West at Home releases environmental impact statistics for telecommuters

Admittedly, it's self-serving, but at the same time, frighteningly clear - West at Home employs several thousand work at home call center agents. And they're really helping the envirnment. According to Fox Business News, West's home-based employees prevented an estimated 17,000 metric tons of air pollution from reaching the earth's atmosphere in 2007. West at Home agents also reduced gasoline consumption by more than 2 million gallons and saved approximately $22.9 million in commuting expenses.

When you think about the thousands of people NOT telecommuting, it's a scary thought. Telecommuting drastically reduces our carbon footprint. And it makes a lot of people happier. And it saves gas...

I would love to see more statistics like this from other homeshoring companies.

Offshoring clinical trials - welcome to 2008

It almost seems like an ethical nightmare when companies are considering offshoring so many vitally American business processes, such as when the Orlando Sentinel wanted to send our journalism overseas.

What about offshoring clinical trials? I am sure that there are many ethics involved in that one. I'm not a doctor, I'll admit, but I did once work in a company that marketed clinical research trials to American doctors. I signed a confidentiality on that one, but from my short-lived perspective, many pharmaceutical companies were, well, desperate to get doctors to test their products on patients. It wasn't pretty and I was relieved when that temporary assignment was over.

Does this scare anybody else? 10% of the trials listed at Clinicaltrials.org, out of the 50,000 of clinical trials currently underway - are being tried outside North America, typically in western Europe and Japan. On top of that, ClinicalTrials.org is the website that our government uses to do clinical testing. Creepy, anyone? There's a really long article about the trend of companies like GlaxoSmithKline transfer of clinical trials overseas at the Financial Times, but you have to register to get access to it. It's interesting to note that some big corporations don't see it as a problem - in fact, they may even see it as a solution to the prying eyes of the FDA and the regulations that slow down the drug approval process... Which they view as an unnecessary evil...

Offshoring the NEWS?

If you haven't heard the controversy, here's a story about it. Basically, the Miami Herald was going to ship its copyediting and other pre-production processes overseas in an effort to save some cash.

When are we send too much offshore? How would you feel about your daily being print and run in a country overseas?

Shouldn't American news be American news?