South African Rolene Strauss crowned Miss World 2014

Miss South Africa, 22-year-old Rolene Strauss, was crowned Miss World 2014 at the pageant's final in London on Sunday, with an estimated billion viewers watching on television around the globe.

Miss Hungary, Edina Kulcsar, was the runner-up and Miss United States, Elizabeth Safrit, came third in the 64th annual competition, contested by women from 121 countries.

Strauss clasped her hands together in surprise and was presented with the sash by the outgoing Miss World, Megan Young of the Philippines.

The medical student sat in the winner's throne as the 2013 champion put the glittering crown on her head before a fireworks finale at the ExCeL exhibition centre in east London.

"South Africa this is for you," Strauss said afterwards. "I think I will brace myself for what's about to happen. It's a huge responsibility."

Mumbai on Farting

How to get a job at Google

Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google - i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world's most successful companies - noted that Google had determined that "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything." He also noted that the "proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time" - now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer. 

Don't get him wrong, Bock begins, "Good grades certainly don't hurt." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more. 

"There are five hiring attributes we have across the company," explained Bock. "If it's a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive." 

The second, he added, "is leadership - in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don't care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power." 

What else? Humility and ownership. 

"It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to solve any problem - and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step back." 

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it's "intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," Bock said. 

"They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.'" You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time. 

The least important attribute they look for is "expertise." Said Bock: "If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.'" Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, "because most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that. 

To sum up Bock's approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one - besides brand-name colleges. Because "when you look at people who don't go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people." Too many colleges, he added, "don't deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don't learn the most useful things for your life. It's [just] an extended adolescence." 

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like GPA. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about - and pays off on - what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills - leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

WhatsApp? Service down, three days after Facebook deal

WhatsApp's 450 million worldwide users were unable to access the smartphone free-messaging service for several hours on Saturday, three days after Facebook declared it was lavishing up to $19 billion on it.

"Sorry we currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly," WhatsApp said in a message on Twitter that was retweeted more than 25,000 times in just a few hours and provoked ridicule because it comes so soon after Facebook's hefty acquisition.

Some WhatsApp users found they were unable to connect to the app, while others complained their messages were not going through.

WhatsApp did not say how long the outage lasted, but about 2.5 hours later it tweeted again to say: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are sorry for the downtime..."

The specialist website techcrunch.com suggested the problem might be down to "a surge of signups and usage that has overloaded its servers" after the publicity the app garnered following Facebook's announcement on Wednesday.

Facebook is betting huge on mobile with the eye-popping cash-and-stock deal for WhatsApp, which was only started five years ago but has quickly grown as a free alternative to text messages.

It is Facebook's biggest acquisition and comes less than two years after the California-based Internet star raised $16 billion in the richest tech sector public stock offering.

Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook were immediately available for comment. 

However, the outage was the source of much amusement -- as well as anger -- on Twitter. 

"I expect you are all away from your desks on the ales drinking some of that Facebook cash!" one user, "leonclarance," replied to WhatsApp's tweet about the blackout.

Another simply tweeted: "Turn down Facebook's offer guys!" 

BEWARE...Stores can track where you go, using your smartphone

Should shoppers turn off their smartphones when they hit the mall? Or does having them on lead to better sales or shorter lines at the cash register?

Retailers are using mobile-based technology to track shoppers' movements at some malls and stores. The companies collecting the information say it's anonymous, can't be traced to a specific person and no one should worry about invasion of privacy. But consumer advocates aren't convinced. It's spying, they say, and shoppers should be informed their phones are being observed and then be able to choose whether to allow it.

The Federal Trade Commission held a workshop Wednesday on the issue, part of a series of privacy seminars looking at emerging technologies and the impact on consumers. FTC attorney Amanda Koulousias says the commission wants to better understand how companies are using phone-location technology, how robust privacy controls are and whether shoppers are notified in advance.

Here's how the technology works:

Your smartphone has a unique identifier code - a MAC address - for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It's a 12-character string of letters and numbers. Think of it like a Social Security or vehicle identification number, but this address is not linked to personal information, like your name, email address or phone number. The numbers and letters link only to a specific phone.

When your smartphone is turned on, it sends out signals with that MAC address (for media access control) as it searches for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Those signals can also be captured by sensors in stores that could tell a department store how often shoppers visit, how long they stay, whether they spend more time in the shoe department, children's clothing section or sporting goods, or whether they stop for the window display, take a pass and decide to move on.

Companies that provide "mobile location analytics" to retailers, grocery stores, airports, and others say they capture the MAC addresses of shoppers' phones but then scramble them into different sets of numbers and letters to conceal the original addresses - a process called hashing. This is how they make the data they collect anonymous, they say.

The companies then analyze all the information those hashed numbers provide as shoppers move from store to store in a mall, or department to department in a store. Mall managers could learn which stores are popular and which ones aren't. A retailer could learn how long the lines are at a certain cash register, how long people have to wait - or whether more people visit on "sale" days at a store.

"We're in the business of helping brick and mortar retailers compete" with online retailers, said Jim Riesenbach, CEO of California-based iInside, a mobile location analytics company. "The retailers want to do the right thing because they know that if they violate the trust of consumers, there will be a backlash."