to “lean back” rather than leaning in as the new Sheryl Sandberg book suggests.

The Huffington Post founder, who spoke today in New York at the National Association of Professional Women networking conference, was referring to an incident that happened five years ago, when she was just building theHuffington Post and had taken her oldest daughter on a tour of colleges. She had promised not to be on her BlackBerry while they were scouting around, but the minute her daughter went to sleep in the evening, she would start working. When she came back from that trip exhausted from the dual roles of daytime mom and nighttime entrepreneur, the fainting incident happened.

"Suddenly, you don’t take care of yourself," Huffington said of the work involved in starting her company. "I’ve made a lot of changes in my life…I now strive to get seven or eight hours of sleep a night. You need time to recharge."

So Huffington, who sold her company to AOL for $315 million in February 2011, should be breathing easier these days.

But the editor told the room, packed with women, that she encourages the same sort of stress-free ethos among her employees. She had two nap rooms installed at the Huffington Post offices, and "they’re full all the time," to the point where there are requests to install a third, she says. There are also weekly meditation and yoga classes for employees.

"We think we know how to breathe, but we don’t," Huffington says, adding that most people take shallow breaths rather than the deep breathing techniques that are encouraged for those who practice yoga or meditation.

The HuffPo editor-in-chief says she tries to encourage an atmosphere where people’s personal lives are respected. Asked about Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer’s policy that does not allow working from home, Huffington diplomatically replied, "It should be up to the manager," but at HuffPo, "we are very flexible."

"If someone needs to work from home because, maybe they have a sick child, we allow it," she says.

To help keep people grounded, Huffington Post launched an app called "GPS for the soul" where users can include photos of their loved ones and put their finger on a sensor to get their heart rate.

Among her tips for working women is to beware that a high salary might not be worth it if a job is so stressful that it's affecting your health.

"It’s not how much are you making, it's, 'What is your stress level?'" she says.

Asked to recall a turning point in her life, she talked about a time in her early 20s when she had just published her first book, which was a success. But 36 publishers shot down her second book, which was about politics, and Huffington said she started to doubt her writing abilities, felt "very depressed, and ran out of money."

Then as she walked down a London street, she noticed a bank and walked in and requested a loan. To her astonishment, she got one.

"It made me fell in a really profound way that you can really trust life," she says. "There are helpful animals, disguised as human beings, along the way."

She sends the bank manager a Christmas card every year and strives to see the positive and ignore her inner critic, which she likened to an "obnoxious roommate."

"If you believe life is rigged your way, then stumbling blocks turn into stepping stones," she says.

upstart.bizjournals.com

Learning Fast From Failure

The philosopher John Dewey once wrote that “the person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

As president of the World Bank Group, where we work every day for a “world free of poverty,” I come face to face with the problem of how to turn failure into learning. Every mother or child who dies of a preventable disease, every country that can’t feed its people, reminds us that when we fail,with sometimes tragic results, we don’t learn from it as much as we should.

In the last decade, many international leaders have put great emphasis on measuring results and learning from success and failure. At the Bank, the challenge now is to develop tools that accelerate our ability to learn from both positive and negative experiences in development. I’m convinced that revolutionary advances in communications and information processing, when linked to an enlightened approach to failure, can help transform our pursuit of ability to achieve development results, even in the poorest countries.

Let me give you two examples. Not long ago, I was in South Africa. There, leaders spoke to me at length about their struggle to improve the education of young people. They said that they had attained great success in enrolling nearly all eligible schoolchildren in primary school, but they also said that too many children fail in school, and that they are not preparing young people well enough for the job market. I was impressed with their openness, and I left Johannesburg feeling hopeful that South Africa would make progress in improving education. They were determined to learn from their mistakes and find solutions that would work in their country.

Another country I visited recently is China, which is experiencing a historic migration of rural villagers into cities. This has led to significant problems like pollution and traffic congestion. Still, China has made enormous innovations in urbanization that should be shared more broadly, and the Chinese leaders I spoke with also were eager to learn from other countries’ experiences, particularly in the transportation sector. Like the South Africans, the Chinese were eager to learn from the success and failures of others and were both justifiably proud of their achievements in urban planning and very much aware of areas in which they needed to make more progress.

To help China, South Africa, and all of our member countries, the World Bank Group will be setting up what we’re calling delivery knowledge hubs, which will begin by collecting and distributing case studies of both success and failure in tackling the most important development challenges from throughout the world.

When I was president of Dartmouth College, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company gave me some advice that has stayed with me. When thinking about tackling complex, difficult problems, he told me: “It’s not how much you know, it's how fast you learn.”

Learning from failure is hard, complicated work. But all leaders could be well served if they admit what they don’t know and learn from their own and others' experiences. We at the World Bank Group stand ready to work with leaders in both the public and the private sector to learn from success and failure. To take a page out of Google’s playbook, if we “fail fast and learn fast,” we will have a much better chance to end extreme poverty and build shared prosperity in every corner of the world.

Jim Kim

President at The World Bank

The Strongest Careers Are Non-Linear

I have seen many such trends lately amongst young Nigerians. This is not to encourage dropping out of school. It is rather to encourage out of the box thinking and action.

For years we have been talking about the education bubble and the problem that colleges charge tons of money and then graduates are unemployable and in debt. Colleges are responding by becoming job preparation centers. And Frank Bruni, opinion editor for the New York Times, says this is a waste of time and resources. Here’s what’s better:

1. Skipping college.
The real issue we have with admitting that college is not a path to the work world is then we have to ask ourselves why we send our kids to high school. There is plenty of data to show that teens are able to manage their lives without the constraints of school. The book Escaping the Endless Adolescence is chock full of data, and a recent article by my favorite journalist, Jennifer Senior, shows that high school is not just unnecessary, but actually damaging to teens who need much more freedom to grow than high school affords.

2. Focus on internships instead of school.
Kids should be working in internships in high school. Because the best path to a good job is a bunch of great internships. But great internships don’t go to people who need money. They are mostly for young people. Yes, this is probably illegal and classist and bad for a fluid society. But we will not debate that here. Instead we will debate why kids need to go to college if the internships are what make them employable? Kids should do internships in high school and by their college years, they are capable of real jobs where they are doing work that people value, with cash.

You cannot take this route if you’re saddled with huge student loans. You can’t take this route if you’re inundated by homework in required subjects you don’t care about. You can’t take this route if you have no work experience when you graduate college. It’s too late. (Don’t tell me you need to go to school to learn, okay? People just do not believe this anymore.)

I was reading the Fortune list of 40 under 40 and I was struck by the career history of Kevin Feige (number 11 on the list). He’s president of Marvel Studios at age 39. He wrote that he interned with the Superman movie director as a film student and that was the last job application he filled out. That’s because if you get an internship with someone great, and your performance is great, your network will cover your employment needs for a very long time.

3. Start a company instead of writing a resume.I’m struck by Marissa Mayer (number 3 on Fortune’s list) whose announced acquisition strategy is buying small, cheap companies. Which is, in effect, buying the team. Silicon Valley calls these acqui-hires. She is looking at young people who start companies that are not necessarily successful in terms of product or sales but successfully market the founders as visionaries, self-starters, and hard workers. You can’t show those traits in school, so if you have those traits, you slow yourself down by going to school where you cannot exhibit your best, marketable traits.

4. Refuse to present yourself in a linear way.
Do any workaround that lets you forgo the linear obsession the standard resume format. Because linear presentations favor people who have long, rule-following careers – which don’t necessarily make you look good anyway. I could write a post ten thousand paragraphs long of all the new things people with nonlinear work histories are doing to get jobs.

People use twitter as a resume, according to the Wall Street Journal, which requires only that you publish ideas, not any sort of academic experience.

Young people are selling stock in themselves - paying out dividends for decades at a time.

Agents represent workers who pick and choose projects that match them rather than signing on for indefinite amounts of time. The Harvard Business Review calls this supertemping. Business Week calls it going Hollywood.

But here’s the big takeaway. A fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting a job is massively circumventing college credentials. And, at the same time, the American public is fed up with the insane debt that college are expecting new grads to take on in order to graduate. (Good essay: How College Ruined My Life.)

If you are not going to school in order to “fit” into the adult world, then why are you going to school? The love of learning, presumably. But school reform pundits are 100% sure that kids will choose to learn if you put no constraints on them. They will just learn what they want. Best example: The MIT program that gave iPads to illiterate kids in Ethiopia, and they taught themselves to use it, program it, and read it in English. No teacher. No curriculum.

The biggest barrier to accepting the radical new nature of the job hunt is the reverberations throughout the rest of life. If you don’t need school for work, and you don’t need school for learning, then all you need school for is so parents can go to work and not worry about taking care of their kids.

It takes bravery to go against the grain. It’s difficult to say that the great learning and the great jobs come from leaning out, doing things in a nonlinear, non standard way, and playing only by the rules that fit your own style for personal learning and growth.

Penelope Trunk

Co-founder, Brazen Careerist

Linkedin.com

How Attitudes Drive Economies

"What do you see from the country you live in? Is your country’s glass half full or half empty and how opportunistic is that?" Dear Colin S., sadly my country, Nigeria, has no glass.

It is fascinating to see, and more importantly, to feel the differences between the two countries that I love - the United States and the United Kingdom (UK). I now live in Sarasota, FL but frequently travel back to England to see the Beyond Philosophy team and deliver key note speeches . Winston Churchill was 100% correct when he said “We are two nations separated by a common language.” But recently I think I have witnessed more that separates us.

I have just returned to the US after being in the UK for 6 weeks and I have noticed a key difference. Now, let me say straight away that I am a very proud Englishman. I love the country of my birth but I have to say in the UK we always seem to look at the glass as if it is half empty, in the USA they look at the glass as if it’s half full.

This attitude drives many behaviors which I see every day. Even in good times, we English tend to see the problems not the opportunities. This is why Australians call us ‘whinging Poms’ (A POM’s is Australian slang for British). Too many people in the UK like nothing more than a good moan at the weather, the government and anything else! This attitude seems to have magnified 20 fold in this economic downturn!

In the US, I believe, the attitude of ‘the glass is half full’ has played a significant part in pulling the US out of the downturn. The US economy is turning around. Americans are not hinderedby a fear of failure and do not resent success of those who have ‘made it’ as they seem to do in the UK. This optimism drives their behaviour.

The second area I admire in the US is the speed they work at when there is an opportunity, which then plays out in the Customer Experience. Here is a prime example: ‘Cell (mobile) phone parking lots’ at airports. We all know that when we are picking up friends and family from an airport we say “When you come through just give me a ring and we’ll drive around and pick you up”. In the UK, people park anywhere to avoid the extortionate airport parking costs– many illegally. In the US they saw this was a growing trend and acted quickly. My local airport in Tampa is a classic example - they have ‘Cell phone parking lots’. You park up, there are information boards showing when the flights will be arriving/have arrived, restrooms and even wifi - all of which are obviously free! It will be years before this happens in the UK.

I think this positive, 'can do', opportunistic attitude is a key reason why America leads the world. The strive for the ‘American dream’ is infectious from the top to the bottom.

What do you see from the country you live in? Is your country’s glass half full or half empty and how opportunistic is that?

Colin S.

CEO, Beyond Philosophy

Linkedin.com

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS II

                           Hysteria and the birth of the vibrator

Writing is hardly a strong point for me even though I feel the urge. It’s usually the patience to sit for a long time blending words (which is what writing is about by the way - nothing spectacular), that restrains me. I admire those who have persevered to perfect the art. The hysteria i refer to above is a movie i came across in the process of warding off boredom, a state of mind i hate. Technically i hardly get bored because i have successfully aggregated activities that act as boredom busters, and they have effectively engaged me at those down times, including seeing movies like this. And interestingly it is usually a very productive time for me.

The modern dictionaries define hysteria as a state of violent mental agitation; excessive or uncontrollable fear; and in the psychiatric parlance we learnt in school, a neurotic disorder characterised by violent emotional outbreaks and disturbances of sensory and motor function. A layman that sees where this definition plays out will say "the person dey craze", and the 'tush' way to describe it is that the individual is hysterical. Now can you imagine if, when you as a woman acts hysterical now and you are told by a doctor that it is as a result of your overactive uterus or womb and it has to be removed. How will think of the doctor? Laughable right? But that was the reality in the 19th century - the Victorian times, it was a way to treat hysteria. Very interesting. Got me thinking a lot. Many things we take for granted now were literarily breath-taking then. They caused undeserved deaths, no thanks to the sparse but growing understanding of medicine. One can pick an argument concerning that and win on grounds that it was safer to stay ignorant than receive the teaching on hysteria, that a form of treatment was to make the woman barren.

The other interesting way the condition was treated was to (permit my vulgarity) 'finger' the woman to submission, something called Vulvar massage, as Dr Robert Dalrymple, specialist in women's medicine, taught Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville, his new employee, in the movie. He taught that it was popularised in the 16th century by a doctor who prescribed it for widows and women in religious orders, but now this was the most direct, most effective method of treating hysteria. Before starting he rubbed musk oil and oil of lilies on both hands, inserted his index finger through the vulvar and applied gentle steady pressure slowly and in a circular motion on the vagina over some minutes. Sure you can imagine the result. But it was 'stuff' then, and when asked Dr Granville mentioned his observation of blushing skin, shortness of breath, fluttering eyelids, vocalisation (moaning) and twitching. These were said to be all perfectly normal involuntary and physiologic responses to the treatment. The essence was to elicit the pain pleasure reaction thereby inducing a hysterical paroxysm which caused the uterus to go back to its normal shape. He also mentioned that the female organ was incapable of experiencing pleasurable sensation whatsoever without actual penetration of a male organ. And i was like, seriously?!!! Anyway that was the teaching then.

Dr Mortimer was introduced to this new art and after observing a first time it was his turn to offer the relief he yearned for, when he mentioned earlier in the movie to his new boss that, "i will be enormously thankful for any position that allows me to offer relief to my patients with little chance of killing them". This was certainly not a difficult procedure. He must have been elated to have immediately been in the position to offer relief to sex starved menopausal women who were misdiagnosed as being hysterical. Well, he soon developed hand cramps after a couple of vulva massages, even leading to his sack. But he had this friend, Lord Smythe whose family had taken care of him after he was orphaned, and who was fascinated by inventions of the time, especially the telephone and electricity, and he had developed this feather duster he always played with as well.

On getting home at Smythe's house, Dr Granville had taken this feather duster to play with and discovered it offered tremendous and soothing relief to his crampy hand. That was the birth of what we now know to be the vibrator. This machine had the shape of a gun with a trigger at one end and a rotor at the other around which feathers were arranged, and so at d pull of d trigger, the rotor spinned with the feathers and did whateva cleaning necessary. Dr Mortimer had removed d feathers to relieve his hand, and the smooth bodied rotor was the next thing that would provide relief to the half population of women in London at the time who were diagnosed to be hysterical. What an innovative mind that was. He successfully convinced Lord Smythe that it could do the job. The idea got patented and they began to market it, ofcourse starting with his now former boss, Dr Dalrymple, who at first hesitated but he had an open mindset unlike Mortimer's former bosses who, interestingly, refused to accept the latest research that a wound could be contaminated by germs and they used bare hands to dress a gangrenous leg wound, the type that will probably be referred to now as from a diabetic foot. I'm sure doctors know what i mean. I can seriously not imagine. Dr Robert decided to try the new appliance and saw an increase in his earnings and Dr Mortimer once again regained his lost glory in the eyes of the women of London.

The vibrator has since undergone various modifications. In fact i got to know that the first inkling as to what may have been a vibrator was when Cleopatra of Egypt filled a hollow gourd with angry bees and the violent buzzing caused vibrations giving a similar effect as the modern cordless vibrators. Real crude innovation, but necessity is the mother of invention. Now regarded as one of the best, if not the best sex toy, the vibrator has be made into various forms (i'll spare details) for better pleasurable sensation to its user, even winning a design award, the kind that the iPhone won. It is also a money spinning industry right now, thanks to the extent of ravaging perversion in the world. Globally, the sex toy industry is valued at USD 15 billion, with a growth rate of 30%. 70% of sex toys are manufactured in China, obviously.

Giving Sight to the Blind (Literally)

Move over, Google Glass. Second Sight's retinal implants don't just come with cool frames--they allow blind patients to see.

Second Sight has created a retinal implant, the Argus ii, that restories partial eyesight to people with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that affects an estimated 100,000 people in the U.S.  “The last time this was done was in the Bible,” jokes CEO and co-founder Robert Greenberg.

Greenberg says that Second Sight looked to cochlear implants, which artificially stimulate electrodes in the inner ear of deaf patients to create sounds, as inspiration for their product. The Argus II consists of a retinal implant surgically inserted into the patient’s eye and a wireless camera mounted on a pair of glasses worn by the patient. The camera records light and transmits it wirelessly to the implant, which then stimulates electrodes within the eye. The brain interprets the resulting patterns as low-resolution black-and-white images. 

Second Sight began selling the Argus II in Europe in late 2011 for $100,000. This February, the 85-person company received FDA approval to launch the Argus II in the United States, which it plans to do this year. But it hasn’t been an easy journey. Second Sight began outpatient testing outside the U.S. in 1992 and has since been refining and formalizing approval for the device. What’s the hold up? Greenberg explains that, as with any surgical implant, surgeons could damage tissue while inserting the device--something  the FDA considers when approving medical technologies. But, Greenberg says, inflicting damage to an already-damaged retina doesn’t change much for blind patients, since their vision would remain unchanged. “This risk-to-benefit ratio made it possible for us to get approval," he says. "There is no alternative for these patients."

Greenberg hopes to incorporate color vision in future versions of the Argus ii. Google Glass and other emerging technologies could also influence the product's design, Greenberg says. “Right now, patients are just happy that they can see,” he adds.

inc.com

INSIDE BILL GATES' $5 BILLION PLAN TO PUT CAMERAS IN EVERY CLASSROOM

"WE NEED A SYSTEM THAT HELPS ALL OUR TEACHERS BE AS GOOD AS THE BEST."

Actors do it. Professional athletes do it. Now Bill Gates wants the country to spend $5 billion for every teacher in every classroom in every district to be filmed in action so they can be evaluated and, maybe, improve.

Among all his foundation's educational initiatives for things like smaller schools and new technology, Gates has increasingly zeroed in on effective teaching as the key lever to improve education, as he discusses in an exclusive interview in Fast Companythis month.

But how do you know effective teaching when you see it? Judging teachers by their students' test scores is crude and incomplete. In a talk he gave for a TED / PBS special to be aired May 7 (filmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 4), Gates discussed the plan to tape teachers, its estimated $5 billion price tag, and the pilot program he funded, the Measures of Effective Teaching, conducted with 3,000 teachers in seven districts. They reported three years of findings in January on a teaching evaluation system that combines test scores, student evaluations, and classroom assessments, where teachers are graded by impartial observers.

The idea of reevaluating how we test teachers is spreading, but remains controversial--even without the privacy issues involved in filming the classroom. "I know some teachers aren’t immediately comfortable with a camera in the classroom," Gates acknowledged, then said that could be overcome by allowing teachers to pick which lessons they want filmed--which would seem to undermine the validity of any findings.

States and districts have already spent millions of dollars overhauling teacher evaluation systems, only to have districts rating 97, 98, or 100% of teachers as "satisfactory" or better.

In his talk, Gates emphasized the idea of using this feedback system to help teachers do their job better. "We need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best," he said. "Our teachers deserve better feedback." He clearly wants to be seen as a friend, not an enemy, of teachers. However, the MET project, at least, has done nothing to demonstrate that these evaluations can actually help teachers improve--rather than just weed out the good from the bad.

www.fastcompany.com

Soccer's Most Valuable Teams: At $3.3 Billion, Real Madrid Knocks Manchester United From Top Spot

1. Real Madrid

Current Value: $3,300 mil.
Revenue 2011-12: $650 mil.
Operating Income 2011-12: $170 mil.

For the world’s most valuable soccer teams, success means turning victories on the pitch into dollars at the bank.

No team has done this as well as Real Madrid, which has usurped Manchester United’s long-held title as the most valuable soccer team in the world. This year marks the first time since Forbes began tracking the value of soccer teams in 2004 that Manchester United has not ranked first. It is not that the Red Devils have faltered. It is just that Los Merengues are simply bigger, more profitable and growing faster than Manchester United.

Real Madrid, which posted revenue of $650 million during the 2011-12 season, is worth $3.3 billion, more than any team in the world. Los Merengues generated operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and player trading) of $134 million, more than any soccer team and second only to the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys ($227 million) among all sports teams.

Thanks to rich sponsorship deals that are underpinned by the team’s storied history of trophies–a record nine Champions League titles and 32 domestic championships–and star players that were or are global bands themselves–Raul Blanco, David Beckham, Ronaldo Lima, Cristiano Ronaldo–Real Madrid’s revenue has increased 62% over the past three years with an average operating margin of 28%. More cash is coming to Madrid: Dubai’s Emirates Airline is close to signing a long-term, $39 million-a-year shirt sponsorship deal with the team.

Manchester United, ranked second on our list with a $3.17 valuation, has been a great investment for Malcolm Glazer since the billionaire bought controlof the team in 2005 for $1.47 billion. Glazer sold shares of England’s most iconic soccer team–which has a record 19 Premiership titles and three Champions League trophies–to the public last August, and those who bought in, including legendary investor George Soros, have been richly rewarded. Most recently trading at $17, shares of the soccer team have outperformed the S&P 500 by better than tw0-to-one since the IPO.

Main reason: Manchester United has also been scoring with its powerful global brand. Just prior to its IPO the Red Devils signed a $559 million, seven-year shirt sponsorship deal with Chevrolet that will begin with the 2014-15 season. In April, Manchester United, sold the naming rights to its training ground as part of a sponsorship deal with insurance firm Aon for an estimated $230 million over eight years.

In hot pursuit of Real Madrid and Manchester United is Barcelona. Barca’s value doubled over the past year, the biggest increase of any top 20 team, to $2.6 billion. Barcelona’s revenue have increased 19% over the past three seasons, to $613 million in 2011-12.

Led by Lionel Messi, the sport’s most prolific scorer, Barcelona is on the verge of coming in first in La Liga this season and captured consecutive domestic titles from 2009 through 2011. It also won the Champions League in 2006, 2009 and 2011. The Spanish powerhouse has parlayed the stellar results into a $38 million-a-year kit deal with Nike and its first ever corporate shirt sponsorship with Qatar Airways, worth $45 million a year through the 2015-16 season.

The top 20 teams are worth an average of $968 million, an increase of 26% over last year. Forbes’ team values are enterprise values (equity plus debt) that are based on multiples of revenue that teams get from television, premium seating, media, licensing, merchandise and concessions. On average, the world’s 20 most valuable soccer teams posted operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $42 million for the 2011-12 season, $3 million less than the previous year.

Real Madrid ($3.3 bil.), Manchester United ($3.17 bil), and Barcelona ($2.6 bil.), now command the top three spots among all teams in the world, followed by the New York Yankees ($2.30 bil.) and Dallas Cowboys ($2.1 bil.).

Overall, the Barclays Premier League is the richest in soccer as teams without the marketing cachet of Manchester United are getting much richer thanks to the league’s new television deals. Last year, the Premier League sold its live television broadcast rights to BSkyB and BT for a total of $4.7 billion beginning with the 2013-14 season, more than twice its current deal.

Also, NBC has secured the U.S. broadcast rights beginning next season for $250 million over three years, just under four times what Fox and ESPN currently pay for the rights. By the time all the broadcast deals are completed for the Premier League, total broadcast rights could top $6 billion (overseas rights are shared equally among all 20 Premier League teams while domestic revenue is allocated on a sliding scale based on league position and the number of television appearances).

We factored these new television deals into our valuations, which in part is why five of the top 10 spots on our list belong to English teams. Arsenal, valued at $1.33 billion, ranks fourth, Chelsea ranks seventh at $901 million, Manchester City, worth $689 million, landed in the ninth spot, and Liverpool, valued $651 million, ranks 10th.

New entry: Brazil’s Corinthians Paulista. Ranked 16 with a value of $358 million, the Corinthians are the first non-European team to ever qualify for our top 20 list. The team, which won the Brazilian championship in 2011 andcaptured the Club World Cup in 2012, has been very creative recently when it comes to capitalizing on its brand as well as the popularity of other sports.

In 2011, Corinthians launched the first Brazilian television channel dedicated to a sports team, TV Corinthians. The same year Timão made an unprecedented move by sponsoring Brazilian mixed martial artist Anderson Silva at a UFC event in Rio de Janeiro. Sponsors have taken notice: The Corinthians recently inked a $14 million-a-year shirt deal with Caixa Economica Federal. Hosting the FIFA World Cup next year will heap even more attention on Brazilian soccer.

Forbes.com