United Club Shower: Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (ORD) Terminal 1, Concourse C

United Club Chicago's O'Hare Airport (ORD) Terminal 1, Concourse C

Chicago is a very large metropolitan area that supports a lot of international and domestic visitors. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (ORD) is one of the few major airports in the world that is a primary hub for two carriers. The only other airport in the US where that is true is John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York City.

Toiletries at United Club Shower

United Club Shower at Chicago's O'Hare Airport

United Club at Chicago's O'Hare Airport

Both United Airlines and American Airlines battle for passengers at the airport—both have noteworthy O&D traffic as well as being a primary connecting point for passengers from other parts of their network.

United Club Shower Area at Chicago's O'Hare Airport

United Club Shower Area at Terminal 1, Concourse C

Bath Towels United Club Shower Area

Koch Industries’ Market-Based Management

Koch Industries

Koch Industries employs a rigorous approach called the Market-Based Management philosophy to run the business. CEO Charles Koch has perfected his management playbook over the decades, and in 2007, published a book called “The Science of Success”, explaining how the system works at Koch.

MBM, as Koch employees call it, lies at the heart of how Koch operates every day. MBM is significant for the reason that it unites Koch’s employees, giving them a common language and a common goal. There is not a lot of art on the walls in Koch’s headquarters, but everywhere you turn, there is a copy of MBM’s 10 guiding principles hanging from the wall. When employees get a free cup of Starbucks coffee in the break room, the principles are printed on the disposable cup.

Five Dimensions of Koch Industries’ Market-Based Management

Companies owned by Koch Industries strive to bring the productive power of the free market into their operations by systematically applying Koch’s market based management philosophy through these five dimensions:

  1. Vision: Determining where and how the organization can create the greatest long-term value.
  2. Virtue and Talents: Helping ensure that people with the right values, skills and capabilities are hired, retained and developed.
  3. Knowledge Processes: Creating, acquiring, sharing and applying relevant knowledge, and measuring and tracking profitability. (Read, “Knowledge sharing in action,” from Discovery newsletter.)
  4. Decision Rights: Ensuring the right people are in the right roles with the right authority to make decisions and holding them accountable.
  5. Incentives: Rewarding people according to the value they create for the organization.

The Kochs Brothers consists of Charles Koch and David Koch. Two other brothers, William and Frederick, cashed out in 1983 and no longer have a stake in the company. The Koch brothers became heir to their father’s company in Kansas, and Koch Industries into the second-largest privately held company in the nation. The conglomerate makes a gamut of products including Dixie cups, chemicals, jet fuel, fertilizer, electronics, toilet paper and much more.

Kochs Brothers: Charles Koch and David Koch

Guiding Principles of Koch Industries’ Market-Based Management

'The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company' by Charles G. Koch (ISBN 0470139889) Market-Based Management has ten guiding principles that set the standards for evaluating policies, practices and conduct, establishing norms of behavior and building the shared values that guide individual actions. These guiding principles also serve as rules of just conduct along with shared values and beliefs. Koch’s focus and hard nosed thinking combined with his application of economics to management decision making, have enabled his firm to grow into a nimble, large company that keeps performing excellently.

  1. Integrity: Conduct all affairs with integrity, for which courage is the foundation.
  2. Compliance: Strive for 10,000% compliance with all laws and regulations, which requires 100% of employees fully complying 100% of the time. Stop, think and ask.
  3. Value Creation: Create long-term value by the economic means for customers, the company and society. Apply MBM to achieve superior results by making better decisions, pursuing safety and environmental excellence, eliminating waste, optimizing and innovating.
  4. Principled Entrepreneurship: Apply the judgment, responsibility, initiative, economic and critical thinking skills, and sense of urgency necessary to generate the greatest contribution, consistent with the company’s risk philosophy.
  5. Customer Focus: Understand and develop relationships with customers to profitably anticipate and satisfy their needs.
  6. Knowledge: Seek and use the best knowledge and proactively share your knowledge while embracing a challenge process. Develop measures that lead to profitable action.
  7. Change: Anticipate and embrace change. Envision what could be, challenge the status quo and drive creative destruction through experimental discovery.
  8. Humility: Exemplify humility and intellectual honesty. Constantly seek to understand and constructively deal with reality to create value and achieve personal improvement. Hold yourself and others accountable.
  9. Respect: Treat others with honesty, dignity, respect and sensitivity. Appreciate the value of diversity. Encourage and practice teamwork.
  10. Fulfillment: Find fulfillment and meaning in your work by fully developing your capabilities to produce results that create the greatest value.

C/C++ Implementation of Levenshtein Distance Algorithm for Approximate String Matching

C++ The Levenshtein is a measure of how costly it is to adapt a string into another one. If you assign a cost to adding a single character, switching one character for another, and removing a character then you can compute the cost between any two given strings.

Changing a character can be seen as removing a char and adding another one so when adding has cost 1 and removing has cost of one a modification has cost of 2.

The difference between two strings can also be measured in terms of the Levenshtein distance: the distance measure if you think the cost as the “distance” between two strings.

Text comparison is becoming an ever more relevant matter for many fast growing areas such as information retrieval, computational biology, online searching. Levenshtein distance can be used mostly to edit distance, explaining the problem and its relevance.

int levDistance(const std::string source, const std::string target)
{

  // Step 1

  const int n = source.length();
  const int m = target.length();
  if (n == 0) {
    return m;
  }
  if (m == 0) {
    return n;
  }

  // Good form to declare a TYPEDEF

  typedef std::vector< std::vector > Tmatrix; 

  Tmatrix matrix(n+1);

  // Size the vectors in the 2.nd dimension. Unfortunately C++ doesn't
  // allow for allocation on declaration of 2.nd dimension of vec of vec

  for (int i = 0; i <= n; i++) {
    matrix[i].resize(m+1);
  }

  // Step 2

  for (int i = 0; i <= n; i++) {
    matrix[i][0]=i;
  }

  for (int j = 0; j <= m; j++) {
    matrix[0][j]=j;
  }

  // Step 3

  for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {

    const char s_i = source[i-1];

    // Step 4

    for (int j = 1; j <= m; j++) {

      const char t_j = target[j-1];

      // Step 5

      int cost;
      if (s_i == t_j) {
        cost = 0;
      }
      else {
        cost = 1;
      }

      // Step 6

      const int above = matrix[i-1][j];
      const int left = matrix[i][j-1];
      const int diag = matrix[i-1][j-1];
      int cell = min( above + 1, min(left + 1, diag + cost));

      // Step 6A: Cover transposition, in addition to deletion,
      // insertion and substitution. This step is taken from:
      // Berghel, Hal ; Roach, David : "An Extension of Ukkonen's 
      // Enhanced Dynamic Programming ASM Algorithm"
      // (http://www.acm.org/~hlb/publications/asm/asm.html)

      if (i>2 && j>2) {
        int trans=matrix[i-2][j-2]+1;
        if (source[i-2]!=t_j) trans++;
        if (s_i!=target[j-2]) trans++;
        if (cell>trans) cell=trans;
      }

      matrix[i][j]=cell;
    }
  }

  // Step 7

  return matrix[n][m];
}

Visit the Jain Temples of Ranakpur, Rajasthan, India

Ranakpur's Jain Temple

Deep in the Aravali hills of the northwestern state of Rajasthan in India, between Udaipur and Jodhpur, stands the stunning fifth-century Jain temple of Ranakpur. Carved exclusively out of white marble and surrounded by green forest, the temple surveys its surroundings in each of the cardinal directions from its chaumukha, or “four faces”. Fortress-solid, great slabs of stone rise out of the ground to hold up the bulk of the temple’s extravagant exterior, a flamboyant edifice of cupolas, domes and turrets of soft grey marble.

In the interior, 1,444 intricately carved pillars hold up the roof, each one unique in its design. Soft light filters through the marble, changing its color from grey to gold, as the sun moves across the sky. Only the saffron and red fabrics of robes brighten up the surroundings as the monks and pilgrims pass between the pillars, through pools of light into shadow.

Temple to Adinath the first Tirthankara In the 15th century a Jain businessman named Dharma Shah had a vision that he should build a magnificent temple in honor of Adinath, the first Tirthankara (enlightened being) and founder of Jainism, also known as Rishabhadeva. He approached the local monarch, Rana Kumbha, to ask him for land on which to build. The king obliged him, and the temple was named “Ranakpur” in gratitude for his munificence.

The result is one of the most pleasant religious edifices in India. The temple is still in constant use and visitors are welcome, although, according to the Jain principle of ahimsa (non-violence to all things), they are asked not to bring any leather into the temple, including shoes. As you walk through Ranakpur, past delicate marble carvings and solemnly praying monks, the loving artisanship of so many individual souls is striking, and the atmosphere of devotion utterly absorbing.