Trump’s big giveaway
QUESTION Following the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Cressida Dick opting for a pay cut, which other highprofile bosses have done the same? CRESSIDA DICK took a voluntary cut of £40,000. Her annual salary is £230,000, compared with the £270,000 paid to her predecessor, sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.
donald Trump said he would donate his entire $400,000 presidential salary to charity. in 2012, U.s. Tonight show host Jay Leno took a 50 per cent drop to halt staff layoffs at broadcaster NBC. That still left him with a $15 million salary.
richard Pennycook, Co-op Group CEO, last year took a cut in his base salary from £1.25 million to £750,000. His incentive plan also became less generous.
in 2015, the board of Credit suisse took a 25 per cent cut after the U.s. fined the bank for helping wealthy americans avoid taxes.
actors have sometimes taken major pay cuts in the pursuit of their art. Matthew McConaughey turned down a whopping $15 million to play Magnum Pi in favour of less than $200,000 to star in dallas Buyers Club. He was compensated with the 2014 Best actor Oscar.
Jonah Hill picked up just $60,000 for his role in Martin scorsese’s Oscar-nominated The Wolf Of Wall street. Hill said ‘i would sell my house and give him all my money to work for [scorsese]… i would have done anything in the world.’
Charles Rey, Greater Manchester.
QUESTION Which country is blessed with the most bank holidays?
ESTABLISHING the figures is not at all straightforward: many countries have national and purely regional public holidays, and some ‘bank’ holidays (when banks shut) are not official public holidays, but are treated as such by the public.
Furthermore, the figures vary according to which source you consult. What is clear is that england and Wales have just eight bank/public holidays (but scotland has nine and Northern ireland ten) and — bearing in mind the above proviso — only Mexico has fewer, a measly seven. The Netherlands also gets eight days, while ireland, Puerto rico, switzerland, Germany and serbia have nine each.
The workers in Colombia enjoy 18 days off a year, and other lucky workers can be found in Japan, Thailand, Lebanon and south korea — which have 16 days. Chile and Finland have 15.
Top of the pile is argentina. it added a federal holiday, september 24, to celebrate the 1812 Battle of Tucuman, a key point in the struggle for independence from spain. it was when the army of the North, commanded by General Manuel Belgrano, defeated royalist troops headed by General Pio de Tristan.
This addition made it the country with the most national holidays in the world, with a total of 19 days off.
Cristina Fernandez de kirchner, who was president between 2007 and 2015, added five national holidays while in power. Her argument for adding days off was to promote tourism in the country and strengthen the economy. some saw it as a bribe to voters. Michael Arnold, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.
QUESTION Who invented the touchscreen?
DURING World War ii, the Uk’s Telecommunications research establishment was moved to Malvern College in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, so it could continue its work to develop range and direction-finding technology using radio frequency electromagnetic energy.
The most famous example of this work was the invention of radar by robert Watson-Watt and his team as a defence system enabling the royal air Force and its allied air forces to detect incoming German aircraft. Great Malvern subsequently became synonymous with advanced research and development in the fields of electronics, telecommunications and military systems.
One such innovation was the invention of the touchscreen. This dates back to 1965, when e. a. Johnson, working at Malvern, published an article titled Touch display — a Novel input/ output device For Computers in the scientific journal electronics Letters. He wrote: ‘a novel input/output device for computer systems has wires, sensitive to the touch of a finger, on the face of a cathode-ray tube on which information can be written by the computer.
‘ This device, the “touch display”, provides a very efficient coupling between man and machine.’
The intended use was in air-traffic control. in a 1968 article, The role Of Touch display in air Traffic Control, Johnson proposed allowing a controller to touch pictures on a screen that would navigate them between menus showing details of each aircraft in the area.
Johnson did not produce a functioning example of his idea, and it took until 1973 before two CERN physicists, Frank Beck and Bent stumpe, were able to manufacture a working screen.
at the time, the super Proton synchrotron, the predecessor to today’s Large Hadron Collider, was nearing completion and needed complex settings and controls, rendering its control room cumbersome and costly.
Beck and stumpe devised a system whereby all aspects could be controlled using six touchscreens, through displays and menus navigable by touch alone.
These touchscreens were ‘capacitive’ touchscreens. rather than using two thin films between the user and display to sense a stylus, capacitive touchscreens measure the distortion in the screen’s electrostatic field created when your fingers touch the screen’s coating.
This is the same type used in today’s iPhones and iPads, but it took many other innovations before the capacitive touchscreens could reach the advanced state of that used by apple.
early touchscreens were integrated with cathode-ray tube technology, the same as old TVs, and so they weren’t flat. This cumbersome design resulted in a lack of accuracy in knowing where the screen had been touched — a problem that disappeared with the development of flat and less bulky plasma screens and liquid crystal displays.
C.L Dance, Swansea.