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Article: Do forget your passport: videoconferencing IT allows cheap and effective face-to-face communication across continents, but that hasn't reduced the mileage clocked up by business travellers, who seem to view jet lag as a badge of honour.(opinion)
- Article from:
- Financial Management (UK)
- Article date:
- June 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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You have to feel sorry for those whose job it is to forecast long-term trends. Some years ago, Nigel Meade, professor of quantitative finance at Imperial College, London, got it just about right when he observed that "forecasting is not an activity at which human intuition excels". He went on to quote from the journal Building News, which on June 29, 1894 expressed great pessimism concerning the future of Tower Bridge in London: "The Tower Bridge is, on the whole, a fine piece of work ... foredoomed to become obsolete. Repeated opening and lowering will be found tedious. By and by the bridge will become a fixed bridge, as it should have been from the first, and a million ...