Fans blow on vuvuzelas in front of Soccer City Stadium in Soweto, host of the World Cup’s opening match and championship game.
World Cup 2010: 10 South African terms to know
Heading to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup? Here are some terms you should know to impress the locals during the tournament (June 11-July 11):
1. “Bafana” – The nickname of the South African national team. It means “boys” in Nguni and often appears as “Bafana Bafana” in news articles and advertising. Although ranked 83rd in the world, the South African team has created so much optimism in the host country that there’s a shortage of its jerseys for sale.
2. “Vuvuzela” – This trumpet-like instrument blows one note that sounds like an elephant. Critics fear thevuvuzela will cause serious issues during the games. The instrument is banned from rugby and cricket matches in South Africa because it’s loud and distracting. Soccer fans vow to blow the vuvuzela loud and often in support of Bafana.
3. “Madiba Magic” – Nelson Mandela is 91 and frail, but hope remains that he will turn up during the World Cup; perhaps when the South African team and his nation most need inspiration. Madiba is Mandela’s Xhosa clan name.
4. “Braai” – Shortened from the Afrikaans word braaivleis, which means “roasted meat”, a braai is what we’d call having a barbecue, except it’s bigger, more social, involves more drinking and lots more meat. You haven’t been to South Africa if you haven’t enjoyed a braai.
5. “Sundowner” – A sunset and the drink enjoyed while watching it. Going for a “sundowner” means going to a pub or the beach for a glass of wine or a pint.
6. “Zakumi” – The World Cup’s popular leopard mascot, whose name comes from the country code for South Africa (“za”) and the word many African languages use for “ten” (“kumi”).
7. “Diski” – The official dance of the 2010 World Cup, the Diski incorporates soccer moves in its dance steps. Diski is the word used for “soccer” on the playgrounds of several black townships.
8. “Biltong” – Delicious jerked meat from a number of sources, including ostrich and wildebeest. Biltong can be found in many restaurants and grocery stores.
9. “Bunny chow” – A type of fast food most popular in Durban, the bunny chow is a hollowed out loaf of bread filled with one of a variety of curries.
10. “Soccer” – It’s not “football”, to the regret of many Europeans. South Africa, like Canada and the United States, calls the sport “soccer” in part because it has another form of football, rugby. For the same reason, Australians and New Zealanders will also call the game “soccer”, which is a 19th-century English euphemism for “association”. You will hear the game referred to as “football” in South Africa too, but many fans call it “soccer,” and the opening and closing matches of the World Cup will be played in Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg.
Today, we focused on logos that use creative methods to represent the brand through color, shapes, and typography. In this post we’ll feature 30 clever logos for your design inspiration.
Critics of the public school system have long lamented the lack of personal finance education in our classrooms. As many have pointed out, today’s high schools rarely teach even the basics. Consequently, students often graduate high school unable to so much as balance a checkbook or compare two different loans. Yet as embarrassing as this is, our schools also neglect a whole slew of more advanced financial concepts. While some are covered in various college courses, the only group of students likely to have encountered all of them are MBAs. In reality, they apply to everyone, not just business owners. If you are not an MBA or are simply curious to learn about some of the important financial concepts overlooked in school, consider the following.
Probability seeks to measure how likely it is that various things will happen and express those odds as a percentage. A coin toss, for instance, has a probability of 50% because it is equally likely that it will flip heads or tails. Banks use probability (albeit in more complicated ways) to determine the odds that borrowers of various creditworthiness will repay their loans and, thus, what interest rate to charge. While many believe that banks charge high or low interest out of “greed” or “favoritism”, it is ultimately a total numbers game. If probability shows that borrowers with your characteristics pay on time, you pay less. If it shows the opposite, you pay more. Understanding probability can put such decisions into perspective and empower you to make better ones yourself.
While probability is about predictions, statistics is about measurement. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of statistics: descriptive and inferential. Descriptive statistics simply reflect the inarguable facts of the data. The heights, weights, genders and eye color of a thousand randomly assembled people would be examples of descriptive statistics. Inferential statistics go a step further by attempting to draw conclusions from the descriptive ones. An example of an inferential statistic might be a theory about how “80% of all people living in this area have brown eyes.” Statistics, like probability, is used across the economy and shapes billions of financial decisions large and small every single day.
A sunk cost is an amount of money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered. Cars purchased, years spent in careers and portions of meals already consumed are all sunk costs. Unfortunately, because human beings are naturally risk-averse, we are often slow to acknowledge sunk costs and change course. We frequently hear friends or relatives justify staying at jobs they despise because of all the time they’ve worked there. Others will actually force themselves to choke down disgusting restaurant food to “get their money’s worth.” But all they are doing is throwing good money after bad by prolonging the original mistake. Instead, true financial rationality demands that you emotionlessly cut your losses as soon as a sunk cost is recognized. Time and money already spent (and which you cannot get back) should not affect what you decide to do next.
Expected Value is a specific and immensely useful application of probability. In simplest terms, it is an expression of the long-term average odds that something will happen. You get it by taking an outcome and multiplying it by the probability that it will happen. The number you wind up with is the Expected Value of that action. While this might sound like abstruse financial jargon, it is anything but. Everyone who buys lottery tickets, for instance, is either unaware of or ignoring the concept of Expected Value. Based on the calculations just described, forking over $10 for buys you a piece of paper with an Expected Value of $5. Seen from this perspective, buying lottery tickets actually reduces your net worth. An index fund, on the other hand, is an example of something with a positive Expected Value that could rationally be expected to grow your net worth.
Another financial mistake we often make is classifying money into arbitrary but seemingly meaningful categories. We hear investors tell us, for example, what they do with “money they can afford to lose.” As kids, many of us probably spoke eagerly about our plans for birthday money that we “weren’t expecting anyway.” A Washington Post article described a study where 86% of people bought a $10 movie ticket after losing $10 on a train, but only 46% bought a second $10 ticket after losing the original. This is a fallacy known as mental accounting. In all the above examples, people are making apples-to-oranges comparisons out of identical things. There is no dividing line between money that matters and money you can afford to lose, or between money you worked hard for and money you weren’t expecting. It is all the same resource: money. Economically speaking, you should make these decisions based solely on Expected Value rather than imaginary categories.
The time value of money states that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. Money already in your possession can be put into investments or savings and earn interest. Investopedia offers an apt example:
Assuming a 5% interest rate, $100 invested today will be worth $105 in one year ($100 multiplied by 1.05). Conversely, $100 received one year from now is only worth $95.24 today ($100 divided by 1.05), assuming a 5% interest rate.
Keep this in mind when someone makes an offer for your house or other property. A seller who offers you “more money later than he can give you today” and tries to make it sound attractive could, in truth, be offering less than today’s “smaller” amount. The old saying “get the fast buck, not the last buck” nicely captures the time value of money.
Astonishing numbers of people have little or no appreciation of true risk management. Mention the risks of any activity and you are likely to hear dismissive responses like “there’s risk in everything” or “you could get killed crossing the street.” Frankly, this is a lazy and ignorant view of what risk truly is. It is not enough to simply assume that risk is present equally in everything so why bother thinking about it. Each activity entails different types of risks and different probabilities that they will materialize. You need to quantify any serious risks that are encountered. The decision of where to buy a home, for instance, should be made partially based on historical property values and the likelihood and they will rise or fall. For extremely important choices, it might help to construct a formal decision tree that visually displays possible outcomes and their Expected Values.
Borrowing money (also known as leverage) is another common source of confusion among the public. Besides attributing high or low interest rates to greed and favoritism, many people fail to comprehend the basic, underlying mechanics of borrowing. The idea of interest can prove especially confusing. Yet, it is crucial to understand what is actually happening when you borrow money. Take the easy example of a car loan. While your new car might cost, say, $28,000, borrowing the full purchase price costs far more than that. Using a cost of loan calculator, we find that borrowing $28,000 at 6% interest and repaying it over 5 years costs $32,479 when all is said and done.
If you’ve ever wondered why financial experts are always telling people to take advantage of tax-deferred 401(k) and IRA accounts, the mystery is solved. Compound interest is the reason. If you put $10,000 into an index fund earning 6% interest and do nothing, it will be worth $57,434.91 in thirty years. That’s because the interest on your original $10,000 is itself earning interest with each passing year. Of course, the returns are even sweeter if you continue putting money in, but the power of compound interest should now be clear. Furthermore, with a Roth IRA, all of this accumulated growth is untouched by income taxes.
You might have heard various analysts and experts claim that some low rate of return (say, 1% or 2%) “doesn’t even beat inflation.” Inflation refers to a gradual, yearly rise in the prices of everything in the economy. Because the government prints more money each year, it loses its buying power at a rate of between 2%-4% annually. In other words, $500 today can buy more goods and services than it will buy a year or two from now. According to the Heritage Foundation, Social Security provides low or even negative returns to various segments of society because of inflation. When making financial decisions (such as evaluating investment performance or yearly income) you must always determine the inflation-adjusted, or “real” rate of return. Neglecting inflation creates a rosier picture, but is nothing more than an exercise in self-delusion.
Opportunity cost refers to the value of your foregone options. The opportunity cost of attending college, for instance, might be the income you could earn at a job if you weren’t in school. The opportunity cost of going to a party might be a lower grade on the test because you didn’t study. Every choice in life, big and small, entails opportunity costs. Nor are they always this obvious. Many “do it yourself” projects are actually a waste of time and/or money when opportunity cost is considered. Let’s say it takes you six hours to do your own taxes, during which you cannot work on your business. If six hours working on the business would have produced more than the cost of an accountant, doing it yourself was a waste. To view it any other way is sheer mental accounting. While you did not physically hand money over, the greater sum of business income you sacrificed means you should have.
One of the most basic ideas underlying many of these concepts is that risk and reward are positively correlated. There is relatively little payoff involved when an activity is extremely safe. As the old saying goes, “if it were easy, everyone would do it.” This is why savings accounts (backed by federal deposit insurance) pay only 1%-2% interest while stocks (which can crash in a heartbeat) routinely pay 5%-10% or more. It is also why working a low-intensity desk job for fifty years is a lot less lucrative than owning an actively managed business. One is relatively sure thing, while the other contains much uncertainty and risk.
Written by Paul Escallier
When Android first debuted on the HTC Dream (also known as the G1) back in October of 2008, it was deemed an “iPhone Killer.” While it didn’t quite slay Apple’s handset, it was the first step in a revolution against the tyrannous iPhone. The initial Android platform bested the iPhone OS on several levels, but lacked some key functionalities that the iPhone could provide. Since then, Android has grown – not only meeting all of the functionalities of the iPhone, but besting it in nearly all aspects from an extensive list of devices to a growing Android Marketplace. Here is our list of the top 10 things Android does better than the iPhone.
Starting with version 1.0, Android has been able to run multiple applications at the same time regardless of whether they are system apps or apps from the Android Marketplace. The current version of iPhone OS does offer limited multitasking, but only allows native applications such as Mail, iPod and Phone to run in the background. Android users benefit greatly from this discrepancy, as they can receive notifications, listen to music, or even record GPS data without keeping the application open. Apple will try to level the playing field with iPhone OS 4, granting developers access to a small and limiting list of APIs that can run certain services in the background, but it’s a long way from the true multitasking that Android has.
One of the key features Android has is a customizable home screen keeps active widgets right at your fingertips, always accesible and always visible – without having to launch an application first. There are widgets for just about every app in the Android Marketplace from playing music to checking the weather and keeping up to date on Facebook. Meanwhile iPhone users are force to flip through their app list to locate and launch each app. If you wanted to check the forecast, for example, you would have to find the app, launch it, and then wait for it to load. With Android, all of that information can be displayed directly on your home screen, never more than a finger swipe away.
It’s true that Apple’s App Store has over 180,000 applications, while the Android Marketplace has only just broken the 50,000 mark but Android’s rapid growth and adoption give it the potential to catch up to the iPhone App Store. Android also has another advantage: a completely open market. Apple receives around 10,000 app submissions per week, yet many apps are overlooked because they appear too simple or denied because a similar app already exists. The Android Marketplace is driven entirely by its consumers, so the best app is the one that succeeds – not the first one to reach the market. In addition, the Android Marketplace doesn’t censor its apps, so the possibilities are truly endless.
The iPhone has some trouble with notifications. Because it’s restricted to pop-up notifications, it can only handle one at a time and because it lacks multitasking, applications must be open in order for them to make notifications. Android, on the other hand, has a convenient notification bar which displays an icon for every notification you have waiting. The notification bar can also be pulled downward to reveal more detail about each notification. Android also allows app developers to make notification details viewable from the lock screen, something the iPhone can only do with native applications.
Apple users are encouraged to “Think Different” but when it comes to the actual hardware, they don’t get much choice. You can pick the color, either black or white, and you get to choose between the 16GB or the pricier 32GB version. Other than that, you’re stuck with the 3.5-inch, 320×480 pixel display, 256MB of RAM, and 600MHz processor. Because Android is an open platform, manufacturers have the freedom to pair it with any hardware they want, like the Nexus One (with 3.7-inch, 480×800 pixel display, 512MB of RAM, and 1GHz Snapdragon processor) or the Motorola Droid which has a physical keypad. Obviously, available selections will vary by carrier – speaking of which….
AT&T truly is the iPhone’s weakest link. The iPhone’s success turned the country’s fastest 3G network into a staggering mess of dropped calls and dodgy data connections. If you lust after an iPhone and live in an area with poor AT&T coverage, you’re stuck struggling with low signal quality, slow data speeds, and missed calls. Android devices are available on every major cellular carrier (although AT&T only offers a single, somewhat underpowered, Android phone). Verizon has the Motorola Droid, Droid Eris, and Droid Incredible to start. T-Mobile has the Nexus One, MyTouch 3G, Behold II, and will soon carry the MyTouch Slide. And Sprint has the Hero, Moment, and plans for the very promising Evo 4G. No matter where you live, Android lets you pick the carrier that’s best for you.
The iPhone can be Jailbroken for some additional functionality, like installing apps that aren’t available in the App Store, but the overall experience is the same. You’re still stuck with the same exact interface. Similar to the Jailbreaking movement, Android has a small community dedicated to building custom ROMs for Android devices. Not only do Custom ROMs bring the same functionality Jailbreaking does, but they also bring an additional level of customization to your phone. There are ROMs that port custom UIs from one device to another. Other ROMs strip down bulky features and optimize for speed. With Android, nothing is out of reach.
Smartphones have been gaining more and more functionality over the past few years: Wi-Fi, GPS, 4G, Bluetooth, etc. While these are all great and necessary additions, they have very adverse affects on battery life. In attempts to counter poor battery life, users have taken to toggling system settings like turning on Wi-Fi or 3G on only when they are needed. iPhone users are stuck digging around in the system settings every time they want to use the internet or a Bluetooth device. Android lets you use widgets to manage your settings directly from your home screen – and for those lesser-used settings that might not have dedicated widgets, you can also create shortcuts on your home screen to take you directly to the setting you want to change.
With Smartphones giving us constant connectivity, it’s not surprising that the majority of our computerized lives are moving online. We have email for our messages, Flickr for our photos, Google Docs for our documents, and Facebook and Twitter for our social lives. Android offers the ability to integrate all of this natively. Your Gmail account can be automatically synchronized with your phone. Photos taken with your phone can be automatically uploaded to Flickr. Your phone can even be linked to your Facebook account and can sync your phone contacts with your Facebook friends – complete with profile images, email addresses, and phone numbers. The iPhone can do this only through use of third party apps, and is nowhere near as seamless to use as the Android alternative.
If you’ve ever thought about buying an iPhone, you have probably noticed the price tag. The older iPhone 3G costs $99 with a two-year commitment and performs sluggishly with the latest OS updates when compared to the 3GS (which will run you a whopping $199 with two-year agreement). Because Android is an open source platform, it is very cost effective to implement which means savings for the end user. Every major cellular carrier (except for AT&T) has at least one Android phone available free with two-year agreement. Of course these are lower end Android devices, but they are still comparable in performance to the iPhone 3GS. The most expensive Android phones (which significantly outperform the iPhone 3GS) are $199 with two-year contract.
