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Occupy English

The 99 percenters now have new ways to talk about the other 1 percent

3 min read

On September 17, we want to see 20 000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Adbusters.org, 13 July 2011

Two months after the above call to action appeared on the blog of Adbusters magazine, thousands of protesters dutifully and gleefully descended on lower Manhattan (but not, alas, Wall Street). They sought a North American Tahrir moment, a revolutionary tipping point on the model of the Egyptian protests that centered on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement created tremendous buzz before packing up due to police pressure and cold temperatures. Whether OWS was a success or failure will be up to the historians to decide. My decidedly more modest goal is to check out its linguistic innovations.


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Asad Madni and the Life-Saving Sensor

His pivot from defense helped a tiny tuning-fork prevent SUV rollovers and plane crashes

11 min read
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Asad Madni and the Life-Saving Sensor

In 1992, Asad M. Madni sat at the helm of BEI Sensors and Controls, overseeing a product line that included a variety of sensor and inertial-navigation devices, but its customers were less varied—mainly, the aerospace and defense electronics industries.

And he had a problem.

The Cold War had ended, crashing the U.S. defense industry. And business wasn’t going to come back anytime soon. BEI needed to identify and capture new customers—and quickly.

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