faulker031

The crash of the Germanwings flight earlier this week is still dominating much of the (Western) news media. It is not just the fact that it happened with a well known Airline with a good safety record (Germanwings is a part of Lufthansa) right in the middle of Europe – in fact one of us sat on a Lufthansa A320 just a day before the crash. But it is also the absence of any good explanation as to the cause of the crash. Now that story has evolved over the last hours. First, we learned from the voice recorder of the black box that the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit and did not open the door for the pilot to come back after his toilet break. It was interesting to see how Lufthansa, the prosecutors and most media then jumped to the conclusion that the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane. While that is indeed one option , only few reports raised the question why the flight data recorder – the other black box – could not be found . Or why when it was found the hard disk with the data w...

The Apple Watch understandably took the limelight at Apple's big launch event today . But what is becoming increasingly clear is that to really understand the company we need to see it as so much more than simply a technology company. And we have to look beyond its products, however alluring they might be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of corporate responsibility. For much of the past few years, the corporate responsibility community has been focusing hard on Apple's product supply chain. And for good reason, with a spate of labour violations plaguing the company (most recently from the BBC in December last year ) despite some impressive commitments to responsible sourcing. But with the launch of the Apple Watch and its extended capabilities for health monitoring, research and diagnosis, along with the rapid growth of its Apple Pay system, it is the company's capabilities in data management and security that will likely define its reputation for corporate re...