DIU Activities > Alumni

Sharpen Your General Knowledge

<< < (12/54) > >>

Shamim Ansary:
Is It Always Worth It to Fight With Your Employer About How They Are Treating You?

It is accurate to say that at one time or another every employee is unhappy or annoyed with what goes on at work. These problems can come from the owners, managers, supervisors, co-workers, the amount of work to be done, or any irritant. Even the building where the work is done may cause problems. The employee must evaluate the problem. Is it an issue that can be resolved by an attorney? Does an attorney even need to be involved? Is it a health issue? Is it a legal issue? Is it something that can be fixed?

I receive many calls from employees who believe that they have legitimate legal grievances against their employers only to find out that the grievance is not covered by any current laws. This could be due to the employer not having a sufficient number of employees or that the unfair action is not considered to be discrimination by the law. Many times these issues involve departments where one group of employees gossips about another group who are all the same in age, sex, race, etc. Or it can be an issue of certain employees being friends with some people and not with others. These may be issues that not only are not covered by the law but are not even covered by the company rules.

For most employees, once they find out that their complaints cannot go anywhere in the court system, they drop the fight and go on working at the same company. However, there are some people who continue to fight even when there is no legitimate way to resolve their issues in a legal venue. The continuation of fighting may include filing lots of internal grievances, writing memos, spending time concentrating on the problem rather than work, or merely telling anyone who will listen about the issue. Or the continuation of fighting may include meeting with several attorneys until the employee finds one who is willing to sue the employer.

From the employer’s standpoint it is difficult to keep an employee who spends time being disgruntled and spreading his or her negativity to other workers. It is hard on the employer to have an employee who will not let go of a problem, especially when the problem has no real solution. This snowballs into poor reviews, promotions not given, and other lost career benefits, which in turn gives the disgruntled employee additional issues to complain about.

We are living in an economy where employers can outsource thousands of jobs, lay off entire plants, or terminate large numbers of people without any warning and without any employment law consequences. Employees must keep this in mind every day. There is no guarantee that work will ever be a fun place to be, and there is no guarantee that your boss will be fair. Once you have looked at all your options and have been told that there is nothing that can be done about the problem, you need to let it go and get back to work. I will leave you with what an Illinois appellate judge once told me: “In employment law, unfair is not always illegal.”

Shamim Ansary:
Was Napoleon Bonaparte executed after being exiled as leader of France?

No, Napoleon Bonaparte was not executed after being exiled as leader of France.

He tried unsuccessfully to officially step down and have his son put on the throne.

But when that idea was rejected, he abdicated voluntarily anyway and was exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. His wife and only child were sent to live with his father-in-law—the emperor of Austria—and he never saw them again.

He did, however, manage to escape Elba. In 1815, he returned to France, rallied the troops, and marched on to Paris. He quickly tried to make peace with his former enemies but was refused.

When pushed to battle, he was defeated by the British at the battle of Waterloo.

Despite his popularity back home, Britain and its allies exiled him once more—this time for good—to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, where he died of stomach cancer six years later.

Shamim Ansary:
Why are clouds white when water is transparent and air is clear?

Clouds consist of millions of tiny water droplets.

Light waves of all the colors bounce and reflect off and refract through the water droplets evenly, sending all of the various colors off in (more or less) equal measure.

As you may remember from school, the “color” white is technically all of the colors mixed together.

Because all of the colors are being evenly dispersed by the water droplets, clouds appear white. We think this is kinda cool, because if clouds weren’t white, the sky would be blue all day and everyday, forever. And that would be pretty boring.

Shamim Ansary:
What Was Edwin Hubble’s Most Amazing Discovery and How Did Hubble Discover That the Universe Is Expanding?

In the nineteenth century, astronomers discovered that studying the light emitted from a star, a study known as spectrum analysis, revealed what elements stars are made of.

Changes in a star’s spectrum indicate the movement of the star, and analysis could determine the star’s speed and direction.

It was revealed that stars only appear fixed in the sky because of their great distance from Earth. They are actually moving at tremendous speeds.

At the same time that Edwin Hubble was fixing the galaxies’ location, the American astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher was using spectrum analysis to determine their velocities.

He measured 41 galaxies and found their speed was as staggering as their distance. Their average speed was 375 miles per second, and all of them were moving away from Earth.

Hubble took the experiment one step further. He measured the distance to 24 of the galaxies Slipher had measured and noticed something strange.

The farther away the galaxy, the faster it was moving, and the galaxies were moving away from each other at a rate constant to the distance between them. He saw only one explanation: the universe was expanding.

Over the years, Hubble confirmed his findings by measuring 150 galactic velocities.

The finding became known as Hubble’s law. He also realized that with such distances involved and the time it takes light to travel, observers on Earth are also looking far back in time.

For example, light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, so we see the Sun as it appeared only eight minutes before.

However, light from the farthest visible stars, 12 billion light-years away, has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth.

We see these stars as they appeared 12 billion years ago, or around the time of the birth of the universe.

Many years before Hubble’s findings, the physicist Albert Einstein had theorized that the universe is expanding.

Shamim Ansary:
What Is a Microclimate?

When you notice that the temperature forecast in your local media is consistently warmer or colder than that which occurs in your neighborhood, you have identified a microclimate.

Light, temperature, and moisture may all vary from one area to another within a biome because of changes in altitude, vegetation, or other factors.

San Francisco is an example of a city with microclimates and submicroclimates, and the San Francisco Bay area can have a wide range of extremes in temperature.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page