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Showing posts with the label #prettyface

All you need is a pretty face and the media.

Just to drive home the point of how media sells ideas and influences our way of thinking, look at Elizabeth Holmes's case. At 19, she dropped out of Stanford in 2003 with a one-tracked mind to prove to the world that her painless blood-testing device was going to revolutionise laboratory blood testing. Equipped with only computer knowledge without a medical background, she proceeded with her plan despite the detractors' scepticism. From the get-go, she was faced with opposition from the senior partners and staff employed in her company, Theranos. Through the benefit of her charm and goodwill, Holmes' company managed to secure close to $6 million in funds through crowdsourcing. The trouble was that the machine that Holmes was selling was not working. It gave wrong results most of the time, and the company ended up using other devices to do the tests instead. Workers who complained of its unreliability were sacked and were required to sign non-disclosure agreements to safegua...