| 1. How will French election be decided? - CNN.com CNN April 16, 2012 |
Photo credit: Getty Images
Paris (CNN) -- French voters are preparing to elect a new president. CNN's Senior International Correspondent Jim Bittermann explains what the main themes of the election are, how the system works and who is likely to win.
What are the issues?
The economy, economy, economy. Basically, for months now the top issues have been unemployment and purchasing power. To a lesser extent -- and for some candidates, a greater extent -- immigration figures in the debate. On the extremes -- both left and right -- Europe is an issue that relates to the economic problems.
Who are the front-runners? Who is expected to win?
The polls at the moment are giving Socialist candidate Francois Hollande victories in both the first and second rounds of the voting. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been gathering support in the past few weeks, was slipping back in the most recent polls. There are three other candidates in double digits: Jean-Luc Melenchon on the extreme left; Marine Le Pen on the extreme right and Francois Bayrou, a centrist.
How does the election system work?
In French presidential elections there are two rounds of voting, with a two-week break between the two votes that take place on Sundays. There are at the moment 10 candidates. After the first round of voting on April 22, eight candidates will be eliminated with only the two with most votes making it into the runoff election May 6.
2. The third industrial revolution
The Economist 2012.04.21
The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too.
The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way, Manufacturing is going digital. As this week’s special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides.
A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes(notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line.
3. Nestlé's Bespoke Chocolate
Bloomberg February 16, 2012
Nestlé (NESN) has long been known for making chocolate treats for the common man. Think Kit Kat or Crunch bars. But demand for pricier premium chocolates is growing faster than that of plain old candy. So the Vevey (Switzerland)-based company has devised a novel strategy to move up the value chain: customized confections. Internet shoppers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein can now order a taster pack from Nestlé’s Maison Cailler line of expensive Swiss chocolates. After nibbling the samples of five kinds of Ecuador-sourced chocolate with various cocoa content, consumers complete an online survey to determine their “chocolate personality.” They then can order larger boxes of the candies, marrying their favored chocolate with preferred fillings ranging from peppercorn and vanilla to raspberry and verbena.
The bespoke chocolate experience doesn’t come at Baby Ruth prices. A 16-piece box of the Maison Cailler chocolates costs 26 Swiss francs ($28.30). That’s just 128 grams of chocolate, or slightly more than 4 ounces, so these custom sweets price out to more than $100 a pound. Yet such luxe pricing can succeed even amid the economic downturn, says Laurent Freixe, head of Nestlé’s European business. “It may sound counterintuitive, but what’s happening in the [financial] crisis is a quest by consumers for value, for more-affordable product, but also for products that overtake their expectations.”
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