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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/05/11/silicon-valley-boston-tech-community-sees-real-life-and-comedy/xciUUCRXJNU6AbRkstMz5N/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140514203806id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/05/11/silicon-valley-boston-tech-community-sees-real-life-and-comedy/xciUUCRXJNU6AbRkstMz5N/story.html
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In ‘Silicon Valley,’ Boston’s tech community sees real life and comedy
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20140514203806
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There’s the look-alike of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. And the dorks who can write computer code in their sleep but can’t talk to a girl without getting tongue-tied. And the millions of dollars seemingly in reach.
When workers in Boston’s technology community watch “Silicon Valley,” HBO’s new sitcom about life in an Internet startup, it all seems so familiar.
“I think it’s so spot on,” said Serge Roux, a 37-year-old industrial designer at Cambridge Consultants in Kendall Square. “It’s magnified, obviously — a little over the top — but the personalities are right on: the complete introverts who have no idea how to act socially. I can name those people in our company.”
An antic takeoff about the pressures and promises of creating the Next Great Company, “Silicon Valley” centers on a crop of shaggy, slovenly, self-absorbed entrepreneurs living and working in a communal “incubator” space that resembles a frat house for nerds. It is the latest creation of Mike Judge, the sharp wit behind “Beavis and Butthead” and “Office Space,” a cult classic for its skewering of cubicle culture.
The show has become the closest thing to required viewing in Greater Boston’s large startup community — and not everyone is laughing. Indeed, the show is a mildly polarizing event: Fans such as Roux enjoy it for accurately portraying the deadpan moments in their work world; others are irked by what they consider an unrealistic depiction of their profession.
“My sister called me the other day and was like, ‘Hey, I’ve been watching that show — that’s what you do!’ ” said Daniel Adler-Golden, 28, who founded an online network called Grouptones that helps musicians find band mates. “It’s like, ‘No, that’s not at all what I do.’”
“It’s magnified, obviously — a little over the top — but the personalities are right on,” said Serge Roux, a 37-year-old industrial designer at Cambridge Consultants in Kendall Square.
Adam Garfield and his colleagues at the Boston startup SpeedETab have turned the program into a weekly virtual gathering. With two workers based in Boston and two in Florida, the SpeedETab workers usually watch “Silicon Valley” on their own but trade wisecracks by text messages. While some moments strike them as far-fetched, much of what they see in the characters and events rings familiar.
“Behind every joke there’s some truth,” said Garfield, 26, whose company is developing a new mobile payment system for bars. “I don’t think you can be in the startup world and not laugh at satire like that.”
Workers at another local tech firm, LevelUp, have taken their fandom up a notch. After the startup featured in the show hired a graffiti artist to redesign its logo in a recent episode, LevelUp brought in graffiti artists to redecorate its new office on Arch Street in Boston and posted pictures of the new art on Twitter.
Whether Boston’s tech workers love or hate the satire depends on how they answer one key question: What is “Silicon Valley” really about?
The ones who see a show about the day-to-day existence of a startup team invariably find details that don’t match their own experiences. While the show’s protagonist, Richard Hendriks, begins fielding multimillion-dollar offers 15 minutes into the first episode, Adler-Golden has been toiling for two years and recently raised $15,000 on the crowdfunding website Indiegogo.
He can take a joke but hates the idea that viewers — such as his own sister — could believe the life of a tech entrepreneur is so glamorous.
“They’re definitely not going to show you the uninteresting parts, and that’s most of it,” he said.
Frank Pobutkiewicz also believes “Silicon Valley” distorts the reality of launching a company. The founder of College Apprentice, a company at the Cambridge Innovation Center that runs entrepreneurship programs and international academic trips for students, he just does not see the fun in a show that’s all about his industry.
“I am surrounded by it,” Pobutkiewicz said. “Why am I going to go home and watch it?”
For those in Greater Boston’s startup scene, part of the fun is the needling the show delivers to the real Silicon Valley, which in the tech world has long been the Big Apple, with Boston cast as the second city.
“I’m so glad “Silicon Valley” is getting so much press because now it’s also getting bad press — and we’re not!” said Carlos Martinez-Vela, executive director of the Venture Café Foundation at the Cambridge Innovation Center.
Coastal rivalries aside, some in Boston’s tech community find that “Silicon Valley” hilariously captures some of the zanier things that can happen in their field.
For example, when Richard, the show’s central character, is faced with a choice between a $10 million buyout offer and a smaller investment that would let him keep the company, he suffers a panic attack and flees to his doctor.
But instead of getting medical attention, Richard gets pitched — his doctor has this idea for a smartphone-enabled device that can distinguish between a panic attack and a heart attack.
If Richard chooses the $10 million offer, the doctor asks, would he consider investing in the medical device company?
“That was awesome and so true,” Timothy Grovenburg, a tech investor at Berwind Private Equity in Harvard, said of the scene. “Everybody and their brother has an idea.”
Ultimately, Richard decides to take the smaller seed money from the venture investor so that he can retain majority ownership of his company, cheekily named Pied Piper, and proceeds to build it with the help of several geeky friends.
“I love caricatures about this world because they’re around us — they’re real,” said Martinez-Vela. “I’m not offended because I’m very critical of this environment. I work in it, I love it, but I also sometimes can’t believe these characters actually exist.”
To some, it isn’t just the satire that rings true.
Subhash Roy, chief executive of Waltham-based Q Factor Communications, appreciates how realistic many of the key relationships in “Silicon Valley” come off. As at the fictional Pied Piper, Q Factor’s business involves technology for transmitting large files of information, such as videos and songs, without losing quality.
Roy singles out a scene involving one of Pied Piper’s business partners, Erlich Bachmann, who pulls off a stirring explanation of the firm to a key investor when Richard freezes.
“He totally nailed it, and we would have said almost exactly the same thing about us,” Roy said of Erlich’s performance.
“Silicon Valley” gets one more thing right, said Roux, the industrial designer. Though it makes fun of socially challenged tech workers almost relentlessly, the show also makes clear they are the industry’s backbone — even if that backbone is a bit hunched from too many hours curled over a keyboard.
“They change the world,” Roux said. “If we didn’t hire those guys, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
• HBO’s ‘The (Dead Mothers) Club’ counts the losses
• Matthew Gilbert: 1,057 channels (and plenty on)
• Jack is back on the clock in ‘24: Live Another Day’
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When young workers in Boston’s technology community watch “Silicon Valley,” HBO’s new sitcom about life in a internet startup, it all seems so familiar. An antic takeoff of the pressures and promises of creating the Next Great Company, “Silicon Valley” centers on a crop of shaggy, slovenly, self-absorbed entrepreneurs living and working in a communal “incubator” space that resembles a frat house for nerds. It is the latest creation of Mike Judge, the sharp wit behind “Beavis and Butthead” and “Office Space,” a cult classic for its skewering of cubicle culture.
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http://www.people.com/article/new-hampshire-house-explosion-police-fatally-shot
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140515020000id_/http://www.people.com/article/new-hampshire-house-explosion-police-fatally-shot
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House Explodes, Burns After Police Officer Fatally Shot : People.com
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20140515020000
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UPDATED 05/13/2014 at 12:50 PM EDT • Originally published 05/13/2014 at 12:20 PM EDT
A New Hampshire police officer was shot to death after he responded to a domestic disturbance at a home that later exploded and burned, authorities said Monday.
The gunman was presumed dead in the ensuing blaze.
Attorney General Joseph Foster said late Monday night 48-year-old Stephen Arkell of Brentwood was shot to death when he answered the call in a suburban neighborhood for people older than 55.
After the shooting, the house burst into flames. A massive explosion blew the front off the house and within an hour, it was leveled.
Foster said Michael Nolan, 47, the son of the homeowner, is the suspected gunman. He is presumed dead.
Debra Vasapolli, director of public relations at Exeter Hospital, said that one person was taken to the hospital but said that person was not the victim of a gunshot wound.
that police responded to the house after neighbors heard an argument Monday afternoon and called 911. His wife, Susan, said that she saw a police officer arrive at the home and then heard "rapid gun fire."
She said she saw Walter Nolan, 86, being taken from the scene by ambulance before she was evacuated from the area. Public records indicate the house is owned by Nolan and he apparently lived in the home with his son.
After the blaze started around 4 p.m., firefighters were kept away from the scene.
shows flames burning through the roof of the house and an explosion punching out the front of the house shortly after 5:30 p.m. Within minutes of the explosion, the house was engulfed in flames as black smoke billowed over the neighborhood.
After firefighters started attacking the blaze around 6 p.m., the fire was largely knocked down about a half hour later.
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The 86-year-old homeowner's 47-year-old son is the suspected gunman; he is presumed dead after the explosion and fire
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http://time.com/104480/malaysia-airliens-flight-370-mahathir-mohamad/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140519124622id_/http://time.com/104480/malaysia-airliens-flight-370-mahathir-mohamad/
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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Former Leader Says CIA in MH370 Cover Up
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20140519124622
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A former Malaysian leader on Sunday accused American intelligence agents of covering up what really happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane missing since March.
Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad claimed that Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board, claimed that the CIA could have taken control of the Boeing 777, and lamented that the Malaysian government is bearing the brunt of the blame for a mystery that sparked a massive, expensive and as-of-yet unsuccessful international search for the plane.
“What goes up must come down,” Mohamad wrote in a blog post. “Airplanes can go up and stay up for long periods of time. But even they must come down eventually. They can land safely or they may crash. But airplanes don’t just disappear. Certainly not these days with all the powerful communication systems, radio and satellite tracking and filmless cameras which operate almost indefinitely and possess huge storage capacities.”
Mohamad said “the ‘uninterruptible’ autopilot would be activated—either by pilot, by on board sensors, or even remotely by radio or satellite links by government agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, if terrorists attempt to gain control of the flight deck.”
No evidence has emerged to support his theory, one of many conspiracy theories that have proliferated since the plane disappeared. Authorities believe it crashed in the Indian Ocean and that no one survived.
“Clearly Boeing and certain agencies have the capacity to take over ‘uninterruptible control’ of commercial airliners of which MH370 B777 is one,” Mohamed wrote.
“Someone is hiding something,” he added. “It is not fair that… Malaysia should take the blame. For some reason the media will not print anything that involves Boeing or the CIA.”
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The former Malaysian Prime Minister accused the C.I.A., Boeing and the media of covering up crucial facts about the missing plane
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http://time.com/105602/chipotle-gun-ban/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140520040629id_/http://time.com/105602/chipotle-gun-ban/
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Chipotle Asks Gun Owners to Leave Weapons at Home
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20140520040629
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Chipotle is requesting that all non-law enforcement customers refrain from bringing guns into their stores amid pressure from a mothers’ group calling for complete ban on guns in stores.
“Recently participants from an ‘open carry’ demonstration in Texas brought guns (including military-style assault rifles) into one of our restaurants, causing many of our customers anxiety and discomfort,” a statement from Chipotle reads. “Because of this we are respectfully asking that customers not bring guns into our restaurants, unless they are authorized law enforcement personnel.”
Chipotle says it typically defers to local laws on the issue because it doesn’t think it’s fair for employees to ask customers not to bring guns into stores. But backlash following a gun rally at a Dallas Chipotle this weekend led the chain to take action.
“The vast majority of gun owners are responsible citizens and we appreciate them honoring this request,” the statement continues. “And we hope that our customers who oppose the carrying of guns in public agree with us that it is the role of elected officials and the legislative process to set policy in this area, not the role of businesses like Chipotle.”
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a Michael Bloomberg-backed gun control group, began circulating a petition calling for the company to prohibit guns in its stores on Monday following a gun rally at a Dallas Chipotle this weekend. According to a press release, the petition received over 10,000 signatures.
The group, which has launched similar petitions against Starbucks, Jack in the Box, and Facebook, applauded the company’s swift response. “Chipotle’s statement that firearms are not welcome in their restaurants is bold and meaningful – it shows that you can support the Second Amendment while also taking reasonable measures to ensure that Americans are safe and secure in the places we take our children,” said founder of Moms Demand Action Shannon Watts.
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After a pro-gun group flashed assault rifles and other weapons in a Dallas Chipotle last weekend, the burrito chain decided to take action
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http://time.com/108893/washington-redskins-name-senators/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140522153511id_/http://time.com/108893/washington-redskins-name-senators/
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U.S. Senators Want a Name Change for the Washington Redskins
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20140522153511
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Fifty U.S. Senators sent an open letter to National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell Thursday urging him to recommend a name change for the Washington Redskins.
The senators — mostly Democrats with two Independents — want Goodell to follow in the footsteps of National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver, who recently banned L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the league for life following racist comments he made in a phone call that was later published publicly.
“Today we urge you and the National Football League to send the same clear message the NBA did: that racism and bigotry have no place in professional sports,” the letter reads. “It’s time for the NFL to endorse a name change for the Washington, D.C. football team.”
The letter, penned by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nv.) and signed by 47 of their colleagues, is the largest Congressional call for a Redskins name change. Senator Reid is among the handful of Congressional members who have already openly denounced the team’s name. Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) sent along a separate letter, according to a press release. No Republicans signed the letter.
The Senators say Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s racist remarks have “opened up a national conversation about race relations,” noting it’s a perfect opportunity for the NFL to act against the Washington Redskins.
“Now is the time for the NFL to act,” the letter continues. “The Washington, D.C. football team is on the wrong side of history. What message does it send to punish slurs against African Americans while endorsing slurs against Native Americans?”
The Washington Redskins organization has been the target of a national public relations campaign over the past year, led by Native American tribal organizations that say the term “redskin” is a dictionary-defined racial slur and should be removed as the team’s mascot. Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder has said repeatedly that he will not change the name. In March, Snyder announced the team had instead formed the “Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation,” meant to support Native Americans across America.
“In speaking face-to-face with Native American leaders and community members, it’s plain to see they need action, not words,” Snyder wrote in a March letter.
In their letter, however, Senators argue the name disparages Indian culture and the majority of tribes and tribal organizations have spoke out against it.
“This is a matter of tribal sovereignty—and Indian Country has spoken clearly on this issue,” the letter reads. “Tribes have worked for generations to preserve the right to speak their languages and perform their sacred ceremonies … Yet every Sunday during football season, the Washington, D.C. football team mocks their culture.”
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Half of all U.S. Senators signed an open letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell calling for a name change for the Washington football team in the wake of the NBA's actions against LA Clipper's owner Donald Sterling
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http://www.people.com/article/miranda-lambert-buys-carrie-underwood-motorcycle
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140526223759id_/http://www.people.com/article/miranda-lambert-buys-carrie-underwood-motorcycle
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Miranda Lambert Buys Carrie Underwood a Motorcycle
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20140526223759
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05/26/2014 at 06:15 PM EDT
What, you thought she was the sweet girl next-door type? Apparently
has a bit of a wild side!
Just a week after Underwood and
set the stage on fire with their duet of
Lambert surprised her good friend with a little thank you gift – a motorcycle!
Underwood Tweeted a photo of her on her new bike, writing, "Well, it's not every day @mirandalambert buys you a motorcycle! Next stop, motorcycle driving lessons!!! #RansTheBest"
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The singer surprises her duet partner with a thank you gift
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http://www.people.com/article/charlize-theron-esquire-cover-talks-sean-penn
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140528184202id_/http://www.people.com/article/charlize-theron-esquire-cover-talks-sean-penn
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Charlize Theron on Sean Penn: 'It Was Nice to Be Single and Now It's Nice to Be Not Single'
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20140528184202
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05/28/2014 at 02:15 PM EDT
Sean Penn and Charlize Theron
fell in love when she least expected it.
"I wasn't in any place that I even wanted something like [a relationship]," the Oscar-winner tells
"Then one day you go: Oh, [my son Jackson's] almost two now ⦠and you have more time again. And it's like if you are open to something, if you just let it happen, it will happen. When you least expect it."
Continues Theron: "It was nice to be single and now it's nice to be not single."
Charlize Theron on the cover of Esquire
While the actress, 38, now starring in
, says she may not have planned on a relationship with Penn, 53, she always knew she would
"I was like, 'Ah, finally!'" she says of adopting Jackson when he was nine days old.
Although Theron says that some people "would never want to have" her life, she admits, "My life is really good."
"I am living my life in a way that if tomorrow it ended – and I hope not because I have a kid – but if it did, this was the life that I really wanted to live."
Says Theron: "A life is good if it's the life that you want."
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The actress says she wasn't expecting to a relationship with Sean Penn, but "if you just let it happen, it will happen when you least expect it"
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http://www.nbc.com/american-dream-builders/episode-guide/season-1/finale-beach-houses/110
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140529011510id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/american-dream-builders/episode-guide/season-1/finale-beach-houses/110
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American Dream Builders
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20140529011510
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After nine weeks of sleep deprivation, constant pressure, countless hours of demolition, rough carpentry, drywalling, painting, shopping, decorating and more, it all comes down to just two designers: Jay and Lukas. Their styles couldn't be more in contrast. Lukas represents the artists, the avant garde and the bad boys who break the rules. Jay is innovative but efficient and practical, a taskmaster who sees through every detail, a general contractor with a critical eye and a natural talent for design. He represents the reliable tradesman, the inventive yet practical builders, and the homeowners who know that a home's form must follow its function.
Nate Berkus, Monica Pedersen and Eddie George convene the proceedings in Ventura, California, where two simple beach houses await transformation. The families in both homes know their properties are special - but they're equally aware that they're dated, with over-the hill furnishings and appliances and some thorny layout problems. The challenge for both Lukas and Jay will be to update the look and feel, improve the flow and focus on one or two breakthrough rooms that really make the case for who should win the competition.
As usual, they'll have less than a week to demolish, design and rebuild the homes - but they won't be working alone. All 10 of the eliminated designers are brought back to pitch in. And in a ceremony on the beach reminiscent of a pickup ballgame, the two remaining designers take turns picking designers to join them. Lukas selects Nina, Vanessa, Andrew, Tarrick and finally Elaine, while Jay chooses Erinn, Christina, Nancy, Dann, and lastly Darren. A quarter of a million dollars is on the line, and the clock is now officially ticking.
The teams fall back to their planning tents, watch videos of the families who live in the homes and begin making their plans. Jay polls his team members as to which rooms they'd like to work on. Jay will sign off on each room, but knows his strength will come from tapping the creative energy of his team. Erinn will take the living room and dining room; Dann the master bedroom, bath and balcony; Nancy the kids' bedroom and family room; and Christina the kitchen, while Darren will take on the massive oceanfront patio and Jay will handle the guest bedroom.
Jay's main goals are to bring the sense of outdoor living to the indoors (and vice versa), open up the kitchen to the living and dining area and divide the upstairs loft to create a true master suite. He's got a major issue in the downstairs common area. As much as he'd like to open the floor up, Jay's faced with a seismic, load-bearing wall that simply cannot move. Unfortunately, it sits smack in the middle of what would be a wonderful great room. Erinn has the answer: mount a large mirror on the wall and bring the view inside. It's brilliant. Jay rolls up his sleeves, and the team gets to work.
Lukas, on the other hand, drives the plans for each room, laying out a vision and enlisting the other designers to help out. Lukas will take on the entire downstairs including the kitchen, dining room, living and family rooms, bathroom and deck. His team wonders how much he can get done on his own, but Lukas knows it's his competition to lose - and he won't take a risk of delegating what could be a make-or-break room. His main goals are to create a proper dining room, add an additional bedroom by reclaiming a landing upstairs and imbue the space with a couple of his signature special projects. But Lukas' most daring decision has nothing to do with any room. He wants to paint the exterior black. To a person, the other designers think it's a disastrous choice; but Lukas has been toying with the idea all season, and now he plans to make a bold statement.
After nine weeks of sleep deprivation, constant pressure, countless hours of demolition, rough carpentry, drywalling, painting, shopping, decorating and more, it all comes down to just two designers: Jay and Lukas. Their styles couldn't be more in contrast. Lukas represents the artists, the avant garde and the bad boys who break the rules. Jay is innovative but efficient and practical, a taskmaster who sees through every detail, a general contractor with a critical eye and a natural talent for design. He represents the reliable tradesman, the inventive yet practical builders, and the homeowners who know that a home's form must follow its function.
Nate Berkus, Monica Pedersen and Eddie George convene the proceedings in Ventura, California, where two simple beach houses await transformation. The families in both homes know their properties are special - but they're equally aware that they're dated, with over-the hill furnishings and appliances and some thorny layout problems. The challenge for both Lukas and Jay will be to update the look and feel, improve the flow and focus on one or two breakthrough rooms that really make the case for who should win the competition.
As usual, they'll have less than a week to demolish, design and rebuild the homes - but they won't be working alone. All 10 of the eliminated designers are brought back to pitch in. And in a ceremony on the beach reminiscent of a pickup ballgame, the two remaining designers take turns picking designers to join them. Lukas selects Nina, Vanessa, Andrew, Tarrick and finally Elaine, while Jay chooses Erinn, Christina, Nancy, Dann, and lastly Darren. A quarter of a million dollars is on the line, and the clock is now officially ticking.
The teams fall back to their planning tents, watch videos of the families who live in the homes and begin making their plans. Jay polls his team members as to which rooms they'd like to work on. Jay will sign off on each room, but knows his strength will come from tapping the creative energy of his team. Erinn will take the living room and dining room; Dann the master bedroom, bath and balcony; Nancy the kids' bedroom and family room; and Christina the kitchen, while Darren will take on the massive oceanfront patio and Jay will handle the guest bedroom.
Jay's main goals are to bring the sense of outdoor living to the indoors (and vice versa), open up the kitchen to the living and dining area and divide the upstairs loft to create a true master suite. He's got a major issue in the downstairs common area. As much as he'd like to open the floor up, Jay's faced with a seismic, load-bearing wall that simply cannot move. Unfortunately, it sits smack in the middle of what would be a wonderful great room. Erinn has the answer: mount a large mirror on the wall and bring the view inside. It's brilliant. Jay rolls up his sleeves, and the team gets to work.
Lukas, on the other hand, drives the plans for each room, laying out a vision and enlisting the other designers to help out. Lukas will take on the entire downstairs including the kitchen, dining room, living and family rooms, bathroom and deck. His team wonders how much he can get done on his own, but Lukas knows it's his competition to lose - and he won't take a risk of delegating what could be a make-or-break room. His main goals are to create a proper dining room, add an additional bedroom by reclaiming a landing upstairs and imbue the space with a couple of his signature special projects. But Lukas' most daring decision has nothing to do with any room. He wants to paint the exterior black. To a person, the other designers think it's a disastrous choice; but Lukas has been toying with the idea all season, and now he plans to make a bold statement.
And Lukas has another trick up his sleeve: a custom-made light fixture that will dominate the vast vertical space above the living room. Even more impressive, he plans to fashion the fixture himself, using galvanized electrical conduit and off-the-shelf lighting components he scores at Lowe's. It's a big move; but it's a big space, and Lukas knows this could cement his stature above the rest.
There's some tension brewing on Team Jay. Nancy's plans for the kids' bedroom are being second-guessed by Jay and Christina. When she's dispatched with Darren to make a materials run to Lowe's, Nancy senses Jay's lost faith in her; she feels disrespected and doesn't want to continue. She leans on Christina, who summons Jay for a little fence-mending.
With three days to reveal, Nate, Eddie and Monica make the rounds. With just two designers' visions to work with, there's not a lot to criticize. They know Jay and Erinn are challenged by the seismic wall and large fireplace; they also know that Jay's delegating of some critical design choices could come back to haunt him. Still, for the most part they like what they see. At Lukas' house, the judges grab a private moment with Lukas to ask him about his decision to draft Nina before Erinn; Lukas explains that he thought Jay relied a lot on Nina in past competitions and wanted him to have to stand on his own. Smart thinking. Touring the house, they're excited about Lukas' great room plan, especially a 12-foot dining table he's going to build and the newly reclaimed extra bedroom upstairs. They have no idea he plans to paint the outside black.
The drama on Team Jay continues. Darren gets an unexpected phone call; he has a family emergency and has to leave immediately. Darren's gotta go, but he leaves Jay in a bind. The outdoor patio, with its fireplace and sitting area is now in jeopardy. It's a signature project. Jay's going to have to do whatever it takes.
The clock continues to wind down. Jay jumps on the patio project, and everyone else steps up their game, painting, decorating, arranging and pitching in to give the two designers the best shot at the championship. With the exception of Elaine. On the night before the reveal, she catches Lukas in a private moment and questions whether he's really making enough of a statement. Is his long dining table or reclaimed small bedroom really a breakthrough? Will his home-grown light fixture tip the scales? Lukas is irritated beyond belief. The next morning, Elaine further weighs down the final push, worrying about whether they'll finish in time. Lukas tells her to calm down, finish her assignments and do her best. He's cool under pressure.
Jay's team is humming along but they're short-handed. Suddenly Darren returns, his unknown family crisis dealt with. He hops right back into the patio project. With less than an hour remaining, Darren can't get the gas fireplace to fire up. Jay is sweating bullets; the fireplace is the centerpiece of the patio. But with moments to spare, the gas catches fire. As the clock winds down, both houses are a flurry of last minute touch-ups.
The judges arrive for their official walkthrough. Before they enter, they have another surprise for Jay and Lukas: they've flown their families in for moral support. Jay breaks down at the sight of his children and wife; it's been weeks since he's seen them. Nate, Monica and Eddie head inside. They find Jay's house to be exquisite. The seismic mirror wall works brilliantly, as does the patio. The kids' bedrooms are tasteful; Christina's kitchen clean and vibrant; and the master bedroom suite, with its expansive clear railing bringing in the ocean view, is judged simply magnificent. There are no major problem areas at all.
On to Lukas' house. The judges' first reaction is strikingly negative - the black exterior reminds them of burnt wood. Monica is upset, and Eddie is baffled; Nate reserves a bit of judgment until he tours the inside. And the inside is indeed transformative. The great room with its giant, custom light fixture takes the judges' breath away. The 12-foot dining table also works splendidly. The bedrooms, decorated with the careful eye of Nina and Elaine also score big points. The neighborhood council walks through both homes and is equally impressed.
Nate, Eddie and Monica compare notes; they know they've got a tough choice on their hands. There were no misses; both homes were stylishly transformed, updated and given more usable space. Monica is still stuck on Lukas' choice of exterior color, but she at least appreciates the bold stroke. Everyone returns to LA. The judges debate the houses once again, this time in the context of who showed progress and innovation. They ask the eliminated designers who should win; it's a split decision. The judges send everyone outside to wait as they debate amongst themselves one final time. They reach a verdict and bring everyone back in.
As all the eliminated contestants look at Jay and Lukas, Nate announces the call: Lukas is the winner. His bold strokes (the light fixture, dining table and, yes, even the paint choice) demonstrated that he was determined to set the bar higher than ever. Jay's work was meticulous, exquisite and just what the homeowners were looking for, but in the end, Lukas' pure artistry shone through.
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In a two-hour finale, Jay and Lukas tackle a pair of beach houses, assisted by all the eliminated designers.
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http://www.people.com/article/florida-cop-derek-pratico-replaces-three-year-old-stolen-birthday-presents
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Florida Cop Derek Pratico Replaces 3-Year-Old Boy's Stolen Birthday Presents : People.com
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20140529150956
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05/28/2014 at 06:15 PM EDT
The boy and Detective Derek Pratico
When burglary detective Derek Pratico was called to the scene of an automobile robbery in Jacksonville, Florida, on March 27, he found a young mother who was distraught over what had been stolen from inside her car. "She told me that she had received her tax refund and had just gone out to buy her son birthday presents and clothing for herself and her family," Pratico, 36, tells PEOPLE. He went back to the station, wrote up the burglary report and tried to call it a day – but he couldn't stop thinking of the little boy's ruined third birthday. "I thought a young boy who was turning 3 deserved a birthday present," Pratico says. "So I went out and got him a toy police car and a Spider-Man birthday card. Then, I got him a birthday cake." On the boy's birthday, Pratico showed up at the family's house and delivered the presents and cake he had purchased. "She was so grateful," he says of the toddler's worried mother. "And it was a real weight off my shoulders." The mom's wallet had been in her stolen car, so Pratico also purchased a $100 gift card to a local grocery store to help her get back on her feet. "When I showed up at their door she was very excited," says Pratico. "She gave me a big hug and thanked me. It felt great."
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Detective Derek Pratico helped save a little boy's birthday, replacing the gifts stolen from the family's car
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Deployed Dad Surprises Family at Daughter's Graduation : People.com
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UPDATED 05/28/2014 at 03:00 PM EDT • Originally published 05/28/2014 at 01:30 PM EDT
Chris Crafton has been serving his
with the U.S. Air Force in Cuba for the past few months, so his family was prepared for his absence from his daughter Taylor's high school graduation.
In fact, "prepared" is an understatement:
of Crafton that they propped up in the crowd during the ceremony.
Chris had a trick up his own sleeve, though: He was able to
in time for Taylor's graduation in Grand Forks, North Dakota, though he declined to tell anyone in the family – not even his wife – which makes all the reactions in this video that much more touching.
"He's here": An announcement from the ceremony's MC was the only thing that signaled Crafton's arrival – he jogged onstage and embraced Taylor, saying, "I told you, don't give up on your dad."
for – by his own count – 1,782 days. "I've missed a lot – you know, birthdays, Christmas, that kind of thing,"
. "So I just tried my best to get here for when she graduated. This is my last deployment so I had to make it happen."
"These are just things that you see on YouTube or on TV, it's nothing that really happens to people that you know, so it's just the best feeling in the world," Crafton's wife Paige said.
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Chris Crafton didn't even tell his wife he was going to make it home in time for their daughter Taylor's graduation
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Ten Years After, Liverpool | Art and design | The Guardian
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20140613112305
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The joint authors of Ten Years After, Jamie Macdonald from Teesside, and Hector (no surname) from New England, both arrived in London at the end of the 1980s. They spent the next decade as 24-hour party people, observing the capital from heaving dance floors and sleazy toilets. They lived on the edge among clubbers, transsexuals, drug addicts and dropouts. Now they want to show you their slides.
The "I Love (insert your decade here)" phenomenon was bound to infiltrate the art world sooner or later, and here we have Hector and Jamie's eulogy to the 1990s. The remarkable thing is that they make it all seem such a long time ago. They give their multi-screen DVD montage an appropriately period feel by projecting it alongside a tinnitus-inducing soundtrack of the Stone Roses' I Am the Resurrection, while the deliberately artless framing of their shots suggests that they may not entirely recall having taken them. There is an initial difficulty in warming to a project that comes prefaced with a passage of self-regarding guff from Will Self, who writes that "every one should experience the same sense of interiority, of being in London, as I have". The darkened installation space offers whatever kind of interiority you are looking for. "Nice room to snog sexy Donna in" notes one satisfied customer in the visitors' book.
Whether or not you find Jamie and Hector (and their milieu) particularly fascinating, you have to admit that they have at least one good eye between them. The documentary-diary format of their work compares well with similar, obsessive self-analysts, such as Nan Goldin's ongoing project to record her life among the drag queens and drug dens of Manhattan. That said, the endless loop of I Am the Resurrection seems a pretty cruel trick to play on the gallery staff. "Oh it's not so bad - you learn to blank it out after a while," says one of the attendants on duty.
Until April 20. Details: 0151-709 9460.
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Is that you in the photograph?
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20140613124439
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If you've ever been featured in a famous photograph, we'd like to hear from you. Perhaps you were in the front row of the stand when England won the World Cup in 1966 - or were snapped taking part in an Occupy protest in 2011?
To kick things off, we'd like to know whether you – or anyone you know – is one of the women shown above, grappling outside Buckingham Palace on 26 October 1962, as the Beatles arrived to pick up their MBEs?
Or perhaps you were one of these two schoolgirls stretching up to the train window to catch a glimpse of the Beatles while they were filming A Hard Day’s Night in 1964:
Or can you spot yourself, or one of your relatives, among the crowd at the Hollywood premiere of the first ever full-length 3D film - Arch Oboler's Bwana Devil – in December 1952?
Perhaps your moment of fame came at another major event – Greenham Common; the Festival of Britain; the Queen's coronation. Wherever you've found yourself caught on camera, we'd like to hear your story, together with a snap of the photograph, if you still have it.
We will contact you if we'd like to feature your story.
• GuardianWitness is the home of user-generated content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others. Posts will be reviewed prior to publication on GuardianWitness, and the best pieces will feature on the Guardian site.
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Have you ever found your own image
immortalised on the pages of a newspaper or magazine? Share your stories and pictures via GuardianWitness
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/14/superpedestrian-copenhagen-wheel-gives-bikers-boost/jrD2lZ6ahOqcQz6LBeyhhK/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140614023732id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/14/superpedestrian-copenhagen-wheel-gives-bikers-boost/jrD2lZ6ahOqcQz6LBeyhhK/story.html
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Superpedestrian’s Copenhagen Wheel gives bikers a boost
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Bicycle commuting is a great way to keep in shape, but pedaling up a steep hill on the way to the office may be a bit more exercise than you want before the workday begins.
Enter the battery-powered Copenhagen Wheel from Cambridge startup Superpedestrian, which turns almost any standard bike into a hybrid e-bike. The Copenhagen Wheel was developed at MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory, designed to replace a bicycle’s regular rear wheel. It kicks in when a rider needs a boost — like on that incline before the office.
“How many of us have bikes in the garage that we walk past on the way to the car?” said Superpedestrian founder Assaf Biderman. “People don’t want to arrive to work sweaty. Overcoming this problem with a motor is kind of an obvious thing.”
The idea is not to turn a bicycle into a motorcycle. The Copenhagen Wheel adds power to the work a rider is already doing. The wheel monitors a rider’s output and can be programmed to turn on the juice when the wattage dips below a threshold.
The rest of the time, it functions just like any other bike wheel. But it quietly captures and stores energy during gliding and braking.
With a top speed of 20 miles per hour, the Copenhagen Wheel is good for 1,000 revolutions when fully charged. That works out to about a mile and a quarter of assistance.
At $799, it is no cheap ride. But the price includes additional high-tech features, such as a wireless connection to a smartphone app that lets riders track their routes and lock their bikes. The wheel is also less expensive than fully electric bicycles, which can cost thousands of dollars.
After planning to deliver its first Copenhagen wheels this spring, Superpedestrian said it received several thousand preorders on its website — many more than expected. Now it’s in the final stages of establishing a production line to meet the demand and put wheels on the road in the near future.
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The battery-powered Copenhagen Wheel from Cambridge startup Superpedestrian turns almost any standard bike into a hybrid e-bike.
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http://www.people.com/article/miss-usa-nia-sanchez-accused-of-faking-move-nevada
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140616032339id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/miss-usa-nia-sanchez-accused-of-faking-move-nevada
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Miss USA Nia Sanchez Denies She Faked a Move to Nevada to Win Pageant
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06/13/2014 at 02:45 PM EDT
Miss USA is accused of crowning around.
In a kerfuffle that hints at one of the pageant world's idiosyncrasies, a "well-placed" source says
, representing Nevada, faked her residency there in order to avoid stiffer competition in her home state of California.
"She never actually moved to Nevada, but continued to work at Disney and live in California, setting up some minimum paper trail to appear like she was in Nevada and allow her to compete," the source tells
Indeed, Sanchez competed three times for the Miss California USA crown – in 2010, 2011 and 2012 – never winning before entering the Nevada pageant, which she won in January. But she says it was a legitimate switch that met the competition's six-month residency requirement.
"[Las Vegas] is my home,"
on Thursday. "I have a house there with a friend."
The model, who worked at Disneyland as a princess character, continued: "I actually had an agent that was working me in Nevada a lot, so I figured why not work in that state, and then I looked into the pageant program because I had done pageants before. So I figured, why not look into the one in Nevada? I really liked the way that it was run, the director that ran it, it seemed like a really healthy, well-run state program. So I decided to go there since I was living there anyway."
While pageant contestants at all levels are known to cross geographic borders to chase crowns, Miss USA Nevada officials require two documents "showing that you have resided in the state in which you wish to compete for at least 6 months prior to the State pageant," according to the organization's website.
On her Miss USA application, Sanchez said she was a model with the AC Model Agency, which operates in both Las Vegas and L.A, according to Fox News. She says she listed her base as Los Angeles because that's where "big money" commercial jobs exist, despite her regular gigs in Las Vegas.
Before that, she listed her workplace as Disneyland in Anaheim, California, where another source said she worked from January 2011 through November 2013, with a stint at Hong Kong Disney.
"It isn't unfair if the girl moves to another state for school or work or family reasons," a pageant insider told Fox. "But it is unfair if a highly competitive girl from a blockbuster state moves to another state solely to win a crown, even if she really isn't connected to that state."
Angie Meyer, a former PR rep for the Miss California pageant, told Fox News: "Most women are really proud to represent their home state, and it starts to become unfair to the hometown contestants competing when this happens. If you can't win at home, you have no business competing elsewhere."
Sanchez, however, insists she did nothing wrong by following the rules.
"You shouldn't be able to live in a different state and compete in a different state. That doesn't seem fair to me," she told Fox News. "But that's why there's the six-month residency rule and you have to work or go to school in that state, which I did."
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An unnamed pageant source claims she left California for Nevada, where the competition isn't quite as fierce
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http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/17/jake-dinos-chapman-tattoo-show-hastings-jerwood
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Jake and Dinos Chapman plan tattoo parlour show in home town of Hastings
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20140618120939
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One of the tattoo designs (cropped) offered by the Chapmans to donors who back their exhibition at the Jerwood. Photograph: Art Fund/PA
If the public stumps up enough money, Jake and Dinos Chapman will be on their way home to mount an exhibition in their native Hastings, with the possibility of rewarding their donors by turning them into works of art – bearing Chapman skin tattoos.
Liz Gilmore, director of the Jerwood Gallery, in Hastings, promises it will be the "biggest baddest show yet" by the pair. However, the show would be relying on the public coming up with £25,000 over the next 76 days through a crowd-funding effort launched by the Art Fund for museum projects.
Jake said: "We will be seeking out the dark underbelly of Hastings, to find its seething evil. And then we're going to tickle it." He added that it was "the only way we're going to get down to Hastings to see our mum and dad".
The brothers will also be "rectifying" works of art sourced from local junk shops and brought in by members of the public.
Art donors should bear in mind that on past Chapman brothers form their much loved picture of great aunt Agatha could well end up with pop eyes and Micky Mouse ears. Worse, "some of the art will probably be so bad it will just need burning", Jake suggested.
He will also be running the tattoo parlour at the show. "There will be pain. Pain and blood," he promised.
Neither brother was expert with the needle, he admitted. Jake's left wrist has got a blue star which he drew himself; his entire right forearm is covered with a scribbly blue drawing by Dinos. "He isn't very good, and he really dug in with the needle – it was very painful."
The original tattoo idea, which the Frieze Art Fair turned down on health and safety grounds, involved one of the brothers setting up with the needles and inks inside a large wooden box with a hole in it. The victims were to sit outside the box and stick their arm through the hole, which would then be clamped in place: their arm would be returned more or less intact but bearing a surprise design.
The rewards on offer for donors to the Chapman brothers' project range from regular updates and a citation on the website for £5, to a Chapman brothers roll of loo paper for £60, and a visit to their London studio, for £995. Removable transfer tattoos are to be at the £25 mark.
Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, said the fund had concentrated in the past on helping museums raise large amounts of money for acquisitions, often working with a few rich donors.
He cited the £10m raised by the National Portrait Gallery to buy the spectacular Van Dyck self-portrait. However that appeal also brought well over £1m in small donations from more than 10,000 individuals. Deuchar said that increasingly they were being asked by museums for advice not just on buying art but on encouraging donations for modest projects costing no more than £25,000.
Research shows that 93% of museum visitors do give to charity, but only 40% of them give to museums: their stated reasons include not being aware that museums need their donations to feeling that such funding is confined to very wealthy patrons.
All the money raised through the Art Happens site will go straight to the museums, and the Art Fund has already covered the start-up and first year's running costs through the Arts Council and individual funders.
If museum projects miss their fund raising target by an agreed deadline, donors get the option of having their money returned or transferred to another project. All the projects will offer rewards to donors, from regular updates to invitations, to gifts such as limited edition prints.
The five pilot projects include mowing a William Morris pattern into a wild flower meadow at Compton Verney, in a garden created by the landscape designer Dan Pearson - who will be making the first big intervention in the parkland of the Warwickshire mansion since Capability Brown's designs of the 18th century.
Meanwhile, the Bowes Museum, in county Durham, needs to commission a special moving frame for a magnificent 15th century altarpiece that would let the paintings on the back of the panels be seen by the public for the first time.
And, the Ironbridge Gorge complex of museums wants £25,000 to transform the displays in an 1832 riverside warehouse, while St Fagans National History Museum, in Wales, is looking for £25,000 to construct a replica iron age farmstead with thick clay walls and a thatched roof.
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Brothers' ticklish needle-to-skin project at Jerwood Gallery seeks public crowd-funding through Art Fund's museums project
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http://www.msnbc.com/all/all-agenda-the-fight-iraq
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140625045408id_/http://www.msnbc.com:80/all/all-agenda-the-fight-iraq
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All In Agenda: The Fight for Iraq
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1. Tonight on “All In,” we have the latest on the violence sweeping Iraq, as Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Baghdad and ISIS seized more territory over the weekend. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf joins us; as well as Sharif Abdel Kouddous, correspondent for Democracy Now and a Fellow at The Nation Institute by phone from Cairo.
2. Tuesday is runoff day in Mississippi’s Republican Senate primary! We’ve got the scoop on the Cochran campaign’s attempt to woo African American voters; Derrick Johnson, President of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, joins us.
3. Where are the most segregated schools in the country? We’ve got the surprising answer tonight on All In America: Behind the Color Line. Plus, ProPublica’s Nikole Hannah-Jones and Georgetown Law professor Sheryll Cashin are here to discuss.
4. And don’t miss our preview of tomorrow night’s “All In America” installment on violence in Chicago.
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All In Agenda for Monday, June 23, 2014.
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http://www.theguardian.com/advertising/electronic-ad-delivery
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140701074831id_/http://www.theguardian.com/advertising/electronic-ad-delivery
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Electronic ad delivery
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20140701074831
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There are three ways to deliver your print-ready artwork to the Guardian and Observer:
Adsend is a web browser-based system that will check your ad for file integrity and match it against our delivery requirement specifications including Ad Size. There is a small subscription fee and a small fee for each file delivery.
2. Adstream's Pagestore software (Quickcut)
If you have Pagestore yourself, you will know how to use it and should be able to find the Guardian delivery specifications easily. If you have any problems, please contact Quickcut who will be able to advise you. If you don't have Pagestore you can get it by calling Quickcut on:020 7539 8400
For professional ad creative companies wishing to build ad copy and send:Visit the Adstream website
To just upload ad copy via adstream:Visit print.adstream.com
Pagestore is paid-for software and there is a subsequent per-file cost for each delivery.
Specle is a cloud-based ad delivery service accessible directly from the Guardian Specle ad specification pages. Specle will flightcheck your file for physical suitability and deliver the file to us. There is a small per-ad delivery cost, but there is no registration fee. You can find the Guardian Specle pages from the link below
We can also set and design your ads for you if you supply text, logos and a style sheet (where needed). This method should always start with the sales team who will guide you through what to do and what to supply.
There is a small charge for this service which your contact can discuss with you. We do occasionally set simple colour advertising with things such as colour borders and swatches of a single colour from an agreed list of colours.
If you have any further questions please contact us at:
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Delivering your print ready artwork
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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/04/26/07/10/malaysia-airlines-staff-held-by-families
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Malaysia Airlines staff 'held' by families
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April 25, 2014: Families of the victims of flight MH370 have been broken up by police after protesting on the streets and demanding answers on what happened to the plane.
Ten Malaysia Airlines staff were held against their will for hours by Chinese relatives of flight MH370 passengers, the airline says.
The airline employees were "barred from leaving" a ballroom at a Beijing hotel for more than 10 hours on Thursday, and another staff member was kicked in the leg in a confrontation two days earlier, the airline said.
Tempers have repeatedly flared at the Lido Hotel, where Chinese relatives have been put up by the airline since the plane vanished, increasingly lashing out in briefings as Malaysian officials and the flag carrier have been unable to explain the plane's disappearance.
"Malaysia Airlines confirms that its staff were held at the Lido Hotel ballroom in Beijing by the family members of MH370 as the families expressed dissatisfaction in obtaining details of the missing aircraft on 24 April 2014 at 3pm," it said in a statement released in Kuala Lumpur.
The more than 200 family members were incensed when a Malaysian government official did not come to brief them on Thursday, and the meeting descended into chaos as relatives angrily confronted airline staff.
An airline spokesman told AFP "the main MAS officials were barred from leaving the ballroom" as about 60 family members left for the Malaysian Embassy to demand information from government officials.
March 09, 2014: Video recorded from an online flight tracker shows the chilling moment Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 vanishes from the live display.
"The group finally released the staff at 1.44am, 25 April 2014," the airline's statement said.
The relatives who went to the embassy remained there in an overnight protest, two participants said on Friday.
The carrier also said a Malaysia Airlines security supervisor was "kicked in the left knee" by an "aggressive" Chinese family member at the hotel on Tuesday.
The airline said it had filed a police report on the incident.
About two-thirds of the 239 passengers aboard the missing plane came from China.
Chinese relatives have for weeks complained bitterly about what they call Malaysia's secretive and incompetent handling of the search for the plane, which vanished March 8.
March 19, 2014: Family members of some Chinese passengers on board flight MH370 have burst into a press room screaming for help and claiming they have been imprisoned by Malaysian authorities.
It disappeared from radar on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and is believed to have crashed far out in the Indian Ocean.
Do you have any news photos or videos?
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Malaysia Airlines staff were apparently barred from leaving a hotel for 10 hours, and held by relatives of those missing on flight MH370.
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http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/rattlers-lose-second-straight-071314
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140718093946id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/rattlers-lose-second-straight-071314
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Rattlers lose second straight
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20140718093946
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Updated JUL 13, 2014 12:39p ET
SPOKANE, Wash. -- The world champion Arizona Rattlers (14-2), looking to get back on the winning track Saturday night, were handed a 73-66 loss by the Spokane Shock (9-7) at Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena in Spokane, Wash.
After setting Arena Football League records for most wins to begin a season (14) and most overall victories in a row (18), Arizona now has lost back-to-back games for the first time since late in the 2012 season. The Rattlers bounced back after that loss, however, and won their last four games â including ArenaBowl XXV, their first of back-to-back world championships.
That's the challenge moving forward in their pursuit of a third straight title. The good news for Arizona is that the team has a lock on the No. 1 seed and home-field advantage throughout the National Conference playoffs. The Rattlers will host either the Portland Thunder or LA KISS.
Spokane, which has won three straight games, is the No. 3 seed and will travel to San Jose for a first-round matchup against the SaberCats.
Spokane trailed Arizona by as many as 21 points in the first quarter, but the game evolved into an instant classic, as the Shock stormed back with 50 second-half points.
The Rattlers had the ball, trailing 73-66 with 10.5 seconds left, but their hopes of pulling out the victory and sweeping the three-game season series with the Shock were dashed when Nick Truesdell stepped in front of a Nick Davila pass and dropped to the turf as time expired.
Moments earlier it appeared Arizona might silence the raucous crowd inside the arena dubbed "Deaf Valley." Down 66-58 with 29.9 seconds left, Davila competed a 10-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Kerry Reed, then found wide receiver Tysson Poots on the two-point conversion to tie the score 66-66.
But Spokane quarterback Erik Meyer, the reigning AFL MVP, came right back with a 27-yard scoring strike to wide receiver Rashaad Carter to give the Shock at 73-66 lead with 10.5 seconds left.
The loss spoiled several outstanding performances for the Rattlers. Davila finished with 388 yards and nine touchdowns on 27-of-39 passing. Wide receivers Maurice Purify caught 10 passes for 155 yards and three touchdowns, while wide receiver Rod Windsor hauled in 10 catches for 149 yards and three scores. It was Windsor who was on the receiving end of a 48-yard bomb from Davila on the first play of the game.
Meyer, meanwhile, finished with 292 yards and six touchdowns on 25-of-38 passing. He also ran for two more scores, but he also was intercepted twice by defensive back Marquis Floyd and once by defensive back Jeremy Kellem. Wide receiver Mike Washington led the Shock with 11 catches for 146 yards and two touchdowns.
In the end, three fumbles and two interceptions, coupled with 13 penalties for 96 yards, were too much for the Rattlers to overcome.
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Rattlers lose second straight, this time to Spokane.
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http://fortune.com/2013/10/10/10-questions-for-ibms-katharine-frase/
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10 Questions for IBM’s Katharine Frase
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20140729152305
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FORTUNE — Fortune’s annual Brainstorm Tech conference brings together the best and brightest minds in tech innovation. Fortune periodically turns the spotlight on a different conference attendee to offer their personal insight into business, tech, and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Katharine Frase was appointed chief technology officer of IBM IBM in March 2013. She sets IBM’s technical strategy and defines areas of growth in addition to cultivating emerging technologies. We asked her 10 questions including whether she thinks business school is necessary for entrepreneurs, her superpower of choice, and what she does for fun. Read on for Frase’s thoughts on tech, business, and missed opportunities as well as her inclination toward a musical hobby.
1. What technology sector excites you most?
I find the big data [data so large that they require extra processing power, like traffic or geolocation data] and analytics space the most exciting, the notion of data everywhere and the new ability for humans to turn that data into insight. This frees us up to make better decisions. It’s not just about putting sensors everywhere.
2. Is business school necessary for entrepreneurs?
I don’t know that it is necessary for entrepreneurs to finish business school, but I think they should take some traditional business courses. Business is like a sport; you always need to know how the game is going to get scored. Accounting, finance, regulatory concerns — this is how the business world scores its game, and that’s important for entrepreneurs too.
MORE: Can Silicon Valley boot camps get you a $120K job?
3. What is the best advice you ever received?
My Ph.D. advisor told me it is very important to do good science, but it is even more important to be able to communicate it.
4. What would you do if you weren’t working at your current job?
5. What is your greatest achievement?
I think that my legacy is the leaders within IBM that I have mentored and coached over the years.
6. What has been your biggest failure?
Fifteen years ago, I had an opportunity to present to a business strategy team, and I did a terrible job because I didn’t understand how those senior executives think. I created a strategy and set of answers that were right for an audience of my peers, but not the right strategy and answers for people running a company. That kind of situational awareness is critical — knowing your audience and asking the right questions and providing the right information your audience needs to get things done.
7. What is one goal that you would like to accomplish during your lifetime?
I would like to raise my children to be responsible and contributing adults.
MORE: The next Most Powerful Women in tech
8. What was your biggest missed opportunity?
I never took the opportunity to work overseas. I’ve had global roles, but during my working career I have never permanently lived outside the U.S. That’s a missed opportunity
9. If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
To understand and speak every language.
10. What is one unique or quirky habit that you have?
I am a chronic list-maker. I so love to check thing off the list that if I do something that wasn’t on my list, I add it anyway just so I can cross it off.
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THE IBM CTO on entrepreneurialism, music, and missed opportunities.
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http://www.people.com/article/lightning-strike-venice-beach
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Lightning Strikes Venice Beach, Kills One, Injures Dozen Others : People.com
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updated 07/28/2014 at 06:00 AM EDT
A 20-year-old man died after lightning from a rare summer thunderstorm jolted a Southern California beach, injuring or rattling more than a dozen people, authorities said.
Witnesses said they saw a glare of light and heard a tremendous boom as lightning struck the water off of Venice Beach around 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Swimmers cooling off on a muggy day, volleyball players on the sand and people strolling the famous boardwalk were jolted.
A 20-year-old man was taken from the beach to a hospital where he died, Los Angeles County coroner's Lt. Larry Dietz said. His identity was not immediately released.
Confirmation of the cause of death was pending an autopsy. Dietz said he also can't confirm whether the man was a swimmer who was pulled from the water and given CPR.
Twelve other people, including a 15-year-old boy, were examined after they felt the effects of the lightning, ranging from anxiety to a man who needed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. However, not all were necessarily actually struck by lightning, said Katherine Main, a city fire spokeswoman.
Nine were taken to hospitals, where one was listed in critical condition.
Most of the others were mainly shaken up and expected to recover, fire officials said.
Lightning also struck a 57-year-old man on a golf course on Santa Catalina Island. He's in stable condition.
Stuart Acher said he was shocked while playing volleyball on the beach.
"We went about our game and then all of a sudden, there was a big flash of light and a boom, and it felt like someone punched me in the back of my head," he told KABC-TV. "It went down my whole side of my right body, and my calves sort of locked up, and I fell over. And I looked up and everybody else was, you know, falling over."
Paramedics examined Acher but he felt all right and went back to playing volleyball.
Steve Christensen said his friend had been body-surfing and was sitting on the beach when lifeguards began searching for a missing swimmer.
"He (Christensen's friend) went out to the water to find him and walked right into him," Christensen said. "He was face down on the bottom."
Christensen said his friend pulled the man, who appeared to be in his 20s, from the water, and lifeguards began CPR before taking him away.
"The guy wasn't moving. He wasn't responding at all," Jesus Zamudio of Riverside
"This tragedy reminds us that we can take nothing for granted or underestimate the power of nature," Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement.
Earlier, off the coast, lightning struck a 57-year-old man on a golf course on Santa Catalina Island but he was taken to a hospital in stable condition, said Steve Denning, a law enforcement technician with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He did not have other details.
The lightning strikes occurred as a fierce but brief thunderstorm hit the island, dumping more than three-quarters of an inch of rain in about two hours, causing minor flooding and setting two small fires in the brushy backcountry that were quickly doused.
Hundreds of lightning strikes were reported all around Southern California as a moisture-laden monsoonal flow spread up from the south and swept the region all the way out to the ocean.
"This is pretty rare" because usually the flow affects just the deserts and sometimes the mountains, said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
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"This is pretty rare," said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service
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http://fortune.com/2012/05/21/mike-moritz-steps-back-cites-illness/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140731211423id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/05/21/mike-moritz-steps-back-cites-illness/
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Mike Moritz steps back, cites illness
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FORTUNE — Michael Moritz, the legendary venture capitalist behind such investments as Google GOOG , Yahoo YHOO and Zappos, is stepping down from day-to-day management of Sequoia Capital due to a medical condition.
In an email sent to Sequoia investors, Moritz said that he has been “diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable,” adding that he feels good right now but that his “quality of life” is likely to decline over the next decade.
Moritz will transition into a chairman position with Sequoia Capital, with existing partner Doug Leone assuming many of Moritz’s organizational responsibilities. The change is not expected to affect Moritz’s investment activity in the short-term, as he is plans to both maintain existing board seats and take new ones.
I am going to extract myself from the daily management of Sequoia Capital, a task that has consumed a large part of my time for the past sixteen years. I will become Chairman of Sequoia Capital and will be deeply involved with nurturing the fresh investments, ideas and relationships that can be of significant long-term benefit for all of us. I will also work very closely with some of our younger and newer members, will continue my role as Managing Member of existing funds and maintain all my current company responsibilities. I will use twelve to fourteen weeks – sprinkled throughout the course of each year – for various pursuits, diversions and trivial indulgences.
Sequoia currently is investing out of a $1.3 billion fund closed in 2010. Moritz’s board seats include Sugar, GameFly GFLY , Green Dot Corp. GDOT , LinkedIn LNKD , Kayak and Klarna.
On a personal note, best of luck to Mike as he battles his condition. As a former reporter, he has always managed to keep information close to his vest without seeming rude about it — something that folks like me really appreciate. “No comment, but thanks for asking,” has been my most regular interaction with him, but it is much more appreciated than anyone outside the business could probably understand.
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Leading venture capitalist has "rare medical condition."
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/07/28/you-can-see-forest-for-quips-cedars/b48koyIrzwlEs5BTjkLZfI/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140803073436id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/theater-art/2014/07/28/you-can-see-forest-for-quips-cedars/b48koyIrzwlEs5BTjkLZfI/story.html
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You can’t see the forest for the quips in ‘Cedars’
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STOCKBRIDGE — Erik Tarloff was a writer for some of the best television comedies of all time: “All in the Family,’’ “M*A*S*H,’’ “The Bob Newhart Show.’’
For good and ill, Tarloff’s sitcom background is apparent in “Cedars,’’ his one-act solo play about middle-age malaise, now making its world premiere at Berkshire Theatre Group.
Starring James Naughton and ably directed by his daughter, Keira Naughton, “Cedars’’ bristles with punchy one-liners. The playwright has a knack for vividly expressive, out-of-left-field imagery, such as this, on the nonstop demands of marriage: “It’s a working farm, not a petting zoo.’’
Sometimes, though, Tarloff sacrifices emotional resonance for the sake of a wisecrack. There is sharp and insightful writing about the fragility of human relationships in “Cedars,’’ and some trenchantly affecting scenes, but overall the play doesn’t cut as deeply as it should. The playwright seems too keenly aware of his audience, too eager to keep them from, as it were, changing the channel.
The setup is a promising one. Naughton, a double Tony Award winner for “Chicago’’ and “City of Angels,’’ portrays Gabe, an attorney in his 50s whose personal and professional life is in a shambles. Now Gabe is trying to figure out where, when, and how things went wrong as he engages in a unilateral conversation with his comatose father in Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. The 90-minute monologue unfolds in a series of five scenes, punctuated by blackouts.
Though there were a few ragged edges to Naughton’s performance on opening night, the actor does a skillful job communicating the wounded interior beneath Gabe’s profane, hard-bitten exterior. Often wearing an angry frown and slicing the air with his hands, Naughton brings a gritty authenticity to even the hollowest scenes.
Gabe’s dad is never seen, but the son’s description makes it clear that he was never a candidate for Father of the Year. To Tarloff’s credit, Gabe’s own moral failings are pretty apparent. “A lot of my life is devoted to not looking like a creep,’’ he says. “Notice I didn’t say not being a creep.’’ Yet Naughton conveys the sense that Gabe wants to be better than he is.
“Cedars’’ takes us on a guided tour of Gabe’s messed-up family — which includes a mother who’s losing the few marbles she ever had and a train wreck of a sister who has followed her married boyfriend to Delaware — and his midlife misadventures, including a semi-disastrous foray into Internet dating. Gabe’s legal career, too, is faltering, in a milieu teeming with young hotshots.
Given the intimacy of the circumstances — a son spilling his guts about his failures and disappointments to his vegetative father lying a few feet away — Gabe’s monologue is curiously formal, even orotund, peppered as it is with words like “denatured’’ and “modality.’’ It’s as if the attorney is making a courtroom defense argument, which I suppose in a sense he is. At other times, Gabe’s disquisition has the feel of one of the comedian Louis C.K.’s R-rated, hard-truths-wrapped-in-humor monologues.
If only “Cedars’’ steered farther afield of cliché and predictable subject matter. For instance: Gabe is separated from his wife, and the wife’s new boyfriend is French, apparently so Gabe can crack wise about his name and all things French. It’s funny the first time, less so the second, third, and fourth times. The lawyer has trouble connecting with his teenage son, who he seems to believe is gay. What’s the tipoff? The kid listens to Lady Gaga. And so on.
When it comes to Gabe’s own sex life, the playwright doesn’t stint on details, especially when the lawyer recounts his date with an overweight woman he met online. The time devoted to his description of their sad sexual encounter would have been better spent delving more deeply into the history of the father-son dynamic between Gabe and the invisible man in the hospital bed to whom he’s trying to explain himself — especially since it’s evident that many of the son’s demons can be laid at the door of not-so-dear old dad.
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Starring Tony winner James Naughton, Berkshire Theatre Group’s world premiere of “Cedars’’ bristles with punchy one-liners, although playwright Erik Tarloff sometimes sacrifices emotional resonance for the sake of a wisecrack.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/07/28/uchida-neidich-young-colleagues-connect-marlboro/7C7XN0weXAx0zApmkMEXUI/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140803074203id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2014/07/28/uchida-neidich-young-colleagues-connect-marlboro/7C7XN0weXAx0zApmkMEXUI/story.html
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Uchida, Neidich, young colleagues connect at Marlboro
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MARLBORO, Vt. — Few pieces test an ensemble’s internal cohesion like Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Written in a German POW camp in the early 1940s, the piece reaches out of the historical catastrophe in which it was created, and opens a series of windows onto eternity. The music is ecstatic, strangely shaped, shot through with silence, and requires something akin to collective ESP to bring off convincingly.
On Saturday, the quartet was played in brilliant and gripping fashion by clarinetist Charles Neidich, violinist Itamar Zorman, cellist Lionel Cottet, and pianist Mitsuko Uchida, during the second weekend of concerts at Marlboro Music. Though they have no lengthy history of playing together and vary greatly in age and career status — Zorman and Cottet are in their 20s, while Neidich and Uchida are world-renowned instrumentalists; the latter is also Marlboro’s artistic director — they nevertheless achieved the requisite sense of unanimity. This is what Marlboro has been doing for 63 seasons — bringing together outstanding musicians, giving them all-but-unlimited rehearsal time, and setting them loose on a wide range of repertoire, only a few samples of which are heard at public concerts.
Like time itself, Messiaen’s quartet oscillates between stasis and frenzy. Some groups try to unlock its sense of timelessness by narrowing its extremes toward the middle. But Saturday’s performance showed that the piece succeeds only by embracing those extremes. Dynamic changes were vast, and the string players’ phrasing showed how much minute attention goes into making its melodies seem vast and oceanic. The care with which Uchida varied her touch so that each iteration of a repeated chord sounded different was staggering.
Most impressive, if one can single anyone out, was Neidich in his solo movement, “Abyss of the Birds.” Some phrases began imperceptibly and only gradually emerged from shadow into full presence. During long, loud notes he seemed to bend his pitch in a way Messiaen may not have intended, but which was spellbinding nonetheless. When a piquant bird call emerged at the end of one such moment, a wave of surprise rippled through the audience. This was the best performance I have heard of the quartet, and one of the very best things I’ve heard during two decades of Marlboro visits.
While the Messiaen was the standout, none of the weekend’s offerings fell below a very high level of preparation and execution. Saturday’s curtain raiser was Mozart’s final string quartet, K. 590, which boasted a delicate, ultra-refined string tone and a deeply poignant slow movement. It was a shock when the players cut loose and dug in more forcefully during the finale. Jay Campbell’s cello playing was a joy throughout.
Campbell returned, along with violinists Francisco Fullana and Joseph Lin and violist Pei-Ling Lin, for the centerpiece of Sunday’s concert, “Terra Memoria,” a 2006 string quartet by Kaija Saariaho, this year’s composer in residence. The piece is a melancholy exploration of the workings of memory, its imperceptible play between identity and change. The opening shimmers with languid melodies over pedal points; motifs recur, though a listener is left unsure how much they change in the process.
As the music gains momentum the sense of clear location is lost. Chords that begin consonantly grow into noise. When the pedal points reappear at the end, there is a sense of return, but now with a ghostly, ambiguous feel. The piece is not only compellingly built but sonically gorgeous. It was heartening to see a warm reception from the Marlboro audience, as well as a steady stream of well-wishers to the composer’s seat in the hall during intermission.
Sunday’s concert began with the Suite from Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” in an appealingly spiky performance. The playfully sinister tale centers in large part around a soldier’s violin, and Elizabeth Fayette’s incisive playing bristled with character. (Her partners were clarinetist Narek Arutyunian and pianist Bruno Canino.) Also on the program were Brahms’s Duets for two sopranos, Op. 61. They may seem like trifles relative to much else in the composer’s oeuvre, but the spacing of the voices and the variety in the piano writing show the hand of a master, lightly employed. The singers, Sarah Shafer and Mary-Jane Lee, blended perfectly; they were joined by Lydia Brown, Marlboro’s resident authority on vocal accompaniment.
Closing the weekend’s activity was Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat, Op. 70 No. 2. If not the cream of the composer’s chamber works, it is one of the most lyrical, with an easygoing breadth not often found in the composer’s middle-period works. Aside from a few balance problems early on, it was played with scrupulous care and great warmth by Fayette, pianist Adam Golka, and cellist Peter Stumpf.
Festival concerts continue through Aug. 17.
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David Weininger reviews two Marlboro Music Festival events, a Saturday night concert that included Messiaen, and a Sunday bill with a recent piece by composer in residence Kaija Saariaho.
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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/08/02/09/26/ivf-parents-of-abandoned-baby-gammy-accused-of-unforgiveable
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140804220223id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2014/08/02/09/26/ivf-parents-of-abandoned-baby-gammy-accused-of-unforgiveable
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'I chose to have him not to hurt him': Surrogate mother speaks of abandoned baby
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August 02, 2014: The surrogate mother of a baby whose Australian parents left him in Thailand after they found he had Down syndrome has expressed disbelief that the couple could abandon the baby.
The surrogate mother of a baby whose Australian parents left him in Thailand after they found he had Down syndrome has expressed disbelief that the couple could abandon the baby.
The couple left their newborn baby Gammy with his poverty-stricken surrogate mother because he has Down syndrome and a congenital heart condition. They took his healthy twin sister back to Australia.
"I feel sorry for him, I don't know what to do," Pattaramon Chanbua said.
"I chose to have him not to hurt him.
"I love him, he was in my tummy for nine months. It's like my child, I love him like my own."
A local Thai newspaper has reported Gammy has now been rushed to hospital with a lung infection.
Gammy has Down syndrome and a congenital heart condition.
A crowd-funding campaign, Hope for Gammy, has now raised over $100,000 to assist Ms Pattaramon with Gammy's medical costs and ongoing care.
The unidentified Australian parents who reportedly abandoned the six-month-old baby have been accused of “unforgiveable” behaviour.
A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Australian Government agencies were examining the issue in consultation with authorities in Thailand.
"The alleged circumstances of the case raise broader legal and other issues relating to surrogacy in Thailand.
"We hope to be in a position to provide further comment and advice to the Australian public in coming days."
The Down syndrome was detected four months into the pregnancy by doctors and the mother refused to have an abortion, Fairfax has reported.
Surrogacy charities in Australia have reacted with horror, and are calling for a change in the law in Australia to encourage fewer parents to go overseas.
“It’s the kind of situation that is hard on anybody but for a couple to turn their backs on a child like this is unforgiveable,” the Global Director of Surrogacy Australia, Sam Everingham, told 9NEWS.
“It doesn’t reflect the values of surrogacy families in Australia. This family will be living with that guilt for the rest of their lives.”
When asked to give his reaction to the Australian couple’s actions, he said: “Horror and despair.”
Mr Everingham, who with his partner is a parent to two baby girls through surrogacy, said the Australian parents should have brought the disabled child here to be cared for.
“I assume a child would go into foster care if the parents didn’t want it and be supported by the foster system in Australia. There is a lot of support for disabled children in Australia not available in Thailand.”
Surrogacy Australia is calling for an urgent response from the Attorney General’s office to make it simpler for couples here to go through surrogacy.
“We want to see the Australian government to take action to fix the broken system in Australia so we don’t have to have as many people going overseas as we do now,” said Mr Everingham.
“The trouble is the Australian system is so over regulated it is pushing a lot of Australians off shore. So we are hoping this kind of case will be a kick up the bum to Attorney General’s department and George Brandis to make some much needed changes to surrogacy in Australia so we can see many more Australians engaging here at home rather than going overseas.”
He said any parent considering surrogacy needed to be fully aware of the risks.
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The Australian parents who abandoned a six-month old baby to its surrogate mother in Thailand have been accused of “unforgiveable” behaviour.
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http://fortune.com/2012/11/09/salary-negotiation-everything-youve-been-told-is-wrong/
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Salary negotiation: Everything you’ve been told is wrong
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FORTUNE — There comes a point in every successful job interview when it’s time to talk money. The standard advice to job applicants has long been to play it coy.
John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, urges applicants to “let the employer name a salary first — it may be higher than you expect.” Penelope Trunk, founder of Brazen Careerist, advises that “the right answer to the question, ‘What’s your salary range?’ is almost always some version of ‘I’m not telling you.’”
This often leads to an uncomfortable, even adversarial, game of chicken. If that’s the sort of conversation you dread, here’s good news: there are better alternatives.
MORE: Weighing the merits of an online MBA
A recent study out of the University of Idaho found that making a joke about a million-dollar salary actually increased subsequent offer amounts by more than 10%.
The hypothetical applicant in the study’s test scenario was an administrative assistant candidate who had listed her last salary as $29,000. When asked what salary she wanted in the new job, she either demurred or quipped, “Well I’d like a million dollars, but really I just want what’s fair.”
In the cases where the applicant declined to name any number, the average salary offer was about $32,500. When she joked about a million bucks, the average offer rose to almost $36,200.
The increase is a function of a psychological effect known as “anchoring.” “When we encounter a number — even an irrelevant number — we fixate on it, and it influences our judgment,” says Todd Thorsteinson, a psychology professor at the University of Idaho and the study’s author.
But before you start throwing numbers around, you should consider the potential for backlash. “In practice, if one’s negotiating partner opens with an offer that is too extreme, the most common response is to disengage from the negotiation,” warns Rachel Croson, professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and director of the school’s Negotiations Center.
Participants in Thorsteinson’s study were not given the option to decline to hire the candidate, but were merely asked how much they would offer to pay her.
So should job applicants make a high-salary joke in hopes of increasing compensation?
MORE: Vote: Businessperson of the Year Round 2
Only if you’re comfortable with the possibility that you might lose the job offer altogether, says Croson. Before recommending the strategy in general, she’d want to see a follow-up study that quantifies the level of risk involved — for example, “what percentage of interviewers would be turned off by the joke and choose to find a different employee.”
Being the first to talk numbers can still pay off, though. The standard advice — to dodge the question — ignores the very real effects of anchoring.
The key is information, says Croson, who has taught negotiation strategies to undergraduates, MBAs, and executives for 18 years. If an applicant knows the salary range for a given position and can name a number at or near the top of what a company is willing to pay, being the first to throw out a dollar figure is always to her advantage.
Challenger still prefers to play it safe. “Companies are all over the map,” he says. “The same position may pay 20% more or less, depending upon that company’s specific salary structure.”
But with company-specific salary data available from sites like Glassdoor.com, today’s job candidates have at least a fighting chance to set a high anchor and come out ahead.
Croson also recommends researching the culture of a corporation — is it individualistic and competitive? Then tough negotiation is fair game. In other environments, aggressive haggling won’t play as well.
MORE: Zen and the art of global domination
It’s important to remember, says Challenger, that “you’re negotiating with someone who may be your next boss, setting up a relationship for the future.”
Croson agrees. “Neither side wants to look like a jerk … or a creampuff,” she says.
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Asking for a million-dollar salary in jest can actually increase your pay package, according to a recent study. Here’s how.
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Restoring the magic of Friedkin’s ‘Sorcerer’
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Three strangers have escaped the consequences of their crimes and have fled to a squalid Latin American cesspit. They want to escape again, because their place of refuge is worse than what they are fleeing. To do so they must accomplish a deadly task — driving trucks full of explosives across 200 miles of jungle road.
That is the premise of Henri-George Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” (1953) and of William Friedkin’s 1977 reinvention, “Sorcerer.” Most critics (many now repentant) dismissed the latter, indignant that Friedkin, director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” dared tamper with Clouzot’s revered original. Audiences rejected it, too, put off perhaps by the misleading title (it doesn’t refer to the supernatural, but is the name of an all too mundane rust bucket truck). Or maybe it was the first 10 or so minutes of non-English dialogue with subtitles.
More likely, though, the fact that it opened about a month after “Star Wars” was what doomed the project, a coincidence that symbolized the new blockbuster mode of moviemaking usurping the short-lived age of the auteur.
Since then, ‘Sorcerer’ has gained in stature. Far from imitating Clouzot, Friedkin’s film maudit shows the director at his most brilliant and original. Now, after years of litigation over the rights, the film can be seen again, restored to its original glory.
Like “The French Connection,” “Sorcerer” begins with disparate narratives occurring simultaneously in various exotic locations – a cheap hotel in Veracruz, a busy street in Tel Aviv, a posh banking house in Paris, and a bingo game in a Catholic church in Elizabeth, NJ. Each episode climaxes with abrupt acts of violence. In the aftermath of the New Jersey caper, getaway driver Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider; Steve McQueen was Friedkin’s first choice for the part, but Scheider brings to it the precise balance of resignation and determination) asks a friend for help. His friend provides him with a fake passport and a ticket to “somewhere nobody wants to go.”
For good reason. Few towns have been depicted on the screen with such loving, aestheticized squalor as Porvenir; it makes the Devil’s Island accommodations in “Papillon” look like Club Med. Soon the quartet of refugees recognize their common situation, especially after the greasily venal local cops start shaking them down. When the American oil company that owns the town (corporations here are seen not as the cause of a fallen world, but a symptom) seeks drivers to transport the lethal cargo, the four volunteer.
The long torturous journey, like a slow-motion version of the car ride in 2013’s lauded “Locke,” allows plenty of time for bickering, soul-searching, begrudged solidarity, and harrowing performances. Unlike “Locke,” though, “Sorcerer” also includes moments of excruciating suspense and spectacular peril — a crossing over a collapsing rope bridge for example — that demonstrate the futility of trying to substitute 3-D for genius.
As the trek continues, torrential rain and increasingly diabolical obstacles obstruct their mission, and the four become identical in their mud-caked, troglodytic misery. Gradually a tingling sense of unreality overtakes this consummately realistic film. Perhaps the elusive, uncanny soundtrack of Tangerine Dream brings this about, or maybe it’s Friedkin’s juxtapositions of close-ups and stark long shots of the tiny trucks lost in jungle or desert landscapes, but “Sorcerer” eventually seems to be happening someplace not of this world. Not hell, exactly; maybe Limbo. How lucky for us that this great film has emerged from its own limbo and can be seen once again.
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“Sorcerer” review: Scorned upon its first release, lost for years in litigation, William Friedman’s brilliant reinvention of Henri-George Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” (1953) returns to the screen.
| 17.119048 | 0.833333 | 6.02381 |
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/02/facebook-secret-manipulation-user-emotions-faces-european-inquiries/zZcGmvo0fx7C8zDsbipH7I/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140813072406id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/02/facebook-secret-manipulation-user-emotions-faces-european-inquiries/zZcGmvo0fx7C8zDsbipH7I/story.html
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Facebook’s Secret Manipulation of User Emotions Faces European Inquiries
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20140813072406
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NEW YORK — Facebook could be in hot water with Europe’s privacy regulators.
The social network is facing potential investigations after it disclosed last week it deliberately manipulated the emotional content of the news feeds by changing the posts displayed to nearly 700,000 users to see if emotions were contagious.
The company did not seek explicit permission from the affected people — roughly 1 out of every 2,500 users of the social network at the time of the experiment — and some critics have suggested that the research violated its terms of service with customers.
Facebook has said customers gave blanket permission for research as a condition of using the service.
In response to widespread public anger, several European data protection agencies are examining whether Facebook broke local privacy laws when it conducted the weeklong investigation in January 2012.
That includes Ireland’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, which regulates Facebook’s global operations outside North America because the company has its international headquarters in Dublin.
The Irish regulator has sent a series of questions to Facebook related to potential privacy issues, including whether the company got consent from users for the study, according to a spokeswoman.
The Information Commissioner’s Office of Britain also said it was looking into potential privacy breaches that may have affected the country’s residents, though a spokesman of the office said it was too early to know whether Facebook had broken the law.
It is unknown where the users who were part of the experiment were located. Some 80 percent of Facebook’s 1.2 billion users are based outside North America.
“We’re aware of this issue and will be speaking to Facebook, as well as liaising with the Irish data protection authority, to learn more about the circumstances,” a spokesman for the British regulator said in a statement.
Neither regulator, however, has launched an official investigation into Facebook’s practices.
In the study, Facebook changed the number of positive and negative posts that some users saw in their feeds to gauge how emotions can affect social media.
Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy in Europe, said it was clear that people had been upset by the study.
“We want to do better in the future and are improving our process based on this feedback,” he said in a statement. “The study was done with appropriate protections for people’s information, and we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have.”
The Federal Trade Commission, the US regulator that oversees Facebook’s conduct under a 20-year consent decree, has not publicly expressed similar interest in the case, which has caused an uproar over the company’s ethics and prompted the lead researcher on the project to apologize.
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, addressed the study in India on Wednesday in a meeting with entrepreneurs and women to promote her book “Lean In” and in an interview with the Indian TV network NDTV.
“We clearly communicated really badly about this and that we really regret,” Sandberg said in the NDTV interview.
“We do research in an ongoing way, in a very privacy protective way, to improve our services and this was done with that goal.”
Sandberg also expressed confidence that the company will weather any regulatory inquiries.
“We are in communication with regulators all over the world and this will be OK,” she said in the interview.
This is not the first time that Facebook has fallen foul of Europe’s tough privacy rules.
In 2011, the social network was forced to revamp its privacy settings after an audit by Ireland’s regulator found that some of the company’s policies did not meet Europe’s data protection rules.
Facebook shares closed down $1.61 to $66.45 on the Nasdaq market.
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NEW YORK — Facebook could be in hot water with Europe’s privacy regulators. The social network is facing potential investigations after it disclosed last week that it deliberately manipulated the emotional content of the news feeds by changing the posts displayed to nearly 700,000 users to see if emotions were contagious.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/02/target-asks-customers-keep-guns-out-stores-for-comfort/Dp6vKMyYkJA60qkXUyXAMI/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140813114203id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/02/target-asks-customers-keep-guns-out-stores-for-comfort/Dp6vKMyYkJA60qkXUyXAMI/story.html
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Target asks customers to keep guns out of stores for comfort
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20140813114203
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WASHINGTON — Target Corp. on Wednesday said it would ‘‘respectfully request’’ that its customers no longer carry firearms inside its stores, after facing mounting pressure from gun control activists who criticized the chain in a national debate about open-carry laws.
The change will apply to both concealed and unconcealed guns in all of the Minneapolis-based retailer’s nearly 1,800 US stores, the company confirmed.
‘‘This is a complicated issue, but it boils down to a simple belief: Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create,’’ John Mulligan, the company’s interim chief executive, said in a memo posted on Target’s website.
Target is the latest large retailer to be drawn into the gun control debate. Last September, Starbucks asked its patrons to leave their guns at home, and Chipotle, Jack in the Box, Sonic Drive-In, and Chili’s Grill & Bar all made similar requests in May. Facebook and Instagram also recently revealed plans to tighten their policies governing images and posts selling firearms.
Target found itself drawn into the fray this spring when a Texas gun rights group posted photos online of some of its members openly carrying long guns in Target stores. The photos prompted rebuke from the National Rifle Association’s lobbying arm, which called the demonstrations ‘‘downright weird’’ in a statement on its website. A few days later, NRA’s top lobbyist backtracked on that criticism, saying it had come from an unauthorized staffer.
The photos spurred a monthlong counter-campaign from the gun-control group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which took to social media and launched petitions to urge Target to prohibit customers from carrying guns in its stores.
The group has attributed other retailers’ similar moves to its previous campaigns.
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, said in an interview that she was ‘‘elated’’ by Target’s decision and said she hopes the changes will spur lawmakers to act on gun control legislation.
‘‘We hope that this win with Target signals our complete dissatisfaction with Congress’s inaction on this issue and the fact that moms really are revved up on this issue — and they will see that in the [November midterm elections],’’ Watts said.
Watts said her group has had several phone conversations with members of Target’s senior management team in recent weeks about the issue, though she had not heard from the company for about two weeks before Wednesday’s announcement.
Watts said that two large companies — a retailer and a restaurant — have recently reached out to her group about taking a stance on the issue, saying they wanted to avoid being the target of one of the group’s public relations campaigns.
Gun rights groups were disappointed by Target’s announcement.
John Pierce, co-founder of OpenCarry.org, said he would encourage gun owners to comply with Target’s request.
Many gun owners will either stop shopping at Target or continue carrying their weapons in a concealed fashion in the company’s stores, he said.
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WASHINGTON — Target Corp. on Wednesday said it would ‘‘respectfully request’’ that its customers no longer carry firearms inside its stores, after facing mounting pressure from gun-control activists who put the chain in the crosshairs of a national debate about open carry laws.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/1a64e164-1d6f-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140816042929id_/http://www.washingtonpost.com/1a64e164-1d6f-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html
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‘Into the Storm’ movie review
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20140816042929
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A tornado disaster movie “Into the Storm” is the story of the town of Silverton ravaged by an onslaught of tornadoes. The entire town is at the mercy of the erratic and deadly cyclones. The movie opens in theaters on Friday. (Warner Bros.)
If Americans are getting bigger, as we’re constantly reminded we are, we need a movie villain that can keep pace. That’s one thing the disaster flick “Into the Storm” has going for it. The tornado that threatens to decimate Silverton, Okla., during the movie’s climax isn’t so much a well-defined cyclone as an amorphous blob that lumbers destructively across great distances. It’s the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of twisters.
The tornado accomplishes awe- inspiring feats, such as sucking up a whole tarmac of airplanes into its orbit and wiping out entire neighborhoods. But for all the movie’s grandiose annihilation, there also is action so absurd and emotion so saccharine that the likelihood of involuntary laughter is high.
Director Steven Quale (“Final Destination 5”) and writer John Swetnam (“Step Up All In”) clearly know that the disaster- movie thing has been done to death, and so, in addition to the bigger-is-better approach, they also offer up another fresh angle by adding a found footage element. We see video from the cameras of high school-aged brothers Trey (Nathan Kress) and Donnie (Max Deacon) and security footage from the school where their father (Richard Armitage) is assistant principal. We get the angles from a storm-chasing team that includes ornery documentarian Pete (Matt Walsh) and scientist Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies).
For a bit of comic relief we also witness the misadventures of aspiring YouTube celebrities Donk (Kyle Davis) and Reevis (Jon Reep). The pair perfectly encapsulate the movie’s biggest drawback, which is weak and lazy storytelling. Donk and Reevis are redneck stereotypes: brainless and drunken rubes with thick accents and a spray-painted sign on the back of their pickup that reads “Twista Hunterz.”
For the most part, the movie is at its best when the special effects are front and center and grouchy Pete or cheeky Trey are spouting those goofy one-liners that action movies are now required to have. But sometimes even the destruction becomes silly. When a character gets sucked up into a tornado made of fire, even impressive computer-generated magic can’t transcend reminders of the inane cult hit “Sharknado.”
The found footage element can also be distracting. When Donnie and his crush find themselves trapped in an abandoned building and she’s whimpering for help with a cut ankle, he has to take a few moments to set up his camera to catch their every move. And then there are the moments when the movie abandons the found footage approach altogether.
On the plus side, “Into the Storm” doesn’t drag. That may sound like small praise for a movie with such bombastic special effects, but it really is impressive, given that “Into the Storm” consists mainly of watching characters run from various little tornadoes before they have to take cover from a very large one.
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains sequences of intense destruction and language, including some sexual references. 89 minutes.
Washington-area native Stephanie Merry covers movies, theater and art for Weekend and the Going Out Guide. She’s also the section’s de facto expert on yoga, gluten-free dining and bicycle commuting.
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The disaster movie promises as many breath-taking moments as laugh-out-loud ones.
| 90.611111 | 0.611111 | 0.722222 |
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http://fortune.com/2013/11/11/vox-media-acquires-curbed-network-for-20-30m/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140816175657id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/11/11/vox-media-acquires-curbed-network-for-20-30m/
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Vox Media acquires Curbed Network for $20-30M
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20140816175657
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FORTUNE — Fortune has learned that ambitious digital media startup Vox Media will acquire Curbed Network, a saucy trio of urban lifestyle and entertainment blogs, for a mix of cash and stock valued between $20-30 million. Though Curbed has just 5 million monthly unique visitors, the deal will help Vox Media grow its business in new categories, including home, food, and style.
Reached by phone Sunday night, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said he was hoping to use the company’s technology platform and its ad products to “blow out these major consumer categories.”
Real estate blog Curbed was founded in 2004 as a side project by Lockhart Steele, who was then managing editor of Gawker Media. I first wrote about Steele’s quippy site back in 2005 as part of an exploration into whether blogging counted as journalism. (It’s a question nobody asks anymore, as media startups vie to become next-generation media empires.) In the interim, Curbed has spawned Eater, a blog that chronicles restaurants and nightlife, and Racked, which covers shopping and style. It now reaches beyond New York City to publish in 32 markets across the U.S. and Canada, and is reportedly making a several million dollars in profits annually.
Also reached on Sunday night, Steele said he and his team will join Vox Media’s New York City operations where he will remain editor-in-chief of the three Curbed titles but also assist Vox in scouting new talent and opportunities. “There’s not many people I’d sign up to have as a boss after running Curbed, and Jim is certainly one of them,” he told me.
Vox Media has grown its combined audience by a whopping 88% over the past year to nearly 57 million unique visitors. Bankoff is betting that he can do for Curbed what he has successfully done for Vox Media’s three existing major brands: SB Nation is a collection of blogs that draws sports fans. Polygon.com features videogame news and features. And TheVerge.com, which is just two years old,* has distinguished itself for smart reporting on consumer technology. As part of the company’s formula for success, Bankoff hires journalists and video producers and provides them the tools to do high-end reporting like this piece on Vaccine Deniers or this Sunday football preview video. He pairs this content with new advertising formats that make creative use of the medium, an experiment the company tweaks constantly thanks to Vox Media’s nimble technology platform, which it calls Chorus.
Founded in 2003, Vox Media is dually headquarted in the Big Apple and Washington, D.C. where Bankoff, a former AOL executive, resides along with a large share of the company’s engineering talent.
The acquisition comes just weeks after Vox raised $34 million in a round of funding led by Accel Partners that could grow to as much as $40 million, according to Fortune’s Dan Primack. Look for the company to continue moving aggressively into new areas; with its war chest of cash, Vox Media likely isn’t done making acquisitions.
*Correction: The original version of this story mentioned that Vox Media site TheVerge.com was “not yet two years old.” In fact, the site was launched on November 1, 2011.
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Vox Media has taken on sports, technology, and video games. Now it’s getting into real estate.
| 29.666667 | 0.857143 | 1.428571 |
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/03/31/community-banks-line-public/gkvGKzMtkUxqkZOQrnevfJ/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140818055623id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/03/31/community-banks-line-public/gkvGKzMtkUxqkZOQrnevfJ/story.html
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Community banks line up to go public
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20140818055623
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Here in go-go Massachusetts, we see a lot of companies itching to go public.
There’s a long list of local biotech businesses that launched initial public offerings last year. We’ve got a crowd of big data companies and other technology ventures anxious for a shot at an IPO.
And then there are your community banks.
Yes, an unusually large collection of Massachusetts banks have filed papers or stated their intention to go public this year. Most of these proposed stock offerings are relatively small, coming from institutions that exist to serve local communities by taking deposits and making loans.
Show me another industry that has less in common with the high-tech revolution we usually associate with the IPO boomlet.
Beverly Bank, the latest institution rolling out plans for the public market, operates just four branches and oversees $324 million worth of assets. It followed two other very small banks, Melrose Cooperative and Pilgrim Bank of Cohasset, which together hope to raise about $45 million.
Two bigger deals in the works would raise considerably more money.
The parent company of East Boston Savings Bank, which sold a minority interest to the public in 2008, plans to go all-in later this year. And Blue Hills Bank, which customers knew as Hyde Park Savings for more than a century, hopes to raise nearly $240 million by going public.
Banks preparing IPOs usually explain by telling the world they have major plans or simply need to get bigger to make their way in a more competitive world.
Many years of experience tells me most bankers take their institutions public for a different reason. They do it for the opportunity to sell those banks before very long.
Lots of people typically make big money in that process — including the executives who took the bank public in the first place. It’s a very familiar story.
I don’t know any of the managers running the current crop of banks lining up for IPOs this year. But I’d gladly make a modest bet that most of their institutions will be acquired by some larger banking company within the next five years.
The fact that there are a lot of banks getting ready to go public is an encouraging sign for our economy. Massachusetts banks that go public must remain independent for at least three years before they are merged or sold.
The line forming at the moment suggests that many bankers believe the economy of the next several years will be strong enough for them to grow and avoid serious loan problems. That’s as clear an economic signal as you are ever going to get from your local banker.
Could the story about all the crazy new government-mandated medical diagnostic codes get any stranger?
Of course it can — Congress is on the case.
Last week, I wrote about the many thousands of new codes, known as ICD 10, and how doctors were complaining about plans to implement the system on Oct. 1. The day after that column appeared, the US House of Representatives voted to extend the implementation date an additional year. Now the issue has moved to the Senate.
The column about diagnostic codes that cover everything from the rare to the bizarre — such as bites from parrots to injury-inducing collisions with spacecraft — generated a lot of e-mail. Many writers offered their favorite ICD 10 codes. A sampling:
■ Code V91.07XA — Burn due to water skis on fire, initial encounter.
■ Code W56.21XD — Bitten by orca, subsequent encounter.
■ Code Z63.1 — Problems in relationship with in-laws.
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An unusually large collection of Massachusetts banks have filed papers or stated their intention to go public this year.
| 34.5 | 0.95 | 11.05 |
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http://www.people.com/article/christopher-lee-erin-corwin-murder-dispose-human-body
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140824193701id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/christopher-lee-erin-corwin-murder-dispose-human-body
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Erin Corwin Murder: Suspected Killer Admits He Searched for 'How to Dispose' of Body
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20140824193701
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San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department
Christopher Lee, the former Marine accused of murdering
, told investigators that he searched the Internet for "how to dispose of a human body," arrest records reveal.
The revelation is just part of the evidence that San Bernardino County prosecutors have amassed against Lee, 24, who police contend was
and killed her out of fear his wife would learn of the relationship.
Several days before her disappearance, Corwin, 19, told a friend that she and Lee were planning on taking a "special" trip together, according to court documents.
An additional murder charge might be filed against Lee pending the outcome of Corwin's autopsy, which won't be finalized for the next four to six weeks.
"There's still an ongoing investigation to determine if she was pregnant at the time of the murder," San Bernardino District Attorney Michael Ramos tells PEOPLE. "If we find that to be true and the fetus was far enough along, there could be another kind of murder charge filed."
at the bottom of a 125-foot gold-mine shaft on Sunday, seven weeks after her husband, Marine Cpl. Jon Corwin,
. Detectives also discovered .22-caliber casings and pieces of rebar at the mine shaft that matched those found in Lee's Jeep.
Lee, who is awaiting extradition from Alaska, where he recently moved with his wife and daughter, told police he was "collecting tires" on the morning Corwin disappeared. Detectives found a tire at the mine shaft. A witness also informed investigators that Lee asked him "the best way to dispose of a human body," according to court documents.
The authorities are also curious to learn whether Lee's wife, Nichole, may have played a role in the murder.
"Investigators would like to interview her at some point," says Cynthia Bachman with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, "to determine her involvement, if any."
Prosecutors are still "a couple months" away from deciding whether or not they'll ask for the death penalty for Lee, added Ramos.
"I was only able to speak with him briefly the day before he waived extradition," Lee's lawyer David Kaloyanides told
"He's not pleased that the case has gone in this direction, but seems to be doing okay."
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Prosecutors are awaiting autopsy results to determine if Corwin was pregnant with the alleged killer's child
| 26.882353 | 0.764706 | 1.470588 |
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http://fortune.com/2012/10/11/marissa-mayer-ready-to-rumble-at-yahoo/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20140828194424id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/10/11/marissa-mayer-ready-to-rumble-at-yahoo/
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Marissa Mayer: Ready to rumble at Yahoo
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FORTUNE — On a Friday morning in late August, six weeks into her new job as CEO of Yahoo YHOO , Marissa Mayer was brainstorming about how to make the company innovative again. She became particularly animated when she talked about empowering employees and ending corporate gridlock, recalls Patricia Moll Kriese, one of several former Google colleagues who followed Mayer to the struggling web giant. “We’re talking about streamlining process, reducing bureaucracy and removing jams,” Mayer told Kriese with a sly smile. At that moment the acronym-loving CEO stumbled upon the name for a new companywide initiative. “Process, bureaucracy, jams,” she said. “We’ll call it PB&J!”
That afternoon Mayer hosted one of her FYI meetings, the Friday town halls that she started holding for employees soon after she arrived from Google GOOG in July. It wasn’t lost on Mayer that PB&J was sure to remind people of the Peanut Butter Manifesto, a 2006 rant by a Yahoo manager about how the company had spread itself too thin. Mayer explained her PB&J — a bunch of small changes to make work more productive — and urged employees to suggest more changes: Employees log in to an internal website and vote on one another’s ideas. The site ranks the ideas by popularity; management implements the best ones. PB&J is Google-like and quintessentially Mayer — data driven, democratic, and fun. That evening, in an e-mail to 12,500 Yahoo employees, Mayer declared her plan to make Yahoo “the absolute best place to work.”
MORE: 40 Under 40 – the list
That’s a pretty ambitious goal for a first-time CEO walking into a company with flat sales, an ever-shrinking workforce, and a revolving door at the top: Yahoo has had four CEOs in five years. Though it has a vast user base of 700 million consumers, 18-year-old Yahoo has utterly failed to produce the must-use products in search, social, and mobile that it needs to keep pace with Google and Facebook FB . The company that once boasted a market value of $125 billion (to be sure, it peaked during the dotcom bubble) is now valued at about $20 billion, and the stock has scarcely budged in the past four years. Why should investors — or employees, for that matter — believe that finally Yahoo has a boss who can fix the culture and attract the talent to upgrade innovation? “I really wish her well,” says former CEO Carol Bartz, whom the board fired last year. “Changing culture is not a sprint,” she adds. “It’s a marathon. It’s very, very hard to affect culture.”
Logic and Yahoo’s longtime troubles could lead anyone to believe that yet another CEO will fail. But Mayer is different — really different. Obviously there’s her youth. At 37, she is the youngest CEO — male or female — of a Fortune 500 company, a distinction that lands her at No. 3 on Fortune’s annual 40 Under 40 ranking. She was an unexpected pick to run Yahoo, then surprised the business world when she revealed, a few hours after Yahoo named her CEO, that she was pregnant. (Fortune got the scoop.) Mayer delivered a baby boy on Sept. 30, fully intending to return to work in a couple of weeks.
If anyone can manage the high-wire act of turning around a company and caring for a newborn, it is Mayer. She is incredibly energetic and loves hard work — she pulled an all-nighter at least once a week in Google’s early days. (She’s also rich, so there’s no reason to believe she won’t have supremely reliable childcare.) While her limited P&L experience gave the Yahoo board pause, her drive to succeed won the directors over. Michael J. Wolf, the former MTV president and Yahoo director who drove the CEO search, says that the board wanted someone “who believed Yahoo can grow again” and, crucially, “who believed they could do it.”
Mayer brings with her a passion for products, a knack for talent development, and bona fide tech cred, all of which Yahoo has lacked for too long. Mayer is a Stanford grad, with a master’s degree in computer science. Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer, she spent five years heading search products and “user experience” — shaping the way people navigate the Internet while protecting the elegant simplicity of Google’s websites. In 2010 she was put in charge of a portfolio that included local services, maps, and location services — a lateral move that some deemed a demotion because it yanked her from Google’s all-important search business. Mayer, also removed from Google’s important operating committee when Larry Page took over as CEO from Eric Schmidt, proved her resilience and strengthened her new unit by engineering an acquisition of Zagat, a purveyor of restaurant guides. She also has insight into how huge companies work, having joined the board of Wal-Mart WMT early this year.
Mayer had no plans to leave Google. But when Spencer Stuart recruiter Jim Citrin called last June, she agreed to meet with the directors. She told them that Yahoo’s products need to become “more innovative and delightful.” The board promised her free rein to shake up the organization and time to prove herself. In less than a month she was Yahoo’s new chief.
Three months into the new regime, Mayer is remaking Yahoo in her image — and Google’s too. First came free food in the cafeteria. Then free smartphones for all employees — iPhones or devices running Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android operating systems. (No BlackBerrys.)
Mayer has told employees that she intends to be “radically transparent” with them, but for now her broader vision for Yahoo remains under wraps. Will she focus on bolstering Yahoo’s content offerings to attract new users? Will she invest in new tech tools to help advertisers expand their reach? Will she partner with other tech companies — including former employer Google?
Mayer declined to speak with Fortune for this article, but we interviewed dozens of friends and people who have worked with Mayer — including some executives who followed her to Yahoo. And while her strategic direction for Yahoo is still a work in progress, the energy at the company is already changing. It is becoming more social, more agile, and more ambitious. Come to think of it, more like her.
MORE: Marissa Mayer’s predecessors at Yahoo
“By my nature I’m a very shy person,” Mayer told me when I visited her on Google’s Silicon Valley campus in 2008. If you’ve ever watched the You-Tube video of Mayer interviewing Lady Gaga at Google Goes Gaga, or if you saw Vogue’s take on her wedding to Zachary Bogue in 2009, you would not imagine Mayer to be an introvert. But growing up in Wausau, Wis. — “Norman Rockwell America,” she calls it — she was the girl who knew all the answers in class and waited to be called on.
Mayer (pronounced MY-er) grew up with a hockey-loving brother, Mason, four years younger than her, a civil-engineer dad who designed water-treatment plants, and a mom who taught art to kids. Margaret Mayer instilled in her daughter not only a love for design and fashion but also a willingness to try anything. Every day of the week she took Marissa to a different activity or lesson — swimming, skating, ballet, piano, cake decorating. In high school Marissa was an all-round overachiever: captain of the debate team and the pom-pom squad, which performed energetic dance numbers at halftime during football and basketball games.
“When Marissa became captain of the pompom squad, she wasn’t in with that clique of girls, but she won them over in three ways,” recalls Abigail Garvey Wilson, Mayer’s best friend from childhood. “First, sheer talent. Marissa could choreograph a great routine. Second, hard work. She scheduled practices lasting hours to make sure everyone was synchronized. And third, fairness. With Marissa in charge, the best dancers made the team.”
Even back in her teenage years, Mayer was mathematical, analytical, and, to use her term, “matrix-driven.” When she got accepted at every college she applied to — Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Duke, and six others — she created a spreadsheet with student-teacher ratios, median SAT scores, and various measures of campus life to help her figure out where to go. She chose Stanford partly because, for a Wisconsin girl, she said, “it was unique.” (Coincidentally, Mayer’s predecessor Carol Bartz also grew up in Wisconsin, surely making Yahoo the only Fortune 500 company to have hired two Wisconsin-raised women as CEOs.)
She arrived intending to become a pediatric neurosurgeon, but she shifted to symbolic systems, an eclectic course of study. SymSys majors study psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science to figure out how people learn and reason, and how to endow computers with humanlike behavior. It was a perfect path of study for Mayer, who, while shy, isn’t a loner. “We were all intense students, but Marissa stood out because she had unusual balance and a deep understanding of people and how to relate to them,” says Hosain Rahman, a freshman dorm-mate of Mayer’s who is now CEO of mobile-device maker Jawbone and No. 24 on Fortune’s 40 under 40 list.
Mayer didn’t plan to stay in Silicon Valley after she got her master’s in computer science in 1999. But when one of her professors, Eric Roberts, e-mailed her to let her know about two guys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were starting a company to organize the web, she decided to go for a job interview. “Sergey drilled me [about data analysis techniques]. Larry said almost nothing, to the point that I almost asked him, ‘Do you speak?’ ” She and Page later dated before they both married other people.
Mayer drew up another spreadsheet to assess her 14 job offers, which included Oracle ORCL , Toyota TM , Carnegie Mellon, McKinsey, and Google. It was down to the last two when Mayer thought to herself, “I could give advice to Fortune 500 companies, or I could help change the world.” She chose Google, although, she admitted, “I gave these guys a 2% chance.”
During her first two years at Google, Mayer worked 100 hours a week. From the day she wrote her first screensaver, she loved programming. Moving into management meant giving that up day to day. “It was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.” That idea of trying uncomfortable things became part of her personal career credo: “Do things that you’re not quite ready to do. And surround yourself with the smartest people.”
Superhuman stamina, high standards, and a willingness to do any job herself made Mayer a challenging person to work for. “Her weakness was an unwillingness to delegate,” says Craig Silverstein, who joined Google before Mayer and left to develop software at Kahn Academy early this year. “She doesn’t need any sleep,” he explains. “When you have four or five more hours in the day than most people do, you don’t learn to delegate because you don’t need to.” She was sometimes curt and controlling, but as her product management organization grew, Mayer had to delegate to succeed.
MORE: 40 Under 40 – the Twitterati
Mayer became a motivational leader, in part because she recognized that leadership depends on nurturing talent. In 2002 she started the APM — associate product manager — program to teach high-potential engineers how to be leaders. The APMs got assignments, meetings with Google’s top brass, and lots of attention from Mayer, who took each class on a weeklong trip abroad. Jess Lee (No. 32 on the 40 Under 40), who was a Google APM in 2004 after earning a computer- science degree at Stanford, remembers a whirlwind week with Mayer and 11 fellow APM grads in Tokyo, Bangalore, and Zurich, where they visited Google’s local offices and met key customers. “The philosophy was to force us to operate at a higher level,” says Lee, who is now CEO of fashion startup Polyvore.
Google’s APM program has become a farm system for tech talent across Silicon Valley — as well as a vital network of people whom Mayer may tap to help her turn around Yahoo. Indeed, the program, along with Mayer’s yen for organizing extracurricular activities such as movie nights for employees, caught the eye of the Yahoo board. “Here’s someone who engendered a tremendous amount of loyalty,” says Wolf, who joined the board in May as part of a slate that activist investor Dan Loeb, now Yahoo’s biggest shareholder, brought in. “People want to work for her.”
Following the second part of her career credo, to “work with the smartest people,” Mayer has moved quickly to recast Yahoo’s senior ranks. To be chief marketing officer, she hired Kathy Savitt, an alum of Amazon.com AMZN who went on to build her own startup, Lockerz. Mayer replaced CFO Tim Morse, who focused on cost cutting, with Ken Goldman, a growth-oriented former finance chief of computer security company Fortinet. For a new position called EVP of people and development, Mayer recruited a veteran investment banker named Jackie Reses, who worked at Goldman Sachs GS and then led the U.S. media practice at private equity firm Apax Partners. Reses is Yahoo’s dealmaker-plus, overseeing HR, business development, strategy, and M&A.
Though she’s added strategic firepower to her team, board members don’t expect Mayer to go on a big-company buying spree. According to Wolf, Mayer is well aware that Yahoo has spent more than $6 billion on acquisitions in the past 10 years and today has little to show for it. The lousy acquisition record is one reason that Mayer, after collecting $4.3 billion last month from the sale of half of Yahoo’s stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, opted to distribute 85% of the proceeds to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. Yahoo has plenty of cash at its disposal; Goldman Sachs analyst Heath Terry forecasts that it will have a stockpile of $6.9 billion at the end of the year. But the board hired Mayer to build, not buy, and she is hardly the type to spend $1 billion on a company like Instagram, the photo-sharing site that Facebook recently purchased.
Instead, Mayer has told employees that she will follow “the rule of 100 million”: Invest only in products and ventures that have a good shot at reaching 100 million users and $100 million in revenue. She has said she is keen on “ acqui-hires” — Silicon Valley lingo for buying startups to get great talent. (It shouldn’t be hard for Mayer to tap into the startup scene: She’s an active angel investor who has put seed money into ventures such as Square, Minted, and Uber.) Mayer is believed to be particularly impressed with acquisitions such as Yahoo’s 2011 purchase of IntoNow, a company that lets viewers “tag” and share content in TV shows. Yahoo bought the startup for about $30 million, just as it was on the cusp of a growth surge.
She’ll likely target nimble ad-technology firms such as PubMatic and Criteo that can help Yahoo optimize the value of its sites to advertisers and bring in more revenue. Mobile technology, where Yahoo hasn’t invested enough, is also a priority. Popular mobile news-reading apps like Pulse and Flipboard are the kinds of acquisitions that may lure Mayer.
MORE: 40 Under 40: Visualizer
The new CEO is also on the hook to address Yahoo’s declining share in search, which brings in about a third of Yahoo’s revenue. Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer forged a 10-year partnership that makes Microsoft MSFT the backend manager of Yahoo’s search operation while Yahoo handles the front-end presentation: what you get when you search via Yahoo or Bing. While the partnership has been strained, Mayer told the board that it was smart to outsource the costly infrastructure management. In fact, Mayer likens Yahoo to a vintner who sells off his vineyard and can still produce great wine with someone else’s grapes. Yahoo needs better winemakers, pure and simple. Sophisticated product engineers would personalize Bing’s and Yahoo’s search results for its users, making the experience more, well, Googley. Mayer’s ability to do a search deal with Google is limited by antitrust law, though Mayer’s old boss Eric Schmidt has suggested publicly that he would be open to a partnership.
It is a long to-do list, plus she’ll eventually have to address questions about what she wants Yahoo to be when it cleans up its act. And then there’s her home-work balancing act. Mayer’s decision to return to work so soon after her delivery has invited commentary and criticism from women and men who wonder if she’s setting an unhealthy precedent for working mothers. But Mayer isn’t a baby boomer fighting for her rights in the workplace; she’s a member of the under-40 set — a generation marked by its mobility, flexibility, and independence. Returning to work on her own terms is very much in keeping with her cohort.
If nothing else, her new gig will take her out of her comfort zone. If history is any guide, that’s exactly the kind of thing that Mayer thrives on.
This story is from the October 29, 2012 issue of Fortune.
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Mayer - No. 3 on the 40 Under 40 - is changing the culture and welcoming new faces to the troubled web company. But this new chief (and new mom) has miles to go before she sleeps.
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http://fortune.com/2011/08/17/the-apple-store-was-down-and-not-in-a-good-way/
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The Apple Store was down - and not in a good way
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For reasons unclear, the online store was not responding Wednesday morning
[UPDATE: As of 11:10 a.m. EST the store seems to be functioning properly. No new products that I can see. Never did get an explanation from Apple PR.]
[UPDATE 2: As of noon EST, the site seems to be misbehaving again. Still no word out of Apple.]
[UPDATE 3: Reader Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint Systems reports that the site had fully recovered by 1:40 p.m. Meanwhile, he has quantified the scale of Apple's Wednesday morning problem with some scary looking charts, one of which we've copied below. Still no explanation from Apple PR.]
[UPDATE 4: MacRumors notes that Apple has added a social dimension to its online store -- allowing users who are so inclined to alert their Twitter and Facebook followers that they have purchased, say, an iPod or a Mac Pro. It's not clear how this could be related to the Wednesday's outages.]
The Apple Store often goes down in a good way — with the classic yellow Post-it note that signals the imminent arrival of a new product or service.
It went down Wednesday morning in a bad way, failing to respond to requests from its own Web browser and triggering instead an error message telling would-be visitors that “the server where this page is located isn’t responding.”
Trouble at the North Carolina server farm? A denial of service attack by hacker or hackers unknown?
We’ve asked Apple AAPL PR what’s going on. Will update if we get an explanation.
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For reasons unclear, the online store was not responding Wednesday morning [UPDATE: As of 11:10 a.m. EST the store seems to be functioning properly. No new products that I can see. Never did get an explanation from Apple PR.] [UPDATE 2: As of noon EST, the site seems to be misbehaving again. Still no word…
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/08/27/harvard-alums-letter-faust-criticize-endowment-pay/kVR4qB3SakXZxC3CuwcafL/story.html
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Harvard alums, in letter to Faust, criticize endowment pay
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In a letter to Harvard University president Drew G. Faust, a group of alumni that has long been critical of high pay for the school’s endowment managers complains that the compensation levels have increased since the financial crisis.
In advance of their upcoming reunion, members of Harvard’s class of 1969 wrote in their letter, dated Aug. 20, that they were “astonished by what we have discovered.”
Total pay for the five highest-compensated managers at the world’s largest university investment fund rose to $28.8 million in 2013 from $25.2 million in 2009. In between, in 2011, pay for that group dipped to $18 million, the result of reduced three-year payouts after sharp losses during the financial crisis.
“We certainly think they should pay less,’’ David Kaiser, a historian and one of the authors of the report, said in an interview. “We think the relationship between performance and pay is not strict enough.”
In fact, Harvard’s endowment was the worst performer among all Ivy League colleges, with a 1.7 percent average annual return over a five-year period ended in 2013, according to data compiled by Charles A. Skorina & Co., an executive search firm that serves the investment management business. Columbia University recorded the best five-year performance among the Ivy League schools, with a 6.8 percent annualized endowment return, the firm reported.
Harvard said the five-year average ending June 2014, when finalized, will be between 11 percent and 12 percent.
A handful of alumni from the class of 1969 have been vocal critics of executive compensation at Harvard Management over the past decade. The authors of the latest letter — nine Harvard graduates, including professors, a pastor, and a lawyer — do not delve into the fund’s performance in recent years but say executive pay has been rising faster than the size of the endowment.
The endowment had $32.7 billion in assets in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2013. It had topped its precrisis peak of nearly $37 billion, but ended the year below that mark because of large payments to support the university’s operations, Harvard said last year.
Kaiser said total annual compensation at the endowment, not including any subsequent pay adjustments, nearly doubled to $132.8 million in the five years ended in 2013. Part of that shift is the result of the endowment’s farming out fewer assets to hedge funds and instead managing the money internally.
Kaiser said he favored seeing the reported pay for employees, rather than not being able to determine the larger undisclosed fees paid to hedge funds.
Harvard spokeswoman Christine Heenan said in a statement that the endowment’s “unique hybrid model has saved the university more than $1.5 billion in management costs compared to what an equivalent external management strategy would have cost over the past decade.”
She said that the endowment had distributed about $11 billion to the university over the past five years, and that investment managers were subject to clawbacks if their performance lagged over time.
“This system encourages strong alignment of interest with the University and a longer-term view that discourages undue risk-taking,’’ she said in the statement.
Compensation of Harvard’s investment managers in recent years pales in comparison to the top pay in the 1990s. Still, Harvard’s financial statements show long-term compensation is on the rise, with estimated contingent bonuses and incentive bonuses budgeted at $43.5 million for 2013, up from $25 million in 2012.
The chief executive of the endowment, Jane Mendillo, recently said she will step down at the end of the year, after six years at the helm. She took over in July 2008, just before the crisis struck, and has spent her time since then trying to make the fund’s investment portfolio less risky.
People close to the endowment say Mendillo was not asked to leave. But critics in Boston’s investment community say she is leaving because of pressure to improve performance. The fund gained 11.3 percent last year but was outperformed by rival Yale University, at 12.5 percent, and the Massachusetts state pension fund, at 12.7 percent.
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In an open letter to Harvard University president Drew G. Faust, a group of alumni that has long been critical of high pay for the school’s endowment managers complains that the compensation levels have increased since the financial crisis.
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Mexican modernism and the politics of painting
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When Sybille Bedford set out for Mexico immediately after the second world war, she was hoping to satisfy "a great longing … to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible". She would not be disappointed. As "the oldest country in the New World", Mexico seemed to have achieved the impossible feat of being both locked in history and innocent of it. As Bedford was to write of her host, "Don Otavio has seen so many changes that he has failed to notice them."
Don Otavio's failure to apprehend change was not simply the insouciance of a sequestered aristocrat, though he was certainly that. Rather, it was broadly symptomatic of the Mexican experience of a revolution that had started in 1910 and, more than three decades later, couldn't stop revolving. The revolution's inability to complete itself meant that it remained strangely ahistorical: the attenuated present was always too wobbly, too contingent, to be patterned into the coherent narrative that the sweep of history demands.
And so it was that Mexico's fascination with its "long nasty history" acquired, in this revolutionary period, a pathological dimension. There was much to be fascinated by, a theatre of cruelty featuring mass human sacrifice and slave labour in the pre-Columbian age, the barbaric subjugation of the indigenous people by the Spanish conquistadores, the war of independence, war with America, military occupation by France, the feudal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and, between acts, too many skirmishes and insurgencies to be counted.
The revolution itself, though it succeeded in seeing off Díaz and his Belle Epoque window-dressing, had no philosophical or ideological underpinning, and no centre. It was a mass agrarian movement, a peasants' revolt that erupted, like Mexico's famous volcanoes, sporadically and unpredictably, with a few charismatic regional characters – Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata – providing the greatest spectacle (Pancho Villa having first negotiated with the Mutual Film Corporation for the cinematic rights to his battles, which he agreed to fight in daylight for technical reasons).
Protracted, bloody, diffuse, the revolution's exorbitant toll on the human spirit was audited by the Mexican writer Mariano Azuela in a searing novel, Los de Abajo (The Underdogs), written in 1916. The protagonists, a small group of revolutionary soldiers whose optimism has curdled as the conflict engulfs them, lose all sense of what they had set out to achieve. They descend into betrayal, murder, rape, drinking and gambling, terrorising the local population who had welcomed them as freedom fighters. They do not overturn the oppressors, they become them.
Confusing enough for its participants, the revolution was mystifying to outsiders. When the Soviet poet and radical futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky arrived in the country in late 1924, his hope of witnessing an uprising that could be conjoined to international Marxism was immediately dashed by the realisation that this was a decidedly local affair. Moreover, it had failed to deliver, even locally. In Mexico City, having toured the "historical" houses of the "priests and the rich", he asked to see where the poor lived. There he found filth, overcrowding, and the descendants of the "magnificent Aztecs" slumped in the pulquerias, indentured to cheap alcohol ("Heroism is not for now," he wrote. "Moctezuma has become a beer brand").
Violence was endemic. Every man between the age of 15 and 70 carried a gun – even Diego Rivera's little daughter was put down for her afternoon nap with a Colt revolver placed next to her. Mayakovsky quickly understood that the Mexican "revolutionary" was not, as in the Soviet Union, an individual with an ideology and a programme, but a person who overthrows authority with a weapon in his hand: "And, since in Mexico everybody either held power, or holds power, or wants to hold power, they are all revolutionaries."
As Adrian Locke points out in Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940 (which accompanies the Royal Academy's exhibition of the same title), remarkably few artists depicted scenes of the Mexican revolution. Which is not to say there was no revolutionary art. Rather, an extraordinarily rich and original visual culture emerged, a Mexican modernism that was as distinct as the energy it drew on: carnivalesque, savage, folkloristic, macabre. Above all, it was independent, rejecting external influences and turning inward to retrieve something from the chaos.
The dominant figures of this new art were "Los tres grandes", The Big Three – Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco – whose murals played a key role in building a national identity, a project that had hitherto stalled in the hands of the politicos. In a country with 90 per cent illiteracy, the task was to develop a visual language that could coax public feeling into public opinion. The muralists took the highly visible remnants of the past – the complex wall paintings and lapidary motifs of the pre-Columbian period, and the Catholic imagery of the colonisers – and reworked them into storyboards for a new consciousness. Where the Soviet Union had a commissar of enlightenment, Mexico had now found its great explainers. Of Rivera's Creation at the secretariat of public education, Mayakovsky reported ecstatically that he had seen "the world's first Communist frescoes".
There was nothing that could properly be called a movement, but the muralists shared a respect for popular figurative art (what Rivera called "the native talent for plastic expression") and embedded its practical, decorative and ritual vocabulary in their work. This was a political as well as an aesthetic choice intended to encourage the inclusion of Mexico's indigenous population – the underdogs of Spanish conquest – into post-revolutionary society. DH Lawrence judged it a failure, complaining that Rivera's "flat Indians" were exploited as mere "symbols of the weary script of socialism". Others (mostly foreigners) were irritated by the over-emphasis of "painted oratory", and could not accommodate the murals' iterative function, their horror vacui, or fear of empty spaces.
It was Rivera, of course, who attracted the most attention, retarding the acknowledgement due to Siqueiros and Orozco. His huge frame housed an inexhaustible supply of stamina – for work, sex and political arguments ignited by tequila – and a compulsion to make things up. He lived his fantasies to the point of self-actualisation, painting himself into his historical pageants as an architect, scientist, revolutionary hero (at the Palazzo Cortés in Cuernavaca he becomes the great southern leader José María Morelos). Egocentric, certainly, but perhaps Rivera was using his own very corporeal self to support the construction of a body politic, to incorporate the new Mexico.
Murals are not just public art but public property, hence their intrinsic revolutionary value – they belong to everybody. They are designed to be moving, but can't be moved, so to see them you have to go to Mexico (and they're worth it). Their absence from the Royal Academy exhibition is no demerit, however, but an opportunity to survey a less obviously rhetorical vein of Mexican modernism.
Where Rivera used a deliberately overblown technique to cover huge surfaces, his wife Frida Kahlo made small paintings that were intensely expressive of the private self. After suffering horrific injuries in a tram accident when she was a student, she lived with permanent pain, her body held together with casts, surgical corsets, braces, pulleys and levers. Her experience of her body was confessed on canvas with terrible intimacy, at once lucid and hallucinatory. But to describe her work as personal is insufficient. It embodied the trauma and mutilation suffered by the country at large, and traced the pathology of that "long nasty history" from which Mexico was struggling to recover.
Kahlo's place in the feminist canon is secured, but she is still undervalued in the history of modernism. She was just as progressive as her husband, often more inventively so. At a time when Mexican society dressed like Europeans, her extravagantly ethnic costumes and jewellery were viewed as eccentric ("Where's the circus?" children would ask her in the street). For Kahlo, it was a political intervention, an aesthetic strategy aimed at rescuing an indigenous people and a culture that had been abandoned. Any view of this culture as "other", as mysterious or "curious" – as implied by André Breton's remark that Mexico was "the Surrealist place par excellence" – she passionately rejected.
Mexican artists did not embrace surrealism in significant numbers, for which Breton never forgave them (or the country, for the assassination of Trotsky in August 1940). It was not a case of hostility towards outsiders – the revolutionaries were nationalistic, not xenophobic, and the many foreign artists and intellectuals who were drawn to the country's dramas were warmly welcomed, among them Tina Modotti, Josef and Anni Albers, Antonin Artaud, Edward Burra, Sergei Eisenstein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa. But the cause was to distil a Mexican reality, for Mexico, and not some hybrid international style.
As the revolution ground on, presidents were challenged by counter-presidents, governments fell and new ones were installed, ensconcing what Mayakovsky called the "pseudo-revolutionaries", whose methods rendered their ideals quite immaterial. Public commissions for artists were either prodigal or non-existent. When the muralists accepted contracts from Roosevelt's New Deal arts programme, their work was often under siege at home.
In the US, they stimulated a national school whose work is still described by Americans – and routinely disparaged – as "socialistic". Jackson Pollock worked in the mural division of the Works Progress Administration, believing, like Siqueiros, that the easel picture was "a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling towards the wall picture or mural". He was a great admirer of Orozco, who lived in the US from 1927 to 1934, and whose stylistic influence is powerfully evident in Pollock's aggressive, dark brushstrokes of that period.
In 1936, Pollock joined the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop in New York, where he was encouraged to use industrial paints and the commercial lacquers used to spray cars (you don't use a wooden brush in the age of steel, Siqueiros insisted). A member of the workshop later recalled that they applied this fast-drying paint "in thin glazes or built it up into thick globs. We poured it, dripped it, splattered it, and hurled it at the picture surface". Described by Siqueiros as a "controlled accident", this was the technical and imaginative breakthrough that produced abstract expressionism, of which Pollock – "Jack the Dripper" – was the poster boy. As it turned out, Mexican modernism was much more than just a local affair.
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Viewed against a backdrop of Mexico's seemingly endless revolution, the paintings of Diego Rivera and his circle were storyboards for a new consciousness. By Frances Stonor Saunders
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British Aid Worker David Haines Apparently Beheaded by Islamic State Militants
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09/13/2014 AT 06:50 PM EDT
A video has been posted online purporting to show the beheading by the Islamic State group of British aid worker David Haines, who went missing in Syria last year.
The video emerged hours after the family of Haines issued a public plea on Saturday urging his captors to contact them.
– and posted video evidence online. At the end of the last video showing the beheading of Sotloff, they threatened to kill Haines next and briefly showed him on camera.
The 44-year-old Haines was abducted in Syria in 2013 while working for an international aid agency.
The British government had managed to keep his kidnapping secret out of concern for his safety until the most recent video identified him as a captive.
British Prime Minister David Cameron late Saturday condemned his slaying as "an act of pure evil."
Cameron confirmed Haines's death in a statement after the British Foreign Office had said earlier that it was "working urgently to verify the video."
"This is a despicable and appalling murder of an innocent aid worker. It is an act of pure evil," Cameron said, adding that "my heart goes out to the family of David Haines who have shown extraordinary courage and fortitude throughout this ordeal."
"We will do everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice, however long it takes," Cameron said.
On Sunday, Haines's brother, Mike Haines, issued a statement on behalf of their family that praised David for his work overseas.
"David was most alive and enthusiastic in his humanitarian roles," he said. "His joy and anticipation for the work he went to do in Syria is for myself and family the most important element of this whole sad affair."
Mike also painted David as a family-oriented regular "bloke" who leaves behind his second wife, Dragana, their 4-year-old daughter and an older daughter from a previous marriage.
"David was a good brother, there when I needed him and absent when I didn't," he said. "I hope that he felt the same way about me."
"He was, in the right mood, the life and soul of the party, and on other times the most stubborn, irritating pain in the ass," he added. "He would probably say the same about me."
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David Haines, 44, went missing in Syria last year
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Best of Twitter Reactions : People.com
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09/15/2014 AT 10:15 AM EDT
, marking the third year in a row that the crown went to a New Yorker.
As might be expected, the glitzy pageantry of Miss America lends itself to some colorful peanut-gallery commentary, and Twitter did not disappoint Sunday.
Here are some examples from the Twittersphere.
Jimmy Kimmel was apparently impressed with the seriousness of the lines of questioning during the show.
#MissAmerica Q&A topics: Ray Rice, military rape, campus rape, ISIS beheadings & 9yr old killing her rifle instructor #notkidding #smilebig!
Others commented on Kazantsev's stripped-down talent routine, which saw her perform a version of Anna Kendrick's "Cups" accompanied by only a red Solo cup.
Canceling the ventriloquist, ballet and piano lessons for Esther's scholarship future. Buying red cup tomorrow. #missamerica
Comedian Bridger Winegar added his own "fun fact" to the screen while viewing the ceremony.
Crazy to think she even has a chance at the crown pic.twitter.com/y129ryjmxj
It's important to understand the implications of what each state's contestant's loss means.
Miss Massachusetts lost, which basically means we fought the Revolutionary War for nothing #MissAmerica
The prominent misspelling of Jane Austen's name was a big talking point for the evening.
Jane AUSTEN, too #missamerica pic.twitter.com/vs0d87vHzg
's grip on pop culture continues.
Can we just name Elsa #MissAmerica? She's got the gown and I dare you to find a talent cooler than ice powers.
The onscreen "Fun Facts" provided plenty of fodder for commenters.
she provoked it i bet #missamerica pic.twitter.com/9czgXaZWY2
Miss America contestants: They're just like us.
If I were one of the eliminated contestants, I'd be in sweatpants eating cheetoes, because that's how you watch #missamerica
columnist David Carr was surprised by the sheer volume of sarcastic commentary online, possibly because this was his first day on the Internet.
Am amazed at Twitter's ability to build a campfire around anything and start snarking/smiling/smartalecking. #MissAmerica #HighLoWorld
In the end, there's really only one thing to take away from the Miss America Pageant: The winner's unfortunate forced marriage to Elvis Costello.
Little-known fact: #missamerica has to be married to this guy for the next 365 days. http://t.co/D1xkHs3pSE
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The comments flew Sunday night as beauty paraded onstage in Atlantic City
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The men continuing Ove Arup's architectural vision
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The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday June 22 2005.
Ove Arup created a firm of engineering consultants and not, as we said above, "an architectural firm".
Charles Eames, universal designer extraordinaire, was once asked what he thought were the limits of his profession. His answer was: "What are the limits of problems?" It's a response that Ove Arup would have applauded, and 17 years after his death, it's a question his firm is apparently still investigating.
As it is, the name of Arup rings through postwar architecture like a subsonic rumble. This extraordinary firm has had a largely invisible hand in many of the iconic structures of the past 50 years, from the Sydney Opera House through the Pompidou Centre, James Frazer Stirling's Stuttgart Art Gallery, Norman Foster's Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, right up to the Swiss Re Tower and the London Eye. If you've got a huge or difficult project to sort out, like a bridge or a skyscraper or an airport, Arup is one of the few companies to turn to.
But beyond the tricky process of making architects' designs - and perhaps their reputations - stand up, Arup is virtually becoming a one-stop shop for practical problem-solving. When Railtrack went into administration, for example, the government turned to Arup to set up its replacement. The same goes for updating Britain's nuclear power stations, building Manhattan's new subway system, controlling infection in Chinese hospitals, designing safer vehicles, quieter roads, more humane prisons, environmentally friendlier towns. If it carries on at this rate, perhaps there'll be no problems left.
And Arup is doing very nicely out of it, too: the company has doubled in size in the past six years and turned over more than £400m last year. According to its own rhetoric, though, Arup is motivated by neither size nor profit, but rather a utopian mission of social improvement. At times it sounds less like a business than a religion - which is perhaps what its figurehead intended. Ove Arup was as much a visionary as an engineer. A liberal Danish emigre who studied philosophy and mathematics, he set up his own company in 1946, working to his mantra of "total architecture" - a holistic approach to design that emphasises expertise, innovation and collaboration. Before he handed the company over to a trust, in 1970, Arup laid out his blueprint for its future in a document that is now referred to internally as "the Key Speech". Every new employee is required to read it. It is not so much a business plan as the reflections of a wise man pondering the fundamental purpose of business. Here for example is Ove on profit: "The trouble with money is that it is a dividing force, not a uniting force, as is the quest for quality or a humanitarian outlook. If we let it divide us, we are sunk as an organisation - at least as a force for good."
"We live by it," says Arup's current chairman, Terry Hill. "We've just been through it again at the end of a five-year strategy phase, and we didn't really want to change anything. It's roughly three principles: excellence, honourable dealings and reasonable prosperity. It seems to us to be a pretty good business model."
Hill has been chairman since last year, but joined the company in 1976. His background is in civil engineering and economics, and he comes to our interview with a list of prepared points and statistics. "We're a very flat organisation," he explains. "There aren't many degrees of separation between graduates and, well, myself. We continually have to work out how to manage that, but it is about finding the best people and letting them get on with it. Ove always said, 'If you see a good person, take them on. Think about what for later.' "
A shining example would be Arup's deputy chairman, Cecil Balmond. Since joining Arup in 1968, he's certainly been left to get on with it, and has become the firm's in-house architectural star as a result. Balmond hasn't so much pushed the envelope of architecture as folded it into a strange shape that doesn't really look as if it should stand up. Structural engineering is too simple a description of his explorations of form and geometry. "I have an interest for, and I use the word in its best sense, complexity," says Balmond. "It's a recoiling from my earlier training as a modernist, where the end product was to design a simple box with glass everywhere and vanishing steel columns and it's all so minimal. That's OK but I feel that there's a certain complexity needed in life to give variety and interest and ambiguity in great works - you don't go with a one-liner. My agenda is to show that the Cartesian world we accept is a subset of a more complex world."
Balmond can talk with erudition about mathematics, string theory, music, and numerous other topics more associated with theoretical research than business practice, but he also brings in the work. His involvement with the company's loyal band of signature architects is producing the next generation of radical architecture, such as Daniel Libeskind's World Trade Centre redevelopment and his Royal Ontario Museum, or Rem Koolhaas' astounding loop of a skyscraper for China's state broadcasting centre in Beijing. His collaboration with these people verges on co-authorship.
"With Koolhaas, we conceptualise together and win projects together," he says. "I've worked with him for 18 years, which has led to a strange autonomy. He comes here without me being here at all and runs my team, and I go there and do the same with his team. Rem has compared our relationship to that of a horse and jockey; sometimes I'm the horse and he's the jockey, sometimes it's the other way round."
Arup's London headquarters, in Fitzrovia, are almost the kind of simple box Balmond was talking about, with open-plan spaces around an atrium. Hill and Balmond's offices, on the first floor, are identical in size, walled with glass, and situated opposite each other like two halves of a brain. If their desks didn't face outwards, they'd be staring at each other across their shared meeting space. But this is only a fraction of Arup. There are more Arup offices in the area, but as Hill explains, 55% of Arup's 6,500 employees are scattered around the rest of the world, getting on with it, but also spreading the word of total architecture.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics, for example, promises to unveil eight sports venues, and Arup is involved in all of them. Herzog and de Meuron's striking athletics stadium is the centrepiece: a voluptuous red form encased in a steel frame that looks like a giant wickerwork basket. Next door will be the even more bizarre swimming centre, a blue cube that appears to be made of giant soap bubbles.
Tristram Carfrae, from Arup's Sydney office, explains how this design was derived from abstract mathematics: "It's the answer to a question you might never ask, which is: 'If you have an infinite array of soap bubbles of equal volume, what shape are they?' In other words, what is the most efficient way of dividing space with structure?" Carfrae's team found the answer in the work of a Dublin professor, and, with the aid of computers, carved the shape of their swimming centre out of this theoretical foam, to create a building with a steel structure sandwiched between "bubbles" of transparent plastic. Thus, it is protected from internal and external humidity, and also acts like a greenhouse to heat up the water in the pools. As you'd expect, it looks like nothing on earth.
Not everything touched by the hand of Arup is necessarily perfect and innovative, though. Their own in-house architectural branch, Arup Associates, turns out designs that are always efficient and functional, but occasionally less than breathtaking, even derivative. And, operating at the trickier end of the spectrum, the firm does make mistakes. The wobbly Millennium Bridge was a recent and very public embarrassment. Arup put its hands up immediately and set about putting it right - the firm's website is almost overzealous in its explanation of why the bridge wobbled and how it was fixed.
Less easy to remedy have been accusations of arrogance and expensiveness. Most of these complaints stem from a decade or so ago, when some developers and architects felt that Arup was becoming more focused on fees than results. More recently, there are still stories of young Arup engineers treating more experienced outsiders less honourably than Ove would have liked.
But even the company's sceptics admit that the firm listens to its critics, and most of them wouldn't hesitate to work with Arup again. "We're not arrogant, we're confident about what we're doing," says Hill, "But there's a fine line between them, isn't there?"
Ove Arup's original tenets seem to keep the company on track like a set of equations. Perhaps Arup is a lesson in how a company can expand and prosper, and accumulate an almost fanatically loyal workforce without conforming to any business school model. For all the magnificent structures it has created, Arup's greatest design is itself, and it's a work that seems to be perpetually in progress. "I see it always like some natural, organic form that keeps changing," says Balmond. There's a self-designing aspect, and what Terry and myself and the board do is to put a kind of loose, inspirational glue around it."
Even when he had retired and was well into his 90s, Ove Arup still came to his top-floor office several times a week. He sat in on meetings and had lunch with staff, but his real interest was designing the definitive chess set. He carried his chess set everywhere, colleagues say, and would show everyone his latest piece designs. He was obsessed with it for about eight years, but for once, the problem seemed to be insoluble. Who knows what might have happened if he'd cracked it?
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Ove Arup created an architectural firm that is as much a belief system as it is a cutting-edge company. Steve Rose meets the men who have carried his vision into the 21st century.
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Going, going... Titian's Portrait of a Young Man, currently hanging in the National Gallery, which the Earl of Halifax intends to sell
Pity the director of the National Gallery. No sooner has Charles Saumarez Smith got his hands back on Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks than another peer of the realm announces his intention to dismember the Trafalgar Square collection. While the Earl of Halifax's decision to rescind his loan and sell Titian's Portrait of a Young Man is undoubtedly a blow for the National Gallery, it also marks the death knell for any remaining aristocratic pretensions to pose as stewards of the national heritage.
Historically, noble dynasties were quick to distance themselves from the nouveau concept of a nation state. To the fury of Tudor monarchs, the great Percy, Howard and Dudley families were forever placing their dynastic concerns above the national interest. The fate of houses - not the needs of nations - was what drove them. Only the trusty Cecils were canny enough to unite their family's advancement with the particular interests of the state.
But since the second world war the British aristocracy has steadily rebranded. As their economic authority has loosened and their political power crumbled, they have quietly recast themselves as the natural defenders of British history and heritage. It is in the grounds of Chatsworth, the drawing rooms of Alnwick Castle, and the long gallery of Hatfield House, we are told, that an aboriginal England is to be discovered. Their heirs are the custodians of our culture.
Through organisations such as the Historic Houses Association, aristocrats have lobbied hard for their place at the fulcrum of cultural policy. Crucially, they have made peace with the Treasury and now enjoy any number of tax breaks and inheritance wheezes to ensure great art and priceless objets are not immediately flogged off following the death of a duke.
To their credit, this policy has proved remarkably successful. Whichever way you cut it, with more than 30 million visitors a year, country houses and stately parks remain among the favourite destinations for British families. Particularly so among the white (if not ethnic minority) working class and those groups traditionally wary of heritage attractions. And there certainly exist some highly successful examples of estate management and historical interpretation - the Buccleuch and Cavendish bequests among them.
But when push comes to shove, when dynastic enrichment comes into conflict with the national interest, mammon outweighs patriotism. Our leading aristocrats seem always ready to take a few million more from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles than allow part of the nation's cultural firmament to remain on free and open display within the United Kingdom.
Knowing full well that no combination of British galleries could come up with his over-inflated £50m asking price, the Earl of Halifax is now touting his Titian across the world's private auction houses. In doing so, he is only following the example set by the Duke of Northumberland, who agreed to sell the Madonna of the Pinks to the Getty Museum for £35m without the knowledge of the National Gallery - despite the fact that the gallery curators had first identified its authenticity.
But it is not just art. The British aristocracy is also engaged in a quickfire sale of its land and houses. Rather than opening it up to the hoi polloi, Lord Hesketh decided to break up his celebrated, Hawksmoor-designed Easton Neston estate. Plot by plot was sold off, with the stately home ending up in the hands of the Russian-born fashion retailer Leon Max. With it has gone an incredible insight into British cultural history.
On the other side of Northamptonshire, the Spencer family is involved in a similar dissolution of the national heritage. Last year it was revealed that Earl Spencer - who at Princess Diana's funeral lectured the royal family on the meaning of nobility - had agreed to flog off acres of the Althorp estate for housing developments and a Tesco. In the hope of garnering an extra few million, Earl Spencer was happy to see ancient woodland, wilderness and unspoilt views destroyed.
In all these cases, it is usually the taxpayer and lottery player who are left to pick up the tab. In his novel of cultural lament Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh contrasted the great age of the country house with the philistine welfarism of 1945. To his hero, Charles Ryder, this decay was miserably symbolised in the character of Hooper, "a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent". Ryder feared the "age of Hooper" would inevitably mean the fall of Brideshead and the civilisation that it embodied.
But, in fact, it is the Hoopers who are now saving Britain's heritage. The dull mechanics of export bans, grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund (of which I am a trustee) and museum purchases is what is keeping the cultural fabric together, while the Spencers and Heskeths jet off to Cape Town and the Côte d'Azur. However, with museum acquisition budgets shamefully in freefall, more and more of our national artefacts seem destined to leave the country.
None of this is to suggest that aristocrats - like anyone else - should not be allowed to dispose of their property as they wish. But with personal greed subsuming any sense of noblesse oblige or the national interest, it is time the hallowed romance of titled wealth was dispelled. The modern British nobility increasingly represents large, land-owning corporations ruthlessly focused on shareholder value. After a brief flirtation with the national interest, the aristocracy is back to putting dynasty before duty.
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Tristram Hunt: As more paintings leave our galleries to be sold on the open market, the aristocracy is abandoning all pretence of altruism.
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Rapid7 of Boston finds Android flaw
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The Boston computer security company Rapid7 warned Monday that millions of smartphones and tablet computers running Google Inc.’s Android operating system are susceptible to a security flaw that a Rapid7 official called “a privacy disaster.”
Engineering director Tod Beardsley said the flaw would enable hackers to steal data using the browsers on most Android phones. This could allow a criminal to “access sensitive information from other Web pages the user has visited, such as cookies, saved passwords, local storage, or any data entered into the website,” Beardsley said.
The bug affects all versions of Android except the most recent, nicknamed “KitKat” and released last fall.
Android is the world’s most popular operating system for smartphones, with about 85 percent of global market share. Beardsley estimated that 75 percent of Android devices use older versions of the software and are therefore susceptible to the bug. Some Android users may be able to update their phones to KitKat.
The flaw was first publicized in late August by an independent software security consultant, Rafay Baloch. Rapid7 said that one of its researchers, Joe Vennix, has now developed a working exploit of the bug, proving that it could be used to steal data.
“We believe attackers are likely using it in the wild,” Beardsley said, “so we wanted to give security professionals an easy way to test it so they can properly defend themselves and their organizations.”
Many smartphone and tablet users open multiple Web pages at the same time. The Android bug would let criminals set up a malicious Web page that could capture data stored on other open pages.
“Imagine you went to an attacker’s site while you had your webmail open in another window,” Beardsley wrote on the Rapid7 blog. “The attacker could scrape your e-mail data and see what your browser sees. Worse, he could snag a copy of your session cookie and hijack your session completely, and read and write webmail on your behalf.”
Beardsley later added that there is no evidence criminals have actually used the bug to steal data, but it would be difficult to know if they had.
A Rapid7 spokeswoman said the company has not contacted Google directly about the bug. Google did not respond to requests for comment.
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Boston-based computer security company Rapid7 a warning Monday that most of the world’s smartphones and tablet computers running Google Inc.’s Android operating system are susceptible to a security flaw that could let criminals steal users’ personal data.
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Ian Jack on the revival of English watercolours
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Earlier this month the Guardian devoted its Eyewitness centrespread to a watercolour landscape by David Hockney. It was one of 36 he'd painted in July and August last year under the collective title Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2004 and it immediately caused the kind of question that rarely troubles art critics to be asked in our house. From my wife: "If it's midsummer, why are those umbellifers looking so autumnal and I wonder what those red flowers are on the right?" From me: "Is it any better or worse than the thousands of other watercolours which must have been painted in 2004 which also show flowers and fields?"
I imagine the second question was asked in many households - another newspaper anticipated it by publishing one of the Hockney series next to a watercolour by Prince Charles and inviting readers to judge which was the more accomplished. But perhaps my question was beside the point - the point being that Britain's most celebrated living painter had taken up watercolours, an unfashionable medium. As the Guardian writer, Charlotte Higgins, put it, Hockney's series represented "a reassertion of the watercolour as an artistic endeavour".
The watercolour is a very English phenomenon. Artists and draughtsmen had used water-based paint for centuries in preliminary sketches, cartoons, and architectural drawings, but it was only in the last decades of the 18th century that the technique was deployed to make finished art. The Royal Academy at first rejected watercolours and then displayed them reluctantly and poorly. A group of artists broke away and in 1805 founded the Society of Painters in Watercolours, the second oldest artistic institution in England after the RA itself, and since 1881 known as the Royal Watercolour Society, the RWS. English romantic poetry and the heightened patriotism of the Napoleonic wars made the English landscape the watercolour's early and enduring speciality, and the watercolour a national art form. Portraits were frowned on. When the society admitted its first woman member in 1809, she alone was allowed to submit paintings of flowers.
The movement produced many wonderful pictures by painters who included John Sell Cotman, JMW Turner, and Samuel Palmer. Its techniques were quicker and easier than oils, its equipment was cheaper and much more portable: it became the amateur painter's favourite and among reasonably well-off Victorian women a social accomplishment ranked with the piano. This combination of popularity and insularity (cut off from artistic developments in Europe) made it ripe for its fall from fashion. The RWS's present archivist, Simon Fenwick, tells the story in his excellent history of the society, The Enchanted River (2004), where Roger Fry, the Francophile art critic and founder of the influential Burlington Magazine, plays his part as a villain. It was Fry who attacked the watercolours of John Singer Sargent as "vulgarly picturesque"; Fry who organised the 1910 exhibition in London of Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the show which, as Fenwick records, "elicited Virginia Woolf's melodramatic remark that in or around December 1910 human nature changed"; Fry who dismissed the superb tonal arrangements of Cotman as the work of "the perfect drawing master" (a bad thing).
It took a long time for the English watercolour to catch up with European modernism, if it ever did. The words that began to stick to it were "quaint", "lady" and "genteel". Fry saw watercolours in terms of furniture, suited to "the lighter and more delicate schemes of decoration possible to the semi-detached householder" who would never own the oak-panelled halls fit for oils. (The semi-detached householder - middle class, suburban, what could be worse?)
If you walk across the new Thames bridge from St Paul's to the South Bank, you can see the results of the last century's revolutionary change in artistic taste. Facing you and filling the horizon is the monumental Tate Modern. Somewhere off to the right, buried beneath a 1970s block of flats and in the same row as a Starbucks, is the barely visible Bankside gallery, the headquarters of the Royal Watercolour Society since 1980.
Last Sunday I walked over the bridge with my children. First we went to see the Tate's latest piece of installation art, Rachel Whiteread's boxes which are scattered in piles, some very high, on the floor of the old turbine hall. They are not actual boxes, but reproductions of boxes in a white plastic material; a stack of them looks like a Cubist iceberg, and a notice warns visitors not to climb on them "in case of falling". The place was packed - the Tate is a "destination". There were people wandering among the boxes and taking pictures of each other with their mobiles (we did the same), and a crowd in the gallery watching the people wandering and taking pictures of them taking pictures; my children made several suggestions about how the boxes could be more fun. We did not know quite what we had seen, or how interesting it was.
Then we walked a hundred yards or so to the Bankside. As usual, it was nearly empty. As usual, they had some fine things on the walls and in the racks - etchings and woodcuts as well as watercolours, mainly figurative, mostly cheap. To see what people can do with a brush or an engraving tool - how succesfully or delightfully they can explore and catch (and in catching, change) some aspect of the visible world - those things are to me always fascinating.
The Bankside's bookshop has many books of the How to ... kind. How to lay a wash, how to tackle perspective, how to achieve highlights. The watercolour is still an immensely popular hobby and craft, though these days it is rarely taught in art schools. When I talked to him, Fenwick said: "The fact that it gives pleasure to so many people is one reason that it isn't highly regarded." That may be true, and it may be that Hockney will change it. But it is also true that the English watercolour doesn't so much need "reasserting" as noticing. The Bankside gallery of the RWS is a good place to start, and well worth a diversion on your way to the Tate.
· Ian Jack is editor of Granta
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Ian Jack on the revival of English watercolours.
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Interview: Gilbert and George
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It is George who opens the door of their expansive, oddly church-like house on one of east London's most beautifully preserved streets, looking, as always, like an eccentric vicar on a day off. The stiff suit, posh voice and formal handshake are all straight out of another time when protocol was all, and civility the norm rather than the exception. 'Welcome, welcome,' he says, but, as soon as the door closes behind you, you wonder what kind of world you are being welcomed into.
He leads me down a long, wood-lined hallway, though a door that leads into a small courtyard, and into another even more expansive house which has been converted into a studio. There Gilbert, looking, as always, like a slightly mad bank manager, is waiting. He is smaller, more effusive, and, for all his adopted English formality, still sounds definably Italian, almost comically so.
"Allo,' he beams, and bids me sit down at a long table, where I am given an invite to their new show. It features a black cross on a white background overlaid with the show's title: 'Sonofagod Pictures', and underneath, the subtitle, 'Was Jesus Heterosexual?' It is pure Gilbert & George: slightly provocative, slightly perverse, a little bit bonkers but in an ordered and obsessive way. A bit like their studio environment, their work, themselves.
'We like the title, "Sonofagod"', says Gilbert, looking pleased as Punch, 'because, if you say it in a certain way, it sounds like son-of-fag-got.' This amuses him greatly and he dissolves into silent giggles. George smiles down on him like an indulgent headmaster. 'Always the double meaning,' he says. 'That's what life's about. Not dogmatism.'
I notice they have used the word 'mufti' in one of their new works, a very Gilbert & Georgian word. 'Oh, a wonderful word, indeed,' says George, smiling. 'But we found out it has another meaning apart from the English one. It's also a person who can issue a fatwa. Terrifying, really.'
We have assembled on their home turf to talk art, religion, and maybe even politics, the three topics guaranteed to ruin any drink-fuelled dinner party. Luckily, Gilbert & George don't drink like they used to back in the Seventies, which was in an ordered, obsessive and drop-down-dead-drunk way, in the cause of Art. In their day, it is said, they could have taught the YBAs a thing or two about oblivion. Now, as they approach the age when ordinary people consider retiring - Gilbert is 62, George 64 - their art and life share a more sombre hue, though they still seem determined to shake things up. 'Mufti' is only the start of it.
'We think the Pope should be dragged into the court of human rights,' says George, when I ask why he is so exercised by religion. 'All the suffering these people have invented and perpetuated. Think of the Pope's policy on condoms: how can you not be angry?' Gilbert nods: 'Saying you should make holes in the condoms! Holes! Absurd, no?' It could be a conceptual art piece, I say, a condom with a hole in it. They both laugh, then fall oddly silent.
So, it's Catholicism you're against, I ask. Isn't that a bit of an easy target? Surely you should be confronting Muslim extremism? Now, that would be brave - or foolhardy. 'Oh, they're all the same,' says George. 'Same tradition. A bit more totalitarian.' He walks over to the studio door and begins reading from a poster pinned to it in his best C of E voice: 'Verily, it is time to rejoice in the coming state of Islam. There will be no negotiation with Islam. It is only a short time before the flag of Islam flies over Downing Street...?' He walks back to the table. 'Extraordinary, no?' Gilbert nods in agreement. 'It came through the letter box. Unbelievable! Every Friday they hand these leaflets out on Brick Lane.' He shakes his head in bemusement. 'The old generation of Muslims were subdued but not the young generation. Sometimes they go around at night and smash in doors. Ours!'
Hadn't you better be careful, I say, in these uncertain times, what with blasphemy laws and incitement laws, not to mention roving gangs of fundamentalists, actual fatwas... 'Oh, we're always careful,' says Gilbert, ' We don't like to confront or be offensive. Ever.' I am just about to mention the 'Naked Shit Pictures' they made in the Nineties, or the 'Dirty Word Pictures' from the Seventies but George is already off on a tangent. 'We had a visit from the Bishop of Stepney recently,' he says. 'I told him we had quite a following among the clergy, which is true. He said, very sweetly, "I'm not surprised at all, dear boy."' Gilbert giggles. 'We always seem to have at least one vicar at our openings, don't we, George?' 'Always,' says George.
What is it, I ask, that attracts the odd vicar? 'I think a lot of them feel we are the nearest modern art comes to exploring their subject,' says George sincerely. 'Picasso never did it, did he?' Gilbert shakes his head. 'Never,' he says. 'Sex and religion are still the great taboos in modern art.' George nods. 'Extraordinary really. You just have to say the words "gay vicar", and it all goes mad.' George giggles some more. 'Or, "lesbian pope!"' he chortles.
In his catalogue essay for the new Gilbert & George show, Michael Bracewell invokes the guiding spirits of Baudelaire and TS Eliot but makes no mention at all of Morecambe and Wise. In person, though, Gilbert & George are British art's greatest and longest-running double act, although you'd be hard-pressed to say who's the straight guy, which one is Ernie, and which one Eric. They met in 1967 when, like the girl in the Pulp song, they were studying sculpture at St Martin's college. 'Since we left that place,' says Gilbert, proudly, 'they have never wanted anything to do with us.'
Back then, Gilbert was Gilbert Proesch and hailed from a small village in the Dolomites, George was George Passmore from Plymouth. In the iconoclastic spirit of the times, they rejected sculpture and surnames, and decided to turn themselves into a living work of art. They have remained one ever since, their oddness congealing into a kind of signature, as instantly identifiable as the pictures they make. Initially, though, they called themselves 'The Singing Sculpture', and specialised in a deadpan version of 'Underneath the Arches', which they delivered standing still, side by side in their suits, their hands and faces painted bronze. A friend who saw them back then says they were 'odd but ubiquitous', and they have remained so ever since.
They have been together, in art and in life, for 40-odd years now, somehow staying abreast of the times by making art that, as George once put it, 'is both old and young'. They first entered the mainstream conscious fleetingly in 1977 when their show 'Dirty Words Pictures' briefly made headlines with its blend of smut and shock tactics, only to be outdone in the outrage stakes by the Sex Pistols swearing on TV.
One controversial piece from that time featured their blank, vicarish faces staring out above the word 'BUGGER', and they have traded on that paradox ever since, their apparent normalness contrasting with, and heightening, the apparent obscenity of their subject matter. In the Eighties they provoked a storm of criticism for the seemingly ultra-nationalist emblems embedded in their work, and for a picture of an Asian man alongside the word 'Paki'. One man's insult is another man's art provocation. Later still they attracted a thousand people a day to the South London Gallery for their show 'Naked Shit Paintings', which featured them doing exactly what it said on the invite.
'They never knew what we would do next,' says Gilbert. 'That is why we were not invited to the Venice Biennale for so long. They thought we might embarrass them.' George takes over. 'We like to ask questions, and provoke thought through our work. So much modern art is timid, it is made for collectors, and it just sits there on the wall, almost invisible.'
George then describes one of his great epiphanies concerning the condition of modern art. He was undertaking one of his daily walks through London when, as he puts it, 'I was suddenly confronted by a wall on which a person had written the words, "My Wife Sucks Dogs Balls"'. It suddenly struck me how tame and middle-class so-called confrontational art is. It's not shocking at all, is it, compared to that. It's tame and it's timid. Only the terminally middle-class could be shocked by it.'
Ironically, though, the same might now be said of their own work, which has become a signature of sorts, instantly recognisable, reassuringly familiar. Despite all their shock tactics over the last three decades, they have inevitably become a fixture on the British art scene, and even a kind of national treasure: the odd couple who delight in making dirty pictures. On their daily walks from Spitalfields to Dalston, where they dine nightly in the same Turkish restaurant, old ladies often come up to them on the street and shake their hands. 'We always say, they really like us, or they are on Prozac,' giggles Gilbert.
Now their self-styled outsider status is also under threat from the embrace of the art establishment that for so long held them at arm's length. Next year, after decades of what they describe as 'total neglect' in Britain, there will be a major retrospective of their work at Tate Modern. What once was shocking now seems perfectly acceptable, familiar even. Recently, too, they moved from the Antony d'Offay gallery to the altogether more trendy White Cube, owned by Brit Art maverick Jay Jopling. When I ask them why they split with D'Offay after 20 years, Gilbert narrows his eyes theatrically and says, 'We hated him. He got under our skin. Slowly. He was of the opinion that he was more important than the artist.'
George nods in agreement. 'Jay is wonderful. Charismatic.' They tell me they first met Jopling when he was 'just a little teenager'. Apparently he knocked on their door in 1986, collecting money for charity. 'For the big show in the park,' says Gilbert. 'For Sir Bob,' says George, 'Can you imagine?' Frankly, no. Jopling, they tell me, was also a teenage fan, and his very first art purchase was one of their early books.
These days, Gilbert & George's art is of the more emblematic kind: big, backlit assemblages, heavy on symbolism, overlaid with text, both po-mo in its playfulness and oddly medieval in style. There is a certain campness there still, but they have shed the outright smuttiness, the nudity, the profanity and innuendo, in favour of a kind of epic modern symbolism that can be both ominous and baffling. You can look at a Gilbert & George work until the cows come home, checking out the gamut of imagery, from Masonic to heraldic, Hebraic to pagan, and never really get to the bottom of what it is they are on about, save for some fusing of opposites: sacred and profane, iconoclastic and traditional, elevated and debased.
I ask them to talk me through the picture inside the invite. It is a work in black, grey and gold, with four crosses in the foreground, each one bearing a bizarre Christlike figure, one of which has two heads, another of which looks like the Alien in Ridley Scott's film of the same name. Various symbols are arranged around the crosses: the three-legged insignia of the Isle of Man, the crescent moon and star of Turkey, a crown, a Judaic ornament, and two mildly phallic metal objects that look like bullets. Gilbert & George are there in the background, as always, though out-of-focus and opaque, waving out of this symbolic minefield like bemused tourists. It seems ordered and, at the same time, oddly haphazard. What though, does it all mean?
'We couldn't possibly say,' sighs Gilbert. 'It's all about life. Emotion. But I cannot explain it. That is not the job of the artist. You just cannot read an artwork in that way. It's how you connect, how you feel. When I stand in front of a small painting by Samuel Palmer, it is just mysterious. That is its power. It has no fixed meaning. It evades words.' George nods. 'Do you know what these are?" he says, pointing at the small phallic objects. 'Prayer containers. Everyone in Brick Lane is wearing one. And they look like bullets. Extraordinary, no?'
In the past 40 years they have seen their adopted East End neighbourhood change dramatically. 'It was Jewish when we arrived,' says George, 'then it got arty, then Maltese, then Somali, then the city boys came. Now it's families, and the new art elite.' (Tracey Emin lives around the corner, Jake and Dinos Chapman have a studio just up the road, Rachel Whiteread a house just down the street.) 'We were here first, though,' says Gilbert, and, in more ways than one, this is true.
The only people people Gilbert & George's art seems to offend these days are the Reverend Ian Paisley, whose followers famously picketed a recent Gilbert & George show in Belfast, and Brian Sewell, the equally puritanical art critic of the Evening Standard, whose loathing for conceptualism is limitless and obsessive.
'Oh, Belfast was very good!' says George, 'They all had megaphones...' 'And raincoats!' says Gilbert, mysteriously. 'They were chanting "Sodom and Gomorrah" over and over,' continues Gilbert, beaming at the memory. 'I asked one of them, "Where exactly is that club? It sounds great."'
When I mention Sewell's name, George strides out of the room, and returns, moments later, brandishing a sheet of paper. 'Found it!' he says, excitedly. 'It's all the key words from a Brian Sewell review of one of our shows. We wrote them down for posterity.' He begins reading aloud in his best Sewell voice: '"Posers, trivial, clean, dirty, dick, lowlife, unkempt, lavatory, ejaculation, emptying bowels, bladder, comely adolescent boy, four-letter words, black penis springing from white loins, Gilbert's anus, youth with greasy torso, sodomolenos, tapioca de wankeur, schoolboy smut, bilge, blasphemy."'
He shakes his head in wonder, 'All in one review!' George is giggling again. 'Tapioca de wankeur!' he says, barely able to get the words out. 'It's so good, it's almost art.' They are both laughing now, and you feel like they could go on like this forever, bouncing ideas, jokes, words, pictures off each other, always secure in the knowledge that their vision is, at least, a shared one, and that the last laugh will somehow always be theirs. You really couldn't make them up.
· Sonofagod Pictures opens at the White Cube, London N1 on 20 January
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They were the terrible-twin outsiders in the Sixties, but now Gilbert & George are a national treasure. With a new dealer and a typically perverse new show, they're as rude and witty as ever. But does their work still have the power to shock, now that it's popular with old ladies and vicars? Well, it still makes them giggle ...
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Photography: William Wegman: Funney/Strange
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William Wegman: Funney/Strange Brooklyn Museum, New York, until 28 May
William Wegman fell in love with a dog and made an artistic career out of this impossible infatuation. At art school in Boston in the 1960s, he juggled 'isms': should he align himself with pop culture like Warhol or play the conceptual games prescribed by the Minimalists? His early graphic work, which introduces his retrospective show Funney/Strange at the Brooklyn Museum, was simple-mindedly whimsical. One drawing consisted of the letters 'e' and 'l' scribbled 16 times each; another sketched four hairpins and four paperclips that have been twisted out of shape. In a third, he copied a handful of coins that add up to 70 cents. Looking at this, you feel in every sense short-changed.
But in 1970, Wegman found his vocation when he bought a weimaraner puppy. He named the dog after Man Ray and justified the choice by saying that the dog looked like a little man, or had rays of light beaming on to it or emanating from it. In one photograph, he even suggested that Man Ray might be the Messiah: the dog has a kitchen mop on his head and the wooden handle, diagonally poking up into the sky, is solarised by a beam of light that broadcasts an annunciation.
Man Ray became Wegman's muse and model, almost his other half. The dog wore fancy dress to illustrate the malleability of identity; he conscientiously worked his way through the history of art, showing off his spindly legs as if they were classical columns, sporting a cornucopia of vegetables like one of Arcimboldo's portraits or dolefully mimicking the pose of the emaciated figure who plays on Picasso's blue guitar.
Emotionally needy, almost symbiotically dependent on their owners, with a hangdog expression that seems to be complaining about the metamorphosis that has trapped them in the wrong body, weimaraners are a breed that will happily do whatever you ask them.
Man Ray developed a slippery semiotic versatility. With a sock on his nose and a pair of tusks drooping from his jowls, he resembled an elephant. Wearing pointy ears and apparently hanging from the ceiling, he could be a bat. On the cover of the New Yorker, he appeared in the guise of the snooty, monocled dandy Eustace Tilley. For the cover of John F Kennedy Jr's political magazine, George, he dressed up as Washington, the augustly bewigged founder of the republic. He had the dignity to carry off both impersonations; we are a long way from the neurotic tizzes of Paris Hilton's flatulent chihuahua. When Man Ray died in 1982, the Village Voice quite properly elected him Man of the Year.
Wegman replaced Man Ray with a bitch which, in a rhyming pun, he called Fay Ray. He was alluding to Fay Wray, who played the original object of King Kong's affection, a specialist in the forbidden love that vaults across the gap between species. Fay obligingly played the dressing-up games that Wegman had taught her predecessor.
After a while, the obligations of celebrity began to hang heavy. In a photograph entitled Lolita, Fay drapes herself in a Bauhaus chair that has the same uncomfortable angularity as her own bony limbs, and scowls with a diva's sulky impatience as she awaits her close-up. In another of Wegman's habitual puns, she is portrayed as 'Fey Ray': she has just applied Revlon polish to her nails and holds out a paw while waiting for the red dye to dry.
Wegman, shrewdly self-protective, has always tried to fend off intrusive interpreters. He complains that people often ask what his work stands for and he usually replies: 'It doesn't stand, it sits.' Or it lies. In one of his most elegantly deadpan photographic sequences, Fay mimics Eadweard Muybridge's freeze-frame studies of a galloping horse and does so while lying flat on the floor, her legs rearranged to match the stages of the process.
But despite Wegman's goofy disavowals, the fascination that his work exerts needs explaining. Why does the audience laugh so delightedly when he trots out his dogs on David Letterman's late-night talk show and has them daintily lap milk from glasses, not bowls? Why did I spend so many minutes watching a video of Man Ray asleep in bed, his head on a pillow and a single paw sticking out?
Animal behaviour enables us to look at ourselves, to study the solemn absurdity of the existence to which we were condemned when we became animate and uprooted ourselves from nature. The dogs' earnest determination to learn is touchingly human; it is humbling because it teaches us that we are not superior to our fellow creatures.
The way Wegman costumes his dogs as personifications of human vice or folly - Man Ray as a bad dog with satanic horns, glowering in the domestic inferno of a fireplace or Fay swanning about in couture gowns as arrogantly as Naomi Campbell - reminds us that these moral flaws are our prerogative, the unique disgrace of our species. Animals cannot pretend, are never untruthful and should not be blamed for doing what is natural to them. They exist in a state of innocence; the fall happened only to us. Then we established ourselves as the deadliest of predators, laying waste to the planet we control. No wonder we snuggle up to our pets with a craven desperation. We are asking them to forgive us.
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Photography: The absurdity of human existence is exposed by William Wegman, a photographer who fell in love with a dog. Peter Conrad finds out more.
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Family mourns teenager drowned on trip of a lifetime
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Callum Howkins (left) with dad Gavin on the ill-fated holiday. (Supplied)
A British teenager who drowned while swimming with dolphins in the island nation of Mauritius posted exuberant updates on social media in the days before his death.
Seventeen-year-old Callum Howkins had travelled to the island to act as best man at his father's wedding.
"Sitting on a beach, drinking from coconuts, watching the women's water aerobics. Could life get any better?" he posted on Twitter two days before the ceremony.
Howkins died on a snorkelling expedition shortly after the ceremony. His body was found in a renowned surfing beach known to be a favourite of dolphin pods – Tamarin Bay.
The teenager had gone snorkelling with a tour group, and other swimmers alerted authorities when he failed to return to the boat.
After an hour-long search, the coastguard found his body – he was already dead.
A police spokesperson said that the investigation was continuing, and declined to offer details.
"The investigation is at a very early stage and we are not yet prepared to discuss details of the accident," he said.
The skipper of the boat has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, and was granted bail by a court.
Howkins' mother Louise said he was "beautiful inside and out".
"I can't put into words how amazing he was," he said. "We want to celebrate his life."
His father Gavin described him as "a perfect gentleman".
"He treated everyone with so much respect," he said. "He touched everybody’s lives. He didn’t even need to speak to anyone for people to like him."
Author: Lachlan Williams; Approving Editor: Emily McPherson
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A British teenager who drowned while swimming with dolphins in the island nation of Mauritius posted exuberant updates on social media in the days before his death.
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Crying baby left brain dead after parents fed him crystal meth
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A four-month-old baby was left "clinically dead" after his drug-addicted parents gave him crystal meth to stop him from crying.
Slovenian husband and wife Silvia Strnadova, 26, and Miroslav, 30, took their unconscious child to hospital where they demanded to see a doctor.
But the child was already brain dead and is now only being kept alive by a life support machine, said Anna Moracikiva, the hospital's head doctor.
"The child's brain is severely damaged and he is clinically dead. His chances of survival are minimal and he is being kept alive by a life support machine," she said.
Miroslav 'the Crocodile' and Silvia Strnadova (Supplied).
Police arrested the couple after doctors discovered the infant had been given a strong dose of methamphetamine.
Neighbours were shocked when they heard the news about the couple but admitted the couple had a notorious reputation in the town of Prievidza, in the north west of the European nation.
"Really weird people kept going to their apartment. I always worried about letting my children play outside because you never knew what would happen," neighbour Jana Trznikova said.
Ms Trznikova said Miroslav was known as the "Crocodile" due to his dangerous short temper and because he had "a reputation for being the best crystal meth cooker".
A police spokesman said the father admitted to giving the baby meth to stop it crying and was arrested for neglect and causing harm to the child.
"That may change if the child dies," the spokesman said.
"He is in custody, while the woman has for the time being been released."
The mother, who has two more children to two different fathers, is being investigated for failing to protect the infant.
Source: Daily Mail Author: Nicholas McCallum, Approving editor: Simon Black
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A four-month-old baby was left "clinically dead" after his drug-addicted parents gave him crystal meth stops him from crying.
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The pain of modern art
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I was enjoying a quiet game of Scrabble with Dad at my parents' house this week when I was stricken with vomiting and a pain in my chest that made it almost impossible to breathe. Eventually, an ambulance took me to Lewisham hospital to discern, after six hours of agony and hyperventilation, that I had trapped wind. More as a sop to respectability than a palliative, I think, they gave me a syringeful of what was basically liquid Kwells and sent me on my way.
Looking back on those six hours, I cannot help but notice that not once did I call for some modern art. Not for the giant £70,000 pebble by sculptor John Aiken purchased by UCL last year or anything acquired by NHS South West during a recent £400,000 spending spree. It turns out that when you are ill, frightened, or in pain - even if it does slightly anticlimactically turn out to be the result of thwarted burping - your mental vista shrinks to a tiny window obscured by a heavy scrawl saying "Where is a doctor who can take away my illness, fright or pain, and could I have him soon, please? (PS While I am aware that men and women are doctors and unquestionably equally adept in the job, I am in sufficient distress not to bother with politically correct double pronouns.)"
I try to greet the bubbles that often rise to the surface of this world of boiling insanity with equanimity. But there is something about the existence not just of people willing to pay this sort of money but of enough of them to form the committees, sign off on the infinite mass of paperwork the NHS purchase of anything bigger than a Biro generates, and then face down the patients who stare in dismay at the aesthetically pleasing but medically useless object before them.
I always want to ask - did nobody, nobody at all in the long chain of decision-makers that must surely stretch out behind the existence of this cripplingly expensive rock ever think to stop and ask whether there was not some way that this cash, or the energies - the well-intentioned though hopelessly misguided energies - that went into raising it could have been diverted into researching the causes of leukaemia, say, or into raising awareness of the fact that the NHS is about to break under the strain of imbecilities like this?
Of course, my reaction is aggravated by the fact that I have a plebeian, simplistic and - oh, what's the word - yes, normal take on modern art. Namely, that anything that requires you to take a chainsaw to a carcass, piss into a mould or build a giant slide might be a valuable asset when you are attempting to stage the kind of stag weekend that will live in the minds of later Nuts generations fulfils only half of the brief.
It's modern, but if you're not painting misty lilies and bridges in dots (rather than arranging them in geometric patterns like overpriced Twister games) or sculpting entwined human forms that bring forth eternal passions out of a solid block of marble, it's not art. Although this is hardly as important when it's sitting outside a hospital, at the price of a departmental research head, as the fact that it's not science.
On Halloween various children rang the bell, to whom I distributed vividly hued pellets of sugar and E numbers with a liberal hand. Then a lad of about 11 turned up - no costume, no mask, no make-up. "Trick or treat?" he said. "But you've not dressed up," I pointed out. "No," he said equably.
"I thought you could use your imagination." I gave him a fiver. Next year he'll probably be my MP.
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Lucy Mangan: when you are ill, frightened, or in pain your mental vista shrinks to a tiny window obscured by a heavy scrawl saying 'Where is a doctor who can take away my illness, fright or pain, and could I have him soon, please?'
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Antonia Bennett follows her famous father’s example
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Show-business success comes with plenty of perks. For Antonia Bennett, one of them was that her family had a special arrangement with Santa Claus.
“We would always open our presents on Christmas Eve, because Santa Claus understood that dad was an entertainer and had to sleep in on Christmas morning, so he came to our house first,” she says, recalling the story her parents told her when she was little. “It made a lot of sense to me, because people did things out of the ordinary for my dad all the time,” she adds.
Her dad, as the astute reader may have guessed, is the inimitable singer Tony Bennett.
Antonia has sung in front of audiences for as long she can remember, called out onstage as a small child to chime in, for special occasions, on fare like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” — though not necessarily with any new lyrics about Santa’s very considerate schedule adjustments.
But Bennett, 40, has been a professional songstress in her own right her whole adult life, since bolstering her musicianship at Berklee College of Music after a childhood full of priceless apprenticeship.
She’s been a regular opening act (and mid-set guest) for her father over the past 10 years or so, and more recently has struck out on her own as a solo recording artist. Following a 2010 EP and an album-length, digital-only release two years later, she’s now released her first full-fledged LP: “Embrace Me,” an album of American Songbook standards.
“As a musician she sings the right songs, in tune and with feeling,” Tony Bennett says of his daughter in an e-mail. “She also knows how to phrase. When I perform with her, I love the audience reaction. They get a big kick out of it, and I love it.”
Antonia marks the release of the album (“Embrace Me”) with a show at Scullers Jazz Club on Thursday, supported by pianist Christian Jacob, bassist Marshall Wood, and drummer Marcello Pellitteri. Then she’ll join her father in her accustomed support role when he headlines Tanglewood on Aug. 31.
“Embrace Me,” on which she’s backed by the Jon Davis Trio, displays Bennett’s taste for the songs and performance approach of yesteryear. A memorable 2002 review in The New York Times, of a Steve Tyrell show in which she made a two-song guest spot, said she “conjures echoes of Billie Holiday and Rickie Lee Jones (with a hint of Betty Boop).”
“She has a nostalgic tone and style that harkens back to the ’40s,” says the songwriter and producer Holly Knight, who has worked with Bennett on her recent studio projects. “She has the kind of voice you want to listen to while you curl up with a cup of hot cocoa and a kitten in your lap, if that makes sense. She has her own sound and it isn’t anything like her father.”
These standards are among the songs she grew up singing, surrounded from her earliest days by great entertainers. She remembers holiday parties with Mel Tormé and Frank Sinatra among the guests, and visits to the homes of family friends such as Dean Martin. There were annual Christmas Day visits (once everybody was awake and ready to go) to Ella Fitzgerald’s house. Crucially, she also had those opportunities to join her father onstage, which gradually evolved from the early, novelty appearances into serious duets and extended guest spots.
“I kind of learned how to do things backward. I did a concert before I really knew what I was doing. And I got addicted to the instant gratification of the audience,” she says in a telephone interview. “It was not so strange for me” to start performing as a professional, she says, “because I had been on those stages, or standing back behind them, my whole life. And the process was gradual.”
Mr. Bennett has long welcomed his daughter’s enthusiasm.
“She loved every minute of it, so I always encouraged her,” he says.
Antonia says she continues to learn from her father whenever they work together. Often the lessons come just by following his example. She remembers joining him onstage at Tanglewood as a teenager. It was the largest audience she’d ever performed for, and she was nervous. At a key moment, the cord to her microphone got wedged under the piano. As she remembers it, her father stepped in to yank the cord loose, but in the process sent the microphone flying out of her hands and across the stage.
“I was so embarrassed — he was calm, cool, and collected,” she says with a hearty laugh. “But it was such a great learning experience, because I realized that when you make a human mistake like that onstage, the audience is always rooting for you. They love you even more.”
With the advent of cordless microphones, she doesn’t anticipate having that particular problem again. But whatever new challenges this business throws at her, you could say she’s learned from the best.
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Jazz singer Antonia Bennett, who celebrates the release of her debut album at Scullers on Thursday, talks about what she learned growing up with famous father Tony.
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http://fortune.com/2014/09/25/hootesuite-60-million-ipo/
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Hootsuite raises $60 million, gets closer to IPO
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Social media management company Hootsuite this morning announced that it has raised $60 million in new private equity and debt funding, bringing its total outside financing figure to $250 million.
The key here is lead investor Fidelity Investments, which Hootsuite only refers to in its press release as “a large Boston-based asset manager.” A firm like Fidelity doesn’t put anyone on a startup’s board, nor does it typically offer any operational advice. Instead, it simply farms out shares to its various mutual funds, thus giving the startup a foothold when it comes time to go public.
“We are building a company that looks like a public company and one reason we’re excited about our new partner is their IPO expertise,” says Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, who also declined to identify Fidelity as the new round’s lead investor.
Other participants on the deal included existing backers Accel Partners, Insight Venture Partners and OMERS Ventures – plus lender Silicon Valley Bank.
Holmes explains that some of the new capital will be used for acquisitions, including the recent purchase of social telephony company Zeetl. Broadly speaking, he says that Hootsuite must expand its social advertising solutions offerings to customers, some of which might be done inorganically. “We can help direct our customers to which social networks — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or others — are most relevant to their users at which times of day,” he says. “The evolution of social is a lot like the evolution of search, in that it will end up with a blend of organic and paid.”
He declined to discuss valuation for the new round, although an earlier WSJ report suggested that it could be in the ballpark of $800 million. The Vancouver-based company said that it now has more than 10 million users in over 175 countries.
Sign up for Term Sheet, our daily newsletter on deals and dealmakers.
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Hootsuite expects to use some of its new money for M&A, perhaps for companies that enable social advertising.
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http://fortune.com/2014/05/20/jamie-dimon-to-shareholders-im-going-nowhere/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141001053143id_/http://fortune.com/2014/05/20/jamie-dimon-to-shareholders-im-going-nowhere/
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Jamie Dimon to shareholders: ‘I’m going nowhere’
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20141001053143
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FORTUNE — Jamie Dimon is in for the long haul at J.P. Morgan Chase.
The CEO of the largest U.S. bank recently told a group of shareholders he wants to stay on at J.P Morgan for as many as five more years, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
“I’m going nowhere,” Dimon reportedly told attendees at a April 23 event in Boston, adding that the bank’s board has the final say over the length of his tenure.
Dimon has served as CEO of the largest U.S. bank for the past eight years. Adding another five years would rank his tenure among those of the longest-serving Wall Street CEOs, joining the likes of Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers for almost 14 years until the firm collapsed in 2008, and Jimmy Cayne, who ran Bear Sterns for nearly 15 years. Cayne also ended his run in 2008 in the midst of the subprime meltdown.
MORE: Target fires head of Canadian operations
Dimon’s latest revelation reverses his tone from a year ago when he hinted he would leave the bank if shareholders decide to separate his roles of chairman and chief executive.
Dimon has spent the past year actively meeting with investors and activist groups, which seems to have paid off. This year’s annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday is expected to be significantly quieter than last year, and for the first time in five years there will be no vote on whether Dimon’s dual role should be split.
The muted tone among shareholders comes in the wake of a rough year for Dimon, who faced a series of regulatory challenges at the bank that ended in $20 billion worth of fines. Earnings also disappointed this past quarter: J.P. Morgan reported an 8% drop in revenue from the year prior.
A J.P. Morgan spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
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J.P. Morgan chief executive says he's ready to stay on at the bank for another five years.
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http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/mar/19/architecture
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141002215347id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/mar/19/architecture
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Jonathan Glancey on the life of James 'Athenian' Stuart
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20141002215347
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The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday March 23 2007
The following feature states that Spencer House, overlooking Green Park, "did once belong to the late Princess Diana's family". It still does. The family has continued to use it for celebratory occasions, although it has been leased out since the 1920s. In this article we also misnamed the court architect to Ludwig I of Bavaria as Leo von Kline. He was von Klenze. This has been corrected.
A few miles to the east of Regensburg, along the banks of the Danube, stands one of the most extraordinary buildings in Europe. This is the Walhalla, a temple to German heroes, commissioned by Ludwig I of Bavaria from his court architect, Leo von Klenze. Built between 1816 and 1842, it is a near-exact reproduction of the Parthenon.
At first sight, the Walhalla seems unreal, especially when experienced on a bitingly cold winter's day deep in snow, its Athenian architecture a long way from its natural, sun-kissed home. And yet, such was the power in the early 19th-century European imagination of the architecture of ancient Greece - its beauty, geometry and all it stood for - that the Parthenon and various other temples were reproduced across the western world. For something like a century, beginning in the 1760s, the Greek revival was not only one of the most potent forces in European architecture, it was also, perhaps, the first truly global form of architectural design. It saw whole temple fronts reproduced in Britain, Bavaria, Poland, Finland, Russia, the US and beyond, as if they had been transported from ancient Greece to the 19th century, through some wormhole in time and space.
The driving spirit behind this global Greek design was a Londoner called James "Athenian" Stuart, who taught himself Greek and Latin. Stuart liked the good life and found it hard to complete commissions; his work, though based on careful scholarship, was often whimsical and unlike - very unlike - that of the powerful architectural Greek devotees who followed in his wake, giving us the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the British Museum in London, the New Admiralty in St Petersburg and countless US country houses.
Stuart, the Indiana Jones of his day, is the star of a new show at London's V&A, entitled James Athenian Stuart 1713-88: The Rediscovery of Antiquity. A collection of some 200 artefacts from books to furniture to paintings and drawings, it will intrigue anyone fascinated by the idea of global design. For it was Stuart who did most, perhaps unintentionally, to trigger a global architectural design, with Greek temples popping up in much the same way as McDonald's do now. But he was never to build on a grand scale; indeed, it took him five whole years just to decorate a bedroom for Elizabeth Montagu, the celebrated society hostess.
What made Stuart so influential was not his own work, but his travels through Greece in 1751 with his friend Nicholas Revett. On their return, they published The Antiquities of Athens. The book was a sensation. Here was the testimony of two men who had actually been to Greece, considered the wellspring of civilised architecture. Stuart was among the first western Europeans to see it, measure it and draw it accurately. This was a much greater achievement than it might seem today, when we can jump on a cheap flight to Athens and gawp, with crowds of tourists, at the ruins of the Acropolis.
An outpost of the Ottoman empire, Greece was then known, darkly and distantly, for its murderous brigands. When Stuart returned from his daring travels (on one occasion, an obliging landlord pulled down a house so that he and Revett could get a better view of the Tower of the Winds; on another, Stuart narrowly escaped murder by a party of Turks on his way to Constantinople), he was commissioned to design a Greek temple. In fact, this was a garden pavilion at Hagley Hall in Staffordshire, a modest project despite its grand name: the Temple of Theseus. A new church in Oxfordshire, built for the Earl of Harcourt in 1764, was a more ambitious project, though the proper Greekness of the building extends only to one fine Ionic portico.
In London, Stuart designed a fine house at 15 St James's Square, which, if you look up, boasts a temple front with columns copied exactly from the Erechtheion, the Parthenon's neighbour on the Acropolis. Not far away, overlooking Green Park, Stuart designed the most striking rooms in Spencer House (yes, it did once belong to the late Princess Diana's family).
What, perhaps, the unambitious Stuart was largely unaware of was his position in the vanguard of an architectural revolution. How was he to know that, after his death, the Greek revival would become the house style of the kingdom of Bavaria and of the government of the USA? Two architects who could see the writing on the wall were the hugely successful Robert Adam and William Chambers. This new Greek contagion was a threat to their beloved - and profitable - Roman styles. Though they tried to belittle Stuart and his "discoveries", Adam and Chambers were unable to halt the Greek revival.
The revival became ever more exotic, and ultimately kitsch, as archaeologists discovered that the ancient Greek temples were originally colourful and richly decorated. In any case, the idea of fitting the rooms and services of a modern house into the shell of a faux-Greek temple was clearly a bit daft. Even so, if you have ever seen Northington Grange (1804) in Hampshire, designed by William Wilkins, you will become an instant convert to the long-lost cause of the Greek revival. It is, simply, one of the most romantic houses in Britain; the English answer to the Bavarian Walhalla, the epitome of the great global design revolution, sparked by an unambitious dilettante, and his willingness to venture where few classical architects had gone before.
· James Athenian Stuart 1713-88: The Rediscovery of Antiquity is at the V&A, London
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He was the Indiana Jones of his day, dodging murderers to pull off astounding architectural coups. Jonathan Glancey on the life and fast times of James 'Athenian' Stuart.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/30/former-belmont-businessman-jack-cranney-arrested-texas-fraud-charges/F9tMdmIOLucFGZVAMrxTGL/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141004055356id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/09/30/former-belmont-businessman-jack-cranney-arrested-texas-fraud-charges/F9tMdmIOLucFGZVAMrxTGL/story.html
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Former Belmont businessman Jack Cranney arrested in Texas on fraud charges
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20141004055356
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Jack Cranney, a former Belmont resident and high-ranking distributor for the Shaklee Corp., has been arrested in El Paso on charges of stealing $6 million in investments from 15 of his clients.
A federal indictment was unsealed Monday in US District Court in Boston, charging Cranney, 73, with four counts of wire fraud, 16 counts of mail fraud, and three counts of money laundering. He was arrested the same day.
The government alleges that Cranney solicited money from friends and Shaklee business associates, promising to invest it for them at attractive rates of return. Instead, officials said, Cranney allegedly spent the money on himself and used it repay earlier investors in his alleged Ponzi scheme. He set up shell investment companies, the government alleged, to which investors were directed to send their funds.
The arrest comes two years after Cranney was charged with civil fraud by the Massachusetts Securities Division and the FBI raided his Belmont home for records. Cranney filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2013, as creditors and angry investors made demands for money.
Cranney’s bankruptcy lawyer, Jeffrey Hellman, declined to comment on the criminal indictment. In the past, Cranney has denied any wrongdoing.
The Cranney saga has been long and distressing for the former businessman’s friends and associates, many of whom are creditors in the bankruptcy case.
Elizabeth Sutton of Independence, Mo., had counted Cranney as a friend and said she lost $2.5 million she entrusted to him, not counting interest. She has been unable to follow through on a $500,000 gift she had promised to the Boy Scouts, because Cranney refused to return her money.
“I do think he should go to jail,” Sutton said. “I hate the time this has taken from my life. We all accepted him as a friend. He really hurt people.’’
Cranney faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for the fraud charges, plus three years supervised release and a $250,000 fine. The money laundering charges carry a 10-year maximum.
The sale of Cranney’s large house satisfied the claims of some of his alleged victims. Others are still owed millions and may get back about 15 cents on the dollar over time, lawyers said, from two Shaklee distributorships that Cranney had controlled. One of the entities was sold.
The other is still controlled by his wife’s daughter, who is not implicated in the alleged crimes. Cranney’s son is entitled to part of those earnings as well.
Shaklee is a Pleasanton, Calif., company that sells vitamins and nutritional supplements. It is organized in a pyramid structure, involving layers of people selling products and delivering the largest earnings to the people at the top.
Cranney was well-known within Shaklee for his own distributorship and another formerly owned by his late mother, Naomi Cranney, a prominent figure in the Belmont community.
The Massachusetts Securities Division in 2012 charged Cranney with stealing $10.4 million in an alleged Ponzi scheme, luring Shaklee associates to mortgage their homes and hand over their retirement accounts to Cranney to invest.
• Investors argue against liquidation in Belmont case
• Belmont businessman pressed on funds in court
• Friends fight to recover money from Belmont businessman
• Belmont man charged with running a Ponzi scheme denies allegations
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Jack Cranney, a former Belmont resident and high-ranking distributor for the Shaklee Corp., has been arrested in El Paso, Texas,for allegedly on charges of stealing $6 million in investments from 15 of his clients.
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http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/ferrari-sergio-marchionne/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141004074742id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/02/ferrari-sergio-marchionne/?
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A new boss-and new game plan-at Ferrari
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20141004074742
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This fall, Ferrari is rolling out a redesign of the California, a V-8 -powered grand touring car and the best-selling model in its history. Called the California T and carrying a base price of $201,940, its progress will be watched closely: It is the first Ferrari built with a turbo-charged engine engineered to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The California’s launch will be watched closely for another reason: It will be the first sales effort under the leadership of Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne. Earlier this month, Marchionne declared his intention to slide into the driver’s seat at Ferrari, which is 90% owned by Fiat Chrysler.
The great worry among enthusiasts is that Marchionne, an accountant by training, will— gasp —dilute one of the few global brands that actually deserves the overused adjective “iconic. ” His sin, in their eyes, would be to ramp up production, which would make Ferraris less scarce and thereby less desirable. You’d think that he was planning to sell cars under flapping vinyl pennants next to a Walmart. Worse, there are worries he might one day consider cashing out his investment in the Italian racing car company with a sale to some well-heeled buyer who somehow would corrupt Ferrari’s heroic history of track triumphs and overall derring-do.
As to the second point, an outright sale of Ferrari isn’t likely. Marchionne has long held Ferrari as his ace in the hole – a fungible stash of rainy-day cash that is hidden behind a glass door with a sign reading “Not to be opened except in case of emergency.” Although Fiat Chrysler is not in robust financial shape, there is no sign of an emergency on the horizon.
The question of brand dilution is one that preoccupies marketing consultants, car lovers , and, yes, some automotive journalists. Anything that disrupts a familiar narrative becomes a target for attacks—some surprisingly harsh. Infractions can range from the mighty—super-luxury brands like Bentley and Jaguar adding SUVs to lineups historically restricted to passenger cars – to the miniscule, like Chevrolet GM using the heritage Impala name on mundane four-door sedans.
Marchionne has indicated that he wants to make Ferrari a little less exclusive by raising production about 40% to 10,000 cars a year. That hardly sounds subversive. The surging market for European luxury cars in China alone should reason enough to build more Ferraris. Even if the current generation of Asian plutocrats prefers to ride in the back seat of limousines, their children and grandchildren will want to show their independence by clubbing in their 458 Italia instead.
Shaking the foundations of the Ferrari brand has never, until recently, been considered a threat. Under the leadership of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who ran the company for 23 years and whom Marchionne replaced, it consciously limited production to 7,000 cars a year—a little more than one week’s output of the Ford F-150—regardless of demand. Ferraris became so exclusive that entrance to the owners club required character references as well the ability to write a check.
Raising production would reduce some of the game-playing that ensues when a potential buyer faces arrives at a Ferrari dealer. If the model sought is an older or less popular one like the unloved FF, he may be able to get a new car in a few months. For more-popular models, the wait may stretch out for years – or to never. Ferrari screens bidders for its ultra high-end cars like the $1.3 million LaFerrari to weed out speculators. It isn’t always successful. A LaFerrari was recently offered for sale by an unknown owner for $3.24 million.
“In general, the ability to buy a new Ferrari is based on the combination of having the money and communicating how passionate you are to get one,” a blogger observed.
If Marchionne isn’t going to dilute Ferrari or sell it, here’s what else the worriers think he might he do:
Some fear that Marchionne will reduce Ferrari’s involvement in racing, the heritage of which gives the brand its raison d’etre.
It’s true that when Ferrari was getting started in 1946, car sales were intended to support the racing team. Even today, one of the appeals of owning a Ferrari is the track time it makes available to weekend racers. But the business of building cars has become so profitable—despite its tiny production, Ferrari accounts for nearly one-sixth of FCA’s operating profit—and the performance of Ferrari’s teams so miserable that the relationship has been reversed. No less a branding authority than Ralph Lauren, himself the owner of several classic Ferraris, argues that racing is no longer a necessary underpinning. “I think the world has changed,” Lauren said in an interview with The Official Ferrari magazine in 2011. “[Ferrari] is not a racing team, it is a universal company that does business around the world.”
Marchionne will dilute the authenticity of future models by using off-the-shelf components.
Just as an older generation of purists fretted that Ferrari would never be the same after the death of founder Enzo Ferrari in 1988, a new wave worries that some Fiat parts may find their way into future models under Marchionne. After all, Chrysler switches and touch screens have already turned up in FCA Maseratis. But Marchionne is uniquely attuned to brand values as he proved by splitting off Ram trucks from Dodge, so he is likely to hide any parts sharing from the Ferrari customer.
Marchionne will cheapen the Ferrari brand by overextending its use and licensing.
Internationally-recognized brands like Hermès or Apple AAPL have long monetized their exclusivity and appeal – and Ferrari is already there alongside of them. Its prancing-horse-on-red background corporate symbol decorates more merchandise around the world than Derek Jeter’s pinstripes do in New York City, ranging from $95 T-shirts to tiny hand-made model cars that sell for as much as $6,500. In some Asian cities, Ferarri’s logo is more recognizable than the national flag. The company has already lent its name to Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, which is said to be the largest indoor amusement park in the world, replete with motor-themed thrill rides, and a second Ferrari-branded theme park will open in Spain.
If Marchionne wants a guide on how to grow Ferrari without debasing its value, he need only follow the example of Porsche. The onetime specialist in rear-engine sports cars has successfully grown its business by successfully diversifying into first mid-engine sports cars (Boxster, Cayman), then SUVs (Cayenne) and most recently four-doors (Panamera) – and with little damage to its lush profit margins. Porsche, now part of the Volkswagen Group, sold a record 162,145 cars in 2013.
Not everyone agrees that Porsche is an appropriate model for Ferrari. “Porsche was just one part of the German technical juggernaut, while Ferrari was the standard bearer of Italian passion, pride and performance,” writes Detroit-based blogger Peter De Lorenzo. “That’s a huge – and fundamental – difference.” We’ll soon find out. Marchionne will be watching sales of the redesigned California T closely to see if he can nudge the volume meter up slightly without starting a stampede away from the brand – and my betting is he can.
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Enthusiasts may have some concerns about the change in leadership, but here's how the luxe brand can forge ahead.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141004211130id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/09/29/ford-shares-fall-company-lowers-europe-outlook/JP7X3bV86bovnzLpVsoFfO/story.html
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Ford shares fall as company lowers Europe outlook
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20141004211130
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DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford shares tumbled Monday after the automaker said it will fall short of its full-year profit goals.
At a conference for investors, the Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker said it expects a pretax profit of around $6 billion this year, down from the $7 billion to $8 billion it previously forecast.
Chief financial officer Bob Shanks said record profits in North America aren’t enough to offset trouble in South America, where Ford expects to lose $1 billion this year, and Russia, where falling sales and the rapid deterioration of the ruble took the company by surprise. Warranty costs — including a $500 million charge for last week’s recall of 850,000 vehicles for defective air bags — are also higher than expected.
‘‘We know this year is going to be short of plan, but we also have to keep an eye on the future,’’ Shanks said.
He said Ford expects a pretax profit of $8.5 billion to $9.5 billion in 2015, based partly upon an expected recovery in South America and improvement in warranty costs. The company also plans fewer vehicle introductions in 2015, which will cut costs. Ford is introducing 23 vehicles worldwide this year; next year, it plans to introduce 16.
Longer term, the company said it expects to grow global sales by as much as 55 percent by 2020, to 9.4 million cars and trucks. That is partly based on expected strong growth in Asia, where Ford is opening five plants over the next year.
As recently as July, Ford said it was on track to make a profit in Europe in 2015. Ford hasn’t made a full-year profit in the region since 2010.
Investors’ hopes grew when Ford earned $14 million in Europe in the second quarter of this year. But the company now said it expects a pretax loss of $1.2 billion in Europe in 2014 and a loss of $250 million in 2015. Ford expects to lose $300 million in Russia alone.
Ford shares fell more than 7 percent to close at $15.11 Monday.
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DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford shares tumbled Monday after the automaker said it will fall short of its full-year profit goals. At a conference for investors, the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker said it expects a pretax profit of around $6 billion this year, down from the $7 billion to $8 billion it previously forecast.
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http://fortune.com/2014/10/06/go-daddy-ceo-why-women-are-so-turned-off-by-the-tech-industry/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141008080309id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/06/go-daddy-ceo-why-women-are-so-turned-off-by-the-tech-industry/
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GoDaddy CEO: Why women are so turned off by the tech industry
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This week, the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing will come to Arizona, for the 20th anniversary of the conference designed to connect, inspire and guide women in computing. Since their first meeting with 500 attendees in 1994, the event has grown to become the world’s largest gathering of women in computing. Along the way, they’ve helped thousands of female technologists find a voice in a male-dominated industry and opened the conversation about inequities, large and small, woven into the fabric of the tech industry.
Notwithstanding, the valuable work of the Anita Borg Institute (organizers of the Grace Hopper Celebration) and many others that share our cause, the gender diversity gap in tech continues to widen. It is said that, ‘admitting you have a problem is first step to fixing it.’ In the case of gender diversity, the problem for our industry is clear: uniform blocks of thinkers by their very nature tend to think in the same ways. In an industry where innovation rules, novel ideas lead to unique solutions—and these ideas can be the difference between success and failure.
Of course, we’ve long intuited that diversity of thought leads to novel solutions, but more and more the diversity theory is being backed by hard data. In a study released in May by the University of Castilla la Mancha, Spain, researchers analyzed the make up and results of more than 4,000 R&D teams around the world and found that gender diverse groups can lead to greater creativity and better decisions. However, the tech industry has an equally important reason to court women developers and tech leaders: women are the majority consumers of tech. Despite the long-running stereotypes to the contrary, women purchase and use more technology than men. Women purchase more tablets, laptops and smartphones; download more music, movies and games; make the majority of household technology purchasing decisions; and utilize devices and services, from games to social media, more than their male counterparts, according to research over the past two years from the market intelligence firm Park Associates.
With the rise of wearable technology following the same patterns, this gap only promises to widen. We experience this directly here at GoDaddy, where we focus on cloud services for small business. More than half of small businesses in the U.S. are owned and run by women, and those ventures have disproportionately adopted cloud services like email marketing, SEO & SEM services and online billing and bookkeeping services. As with consumer technology, it’s clear that women’s opinions matter deeply to the success of the small business cloud services industry.
Understanding how women adopt and utilize technology are two of the most important insights the tech industry can glean—and there’s no better way to do that than to have women build and lead product development. However, our industry has turned in a dismal report card on gender diversity. Recently released gender demographic stats from Google GOOG and Facebook FB to Twitter TWTR and LinkedIn LNKD demonstrate the consistency of the problem, and I’d like to say that GoDaddy stood on higher ground, and that knowing our customer needs well (as we do) had more effectively balanced our workforce.
Unfortunately that isn’t the case. With only 18% of technical roles filled by women at GoDaddy, we sit only 1% above the rest of the Bay Area pack. This is nothing to celebrate.
Though our industry’s gender diversity numbers are troublingly low, the worse news is that they are lower than ever. In 1991, women held 36% of all computing-related occupations—double the rate in the Bay Area today. Some would-be defenders of Silicon Valley culture have responded that since only 20% of computer and information science degrees were awarded to women (as of 2008, down from 37% in 1985) we are exactly where we ought to be. They are right to look at education as a root problem, but they are wrong to suggest our responsibility ends there.
To understand why graduation rates in computer science are so low for women, we only need to answer one question: Why do 74% of high school girls report affinity for STEM subjects in school and yet, according to a report by the Girl Scout Research Institute, only about 20% pursue STEM-related undergraduate degrees? What happens between high school and college to account for such a radical drop in the pipeline?
Research from the US Department of Commerce suggests that gender stereotypes may play a central role in the choice to pursue a career in computer science or other STEM related jobs. Other studies suggest a fear of bad grades and ‘fear of failure’ in general may be key. Everything from teasing, lack of encouragement, lack of role models and subtle biases have recently been proposed as playing a major role in women’s decisions to look away from technical careers, but I suspect the answer is more portentous—and follows women from the classroom to the workforce.
Of all the causes that could narrow the pipeline of women in tech from 74% to 20%, I suspect the principal contributor is that the environment we’ve created in tech is simply off-putting to most women.
Juxtaposed by the steady stream of stories women have shared about their bizarre/creepy Higher Ed and Silicon Valley experiences, rationales like “lack of role models” and “subtle biases” quickly lose explanatory power. In both venues, we have built environments where men can be highly performant—and made the assumption that because men flock there, women will want the same. They clearly don’t. What’s worse, the more women who leave tech or opt never to enter, the more unwelcoming the environments potentially become. The compounding effect of this negative feedback loop is anything but subtle, and it’s keeping our industry behind the curve on this issue.
The new trend of demographic transparency in tech marks a possible turning point in the industry — not for the transparency itself, but because it makes clear that all of the diversity recruitment goals and “special initiatives” at most tech companies aren’t enough to reverse the negative trend we’re combatting. Transparency makes clear that the unacceptably low numbers of women in tech are a systemic issue. If we fail to address the problem systematically we’ll continue to fail overall—and innovation will suffer as a result.
This month, UC Hastings professor Joan C. Williams penned an in-depth article for the Harvard Business Review called “Hacking Tech’s Diversity Problem,” where she identifies a number of the subtle systematic elements that lead to women opting-out of tech roles. “When an organization lacks diversity,” Williams wrote, “it’s not the employees who need fixing. It’s the business systems.” In the article, Williams convincingly argues that we need to use the same tools to tune our workplaces as we use to rapidly iterate on our own products.
Williams’ prescription for systematically identifying and implementing “interrupters” into our work environments is just what the doctor ordered for the tech industry. Peter Drucker famously said that, “what gets measured gets managed.” At GoDaddy, we’ve begun to work on tangible steps to tune our work environments to be equally welcoming to both genders. My first act as CEO was to completely overhaul our brand and advertising—dropping the commercials that women clearly articulated to be objectifying and over-sexualized for a value prop that emphasizes the entrepreneurial spirit of our customers, many of whom are women. The old brand did not represent our passion for the success of our small business customers and sent a signal, wrongly, that GoDaddy was not a place that respected women.
Another way GoDaddy is working to transform our technical environment is by balancing as many Agile development teams as possible with 50% women vs. sprinkling one or two women per team across all teams. Even in small teams, I’ve seen that when men work in equal numbers to women, coarse male behavior wanes almost universally. Women on those teams describe their environment as more inclusive, more respectful and more satisfying. Though this is just one of many environmental improvements, I find it a very hopeful one.
American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” As the Grace Hopper Celebration approaches, it’s a good time for the small group of leaders across the tech industry to pause and evaluate if they are doing enough (and doing it systematically) to effect real change.
Blake Irving is CEO and Board Director of GoDaddy. Follow him @blakei
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Education in math and science could be the root of the problem, but the tech industry’s macho culture must also change.
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http://fortune.com/2009/03/04/amazons-kindle-hits-the-iphone/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141009094644id_/http://fortune.com:80/2009/03/04/amazons-kindle-hits-the-iphone/
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Amazon's Kindle hits the iPhone
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20141009094644
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If there was ever any question that Amazon’s AMZN Jeff Bezos is more interested in selling books than selling Kindle electronic book readers, the answer showed up on the iTunes App Store overnight Wednesday: a free application to read Kindle books on Apple’s AAPL iPhone.
Given that there are more than 17 million iPhones in circulation and probably not more than a few hundred thousand Kindles, Amazon has, with a single stroke, vastly increased the size of its potential readership without necessarily boosting sales for its $359 reader.
The app, which you can download here, works pretty much as advertised. You can’t order books directly from the iPhone — you have to do that from a Kindle or through a Web browser. But once you’ve established that you have an Amazon account, the books you’ve ordered show up instantly — and wirelessly — on the screen, thanks to the magic of Amazon’s new Whispersync technology. If you’ve started to read a book on a Kindle, Whispersync is smart enough to remember what page you were on.
There are plenty of titles to choose from in the Kindle Books section of the Amazon store — more than 240,000, according to Amazon’s press release — although as you might expect, the list is heavily tilted toward current bestsellers (104 of the 112 titles on New York Times‘ list, most for $9.99 each).
At the store, you can arrange books by popularity (“The Shack” by William P. Young currently tops that list), customer review (Ron Paul’s “The Revolution”) or publication date (“Eye of the Beholder,” Jade Falconer).
But you get a better feel for the range of books available when you list them by price, high-to-low or low-to-high. The most expensive title is something called “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4),” which sells for $6,431.20. On the other end of the spectrum, there are pages and pages of books priced at $0.00, including Arnold Bennett’s “Sacred and Profane Love” and Hugh Dalton’s “With British Guns in Italy,” to name a couple at random.
The books are certainly readable on the iPhone, although I’m not sure anybody is going to make it through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page “Team of Rivals” (No. 16 on the Kindle bestseller list) on a 3.5-inch screen. The pages are formatted for Kindle, not the iPhone, which creates some unfortunate typographical effects. At right, for example, is what the preface page of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” looks like on the iPhone, with an ugly and unnecessary break in the word “preface.”
All in all, the reading experience on Kindle for iPhone falls somewhere between Google’s GOOG free iPhone Book Search app, with 1.5 million titles to choose from but minimal formatting, and Andrew Kaz’s $2.99 Classics, which offers only a dozen or so books, but each of them specially formatted for the iPhone screen.
And that’s probably as it should be.
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If there was ever any question that Amazon's Jeff Bezos is more interested in selling books than selling Kindle electronic book readers, the answer showed up on the iTunes App Store overnight Wednesday: a free application to read Kindle books on Apple's iPhone. Given that there are more than 17 million iPhones in circulation and…
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http://www.nbc.com/a-to-z/blog/headheart-a-to-z-blog/exclusive-opportunity
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EXCLUSIVE OPPORTUNITY?
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20141013070836
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OK, I'll admit that when it comes to love and dating, my brain is not always the boss. I can't deny that we seem to be preternaturally wired to let our emotions take over once in a while. Living "in the moment" is part of what makes us human and I can go with the flow for the small stuff. It's the big decisions that have me more circumspect. Decisions like if or when to go exclusive.
To be clear, I accept that the whole aim of dating is to find the right person to share your life with; going exclusive is one of the first serious major milestones on that journey. But committing prematurely is perilous.
Whether you call it Facebook Official, going steady or "seeing someone," the act of going exclusive puts your friends, acquaintances and would-be suitors on notice that you're no longer taking applicants for the job of Significant Other. It also sends a firm message to your partner that he or she has prospects of being "the one." Again, if this happens after a few weeks or months of really getting to know one another, it can be a glorious thing. But going exclusive after a couple of dates can be a disaster, a premature confirmation that could painfully prove to be a false positive.
Perhaps most importantly, committing early on also sends a signal to your paramour that you like to move fast. You leave yourself very vulnerable to all kinds of bad behavior. You're literally throwing caution to the wind. Personally, I want a relationship that's built to last and I don't care if it takes a while to build it right from the ground up.
When it comes to the big stuff, I say temper your heart's desire to dive into the deep end. If it's meant to be it'll be, in time. Agree? Disagree? Leave your comments below.
Falling in love is inherently an irrational act. A glorious, all-consuming, primordial act. It's a process over which I have, thankfully, have zero control. You know it when it's right.
And when it's time to take the relationship to the next step (aka going exclusive), my view is that nothing is scarier that not acting on your emotions. Cowering away from coupling is understandable: you could have your heart broken, you may not ultimately be right for one another, you could waste a lot of time, time that could be spent finding someone else. But you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket or, as hockey legend Wayne Gretzky put it, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
If the sight of that special someone has my heart pounding to the beat of my "Big Glory" music, if everyone else falls away in the room when we're in a crowd, if I can while away the day dreaming of how we'll raise our children, I'm not going to torture myself by waiting. I'm going to put myself out there as unafraid, ready and roaring to take the next big step.
It doesn't matter if we've been dating for two days or two months—the future is ours and the time is now. Tell yourself carpe diem, YOLO or whatever thought gets you to open your heart and act on how you truly feel. That feeling inside is a mandate to act and let the magic come over the two of you.
Agree? Disagree? Leave your comments below.
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EXCLUSIVE OPPORTUNITY? */ HEAD
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2012/08/27/pick-alanis-morissette-havoc-and-bright-lights/HDxVTse5vucBzV67rM1cOJ/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141019140616id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2012/08/27/pick-alanis-morissette-havoc-and-bright-lights/HDxVTse5vucBzV67rM1cOJ/story.html?camp=pm
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Alanis Morissette, ‘Havoc and Bright Lights’
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20141019140616
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It’s been four years since Alanis Morissette’s last album and judging by the sound of the new one, it was a bountiful hiatus. Marriage and motherhood are strong muses and the Canadian-born singer-songwriter sounds refreshed, curious, and open on “Havoc and Bright Lights.” And as ever, Morissette remains in list mode. On the ultra-catchy first single, “Guardian,” a burbly slice of shiny radio pop, she takes on the titles of guardian, angel, warrior, watchwoman, and keeper of life. The narrator of the grungy and hypnotic guitar rocker “Numb” feels smothered, encumbered, defeated, disappointed, and overextended, among other things. (This sense of “over-caring” resurfaces in the self-soothing “Receive” in which Morissette sings of the need to learn to accept help.) There is also a recitation of the various women tolerating indignities and abuses in the electronica-tinged anthem “Woman Down” and the many blessings to be thankful for in the bright piano ballad “Empathy.” There are a couple of clunkers, including the finger-wagger “Celebrity,” directed at those who seek fame as its own reward, and the droning “Win Win.” But for the most part Morissette and producers Guy Sigsworth and Joe Chiccarelli keep the proceedings crisp, tuneful, warm, and sincere. While that last element occasionally leads Morissette to flirt with flakiness, it’s refreshing that the artist who burst onto the scene in the mid-’90s is plumbing the depths to figure out what she oughta know. (Out Tuesday)
Alanis Morissette performs at the House of Blues on Oct. 17.
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It’s been four years since Alanis Morissette’s last album and judging by the sound of the new one, it was a bountiful hiatus. Marriage and motherhood are strong muses and the Canadian-born singer-songwriter sounds refreshed, curious, and open on “Havoc and Bright Lights,” out Tuesday. And as ever, Morissette remains in list mode. On the ultra-catchy first single “Guardian,” a burbly slice of shiny radio pop, she takes on the titles of guardian, angel, warrior, watchwoman, and keeper of life.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/10/17/popeyes-eyes-new-stores-boston-area/LJE5Z7Z0JAXcYVWm44ywcK/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141021140719id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/10/17/popeyes-eyes-new-stores-boston-area/LJE5Z7Z0JAXcYVWm44ywcK/story.html
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Popeyes eyes 30 new stores in Boston area
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20141021140719
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Bostonians will soon have a lot more places to buy southern fried chicken — or at least the fast-food version.
Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen is looking for franchisees to open 15 to 20 new stores in the Boston area in five years and 30 total over the next decade.
The Atlanta company currently serves its spicy chicken, jambalaya, red beans and rice at eight fast-food restaurants in the state.
“Boston is a prime market for further expansion of the Popeyes footprint,” said Greg Vojnovic, Popeyes chief development officer, in a statement.
The company said it is “poised to rapidly expand domestically” with sales at a 10-year high.
Founded in 1972, Popeyes claims to be the world’s second largest quick-service chicken concept by locations with 2,262 restaurants worldwide.
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Bostonians will soon have a lot more places to buy southern fried chicken -- or at least the fast food version.
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Meet us at the all-new Fortune.com
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20141022003425
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Connectivity is perhaps the biggest opportunity of our time. As technology makes the world smaller, it’s clear that the countries and companies that connect the best — either in terms of, say, traditional infrastructure or through digital networks — are in the driver’s seat. Think about China’s lickety-split, high-speed-rail build-out, and how unfavorably the pace of our large public works projects compares. Or the economic and political leverage of Gazprom’s pipeline network, or the still early-stage power of Google. I’ve been thinking about the connectivity opportunity for a number of reasons lately, as you’ll see.
While our entire staff has been working like crazy creating this mega-issue of Fortune (more on that in a second), we’ve also been engaged in an even bigger project for you, and that is the launch of an entirely new Fortune.com. A little context here: Previously Fortune.com was part of a joint venture between CNN and Time Inc. (both of which had been divisions of Time Warner) called CNNMoney. Now that Time Inc. is being spun off from Time Warner, the joint venture has come to an end, and Fortune.com will be an independent website.
It is an understatement to say that we are totally juiced. The new Fortune.com is a dynamic business news website with a terrific interface that showcases a new level of depth of stories and scale, plus videos, graphics, and expanded magazine features, all honed by Fortune’s world-famous journalists and a new crop of recent hires brought onboard to greatly expand our coverage. It really is the best of both worlds: better access to the content you love and way more of it to boot. So please go to Fortune.com and tell a million of your best friends to do so too. I guarantee you will love it.
Now back to the latest print edition of our magazine, Fortune’s annual ranking of the nation’s largest 500 companies, which is remarkable for a number of reasons. It’s the 60th time we’ve created this ultimate barometer of business, and amazingly it marks the first time that the collective profits of the 500 exceed $1 trillion. (Wow!) It’s also the largest Fortune 500 in terms of pages that we have produced in nine years.
And getting back to my connectivity theme, I noticed many of the big winners on the list are connectors, like No. 5 Apple (tops in profit growth over the past decade — see Apple’s newest product: Complexity), No. 206 Kinder Morgan (see “The energy boom’s mighty middleman”), and No. 341 Facebook (whose earnings per share grew 5,900% last year). Of course, the Fortune 500 is even bigger and better on our new website, with pages and pages of compelling incremental content, like stories on the biggest stock gainers in the Fortune 500, the coolest jobs, and video of heroes of the Fortune 500.
So Fortune today is an awesome new website, a huge issue of the magazine, plus a high-powered series of conferences, like our upcoming Brainstorm Tech event in Aspen, July 14-16. That’s three vital and interconnected platforms, which afford us the opportunity to build out and make your whole experience greater than the sum of its parts. We hope you will continue to connect with us online, in the magazine, and at our live events as we look to bring you the very best in business.
This story is from the June 16, 2014 issue of Fortune.
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Check out our all-new website, revamped and expanded to raise the bar on the content you love.
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http://fortune.com/2014/10/29/poor-chinese-get-10-million-in-yale-scholarships/
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Poor Chinese get $10 million in Yale scholarships
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20141029085058
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The power couple behind SOHO China, the developer that has dotted Beijing with futuristic-looking Zaha Hadid-designed complexes, today announced a $10 million scholarship with Yale University for financially-strapped Chinese students.
“We hope the donations will help Yale admit more Chinese students, and those from modest backgrounds,” Pan Shiyi, Soho’s chairman, who along with his wife Zhang Xin, Soho’s CEO, created a $100 million foundation earlier this year for education, said at a signing ceremony Wednesday in Beijing.
The Yale endowment comes just months after Soho allotted $15 million for Harvard. The scholarships are just the latest lagging indicator of the swell of Chinese interest in American higher education. Last year the number of Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities jumped 21% to 235,000 students, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report.
Pan said he met Yale president Peter Salovey this spring in his New Haven office for sandwiches before touring the campus. He was introduced to a Chinese student who said she had been rejected from 10 other universities for financial reasons before settling at Yale. The university, like Harvard, employs a “needs blind” acceptance policy admitting students regardless of their financial means.
Yale president Peter Salovey was in town for the signing ceremony at Soho’s new Zaha Hadid-designed complex on the edge of Beijing’s downtown. He opened his remarks to the small crowd with a typical foreigner greeting—Da jia hao! ( Hello everyone) —the same phrase Mark Zuckerberg used in front of Chinese students last week.
Salovey emphasized Yale’s unique relationship with China. The country’s first student to study in the U.S., Yung Wing, graduating in 1854, during the end of the Qing Dynasty; Yale says it was the first American university to teach the Chinese language.
Salovey says more international students at Yale come from China than anywhere else. Yale has more than 500 Chinese students in its undergraduate and graduate schools out of 12,000 students.
He did, however, stop short of guaranteeing an increased ratio of Chinese students because of the Soho scholarship. Although Yale is increasing its student size by 15% by fall 2017, its first expansion since the 1960s, the ratio of Chinese students may not change. Of Soho’s scholarship, he said, “I know that it will allow us to look much more aggressively toward wonderful applicants we get from China.”
The Soho China Foundation’s endowment of U.S. universities has created some blowback with China, where critics ask if the money would be better served at Chinese colleges. A reporter from China Daily, the English-language state-owned newspaper, repeated the criticism, to which Pan replied that Soho has also endowed Chinese schools in years past.
Pan admitted he’s jealous of the students studying abroad. Born in the poor western province Gansu, Pan said the closest he’s gotten to studying abroad is a recent invitation from Vanke founder Wang Shi, another large Chinese real estate developer, to join him at Harvard as a visiting scholar.
Pan’s wife, Zhang Xin, who’s better known than him in the West because of an appearance on 60 Minutes and her investment in Manhattan’s General Motors building, worked in a factory before earning full scholarships to study at the U.K.’s University of Sussex and Cambridge.
To meet the swelling demand from Chinese students, Pan said the couple was looking into Stanford and Duke as the next possible schools for scholarships.
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The couple behind SOHO China, a Beijing developer, followed up their Harvard endowment by adding another Ivy League school.
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http://www.people.com/article/fugitive-gregory-lewis-captured
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141030202850id_/http://www.people.com/article/fugitive-gregory-lewis-captured
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Fugitive and Alleged Rapist Gregory Lewis Captured in New York State
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20141030202850
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10/30/2014 AT 02:45 PM EDT
A fugitive who went on a cross-state crime spree has finally been apprehended, Massachusetts authorities say.
Southbridge resident Gregory Lewis, who was initially arrested for the alleged statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in August, cut his ankle monitor and fled the state Sept. 15, the
He then went on a nationwide crime spree, allegedly assaulting six people in eight incidents, according to
Lewis, 26, was finally caught on Tuesday shortly before midnight in the Village of Fort Edward in upstate New York,
Cops received calls that a car had crashed into a river in Ford Edward. A witness who heard the crash helped Lewis out of the vehicle, only to have the fugitive threaten him with a gun.
"He went to help a guy who was in danger," Washington County District Attorney Tony Jordan tells PEOPLE. "He actually helped him up twice. He helped him out of the water and then the guy fell and he helped him up again. And then he had a handgun pointed at him."
But the witness was saved by officers responding to the calls, who took Lewis into custody at the scene. "It's only afterwards you realize what could have happened," says Jordan.
Lewis was arraigned Wednesday on a fugitive charge. A hearing is being held on Thursday afternoon to decide whether he will be extradited to Massachusetts, which Jordan believes is likely.
"He could have faced charges here in Washington County, brought against him by the witness who had a gun pointed at him," says Jordan, "but that individual will not be filing charges here so that Lewis can be returned immediately to Massachusetts.
"He was great about it," adds the D.A. "He really understood the significance of the charges in Massachusetts – you have a 13-year-old girl who was brutally raped, any delay there can be harmful to the girl – and he wants him held accountable for that."
Wednesday that Lewis reportedly planned to return to Massachusetts to kill his original victim.
While on the run, Lewis is also suspected of having committed a series of "alleged rapes, kidnappings and robberies of female escorts in North Carolina, Colorado, and Oregon and an alleged armed robbery of an escort in Indianapolis," according to the
"It was almost like he had nothing to lose. It was his last hurrah, and he was going to go out and do as much damage as he possibly could," Detective Lt. Michael Farley, commander of the State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section, said Wednesday.
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Lewis, who was initially arrested for statutory rape, allegedly assaulted eight people in a nationwide crime spree
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http://fortune.com/2011/01/25/merrill-pays-10-million-in-sec-case/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141101020303id_/http://fortune.com/2011/01/25/merrill-pays-10-million-in-sec-case/
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Merrill pays $10 million in SEC case
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20141101020303
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Maybe Mother Merrill was a little too sweet for her own good.
Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm long known for looking out for its own, on Tuesday paid $10 million to settle charges it fleeced customers to pad its own trading account.
The brokerage firm consented to a Securities and Exchange Commission censure over the actions of its proprietary trading desk between 2003 and 2005. The firm’s equity strategy desk improperly got wind of trades the firm’s institutional clients were making and placed the same trades for its own account, the SEC said.
Merrill, which was purchased by Bank of America BAC in 2009 after nearly collapsing during the financial crisis, also overcharged some institutional and rich customers without telling them, the SEC said. Merrill didn’t admit or deny the findings.
“Investors have the right to expect that their brokers won’t misuse their order information,” said Scott W. Friestad of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “The conduct here was clearly inappropriate. Merrill’s proprietary traders had improper access to information about the firm’s customer orders, and misused it to place trades on the firm’s behalf.”
That’s not the only legal news swirling around the banks Tuesday. A group of institutional investors sued BofA’s other meltdown-era acquisition, Countrywide, on Tuesday, claiming it engaged in “massive” mortgage fraud by providing false documents in securities offerings. BofA shares fell 3%*.
But other banks are in the cross hairs as well, with a filing in another case claiming JPMorgan Chase jpm was aware of problems with the loans backing mortgage securities trusts but failed to rectify them. JPMorgan fell 1% and Citi c and Wells Fargo wfc each slipped 2%.
The flurry of bad news comes just a day after BofA began promoting its latest effort to attract individual investing dollars via a trading and advice platform known as Merrill Edge. Individual investors largely weren’t affected by the SEC charges announced Tuesday, but they will surely sleep easier knowing they aren’t the source of Merrill’s trading edge.
*Correction 2:59 p.m.: Earlier I wrote the stock hit a 52-week low. At a recent $13.40 it is about $2.50 above its 52-week low. My regrets.
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Maybe Mother Merrill was a little too sweet for her own good. Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm long known for looking out for its own, on Tuesday paid $10 million to settle charges it fleeced customers to pad its own trading account. The brokerage firm consented to a Securities and Exchange Commission censure over the actions…
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http://fortune.com/2012/09/13/apples-strategically-timed-iphone-5-rollout-schedule/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141102091353id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/09/13/apples-strategically-timed-iphone-5-rollout-schedule/
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Apple’s strategically timed iPhone 5 rollout schedule
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20141102091353
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FORTUNE — Several analysts have pointed out that the launch schedule for the iPhone 5 is the most aggressive Apple AAPL has ever attempted.
It’s a tribute to Tim Cook’s supply chain management that he’s able to promise delivery in more than 100 countries by Christmas. But the details of that rollout reflect the attention he pays to Apple’s quarterly reports and their effect on the stock price — something Steve Jobs didn’t always do.
Now let’s compare the timing of those rollouts:
By packing in 31 countries before the quarter ends on Sept. 29, Cook has pretty much guaranteed that the iPhone 5 will break all previous sales records, and that the revenue from those sales will be reflected in the next earnings report.
Several analysts have already adjusted their Q4 iPhone unit sales estimates to reflect the aggressive launch schedule. We expect that more will do the same once they realize what it means.
See also: Apple’s iPhone 5: What the analysts are saying
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Why 9 countries on Sept. 21 and 22 more on Sept. 28? Because fiscal 2012 ends Sept. 29.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141104013306id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/10/31/dispatch-from-disruption-zone/j23NKZYrcBLdNm1DgOi96I/story.html
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Dispatch from the disruption zone
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20141104013306
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SAN FRANCISCO — Rujul Zaparde walks into a Thai restaurant on the Embarcadero a few minutes late, wearing a Harvard windbreaker. He explains that he’s crunched for time, and just orders an appetizer for lunch.
Zaparde is a busy 19-year old. He runs a company, FlightCar, that is trying to reinvent the businesses of airport parking and car rental. Since launching in 2013 at San Francisco’s airport, FlightCar has expanded to three other cities, including Boston. Zaparde’s company has nearly 80 employees, not counting the outside attorneys fighting lawsuits with the cities of San Francisco and Millbrae over issues like operating permits and fees.
The controversy, Zaparde says, hasn’t been a bad thing: “Getting press is one of the big ways people learn about us.”
Zaparde is part of the latest band of disruptors here in San Francisco, unafraid to think big, take on established players (like Hertz and Avis), and push against regulators. While Boston entrepreneurs often focus on setting up appointments to sell products to big corporate buyers, it strikes me in San Francisco that the motto is, “Ask forgiveness, not permission.”
Nabeel Hyatt moved to San Francisco from Cambridge last year, not long after he joined Spark Capital, a Boston venture capital firm. He’s helping to open a satellite office for Spark in the city’s bustling South of Market neighborhood, not far from companies like Uber and Airbnb.
In Boston and San Francisco, Hyatt says, the narrative of the typical startup has long involved entrepreneurs with knowledge of a particular industry — human resources software, for instance. They raise money from investors to create a “new and improved” product for that industry, something that is better, faster, or cheaper than what came before.
But what San Francisco is especially supportive of right now, Hyatt says, “is the guy who knows nothing about the industry taking an outsider’s point-of-view, just ignoring whatever rules exist, and going for it.” He mentions companies like the electric car-maker Tesla, unmanned aerial vehicle start-up 3D Robotics, and delivery service Postmates. “These aren’t guys who knew a lot about cars, drones, or logistics businesses.”
In many ways, Hyatt says, that naivete gave them an advantage.
Spark is among the investors in Postmates, a delivery service that has raised $22 million. It lets you order anything from any store or restaurant in your city, with a few taps on a mobile app. Postmates assigns a bike courier to pick it up and deliver it to you, in one hour or less. All payment is handled through the app, using a credit card.
Founder Bastian Lehmann, born in Munich, says he came to the Bay Area because “you can try anything out.” His big vision is that Postmates can help local merchants compete with Amazon by offering quick delivery as an option.
“Local retailers are in danger,” he says. “What we’re doing is treating the city as if it were our warehouse, and creating a platform that connects local merchants with customers.”
Like many in this new wave of app-driven services, Postmates pays its army of nearly 6,000 couriers as contractors, rather than employees. But in many states, including Massachusetts, the law tends to define people doing the core work of a company as employees, rather than contractors, and requires firms to pay Social Security and unemployment taxes.
The transportation service Uber has run into this issue, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of drivers claiming they should get the wages and benefits befitting employees. But Uber founder and chief executive Travis Kalanick says citizens want access to new services, and government’s role is support that — not protect incumbent industries, like taxi and livery operators. “The bottom line is that the regulations that are not in the interest of the citizens at large will not last very long in the wired-up city,” Kalanick says.
It isn’t yet legal, for instance, to fly small, camera-toting drones for business purposes. But a farmer might find them useful for monitoring crops, or a realtor for shooting video of an oceanfront estate, says David Merrill, vice president of product at 3D Robotics, a drone-maker in Berkeley. 3D Robotics is betting sales will skyrocket as commercial drone uses are authorized; the company recently attracted the backing of Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. (We did discuss the dangers of being conked on the head by a malfunctioning drone -- which aren’t insignificant.)
FlightCar has tried to build a business that isn’t subject to the same taxes and fees that traditional rental car companies pay airports for operating shuttle buses and using shared rental car facilities. With FlightCar, you drop your vehicle off at their lot, and a Town car service takes you to the airport. The twist: in return for free parking, FlightCar rents your car to other travelers, and passes some of the money on to you. When you return, your car is washed and vacuumed.
I asked Zaparde about his Harvard jacket. He never showed up for the first day of classes; the jacket was purchased on an earlier campus visit. Zaparde and two friends came up with the idea for FlightCar in 2012, and instead of going to college, he went through two entrepreneurial “accelerator” programs to help him hone the concept and launch the business. Two years after Zaparde was supposed to enter college, his startup has raised nearly $20 million.
Going back to school, he says, is “not really on my radar. He’s also not distracted by the lawsuits. The mentality in San Francisco right now, Zaparde says, is, “Nothing is impossible.”
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The latest band of disruptors in San Francisco is , unafraid to think big, take on established players and push against regulators. Their motto: “Ask forgiveness, not permission”
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http://fortune.com/2014/11/04/best-selling-fruit-us/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141104182518id_/http://fortune.com/2014/11/04/best-selling-fruit-us/
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The best-selling fruits in America
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20141104182518
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The announcement last week that two Brazilian companies bought Chiquita Brands International, known for its bananas, in a deal worth $1.3 billion certainly demonstrated one thing: there’s big money in fruit.
And it’s only getting bigger.
In 2004, fruit was the fifth most popular food item consumed by Americans, according to Harry Balzer, a chief industry analyst who studies food trends for NPD Group. Today, the category is now in second place, taking over the spot once occupied by soft drinks. (Sandwiches have long been in first place.)
Americans’ growing health consciousness is partly responsible for fruit’s ascent. There is also the convenience factor. “It requires no cooking,” Balzer says “It can be part of breakfast, lunch, or dinner.”
Produce is facing some challenges, though. From an inflationary standpoint, retail prices have increased and the drought in California is threatening some supply, says Sherry Frey, senior vice president of Nielsen Perishables Group.
Still, grocery stores are devoting more space to produce, Frey says. “When you look at the entire store, one of the best growing departments is produce,” Frey says. You can chalk the growth up to healthier eating habits and a more diverse assortment of fruit offerings at stores. “Specialty fruit in 2009 it was 2% of sales, now it’s 15%,” Frey says. “When you used to hear ‘specialty fruit,’ you’d think pineapple and mango. Now it’s guava and starfruit.”
So, is that increase in sales consistent across all fruit or are there certain types that are especially—ahem—ripe for growth? Nielsen Perishables tracks sales of fresh fruit at grocery stores by dollars and volume, and its statistics point to which fruit—from a business perspective—is really top banana.
1. Berries—2013 Sales: $3.020 billion
Nielsen groups all berries as one category, and with just over $3 billion in sales last year, it is the highest-grossing fruit. It captured that title thanks in part to the category’s “super food” designee: blueberries.
The fruit’s much-heralded antioxidant properties have helped increase sales, Frey says. Grocers have responded to consumer demand by selling blueberries in larger quantities. “You used to be able to only buy these small packages,” Frey says, “Now, you can buy them by the pound.”
2. Apples—2013 Sales: $2.442 billion
Staple fruits like apples are often the ones that lose out when consumers sample new types of fruit, Frey says. But a new iteration of this American standby has lifted the category’s overall sales since 2009: pre-cut apples. Sales of sliced apples, which are often packaged with dip or in parfaits, are priced higher than fresh whole apples and neared $177 million in sales in 2013, an increase of 72% over the past five years.
3. Bananas—2013 Sales: $2.183 billion
Banana sales are also “cannibalized” a bit when consumers experiment with new fruit, Frey says. Nielsen’s data points to relative stagnancy in dollar and volume sales of bananas, but since it only measures grocery store purchases, it doesn’t capture what Frey says is a growing source of sales: convenience stores and coffee shops, where consumer are paying a premium for the portable fruit.
4. Grapes—2013 Sales: $2.135 billion
The drought in California has posed a challenge to the sector, as increased prices have stunted volume growth. But there’s good news, too: innovation related to flavor and seeds—of lack thereof—has increased the assortment of grapes available to consumers. Changes in packaging—like housing grapes in plastic clamshells instead of cellophane—have helped to ensure that the easily squished fruit makes it through the distribution process and your next full-cart shopping trip, Frey says.
5. Citrus—2013 Sales: $2.133 billion
Citrus is undergoing what Frey refers to as “shape shifting,” as new items replace the category’s long-standing favorite as the driver of sales growth. In other words: hello mandarin, goodbye orange. (Note: Citrus sales are measured in “eaches,” which refer to individual pieces of fruit.)
As consumers clamor for convenience, they have begun to ditch the bulky, stubborn orange for more compact, seedless, easy to peel mandarins—think of Cuties that are marketed toward kids. Mandarins have experienced an 89% increase in dollar sales from 2009 to 2013.
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The recent $1.3 billion deal for Chiquita Brands proved one things: there’s big money in fruit and it's only getting bigger.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/11/03/music-review-umphrey-mcgee-house-blues/9wGs56ozZ8EkPvQCpcka2M/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141107015228id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2014/11/03/music-review-umphrey-mcgee-house-blues/9wGs56ozZ8EkPvQCpcka2M/story.html
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Music review: Umphrey’s McGee at House of Blues
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20141107015228
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The jam band scene has always been excluded from the lunch table where the cool kids meet up to hype the latest, most fashionable moves in beard-rock. Maybe that’s why its leading practitioners seem to have such a self-deprecating streak.
The six members of Umphrey’s McGee took the stage for their sold-out Halloween show at House of Blues wearing costumes that offered carefully plotted visual puns to go along with the musical ones to come. An Adidas track jacket and spikey wig turned guitarist Brendan Bayliss into Run D.M.C.C. DeVille, referencing the rap group and the guitarist from Poison. A broad-brimmed black hat and a skirt helped form bassist Ryan Stasik’s character, Hasidic Julia Roberts.
Like the meaty waves of densely packed jams that flowed through two sets, these visual jokes were high concept. They alluded to the main musical treat promised this evening, a series of song mash-ups channeling the band’s showy musicianship and its playfulness.
The familiar riff of James Gang’s “Funk #49” was a framing device stitching together bits of two Aerosmith picks, “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way.” Later, the deliciously ominous bass figure of Radiohead’s “The National Anthem” laid down a bed for lyrics from Beck’s “Loser,” with a couple detours into Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” milked for melodramatic effect. Bits of songs by Rick James and the Beastie Boys found their own moments.
The mash-up sugar high notwithstanding, the real highlights were suites of original material where themes were introduced, elaborated upon, set aside, and eventually revisited. A circular sensation colored a series of instrumental passages that offered the sense of forward motion without really varying the essential elements — upbeat grooves colored by flavors of 1980s pop and the band’s distinctive variant on prog-rock, which marries 1970s-vintage guitar heroics with the light-metal headbanging of the following decade.
Thorny show opener “1348” transitioned into the chilly swing of “In the Kitchen,” only to reemerge as a reprise out of the first half of “Ocean Billy,” which itself returned again deep into the second set. For “Bad Friday,” the band found a terrifically tight pocket. As James Joyce might observe, here comes everybody.
All this jammy gear-shifting cued waves of ecstatic crowd response, while establishing the band’s essential identity as a collage artist. But when an audience isn’t quite sure when to chuckle at the irony and when to cheer the fast-fingered wankery, a musical costume can start to feel more like a disguise.
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The jam band scene has always been excluded from the lunch table where the cool kids meet up to hype the latest, most fashionable moves in beard-rock. Maybe that’s why its leading practitioners seem to have such a self-deprecating streak. The six members of Umphrey’s McGee took the stage for its sold-out Halloween show at House of Blues wearing costumes that offered carefully plotted visual puns to go along with the musical ones to come. An Adidas track jacket and spikey wig turned guitarist Brendan Bayliss into Run D.M.C.C. DeVille, referencing the rap group and the guitarist from Poison. A broad-brimmed black hat and a skirt helped form bassist Ryan Stasik’s character, Hasidic Julia Roberts.
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/06/mullen-takes-top-prize-awards/7vYJ9zrJcABM0jd1vPNkeM/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141107164931id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/06/mullen-takes-top-prize-awards/7vYJ9zrJcABM0jd1vPNkeM/story.html
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Mullen takes top prize at ad awards
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20141107164931
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The ad agency Mullen won the high-profile “Best in Show” award at Thursday night’s Hatch Awards, an annual event honoring the work of New England advertising and marketing companies.
The Boston marketing firm was recognized for its viral ad “World’s Toughest Job,” which has been viewed almost 22 million times on YouTube. The video, which can be viewed at the top of this article, was produced for the greeting card company American Greetings.
“In the advertising business, producing creative work that is memorable, meaningful and engaging is our toughest job,” said Kathy Kiely, the president of the Ad Club, the regional trade group that presented the awards.
More than 1,000 ad submissions were in competition for a total of 162 awards. Other big winners at the Hatch Awards included Arnold Worldwide, another Boston-based marketer, which took home 65 awards. Hill Holliday, whose headquarters are in the Financial District, won 42 awards, and Mullen won 10.
The Hatch Awards are presented by the Ad Club, which represents the marketing and communications industries in New England. The Boston Globe was one of the event’s sponsors.
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The Boston-based ad agency Mullen won the top-billed award at a Thursday ceremony honoring the work of New England advertising and marketing companies.
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http://fortune.com/2012/02/14/a-texas-standoff/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141107210156id_/http://fortune.com/2012/02/14/a-texas-standoff/
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A Texas standoff
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20141107210156
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The largest public pension in Texas won’t back up its big talk.
Three months ago, The Teacher Retirement System of Texas announced that it had selected Apollo Global Management APO and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. KKR to each manage $3 billion. It was a huge announcement, with many believing that it could lead to a realignment of relationships between large public pension systems and top private equity firms.
Here was the basic value proposition: The private equity firms each would get to boost their assets under management by $3 billion, with a single stroke of the pen. That’s a big deal for any firm, but of particular import for publicly-traded shops like Apollo and KKR. In exchange for its up-front largesse, TRS would receive certain concessions on fund fees and other investment-related expenses.
Fast forward to today: We know that the private equity firms have gotten their commitments. But we have no idea what term concessions, if any, TRS has received.
This is important, because such long-term agreements actually can result in higher-than-normal fees if not executed properly. For example, imagine that TRS agreed to pay 80 basis points in annual management fees and 15% carried interest on its commitments. Both are below-market terms (usually 200bp and 20%), but certain recycling provisions could mean that TRS would actually pay around $4.5 billion in fees over a 15-year period (based on a 15% annual return and no provision excluding fee payments on uncommitted capital).
I’m not alleging that TRS struck a bad deal with Apollo and KKR. What I am saying, however, is that its silence on the matter is violating the spirit of transparency under which most public pension systems operate.
TRS held a board meeting last November 4, in which it first disclosed the agreements with Apollo and KKR. Steve LeBlanc, a senior managing director of private markets at TRS, said that the agreements would be “ILPA-compliant.”
For the uninitiated, ILPA is a group of institutional investors in private equity (including TRS) that has developed a set of best practices to govern the LP-GP relationship. For example, ILPA principles suggest that all deal fees should accrue to limited partners. It also believes funds should feature a “waterfall” — which basically means limited partners get all of their drawn-down principal returned before general partners begin to collect carried interest. Many private equity firms have endorsed the ILPA principles, but very few adhere to each and every one of them.
But LeBlanc’s statement implied that both Apollo and KKR would, indeed, be in full compliance. So I emailed TRS communications director Howard Goldman, to make sure that LeBlanc had not misspoken. After a couple of days, Goldman told me that TRS could not comment because the agreements had not yet been executed. So I waited.
Then KKR announced quarterly earnings last week, and announced that its deal with TRS was signed. So I emailed Goldman back, to see if the now-executed agreements were fully compliant with ILPA principles. After a couple of days of waiting, he sent the following:
Wait a minute. What on earth is “TRS-ILPA compliant?” Seems to be a pretty big qualifier, and now only “certain” ILPA terms apply? So I asked for additional clarification. What came back was kind of stunning:
TRS might have adopted the ILPA guidelines, but apparently it’s applying its own secret version of them. Do as we say, not as we do.
And I did look at the “Texas Way” document, which provides as much relevant information as a standard-issue chewing gum wrapper. Remember, it was TRS that first said it would be ILPA compliant. And it’s TRS staffers who go on business television networks, talking about how they’re fighting the good fight on private equity governance. But when you ask them to get specific, TRS hides behind bogus, self-constructed propriety.
I called Goldman last night after receiving the aforementioned email. He said he was on his way out of the office, and that it was too late to talk (note: it was later in Boston, where I’m based). He suggested I ring “late morning” today. Upon doing so, I only received an email in reply, saying “Unfortunately, there is no one who can speak with you at this time.”
Get Dan’s daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com
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The largest public pension in Texas won't back up its big talk. Three months ago, The Teacher Retirement System of Texas announced that it had selected Apollo Global Management and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. to each manage $3 billion. It was a huge announcement, with many believing that it could lead to a realignment…
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/09/everett-neighbors-recall-wynn-casino-parcel-polluted-past/5OaQW8yh1xd4uP2WlJ4DMJ/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141109221332id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/09/everett-neighbors-recall-wynn-casino-parcel-polluted-past/5OaQW8yh1xd4uP2WlJ4DMJ/story.html
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Everett neighbors recall Wynn casino parcel’s polluted past
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20141109221332
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The acid leak at Monsanto Chemical Co. began in the dead of a mid-August night 56 years ago, quickly filling Frank Dascoli’s Everett neighborhood with a noxious sulfur mist.
Rousted by the fumes, residents slammed their windows shut and phoned the police. People gasped for breath. Some reported their children were seized by fits of violent coughing as the acrid shroud spread through the morning over Chelsea, Revere, and Boston. Visibility on some roads was limited to 20 feet, forcing motorists, eyes tearing up, to slam their cars to a stop.
It was as if the entire region had come under an invisible attack.
Dascoli, 77, said he does not remember much about that morning — but not because his memories have faded. It’s just that the day of the leak, Aug. 12, 1958, wasn’t much different than many others he spent living near Chemical Lane, where Steve Wynn is now preparing to build a $1.6 billion gambling resort.
“It was a filthy hole back then,” said Dascoli, whose father worked at Monsanto for more than 20 years. “There were big sulfur piles that would blow everywhere. If you ever took a deep breath, you would choke.”
The site where casino mogul Steve Wynn wants to build his $1.6 billion gambling resort in Everett has a colorful, if sometimes toxic, history.
For Dascoli and others who recall — and endured — the property’s past, Wynn’s plan to build a five-star resort there is both deeply ironic and thrilling. One of the region’s most polluted addresses, a throwback to an unregulated era in local industrial history, is soon to become a gilded destination — for the moment, remarkably, the most important and talked-about patch of land in Greater Boston.
The Wynn project would reopen a section of the Mystic River waterfront that served as an industrial workhorse for decades, supporting production of everything from sulfuric acid to household cleaners to jet engines.
Accidents related to the facility, like this tank car spill in Somerville in 1980, were common.
The land is nothing much to look at now, but its fallow appearance belies a history full of surprising chapters and dramatic incidents. Before it was taken over by industry in the mid 1800s, the tidal marshes were owned by Hawes Atwood, a founder of Boston’s Union Oyster House who harvested shellfish there.
Atwood kept a home in Everett, which at the time was dominated by farms and large homes with sweeping views of the waterfront. Over the years, however, farms gave way to factories, and many of those residences were replaced by oil refineries and chemical company buildings that eventually consumed the marshes.
Monsanto took over the site in 1929, becoming one of the Everett’s largest employers, and the source of considerable chaos. Its smoke-belching plants were prone to fires, explosions, and acid leaks that injured workers and alarmed thousands of people.
The company’s operations in Everett peaked before the environmental movement gathered momentum. There were few controls on pollution or awareness of the public health implications of contaminated air and water.
Even as Monsanto spewed chemicals into the community, and the Mystic River, the company’s payroll sustained thousands of families in the region. Industrial growth of any kind was good, it meant jobs and prosperity. Few questioned that calculus, even when noxious odors filled the morning air.
That fact of local life was underscored on a September weekend in 1949, when news about the Everett plant dominated the front page of the old Everett Evening News-Gazette. One story described yet another acid leak at the plant that had spread fumes into neighboring communities and triggered panicked calls to police.
The fumes caused “wholesale irritation of the upper respiratory organs among hundreds of families in South Medford and the Ten Hills section of Somerville,” the newspaper said.
That same day, a front-page editorial about Monsanto made no mention of the acid leak. Instead, it praised the company for being among the first to reestablish open houses for employees and their families after the war.
“Despite the fact that thousands of women here in Everett and elsewhere took places in plants during the war years, there are still thousands of wives and mothers who have never seen the interior of the plant where the breadwinner works, just as too many men do not have the faintest notion of how the dainty dessert they eat for dinner gets to the table,” the editorial read.
Dascoli remembers his father, who worked as a Monsanto steamfitter, describing the plant as a dangerous place, with large open vats of chemicals and other hazards.
“He’d say to us, ‘One slip and I fall into the tank,’ ” Dascoli recalled.
Also common at the Monsanto site: sulfur blown from the piles there.
Sulfur, Dascoli said, was a constant irritant in their lives. “You’d wake up and sulfur would be on your car like it was snow. We just lived with it. What else could you do?”
Even today, more than 20 years after the plant’s closing, the property remains badly contaminated. The company that operated the facility was broken up in a complex process that led to the creation of several new entities, including Monsanto Co., which now makes herbicides and other products used in agriculture.
A spokeswoman for that company said it is engaged in the environmental cleanup of the Everett site and expects to continue that work under future owners of the property.
Wynn has estimated it will cost $30 million to remove high concentrations of arsenic and lead in the soil, and restore badly damaged marshes and coastal vegetation.
That work, due to begin by early next year, must be completed before construction can start on the resort, which will include a casino, a 500-room hotel, 94,000 square feet of retail stores, eight restaurants, a nightclub, and other attractions.
“It’s really hard for me to visualize, but it’s a wonderful thing that’s happening for Everett,” city native Mary Bagarella, 88, said of the casino. Bagarella recently appeared in a political advertisement urging voters to vote no on Question 3, a ballot proposition that would have effectively banned casinos and block the Everett project from proceeding. Voters by a wide margin opted for casinos in the Nov. 4 election.
She is among those with vivid recollections of the Monsanto era.
Spread across 70 acres, the gray and black complex loomed over her family’s home on May Street like a volcano, spewing smoke and chemicals that sometimes illuminated the night sky. The plant’s property was surrounded by two predominantly Italian-American neighborhoods that supplied many of the company’s rank-and-file workers.
“The fumes always started up right after supper,” Bagarella said. “White steam would shoot up out of the chimney and all of our eyes would start to tear up.”
As vividly as they recall the pollution, longtime residents also remember how it united them with neighbors who shared in their struggles and found ways to overcome them.
“We played in a playground with no grass and we all had 11,000 friends,” said Jean Chronowski, 70, who grew up on Lynde Street. “We were poor and we didn’t know it.”
Dascoli recalled how, even with the sulfur fumes and periodic fires, one neighbor kept horses on his property, and another had goats.
He said children had to get creative — sometimes mischievous — to entertain themselves. On winter nights, they would occasionally steal a water wagon from the nearby Esso company site and use it to flood the park at the edge of the neighborhood.
“We’d wake up in the morning and we’d have the whole park to skate on,” he said. Dascoli added that he and others would also sometimes sneak onto Monsanto’s property in the summer to go swimming in “rainbow colored” water.
Chemical spills, like this one in 1975, were not uncommon at the Monsanto plant.
During the 1950s, the plant was constantly making headlines due to a series of acid leaks, industrial accidents, and fires. Six workers were hospitalized in January 1950 after an explosion ripped a section of roof off a building used for manufacturing Santocel, an insulating material used in refrigerators and other appliances.
The Boston Globe reported on other major incidents at the plant in 1951, ’55, ’56, and ’58.
The 1958 leak released acidic clouds that blanketed Everett and parts of Boston, Revere, Chelsea, and Nahant. Low visibility on some roads caused motorists to stop their cars amid “coughing and weeping spasms,” according to the Globe.
“I had to shut the windows right away,” Mrs. James H. O’Malley of Chelsea told the newspaper. “None of us could stand it. The children were coughing and crying. Their throats hurt.”
The problems continued during the 1960s and ’70s, although with less frequency. In 1972, the federal clean water act established stricter waste-water standards, making it illegal to discharge pollutants into a navigable waterway without a permit.
Monsanto was flagged by some environmental groups as a frequent violator of the law. In 1983, activists from the environmental group Greenpeace were arrested after sneaking onto Monsanto’s property and blocking several discharge pipes. They claimed the pipes were being used to dump toxic waste into the harbor.
Eight years later, state environmental regulators hit Monsanto with a $1.2 million fine, the largest ever at the time, on grounds of attempting to conceal a large chemical spill into the Mystic River. State officials accused Monsanto of misrepresenting the size of the spill, reporting it amounted to 5,000 gallons when the total was really 40 times greater.
Though it sold a portion of its property in 1983, Monsanto continued to operate on the western side of the land along Route 16 until 1992. The company’s former chemical division funded the cleanup of that site, which is now the Gateway Center mall.
The eastern side of the property along Route 99 has remained vacant and was used in the 1990s as a dumping ground for material dredged during the Deer Island sewage project, which was part of a multibillion-dollar cleanup of Boston Harbor. Wynn is the only developer to mount a serious proposal for the property.
Chris Gordon, a project manager for Wynn, said the cleanup will take several months. The work involves dredging the Mystic and disposing of or capping toxic sediments concentrated at several locations. The soil — stained red, green, yellow, and white in places — is contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons and a variety of heavy metals, according to state environmental records.
“The amount of contaminated material is not huge,” Gordon said. “It just has to be very carefully handled.”
Once the cleanup is certified by the state, it will take about three years to construct the hotel and casino. Wynn has committed to building a 20-foot-wide harborwalk with overlooks of the restored salt marsh and coastal vegetation.
Many longtime residents are darkly comedic when they speak about the project, saying they just hope to live long enough to see the turnaround it promises. Charles DiPerri, 75, laughs when he thinks about it, remembering how the plant used to belch soot onto many of the homes in his neighborhood.
“Our mothers would hang out the sheets and they’d be covered with these black flecks,” said DiPerri. “Your eyes would burn from whatever was in the air. It was always the worst on hot summer nights.”
On a recent afternoon, he stood along a section of the waterfront near his family’s former home and tried to envision the radical makeover. It almost seems unreal, so far removed from the days DiPerri, his eyes stinging, swam in a discolored creek that split off from the Mystic.
“The water was yellow and blue,” he said. “We used to build forts there out of cardboard boxes. We didn’t know any better. It’s just what we were brought up in.”
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Steve Wynn’s plan to build a five-star casino resort in Everett on the site of a former chemical plant is there is both deeply ironic and thrilling to those who recall — and endured — the property’s polluted past.
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Close to retirement? Why America’s recovery is working against you
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20141111163616
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When the Federal Reserve Board released data from its 2013 Survey Consumer Finance (SCF), most of the attention focused on the growing gap between rich and poor. This survey of wealth showed that most of the country had seen little or no gain since the last survey in 2010, but the top 1% is doing quite well. The story is that the bounce back of the stock market from its recession trough meant big gains for the wealthy, since they own most shares of outstanding stock.
Meanwhile, home prices are still far below bubble peaks. Since houses are an asset that most families own, this means that the middle class have seen no comparable run-up in their wealth. Furthermore, continuing high rates of unemployment and weak wage growth have prevented most workers from adding to their savings.
This is a bad picture for the country as a whole, but it is especially bad news for those at the edge of retirement. These families do not have time for an economic turnaround to improve their situation. They must rely on the wealth they have accumulated to date to support them in retirement, and that is it. This is not a pretty picture.
The middle quintile of the cohort of workers between the ages of 55 to 65 had an average of just $169,000 in wealth in 2013. This is actually $19,000 below the average wealth for this group as reported in the 2010 SCF. (All numbers are in 2013 dollars). What’s more, it is $150,000 below the peak wealth for this group reported in the 2004 SCF. To give a basis for assessing the $169,000 difference, the median house price for the country as whole was $209,700 as of September.
This means that if a typical family in this 55 to 64 age group took all their wealth (which includes home equity) and used it to pay down their mortgage, they would still owe more than $50,000 on the median house. They would go into retirement with only their Social Security to support them, and a mortgage that is far from paid off.
The SCF supports this picture in its debt data. This middle quintile in the wealth distribution has only 54.6% of their home paid off on average. By comparison, in 1989, this group on average had equity equal to 81% of their house price, meaning that many could look forward to a retirement in which their mortgage was already paid off.
Going down to the second quintile, the situation looks far worse. The average wealth for this group is just $43,400. It had been almost $113,000 at its peak in 2007 and was $74,600 back in 1989, meaning that wealth for this group has declined by more than 40% over the last quarter century. Just over two-thirds of this group owns a house, with an average equity stake that is a bit more than 30% of the house price. This compares with a homeownership rate of more than 85% in 1989 and an average equity stake of more than 70%.
The average wealth for the bottom quintile is -$16,000, meaning that these people will be approaching retirement while still carrying debt. The homeowners from the group on average have negative equity, meaning they owe more than their house is worth.
Even the fourth quintile from this age group is not looking especially prosperous. Their average wealth is $470,000. That is down by almost 40% from the peak hit in 2004. The average equity stake for homeowners is 69.2%, down from 85.2% in 1989.
To put this $470,000 in perspective, if a couple used this money to pay off the mortgage on a median priced house, they would be able to buy an annuity that would pay them roughly $1,200 a month. This money, plus their Social Security, will keep them well above the poverty level, but it would hardly make for a comfortable retirement for households that are well above the median of the income distribution.
The basic story is that the vast majority of near retirees have managed to accumulate very little wealth. The collapse of the housing market bubble and the resulting economic downturn have been major blows from which they will not be able to recover before they retire. As a result they will be overwhelmingly dependent on Social Security and Medicare in their retirement years. Those who envision a population of affluent elderly who can easily get by with cuts in these programs are not looking at the data.
Dean Baker is a macroeconomist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University.
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Many are approaching retirement with only their Social Security to support them and a mortgage that is far from paid off, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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http://www.people.com/article/missing-massachusetts-mom-jaimee-mendez-police-search
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141111211820id_/http://www.people.com/article/missing-massachusetts-mom-jaimee-mendez-police-search
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Jaimee Mendez at Center of Police Search : People.com
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20141111211820
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11/11/2014 AT 02:00 PM EST
Police in Massachusetts are searching for a missing mother who disappeared after making phone calls to friends saying she was with a man who made her "nervous."
Jaimee Mendez was last seen on Thursday, according to
. The 25-year-old reportedly made two calls to friends expressing concern over the suspicious man.
"She said, 'Listen, I'm on this street, I'm with this guy, he's making me really nervous, I want to get out of here,' " her sister, Alyssa Mendez, said.
Alyssa added: "[Her friend] went to go pick up her up, she never showed, and her phone was off. That's the last anyone ever heard of her."
Police confirmed to PEOPLE that Jaimee is missing, but declined to comment any further on the investigation.
The Mendez family revealed Jaimee's jacket, phone, charger and ID were found this weekend in an industrial area.
Her sneakers were later discovered in a dumpster outside a local CVS, along with some men's clothing and a part of a rug that matches the one in a car that belongs to the man Jaimee was last seen with, according to her sister.
Alyssa said that police have spoken to the man in question. "He had scratches on his face, he had scratches on his hands," she told the station. "It just didn't make sense, his story."
For her part, Alyssa insisted that her sister would never leave her 5-year-old son alone for this long, adding that Jaimee has diabetes and needs her medication.
Said Alyssa: "It's like a race against the clock."
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Jaimee Mendez's family says she would never leave her son alone for this long
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http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/john-stallworth-philanthropy-nfl/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141113151645id_/http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/john-stallworth-philanthropy-nfl/
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John Stallworth: An MVP passes it on
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John Stallworth is in one of his least favorite places, standing in the glow of a spotlight. It’s a late-October day, and he’s behind a lectern in a concert hall in his hometown of Huntsville, Ala., introducing the third annual John Stallworth Legends Round Table. “Regardless of what you think of us when you look at us in the light of our success, we want you to realize your journey is not terribly different from ours,” says Stallworth, who has enlisted a panel consisting of former teammate Franco Harris,ex-Seattle receiver (and ex-congressman) Steve Largent, and Huntsville’s Margaret Hoelzer, a three-time swimming medalist in the 2008 Olympics, to inspire the young athletes and students who fill the audience. Harris and Largent recall the struggles on their paths to Hall of Fame careers. Hoelzer shares her powerful story of being sexually abused as a child.
Stallworth, 62, faced serious challenges of his own. At 8, a viral infection left him temporarily paralyzed on one side. He was a clumsy, pigeon-toed kid who tripped over his own feet—not a person anybody would have pegged as a future NFL star. But this son of a plumber and a maid went on to become a Hall of Fame wide receiver, then developed a multimillion-dollar company in the defense industry, started his own charitable foundation, and became a part-owner of the very team for which he played 14 seasons.
Two mornings after the roundtable, Stallworth sits in the conference room at his family’s offices. He’s still remarkably fit, prompting a comment he often hears: “You look like you could still play.” His stock reply: “I tell myself I have one play left. And I don’t want to go out and prove that’s wrong.”
Stallworth says his terrifying experience with paralysis “brought out a motivation in me to really extend myself.” He didn’t play organized football until his sophomore year of high school. He was rebuffed by the top local high school and then ignored by marquee colleges such as the University of Alabama.
Instead, Stallworth attended Alabama A&M. The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted him in the fourth round in 1974, after a more glamorous wide receiver chosen in the first round: Lynn Swann. Stallworth, says Harris, “was a very unassuming guy who didn’t come in with much fanfare. But you noticed that he steadily kept working hard, pounding away. He just grew into greatness.”
Stallworth was twice the Steelers’ MVP and played in four Super Bowls. He still owns the record for most yards per catch in Super Bowl history. He had two touchdowns in Super Bowl XIV, and his fourth-quarter 75-yard TD catch the following year put the Steelers ahead for good (and landed Stallworth on the cover of Sports Illustrated).
During his NFL days, he was warned about the perils of squandering paychecks. Steelers coach Chuck Noll preached about players’ “life’s work” beyond the sport, saying, “You can’t wait until the day you retire from football and look up and say, ‘What am I going to do now?’” Says Stallworth: “I made up my mind I was not going to play and make a little money and then wonder what happened to it.”
Stallworth returned each off-season to Huntsville, where his wife, Flo, and two children made their home. He “experimented,” he says, earning licenses to sell insurance and real estate and developing apartment complexes while earning his MBA, also from Alabama A&M.
In 1986, the year before his retirement from the NFL, Stallworth, his wife, and engineer Sam Hazelrig established Madison Research, which provided engineering services and technology support for Huntsville’s burgeoning defense industry. They initially worked out of Stallworth’s home, typing proposals on an old electric typewriter on which the “T” was out of whack.
It took a while for people to see Stallworth as a businessman. Athletic renown “was good because it got you in the door,” he says. “In other aspects it was bad because if people couldn’t see you in another role, it was hard for them to do business with you. They had to start to see me as a businessperson. They had to realize that I was competent in this new role.”
January 28, 1980 Sports Illustrated Cover. Football: Super Bowl XIV. Pittsburgh Steelers John Stallworth (82) in action, making catch and scoring game winning touchdown vs Los Angeles Rams at Rose Bowl Stadium. Pasadena, CA 1/20/1980Photo By: Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated
Madison Research earned its first contract with the Anniston Army Depot for two pieces of hardware to test equipment on an M1 tank, then gradually began to blossom. The company eventually managed computer maintenance at the Space and Missile Defense Command’s simulation center. By 2006, when Stallworth sold Madison for $69 million, it had 375 employees in 15 states.
His next unusual turn came in 2009, when Steelers chairman Dan Rooney asked Stallworth to become involved in ownership. He grappled with the dichotomy of field and boardroom. “I know what I felt was important to me and players around the league,” he says. “Would I have to junk all of that now to exist in that [owners’] box?” Says team president Art Rooney II: “It’s great to have him be a sounding board, particularly on things that affect players and retired players.” (For example, Stallworth has expressed his view that extending the regular season to 18 games is “crazy” for the toll it would take on players.)
Along with serving on corporate and charitable boards, Stallworth devotes much of his time to Genesis II, which manages his family’s investments and serves as an umbrella for his philanthropic work. Among other things, his foundation has provided scholarships of more than $350,000 to 125 college students. Says Stallworth: “The money we give to the kids, that changes them. That really excites me.”
Stallworth still gets excited for football too. He was present when the Steelers hosted the Baltimore Ravens in early November, a night when Antonio Brown, whom Stallworth has gotten close to, caught 11 passes. Stallworth was there to help honor a legendary teammate, “Mean” Joe Greene, who was having his number retired. When Stallworth became a part-owner, Greene was working in the Steelers’ front office. Greene looked at him quizzically and said, “Do I have to call you boss now?”
For more great business stories in our Pro-Files series check out both Fortune.com and SI.com
This story is from the December 1, 2014 issue of Fortune.
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Former Steelers great John Stallworth didn't follow the typical post-NFL path; he founded a defense-industry company and now devotes himself to philanthropy.
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http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-game-grades-Nov-16-vs-Giants-5897428.php
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141117083104id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-game-grades-Nov-16-vs-Giants-5897428.php
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49ers' game grades, Nov. 16, vs. Giants
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20141117083104
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One TD against the NFL’s 32nd-ranked defense? The first-half performance was solid, but the 49ers netted just six points from drives of 63, 67 and 42 yards. On the bright side, their once-porous offensive line surrendered only one sack and helped pave the way for 148 rushing yards. TE Vernon Davis (1 catch, 7 yards) continues to be oddly ineffective.
Thanks to consistent pressure — and some curious decisions by Eli Manning — the 49ers collected five interceptions, two by sensational rookie LB Chris Borland. Manning had a lower passer rating (36.6) than 49ers punter Andy Lee (39.6 on one incompletion). Justin Smith and Ray McDonald were big reasons the Giants had 65 rushing yards and averaged 3.1 yards a carry.
A ground-ball snap from Kyle Nelson on a field-goal try forced Lee to throw an incomplete pass. Another gaffe came on the Giants’ successful third-quarter onside kick: Bubba Ventrone wasn’t fooled and corralled the loose ball, but had it wrested away by ... kicker Josh Brown? Lee drilled a 59-yard punt and dropped three of his four punts inside the 20-yard line.
Vic Fangio deserves a game ball, again. Several of his defensive players credited the coordinator’s schemes for Manning’s five-interception disaster. The offense was, again, less than impressive but it wasn’t because it ignored Frank Gore (19 carries, 95 yards). The 49ers wisely had 37 runs (and 29 Colin Kaepernick passes) against the NFL’s worst run defense.
The defense bailed them out and its consistently excellent play offers hope the 49ers could be dangerous if the offense eventually finds its way. This wasn’t pretty, but it was a win 3,000 miles away from home in a game that started at 10 a.m. on the West Coast.
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On the bright side, their once-porous offensive line surrendered only one sack and helped pave the way for 148 rushing yards. Thanks to consistent pressure â" and some curious decisions by Eli Manning â" the 49ers collected five interceptions, two by sensational rookie LB Chris Borland. Manning had a lower passer rating (36.6) than 49ers punter Andy Lee (39.6 on one incompletion). Justin Smith and Ray McDonald were big reasons the Giants had 65 rushing yards and averaged 3.1 yards a carry. Another gaffe came on the Giantsâ successful third-quarter onside kick: Several of his defensive players credited the coordinatorâs schemes for Manningâs five-interception disaster. The 49ers wisely had 37 runs (and 29 Colin Kaepernick passes) against the NFLâs worst run defense.
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http://fortune.com/2011/10/11/steve-jobs-last-speech/
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Steve Jobs’ last speech
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20141118082322
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On June 7, the day after his final Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance before the Cupertino City Council. He was seeking permission to build a new corporate headquarters for Apple AAPL .
“We have a shot,” Jobs told the council, “at building the best office building in the world.”
121 days later, he was dead.
On Sept. 8 the city held a public hearing to discuss the environmental impact of the project. You can watch it here.
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http://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M On June 7, the day after his final Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance before the Cupertino City Council. He was seeking permission to build a new corporate headquarters for Apple . "We have a shot," Jobs told the council, "at building the best office building in the world." 121…
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http://www.people.com/article/erika-christensen-engaged-cole-maness
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Erika Christensen Engaged to Cole Maness : People.com
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20141119164835
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Cole Maness and Erika Christensen
11/17/2014 AT 01:05 PM EST
The state of Julia Braverman's marriage may be up in the air, but
's happily ever after is just getting started.
star is engaged to cyclist Cole Maness, her rep confirms to PEOPLE.
Although the couple has kept quiet about the relationship, both Christensen, 32, and Maness are active on social media and share silly snapshots of their adventures together.
For the actress, that often includes brushing up on her cycling skills, but for Maness it means hanging out on the set of his bride-to-be's hit show.
Maness has posted pictures of Christensen trying on costumes
during interviews with her onscreen husband, actor Sam Jaeger.
But Maness isn't the only one confessing his love for Christensen: Her character, Julia, is facing a tough decision as Joel has been convinced to fight for his wife – in the midst of signing their divorce papers.
's Page Six was first to report the news of their engagement.
Pssssst.... Hey thanks all my virtual friends. I feel the virtual love.
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The Parenthood actress is set to tie the knot with cyclist Cole Maness, her rep confirms to PEOPLE
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/11/10/foo-fighters-sonic-highways/JesPQhWJqVBLV0hgPxaCON/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141121062938id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2014/11/10/foo-fighters-sonic-highways/JesPQhWJqVBLV0hgPxaCON/story.html
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Foo Fighters, ‘Sonic Highways’
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20141121062938
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In a contemporary pop landscape where Adam Levine is presented as an embodiment of and advocate for rock music on millions of televisions weekly, Foo Fighters’ “Sonic Highways” is welcome recalibration for the genre. But in the context of a world where “The Colour and the Shape” and “Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace” exist, it’s hard to view the band’s eighth album as anything but its weakest. Which isn’t to say that “The Feast and the Famine,” “Congregation,” and others don’t rock righteously, it’s just that only “What Did I Do?/God As My Witness,” burning with the drive and breadth of a compact epic, pulls off anything more than that. Blame the decision to record in a variety of American music cities — Nashville for the Zac Brown-assisted “Congregation,” Chicago for “Something From Nothing,” and so on — which seems to interrupt Foo Fighters’ previously effortless creative momentum with every song. “Sonic Highways” isn’t a bad album, merely a disappointingly bloodless one; after all, one thing Foo Fighters have never lacked in the past is immediacy. (Out Tuesday)
ESSENTIAL “What Did I Do?/God As My Witness”
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Despite Foo Fighters’ characteristically righteous rock, restless rambling dilutes the focus of the band’s ambitious eighth album.
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http://fortune.com/2014/11/25/home-depot-data-lawsuits/
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Home Depot faces dozens of data breach lawsuits
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20141125162402
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Home Depot is facing at least 44 lawsuits related to a data breach at the home-improvement retailer that involved the theft of payment card information and customer e-mail addresses.
The retailer warned it was facing dozens of civil lawsuits in the U.S. and Canada, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as investigations by a number of state and federal agencies.
The fallout continues at Home Depot HD , which suffered from a data breach earlier this year that exposed millions of payment cards and e-mail addresses. Much of the damage has been fairly well contained, as Home Depot’s latest sales results signaled that customers weren’t dissuaded from visiting the retailer’s stores even after the data breach made headlines in September. But Home Depot warned it has recorded millions in costs, and observers say more expenses will be booked as Home Depot manages the fallout from the breach.
Home Depot on Tuesday warned the lawsuits could affect its business, resulting in additional costs and fines and potentially diverting the attention of the company’s management team away from standard operations. In addition, the government could impose injunction relief, which Home Depot said could result in higher data security costs.
The retailer also said it believed it was probable “that the payment card networks will make claims against the company.” Those claims would likely include amounts for counterfeit fraud losses, as well as other expenses such as the issuance of new cards. Home Depot indicated it could potentially settle those claims in negotiations with the payment card companies.
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Suits related to data breach at the home-improvement retailer that involved the theft of payment card information and customer e-mail addresses.
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http://fortune.com/2014/11/25/tiffany-us-sales/
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Rich Americans come to Tiffany's rescue
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Tiffany & Co TIF reported an 11% jump increase in comparable sales in the Americas last quarter, helping it mitigate poor sales in Asia, where its business got dinged by protests in Hong Kong.
For all its (successful) efforts to expand internationally in recent years, Tiffany can thank its erstwhile customers for a stellar quarter: wealthy Americans, particularly New Yorkers.
Tiffany’s big sales jump at home was fueled by its consumers not batting an eye at its raised prices, stronger demand for gold jewelry, and generally increased unit sales. What was particularly impressive was how Tiffany customers shrugged off a big stock market drop in October, the level of which typically has an immediate and direct effect impact on luxury spending, as fears of a market correction swirled. (The market has since rebounded and hit new all-time highs.)
At Tiffany’s legendary flagship store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, a location that generates 8% of company sales, sales to locals soared, even as business from foreign tourists was unchanged. U.S. sales were strong across the country, the company said.
But the most encouraging sign was strong demand for fashion jewelry—as opposed to its bridal jewelry, or statement jewelry, which is the really pricey stuff there—a sign its hiring last year of design director Francesca Amfitheatrof, whose pedigree includes Chanel, Fendi, Garrard and Marni, is paying off and bringing Tiffany jewelry, long seen as boring and dowdy, into a new era. Her Tiffany T collection, her first for the retailer, has gotten off to a strong start.
The only stateside blemish in the report was continued softness in Tiffany’s less expensive silver jewelry, which generates about 25% of sales. (It was all the more disappointing, given the strong U.S. sales at Signet Jewelers’ SIG Kay chain, a mid-price retailer whose comparable sales rose 7.5% last quarter.)
The strength in the U.S. was a balm for a retailer which has come to rely on Asia for growth. While mainland sales in China did well, the unrest in Hong Kong, still a key market for Tiffany, was painful, contributing to a 3% comparable sales decrease in the region.
“To no one’s surprise, recent protests and demonstrations have led to a decline in visitors coming to Hong Kong, which we believe was the primary factor adversely sales at several of our Hong Kong stores,” Tiffany investor relations head Mark Aaron said on a conference call.
Worldwide, comparable sales rose 4%.
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Tiffany & Co reported a huge surge in U.S. sales, as wealthy Americans splurged, helping it offset the damage of the Hong Kong protests.
| 18.074074 | 0.814815 | 1.555556 |
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http://www.nytimes.com/1862/02/22/news/washington-sympathy-congress-for-president-his-family-agreement-between-railroad.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141130165921id_/http://www.nytimes.com/1862/02/22/news/washington-sympathy-congress-for-president-his-family-agreement-between-railroad.html
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NEWS FROM WASHINGTON. - Sympathy of Congress for the President and his Family. Agreement Between the Railroad Men and the Government. THE FUNERAL OF THE PRESIDENT'S SON. - NYTimes.com
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20141130165921
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The funeral of the President's son will take place next Monday.
The following was addressed to the Senate and House of Representatives, but Congress adjourned before it was transmitted to them:
The President of the United States was last evening plunged into affliction by the death of a beloved child. The Heads of Departments, in consideration of this distressing event, have thought it would be agreeable to Congress, and to the American people, that the official and private buildings occupied by them, should not be illuminated in the evening of the 22d inst. (Signed)
WM. H. SEWARD, S.P. CHASE,
The Cabinet held their meeting at the State Department. The public buildings will not therefore be illuminated, the arrangements for that purpose being suspended.
About four hundred released prisoners reached Washington, to-night, from the South, by way of Baltimore. They hunted up Mr. ELY, in great numbers, and were overjoyed on finding their old partner in misfortune. To-morrow, a formal interview will take place between them.
The Judiciary Committee have closed their investigations into the Government Censorship.
RECONNOISSANCE UP THE OCCOQUAN CREEK.
The steamer Stepping Stones arrived at the Nary-yard this morning from the upper flotilla.
Yesterday morning this steamer, with a launch and boat's crew from the Yankee, went on a reconnoissance up Occoquan Creek some four miles. Lieut. HASTMAN sent out Acting-Master LAWRENCE with the launch, who visited the north and south shores of the Creek, penetrating a short distance into the interior, but without finding any signs of the rebels.
Just as the launch was leaving the south side of the creek, a brisk was fire was opened on them by the rebels, from five or six field pieces posted in a clump of woods.
Some forty shells were thrown by the enemy, all of which flew uncomfortably near the Stepping Stones but doing no damage, save slightly tearing the flag.
The fire was returned from the Stepping Stones and a howitzer on the launch, plunging a shower of rifled shot into the cover of the rebels, which undoubtedly damaged them, as the fire soon slackened.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE RAILROAD CONVENTION.
The National Railroad Convention assembled at 4 o'clock this afternoon to receive the report of the Committee appointed yesterday to prepare rates for Government transportation. The result may be briefly stated as follows:
On all roads or distances over fifty miles, adopting the classification of the four Atlantic Trunk lines, it was agreed that a deduction of ten per cent. should be made from their regular tariff rates on all supplies on material transported for Government account, with the proviso that in no case shall these rates exceed for first class freight three cents per ton per mile; for second class freight two and three-quarter cents per mile per ton; for third class freight two and a quarter cents per ton per mile; for fourth class freight one and three quarter cents per mile per ton.
After a full discussion, the report was unanimously adopted. The entire proceedings were conducted with the greatest harmony of feeling, and the public will readily perceive when the extreme pressure of private business upon the roads incident to the large export of domestic produce is considered, that the companies have met the views of the Government in a spirit of great liberality.
Secretary STANTON having yesterday suggested the appointment of a Standing Committee of the Convention with whom he might confer from time to time, Messrs. CORNING, FELTON and JEWETT were appointed such Committee. The Convention adjourned vine die.
STATE PRISONERS TO BE RELEASED.
The following prisoners of State will be released on the 22d inst., by order of the War Department, on their parole of honor to render no aid or comfort to the enemies in hostility to the Government of the United States, in accordance with the terms of the Executive Order, No. 1, of the War Department, dated Feb. 14, 1862, in reference to political prisoners:
Guy J. Hopkins, E.M. Jones,
David N. Waddle, Geo. Julius,
Geo. W. Jones, J. Garnett Guthrie,
Theo. O. Leary, Thos. Matthews,
Robt. M. Raisen, J.P. Swain,
Edward C. Cotterell, Wm. Grosse,
R.S. Freeman, A. De Costa,
J.A. Douglass, Wm. H. Windor,
James Brown, Parker H. French,
Ed. O'Neil, Geo. Van Ameringe,
Wm. St. George, J. English,
Charles Keene, Wm. G. Hamson,
Wm. H. Gutchell, Robert M. Dennison,
J. Hanson Thomas, Wm. T. McCune and
THE PROPOSED SURRENDER OF NASHVILLE.
It is believed that no information has been received here other than that brought by the Norfolk steamboat, in relation to the reported proposed surrender of Nashville.
The Senate hill recently introduced, proposing toconfer medals on meritorious private soldiers excites much comment in military circles. The objection to it, however, is, that it omits to similarly reward the officers, the general argument being that there should be no distinction among all who deserve such an acknowledgment of gallant conduct.
Congress having declined to make an appropriation to facilitate the arrangements of the Executive Committee for the World's Fair, including the chartering of a vessel to convey to London American products, as recommended by the President, the Committee are unable to proceed further in the premises, and to-day adjourned. Exhibitors are, therefore, thrown entirely on their own resources.
THE SPHERE OF HIS DUTIES EXTENDED.
Gen. PORTER, the present Provost-Marshal of Washington, has been appointed Marshal of the Army of the Potomac; in other words, the sphere of his duties has been extended.
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The funeral of the President's son will take place next Monday. NO ILLUMINATION. The following was addressed to the Senate and House of Representatives, but Congress adjourned before it was transmitted to them:
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http://fortune.com/2014/12/03/why-elizabeth-warren-is-wrong-about-wall-street-insiders/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20141203121224id_/http://fortune.com/2014/12/03/why-elizabeth-warren-is-wrong-about-wall-street-insiders/
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Why Elizabeth Warren is wrong about Wall Street insiders
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20141203121224
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Twice last month, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called for the White House to back away from, or rule out considering, nominating Wall Street insiders for senior regulatory positions. If this is the start of a crusade, it’s a very bad idea.
The greatest challenge facing financial regulators is the mind-numbing complexity of financial instruments. One big reason Wall Street has gotten away with so many shenanigans is that too few regulators understand what banks are up to.
Although the public hears a lot about the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington—and though it surely poses concerns—the senior positions at the top regulatory institutions are filled with people from public service backgrounds, with academics, and with economists who, in their prior jobs, were not primarily engaged in trading, or reading balance sheets, or evaluating financial risks.
And for the most part, when Wall Street was piling into mortgage securities, these regulators did not understand the risks. They may not understand the next time either.
If Washington is going to be effective at policing Wall Street, it needs to understand what Wall Street does. Franklin D. Roosevelt appreciated this—in a far less complex age—when he nominated Joseph P. Kennedy, a one-time stock market “pool” operator (basically a manipulator) to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Blunting criticism that he was putting a fox in charge of the henhouse, FDR reportedly said, “set a thief to catch a thief.” Kennedy got the message. He was a resolute chairman and established a solid reputation for the SEC that endured for decades.
Kennedy was not an aberration. His most illustrious successor may have been Arthur Levitt, a one-time stockbroker and stock exchange chairman who was wise to the canny ways of his profession. Levitt sniffed out the simmering potential for conflicts of interest between auditors and public companies—though Congress wouldn’t listen—and was ultimately proven right by the 2002 Arthur Andersen scandal.
By contrast, Christopher Cox, a lawyer and later a congressman, was an ineffective SEC chair. He was blindsided by the 2007 mortgage crisis and it was under his watch that the agency missed the Bernie Madoff scandal. One of the toughest regulators was Nicholas Brady, the head of a presidential commission and soon to be Secretary of Treasury, who courageously identified “portfolio insurance,” then a hot Wall Street product, for stoking the panic in the 1987 stock market crash. Also at the Treasury, I would argue that Hank Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs GS , responded swiftly and effectively to the 2008 meltdown; he was more forceful than either of his two immediate predecessors, who hailed from the aluminum and railroad industries.
Perhaps a couple of practiced lenders would have been useful at the Federal Reserve—which utterly failed to appreciate the risks in the sub-prime mortgage bubble. Indeed, it seems incredible that during the run-up to the mortgage crisis, among the Fed’s seven governors, only one had a background in private sector banking. (Another, Keven Warsh, had worked at Morgan Stanley MS , but by the time he joined the Board the bubble was ready to burst.)
This is not to urge a blanket ban on industry outsiders. The lone Fed governor who sounded early alarms about the mortgage crisis was Edward Gramlich, a former economics professor. Nor is it to suggest (obviously) that bankers never get it wrong. But finance cannot be regulated without expertise. To blackball professionals seems dangerously naïve. We should not forget that Paul Volcker, one of the best, and an impeccably ethical, Fed chief, was groomed at Chase Manhattan Bank.
Warren is fighting to block Antonio F. Weiss, who has been nominated by President Obama to be the next Treasury under secretary for domestic finance. Though an important post, it’s an obscure one to be the focus of a Congressional intervention—especially from a Senator of the President’s own party. But Warren has made clear that one of her main objections is that Weiss works at Lazard, a Wall Street investment bank. She wrote in the Huffington Post that Obama should “loosen the hold that Wall Street banks have over economic policy-making.”
That article followed closely a Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which Warren and a fellow Democratic Senator called on President Obama to “move in a new direction” by filling the two vacancies on the Federal Reserve Board with nominees who will “look out for Main Street, not the big banks.”
To maintain, as Warren did, that Wall Street has a “hold” over the Treasury is a curious reading of recent history. Of the eight U.S. Treasury secretaries since the beginning of the Clinton Administration, only three have come from Wall Street.
And if Warren thinks nominating Fed governors sensitive to Main Street represents a “new direction,” she is dead wrong. None of the five Fed governors worked as private sector bankers. All are from public service or academia. Even among the Federal Reserve Banks, the level at which most of the supervision occurs, only three of the 12 have presidents who worked in private sector finance.
Given Warren’s objections, it’s perhaps surprising that, last year, she voted to approve Jack Lew as Treasury Secretary (Lew was at Citigroup C when the bank collapsed and required a bailout). But that’s the point: Wall Street-ers should be evaluated on their merits, just like others. Wall Street experience is certainly not a qualification in itself—nominees must demonstrate that they can separate from their employers, intellectually as well as financially. But nor should it be a disqualification. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few foxes on the lookout.
Roger Lowenstein is the author, most recently, of The End of Wall Street. He is writing a book on the origins of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
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In her quest to keep bankers out of senior regulatory positions, the Massachusetts senator forgets that too few regulators actually understand what Wall Street is up to.
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http://fortune.com/2014/12/03/10-subliminal-retail-tricks-youre-probably-falling-for/
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10 subliminal retail tricks you’re probably falling for
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20141203223011
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This post is published in partnership with Money. The original can be found at Money.com
Today’s marketing strategies aren’t dreamed up in smoky rooms full of Mad Men. The tools companies employ to get you to buy their stuff have grown ever more sophisticated, with marketers even using neural measurements to design product packaging and appeal to your deepest desires (to be covered in Cheetos dust, apparently).
Consumer experience these days is not simply designed; it’s engineered. Research determines the ads you see, the scents and sounds you encounter in stores, even the way a salesperson might casually touch your arm. It’s not all high-tech brain science, but here are some of the tricks companies use to entice you to spend more.
1. They make you nostalgic. Don Draper was on to something with his sentimental pitch for a Kodak campaign. But the abundance of families, puppies, and childhood ephemera in the ads you see every day is more than a simple ploy to tug on your heartstrings. Recent research shows nostalgia makes people value money less and feel willing to pay more for purchases.
2. They sic rude salespeople on you. At high-end stores like Gucci, customers are actually more inclined to buy expensive products after a salesperson has acted snottily to them, a new study found. This effect—which doesn’t work with mass-market brands, only luxury—seems to have something to do with the desire to be part of an in crowd. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, you’re more likely to want to belong to a club that doesn’t want you as a member.
3. They use smaller packaging to get you to buy bigger.You’d think that it would be easier to buy and drink less soda and beer if you stick to the cute new mini-cans that seem to be all the rage these days. But research shows buying multi-packs of those small sizes can actually lead people to consume more overall.
4. They get you lost and confused. It’s not an accident that grocery stores are often laid out unintuitively. Losing focus makes people spend more on impulse purchases, says expert Martin Lindstrom, who has conducted studies on marketing strategies. Getting interrupted during shopping also makes you less price-sensitive, according to research co-authored by marketing professor Wendy Liu at UC San Diego. That’s because when you return to look at products after a distraction, you have a false sense of having already vetted them, she says.
5. They mimic your gestures—and get women to touch you.A woman’s touch—but not a man’s—makes people of either sex looser with their money, so when that saleswoman touches your shoulder, you may unwittingly end up spending more. Additionally, research shows that if a salesperson of either sex imitates your gesticulations, you are more likely to buy what he or she is selling.
6. They get you to handle the merchandise. Consumers are willing to pay at least 40% more for mugs and DVDs—and 60% more for snacks—that are physically present than for the same products displayed in photographs or described in text, according to a Caltech study. And other research shows your willingness to pay more increases as you spend more time looking at and holding objects.
7. They create the illusion of bulk bargains. Whether you’re using a jumbo shopping cart or a small basket, you’re going to be tempted to load it up, so it pays to make sure those “deals” are actually worthwhile. Researcher Lindstrom found that adding the sentence “maximum 8 cans per customer” to the price tag of soup cans caused sales to jump, even if no true discount was offered, because it gave the illusion of one. It’s worth asking at checkout: Does that “10 for $10″ actually just mean one for $1?
8. They give you free treats. Consuming even one free chocolate increased shoppers’ desire for nonfood luxuries—including expensive watches, dressy designer shirts, and Mac laptops—right after eating it, according to a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
9. They drop the dollar sign. If you think the plain old “28” rather than “$28″ on the menu of your favorite fancy restaurant is simply designed to look chic and minimalist, think again. A Cornell study found that a format that leaves off dollar signs and even the word dollar gets people to spend 8% more at restaurants.
10. They carefully engineer store ambiance. Ambient sounds and smells can make you less careful with your cash. In an appliance store, researcher Lindstrom pumped in the smell of an apple pie, and the sales of ovens and fridges went up 23%. He also found that alternating German and French music in a wine shop influenced which bottles customers purchased. Even non-music background sounds can make you overspend: A researcher found that the distraction of noise made people more likely to buy fancier sneakers.
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There's a reason that salesperson is being rude. Increasingly sophisticated consumer research shows that if she disses you, you'll spend more.
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Mick Jagger, William Morris and Minecraft - the week in art
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20141204024502
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Love is Enough: William Morris and Andy WarholTwo apparently utterly different artists – one a champion of craft and communism, the other a prophet of the ready-made and capitalism – have more in common than we think according to this exhibition’s curator Jeremy Deller. Fascinating.• Modern Art Oxford, Oxford OX1 from 6 December until 8 March
William BlakeA trinity of radical artists in Oxford is completed by this survey of the great Romantic poet, artist and visionary.• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford OX1 from 4 December until 1 March
Drawn by LightThe story of photography as seen through the Royal Photographic Society collection. • Science Museum, London SW7 from 2 December until 1 February
Stan DouglasA retrospective of the seminal Canadian video artist. • Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh EH1 until 15 February
Pipilotti RistAn immersive new video installation by this fun, subversive artist.• Hauser and Wirth, London W1S and Bruton, Somerset until 10 January
Leonardo da Vinci – The Burlington House Cartoon (c 1499-1500)In Florence at the start of the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci had an exhibition of a single, unfinished work of art – a “cartoon” or full-size sketch of a religious picture. This is probably it. If so, it is not just one of the most beautiful and compelling drawings of all time, but a document of the intellectual radicalism of the Renaissance – for people came to see an idea in progress, a shadowy invention of the mind. • National Gallery, London WC2N
What 160 years of war photography really looks like – from cannon-blasted fields in the Crimean war to sheep amid the ruins in Afghanistan
How good photography actually is at capturing conflict, as a new exhibition of war photography opens
That Tate has teamed up with Minecraft
That Marrakech is about to become photography’s global HQ – although many of the locals still rail against having their picture taken
How design duo Hipgnosis turned Mick Jagger into a goat – and Peter Gabriel into the Vitruvian Man
That the documentary about David Hockney is hitting the screens
That a new show of Post Pop art is pumped full of shockers, from penis pasta to Piss Christ
How a band of Liverpool locals have taken control of their long-neglected streets
That a museum in Switzerland accepted part of the Nazi art horde, with “sorrow”
... and why the haunting Nazi art treasure trove deserves to be publicly seen
What the first art to explore the horror of concentration camps was
That a photographer has channelled David Lynch to create disturbingly creepy dreamscapes
How one man in the DRC made people show him their secrets
Why Greece has reclaimed El Greco four hundred years after his death
What the world’s most iconic buildings look like emerging from the shadows
That a woman makes her friends recreate the moments they met for a poignant photography project
It’s your last chance to submit your pencil drawings before the new Share Your Art theme is announced
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Jonathan Jones: Tate teams up with Minecraft, Hipgnosis turn the Stones into goats, and a new Hockney documentary hits the screens
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About Stephanie Mehta
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Stephanie N. Mehta is an assistant managing editor at FORTUNE, overseeing technology coverage for Fortune. She also is a co-chair of the annual Brainstorm: Tech conference, an annual gathering of tech and media thinkers. Previously, Mehta spent seven years as a tech writer at FORTUNE covering the telecom and media industries. She also has worked for the Wall Street Journal and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va.
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Stephanie N. Mehta Stephanie N. Mehta is an assistant managing editor at FORTUNE, overseeing technology coverage for Fortune. She also is a co-chair of the annual Brainstorm: Tech conference, an annual gathering of tech and media thinkers. Previously, Mehta spent seven years as a tech writer at FORTUNE covering the telecom and media industries. She…
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Somerset House to celebrate beards with portrait exhibition
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They were once the domain of the dignified elderly gent – but now as beards and ostentatious facial hair adorn every on-trend male face they are to be the subject of an art exhibition.
A series of 80 portraits of people sporting impressive and interesting facial hair will go on display at Somerset House, central London, next year.
The photographs were taken by award-winning photographer Brock Elbank, with a dozen of the works commissioned by Somerset House for the show exhibited for the first time. Subjects vary from actor John Hurt and model Ricki Hall to Harnaam Kaur, a woman with polycystic ovaries which have caused her to grow facial hair as a symptom, and an Italian called Angelo Gallamini who Brock described as owning “the Zeus of beards”.
The exhibition began as a charity project when Elbank teamed up with friend Jimmy Niggles, who had begun a charity called Beard Season in Australia, raising awareness about skin cancer through persuading men to grow beards.
Elbank contacted people from around the world with unique or flamboyant facial hair to be a part of the photography project, with many travelling thousands of miles over the past year to the UK to have their pictures taken and included in the original 60 charity portraits. After Somerset House agreed to exhibit the project, Elbank was commissioned to shoot a further dozen portraits of bearded figures that would be exclusive to the show, which opens in March.
“I’ve been labelled a beard photographer but I’m not, I just like interesting subject matter for my portraits,” said Elbank. “It’s not the beard, it’s the person wearing the beard. I mean, we have shot people with beards down to their waist, which is obviously very impressive, but I hope that people will see beyond that in my photography. It’s just interesting people, a real cross-section of society that will be brought together in this show. We even went down to the British Beard and Moustache championships and we shot a guy called Edwin Ven who had terminal cancer. He was only 51 and he actually passed away six days after I took that portrait.”
Elbank said that while the show was a celebration of beards, he insisted it was not simply jumping on the hipster facial hair bandwagon.
“Beards are very in vogue at the moment but when I took the first photo that will be in this exhibition, of my friend Miles Better who is a tattooist in Soho, it was 2004 and beards weren’t fashionable,” he said. “I don’t really want to use the word hipster in relation to this exhibition because that’s not what it’s about – this all began because of a charity and to raise awareness of melanoma, it wasn’t about making a fashion statement. This is not just jumping on the fashion bandwagon, it is simply an angle, an interesting set of subjects for my photos.”
Beard is from 5 March – 29 March in the Terrace Rooms at Somerset House
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Series of 80 photographic works of people sporting impressive and interesting facial hair will go on display next year
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New Indonesian human rights minister against death penalty
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Australian death-row prisoners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. (AAP)
The minister who will advise Indonesia's new president on whether to grant clemency to two Australians says he's personally against the death penalty.
Indonesia's former president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, failed to sign a decree commuting the death sentences of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran before leaving office last month.
There were hopes he would rescue the pair, members of the so-called Bali Nine, because of the special attention he gave to relations with Australia.
Now Chan and Sukumaran's fate rests with the new president, Joko Widodo, with advice from his new ministers, who were appointed late last month.
Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna Laoly says he hasn't yet turned his attention to the clemency cases left unsigned by Dr Yudhoyono.
On drug crimes generally, the new minister says he agrees with Indonesia's move towards rehabilitation programs rather than jail for drug users, but not traffickers.
But he also doesn't personally agree with capital punishment.
"I have a dilemma with this," he said in Jakarta.
"If it's the court's decision, what can we do?
"I'm among those who think of the death penalty differently.
"I'm not a supporter of the death penalty."
While this was his view, Mr Yasonna said he wasn't "pushing it", as he respected the sentences handed down by the courts.
He is among a number of officials Mr Joko can call on to advise on clemency cases.
Also available to the president is a letter from the former governor of the Bali prison where Chan and Sukumaran are jailed, which recommends their sentences be commuted to life.
Lawyer for the pair, Julian McMahon, says they have used their time in jail productively, helping rehabilitate and re-train other prisoners.
Chan, 30, and Sukumaran, 33, were among nine young Australians convicted over a 2005 heroin trafficking plot.
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The minister who will advise Indonesia's new president on whether to save two Australians from death by firing squad says he's against the death penalty.
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Is there a ‘bamboo ceiling’ at U.S. companies?
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FORTUNE — Dear Annie: I just got passed over for yet another promotion, the third one in five years, even though I’ve been working flat-out and all my performance evaluations have been great. This is upsetting, but perhaps not surprising, considering that I am Asian American (third-generation Chinese) and there is no one of Asian extraction in any high position at this company. I hate to “play the race card,” but given the circumstances, I can’t help wondering if there is some subtle race discrimination at work here. What are your thoughts? — Invisible Man
Dear I.M.: You aren’t the only one wondering. About 5% of U.S. residents identify themselves as Asian, but Asian Americans hold fewer than 2% of executive jobs at Fortune 500 companies, according to a study published in July by the nonprofit Center for Work-Life Policy.
The gap clearly isn’t due to a lack of education: 16% of all Ivy League college grads identify as Asian or Asian American (over three times the group’s representation in the population overall), and more than one-third (35%) of students at top schools like M.I.T. and Stanford identify as Asian or Asian American.
Granted, every now and then someone who identifies as Asian or Asian American scales the corporate heights, like Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon Products AVP , and Citigroup c chief Vikram Pandit. Altogether, eight Fortune 500 CEOs identify themselves as Asian.
Partly for that reason, about one-quarter of Asian people surveyed for the CWLP study said they believe that race discrimination is holding them back at work. Interestingly, a scant 4% of Caucasians saw any evidence of bias against Asian people.
Human resources consultant Jane Hyun says that some Asian cultures encourage an ethic that rewards hard work without seeking public recognition. “’But hard work alone isn’t enough,” says Hyun, who runs an executive coaching firm called Hyun & Associates and is the author of Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians. “Asian cultures have sayings like ‘The loudest duck gets shot,’” Hyun observes. “This is totally opposite from, and incompatible with, Western notions like ‘The squeaky wheel gets the grease.’”
Michael Hyter, author of a new book called The Power of Choice, agrees. As head of Boston-based consulting firm Global Novations, he has noticed in his work with American and Asian clients that “there is a real cultural disconnect.
“Americans are taught to show leadership potential by being gregarious, outgoing, outspoken, and confident, but the Asian ideal is to work very hard, be humble and deferential, and blend in with the group. Expressing opinions or proposing changes is often seen [in Asia] as disrespectful.”
About half (48%) of respondents to the CWLP survey said the biggest hurdle Asian Americans face is “conformity to prevailing leadership models.”
Says Hyter, “It’s important to take a close look at who is getting promoted at your company and analyze what they’re doing, besides working hard. You need to understand how your company defines leadership qualities.”
He notes that technical skills are the easiest kind to identify and measure, so “they tend to be how we evaluate our own performance. But, although no one talks about it, promotions are 85% based on other skills, like the ability to influence others and form strategic relationships.”
You don’t have to go it alone. Hyter, a former executive at Dayton Hudson (now Target) who happens to be African-American, says his own parents instilled in him the idea that “getting good grades and out-working everyone else would make me successful,” he recalls. “Then I noticed that alone was not doing it. Luckily, I had a mentor who helped me figure out the unwritten rules.”
You need one too. “It should be someone at least two levels above you in the organization,” Hyter says. “Ask for feedback about what you need to work on.”
At the same time, both Hyun and Hyter urge you to expand your network and boost your visibility by seeking out “opportunities to lead projects and influence people,” Hyter says. “It requires you to stretch a little — without losing sight of who you are.”
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Few Asian Americans have made it to the top of the corporate ladder at Fortune 500 companies despite the minority group's outsize achievements. Why is that?
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US man arrested for allegedly downloading child porn at Starbucks cafe
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A US man has been arrested for allegedly using free Wi-Fi at a Starbucks to download child pornography.
Robert Dietz, 59, had been monitored for two months by detectives after police received several tipoffs, The Oregonian reports.
Police traced the activity to a Starbucks in downtown Hillsboro, Oregon, where Dietz was arrested on Saturday morning.
The coffee shop is across the street from the town's courthouse.
He now behind bars on charges of encouraging child sex abuse and parole violation.
The lead detective in the case had arrested Dietz for the same crime in 2009, for which he was sentenced to 40 months in prison, Washington County Sergeant Vance Stimler said.
Mr Stimler said it was likely Dietz was using public Wi-Fi in hopes of avoiding discovery.
"It's not as clear as, say, a DUI. There's a lot of extra steps that go into establishing who the suspect is, what they're downloading, ensuring it's intentional, and getting the district attorney involved," Mr Stimler said.
Dietz has been convicted four times since 1996 for a range of child sex offences, including sodomy and failing to register as a sex offender.
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<p>A US man has been arrested for allegedly using free Wi-Fi at a Starbucks to download child pornography.</p><p>
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4 successful CEOs who throw cold water on the marriage-success theory
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The professional benefits of marriage have long been extolled. Married couples tend to make more money over their professional lifetimes. And tying the knot can come with a number of perks—financially and socially. Senior executives often prefer the stability associated with the coupled, which can lead to promotions. Married people are said to live longer as well.
Recently published research by Washington University’s Joshua Jackson even suggests that you are more likely to rise the ranks fastest with a “conscientious” spouse; one who is reliable, organized, and good at managing chores and finances.
But where does that leave those Americans who simply haven’t found “the one” yet? In many ways, staying single can do wonders for your career. It gives you more flexibility—you are less likely to feel guilty about spending long hours in the office.
In fact, at certain points in a company’s life, it may be better for the top spot to be filled by a lonesome dove. That’s because the unhitched are more willing to take chances on investment in research and development or mergers, according to recent research. Such efforts can turn a small struggling business into a publicly traded gem. In fact, a number of CEOs without a marriage certificate are at the helm of fast-growing companies.
This is certainly the case in the boom and bust world of startups. These four companies have been aided by the attention, dedication, and attentiveness of their unmarried CEOs. At least most of the time. These four executives have found love; it just doesn’t necessarily include a living, breathing partner.
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Married CEOs are thought to be good for a company’s stability. But unhitched leaders may be best suited for fast-growing startups.
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JetBlue Nudges Fliers on Etiquette After Summer of Air Rage
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DALLAS — Snoring, slouching sleepers, and the challenges of climbing over fellow passengers for a trip to the restroom — those are among the myriad etiquette issues on crowded planes, and the first targeted by JetBlue Airways Corp. in a series of over-the-top videos posted on Facebook and Twitter to encourage passengers to think about their behavior.
“We wanted to say, ‘We’ve all been there. We get it, and let’s talk about it,’” Lisa Borromeo, JetBlue director of brand management and advertising, said about the clips for #FlightEtiquette. “It’s a universal truth of flying.”
The videos follow a summer with several cases of air rage on crowded US aircraft, including three that led to flight diversions. One, on a United Airlines plane, involved a passenger spat that escalated into water tossing and transformed the Knee Defender seat gadget into a household name.
The JetBlue videos don’t tell customers how to behave, Borromeo said. The exaggerated examples “are meant to be fun” and to generate dialog.
While the carrier would be “thrilled” if the clips lead to positive behavior changes, “we’re also happy knowing that the video caused some travelers to smile and nod in understanding,” said Morgan Johnston, a spokesman for the carrier.
JetBlue was an early adopter of social media to converse with customers, and the videos extend that. The first is entitled “How Not to Take a Nap.” It portrays a sleeping, snoring man leaning onto the shoulder and then the lap of a passenger next to him — and eventually lying across the entire row of seats.
The second shows a passenger in a window seat who is consuming several beverages and then facing the dilemma of getting past sleeping travelers in the middle and aisle seats.
In “How Not to Make an Exit,” the fidgeting woman tries various ways to wake the sleepers, then attempts to climb over and under them.
The videos don’t hold universal appeal, however.
Jay Sorensen, a former marketing director at Midwest Airlines, said the goal is not clear, beyond JetBlue’s using social media to engage customers.
“There’s no heroes in these stories, and there’s no solution provided,” said Sorensen, president of the aviation consultant IdeaWorksCompany. “Maybe I’m a dolt, but I don’t understand the purpose of this.”
In 2003, JetBlue created “air-tiquette” cards that offered tips for passengers “to be savvy, comfortable, nice and safe while in the air.” The suggestions included saying excuse me, keeping the aircraft clean, stretching out but being considerate, and keeping feet out of the aisle.
Unruly passengers triggered 121 “enforcement actions” by the Federal Aviation Administration last year.
The FAA’s cases reflect reports by flight-crew members and exclude violations that may be reported to the Transportation Security Administration.
JetBlue will continue the videos with an unspecified number of clips, some based on personal experiences.
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Snoring, slouching sleepers and the challenges of climbing over fellow passengers for a trip to the restroom — those are among the myriad in-flight etiquette issues on crowded planes, and the first targeted by JetBlue Airways Corp. in a series of over-the-top videos posted on Facebook and Twitter to encourage passengers to think about their behavior.
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UCLA's business school embraces the tech boom
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(Poets&Quants) — When Dan Reiss and Robert Fagnani were applying to business schools two years ago, their backgrounds suggested they would stay on the East Coast.
After all, Reiss was a native of Philadelphia who majored in drama at New York University. He had been workingfor an investment management firm in New York City. Born and raised in New Jersey, Fagnani had gone to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and spent the past four years at Morgan Stanley in New York.
Ultimately, the pair went west, accepting invites from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. Reiss turned down Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business to come to sun-bleached Los Angeles, while Fagnani passed on the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business to enroll at Anderson, currently ranked 14th best by Poets&Quants.
Why turn down higher ranked schools to go to UCLA? For both MBA students, it came down to culture. “There’s a very different way that people think on the West Coast,” says Reiss, who also saw a benefit in the emphasis on technology in the West. “People aren’t afraid to start with a blank canvas and rethink everything. I like that lifestyle. If I had went to Tuck, I would have never left the Northeast.”
Fagnani, 28, agrees. “The more I looked at programs, the more I realized that the infrastructure, the classes and the opportunities are roughly the same at the top schools,” he says. “The biggest variable is the culture. I felt this was the place I would fit in and thrive.”
He’s not alone. Student opinion surveys show increased satisfaction at UCLA’s Anderson School, which has gone through a transformation in recent years, becoming more closely tied to the tech boom, in L.A., Silicon Valley, and Seattle. The upshot: Applications last year soared by 32%, while the average GMAT for the overall applicant pool was up five points to 688, swayed in part by the greater tech focus. Those extra apps drove the school’s acceptance rate down to 18% from 22% a year earlier, while the average GMAT for the new class hit a record 715, up from 706.
“This class is phenomenal,” boasts Rob Weiller, associate dean of admissions for the MBA program. “The second years are in awe of the new class. More importantly, though, they are still the same kinds of people. We haven’t sacrificed our supportive culture. There is just a world of opportunity out there and our career center is plugged into those opportunities. It is way more difficult to do that from the East Coast. I don’t care if you have the H word on your diploma.”
At 26.5% of the Class of 2014, technology is the top hiring industry of Anderson graduates and has been for the past three years. The percentage going into tech from UCLA has more than doubled in the past four years, eclipsing the 20.4% who took finance jobs and the 14.2% of Anderson MBAs who went into consulting.
This year, in fact, at least 15 students went to work at Google, while Amazon and Microsoft each hired 10 or more MBAs, and Adobe Systems, Amgen, Apple, Ebay, Symantec, and VMware each employed between five and nine Anderson graduates. School officials, moreover, believe that tech has morphed with L.A.’s traditional strengths as an entertainment and media mecca to give birth to a host of new startups and tech firms in Silicon Beach, a three-mile stretch of sand between Venice and Santa Monica. The area is home to more than 500 startups and tech giants, ranging from Snapchat to online video service Hulu, along with an expansive L.A. office for Google.
“The school has pivoted fairly quickly to become much more of a technology school than when I first came here,” says Mark Garmaise, a finance professor who joined UCLA in 2001 after a stint at Chicago Booth. “Our major new push is going towards analytics and technology. We have great data analytics courses and classes where students are working with Google and doing real-time problem-solving.”
Dubbed “The Google Class” by students, the course represents how Anderson, once a finance and quant haven, is transforming itself into a pathway into tech. Anderson worked with Google to develop the course, which is officially called “Digital Marketing Strategy” and was first offered on a trial basis this past fall. Co-taught by marketing professor Sanjay Sood and a Google executive, the course provides students with a broad overview of Google’s approach to marketing. It focuses on four key areas: insights, measurement, storytelling, and brand.
“We reinvented the class to be more industry relevant,” says Karen Williams, executive director for the school’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports. “There are Google cases and projects with Google executives. All the top schools are being challenged to bridge the thinking with the doing. It is a model we are talking with another company about and have two more firms on our target list.”
Beyond the Google example, Anderson doesn’t shy away from bringing in leading executives to teach in its classrooms. Brian Frons, the president of daytime Disney/ABC, now teaches a course called “Making Creativity Profitable in Entertainment & Technology.” Dean Judy Olian and Hollywood producer Peter Guber, CEO of the multimedia Mandalay Entertainment Group, teach a class together. Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of the school’s six specializations, along with such traditional MBA areas as accounting and corporate finance, is technology leadership, with such courses as “New Product Development” and “Technology Management.”
“This California location has us keyed into the tech boom,” adds Garmaise, who is also senior associate dean of the MBA program. “We didn’t stop being a finance school, but we have pivoted in terms of industry because it is a better fit for us. You have California opportunities that would open up to you that are very difficult to access from other parts of the country.”
Once wary of heavily promoting its southern California location, in the affluent Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, the school seems far more willing to embrace it these days. “We’ve done a much better job of talking about why California,” says Weiller in admissions.“Five years ago, there was this feeling that we couldn’t even put palm trees or sand on our brochures because some thought we would diminish our reputation by making people think we are here playing beach volleyball. But we are the school in Los Angeles. We are not going anywhere. So we need to learn to talk about L.A. as a competitive advantage.”
Many business schools in big urban centers tend to be less collaborative and more competitive. It’s because students often disperse into the city after class, making it difficult to form bonds with each other. Not so at UCLA’s Anderson. “Some students say they expected UCLA to be a commuter school because we’re in the city, but their experience is just the opposite,” adds Weiller. “They are here and it feels like they are in Hanover or Charlottesville. It is an organic part of who we are: We are confident but not cocky and smart but not overbearingly so.”
Students say the environment is supportive. “Business schools are super competitive, but you can be in this competitive environment and win together,” says Schoelkopf. “I was showing students to a class last winter and we were finding out about consulting interviews and offers. One of my friends came up and said, ‘I heard you got a final round at BCG.’” She said, ‘I didn’t get it but I am super pumped for you.’ People were generally excited about the things others were doing. It is such an anxious time in all of our lives. At other schools, people don’t talk to one another during recruiting. It’s a lot more cut-throat.”
In Schoelkopf’s learning team, he played the role of the finance guy in a diverse group that included a former Wall Street Journal reporter, a consultant, a serial entrepreneur, and a human resources person. “Managing that dynamic was a bigger learning experience than any class you are going to take,” he says.
At UCLA, students take a fairly typical set of core courses in the first year. In the second year, there’s the usual array of electives as well as a capstone course, a 20-week project in which students choose teams and do one of three options: a management field study in which MBAs work on a key strategic issue with a participating company; a business creation option, which gives entrepreneurs the chance to work on their own startups, and a special project option, which allows teams to analyze a strategic issue facing an entire industry.
Through it all, the school has gotten closer to students and their career needs, insists Regina Regazzi, assistant dean and director of the school’s Parker Career Management Center. “We got to know the students a lot better. Starting with the Class of 2012, we committed to tracking them and met every student before the end of orientation. We started to problem solve what they needed and what they were looking for.”
The school launched what it calls ACT, which stands for Anderson Career Teams, in which some 80 second-year MBAs volunteer to coach first-year students based on their industry and functional backgrounds. “That allows us to teach our career series and then individualize it for each student,” says Regazzi. “Some volunteers are putting in 10 to 15 hours a week. And when it comes to show time, before the interviews, our second years conducted 125 mock interviews in one week just for banking interviews last year.”
The entrepreneurial culture at Anderson is also predictably strong, with some 300,000 entrepreneurial ventures based in the L.A. metro area. “Finding new sources of value is the best way to secure our future,” says long-time UCLA professor Al Osborne, founder and faculty director of the school’s Harold Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. “This generation of students wants to be on their own. They are not interested in gold watches and security. I see students who want to make a big difference with their time. My generation made a fortune destroying the environment. What they want to do is make a future cleaning it up.”
Adds Reiss, who will graduate this June, “The students basically run everything here. The only disappointment is that I don’t have 48 hours in a day to get everything done.” His classmate Fagnani knows the feeling. “A common pitfall for a lot of MBA students is that they don’t do enough [due] diligence before they come to know what they want to get out of the experience,” he says. “They are trying to explore and those are the ones who struggle during recruiting because they spread themselves too thin.”
Reiss and Fagnani are helping to run the school’s consulting firm, which is called the Anderson Strategy Group. Last year, the group—composed exclusively of UCLA MBA students—did consulting for companies that ranged in size from $200 million to $1 billion, including a food and beverage company, a ticketing company, a hospital, and a non-profit organization. Both students are making the transition from finance to consulting and will join their summer internship employers as full-time employees, with Reiss going to ZS Associates and Fagnani headed for Boston Consulting Group’s West Coast practice.
Within Anderson’s Class of 2014, the median base salary improved by $10,000 to $110,000, but the school’s job offer rates trailed many rival schools. Some 75.4% had offers at graduation and 90.3% had offers three months out, numbers that Weiller believes would be better if not for the strength of the job market and the school’s location. Compared to some rivals, those stats are not nearly as impressive. The average offer rate at graduation for a Top 25 school this year was 84%, while the three-month rate was slightly over 94%.
“The market has given people some comfort,” explains Weiller. “We have more students who go to firms with just-in-time hiring. There were plenty of students who had job offers before graduation and they turned them down. That is a drawback of being in a big city. If you are in Hanover or Charlottesville, there is a real incentive to make sure you get a job before you get out of there. So we are going to lag a bit, but I don’t want to push anyone to take a job for statistical purposes.”
All told, administrators, faculty, and students seem to be getting a lot of value out of Anderson and its new direction. “I think we are on this incredible upward trajectory,” believes Weiller. “I love where we are positioned right now. We have caught up in many ways and our level of services has caught up. We are delivering a really, really good product to our students. In the past five years, the grumbling went from ‘Parker sucks’ to ‘the water fountain in the library shoots too high.’”
M7: The Super Elite Business Schools By The Numbers
What Investment Banks Now Pay MBAs–By Firm
This Week’s Frenetic Rush To Submit An MBA Application
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UCLA’s Anderson School has gone through a transformation in recent years, becoming more closely tied to movements within the tech industries in L.A., Silicon Valley, and Seattle.
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Google wants more airwaves for broadband
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The wireless spectrum auction ended last week but Google is not done lobbying the Federal Communications Commission.
On Monday the company sent a letter to the FCC outlining what it would like to do with so-called “white space” — airwaves found between broadcast channels that will become available when television switches from analog to digital early next year. Unlike the five blocks of spectrum recently up for auction, these airwaves are unlicensed and largely unused.
Google (GOOG) is proposing that the spectrum be used for mobile broadband services, including Internet access for upcoming — you guessed it — Android-running phones, which use an operating system promoted by Google. The company says it will ensure that devices operating in the unlicensed spectrum won’t interfere with TV channels or wireless microphone signals, and that it intends to provide the “technical support necessary to make these plans happen” at no cost to phonemakers.
The company said it is confident its proposal will “eliminate any remaining legitimate concerns about the merits of using the white space for unlicensed personal/portable devices.”
Google’s not the only one pushing the FCC to allow the unused spectrum to be used for mobile broadband services. Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) have also joined the “White Space Coalition.” But the proposal has drawn plenty opposition from groups like the National Association of Broadcasters, who worry that using white space for a wireless broadband service will interfere with digital TV transmissions.
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By Michal Lev-Ram The wireless spectrum auction ended last week but Google is not done lobbying the Federal Communications Commission. On Monday the company sent a letter to the FCC outlining what it would like to do with so-called "white space" -- airwaves found between broadcast channels that will become available when television switches from…
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2015 Academy Award nominations
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The nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced Thursday morning by Chris Pine, Alfonso Cuarón, and J.J. Abrams.
A complete list of the nominations follows:
‘‘American Sniper"; ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; ‘‘Boyhood"; ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘The Imitation Game"; ‘‘Selma"; ‘‘The Theory of Everything"; ‘‘Whiplash.’’
Steve Carell, ‘‘Foxcatcher"; Bradley Cooper, ‘‘American Sniper"; Benedict Cumberbatch, ‘‘The Imitation Game"; Michael Keaton, ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; Eddie Redmayne, ‘‘The Theory of Everything.’’
Marion Cotillard, ‘‘Two Days, One Night"; Felicity Jones, ‘‘The Theory of Everything"; Julianne Moore, ‘‘Still Alice"; Rosamund Pike, ‘‘Gone Girl"; Reese Witherspoon, ‘‘Wild.’’
Robert Duvall, ‘‘The Judge"; Ethan Hawke, ‘‘Boyhood"; Edward Norton, ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; Mark Ruffalo, ‘‘Foxcatcher"; J.K. Simmons, ‘‘Whiplash.’’
Two extravagant comedies, ‘‘Birdman’’ and ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’’ tied for the most Oscar nominations Thursday morning with nine nods each, including best picture.
Patricia Arquette, ‘‘Boyhood"; Laura Dern, ‘‘Wild"; Keira Knightley, ‘‘The Imitation Game"; Emma Stone, ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; Meryl Streep, ‘‘Into the Woods.’’
Alejandro G. Inarritu, ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; Richard Linklater, ‘‘Boyhood"; Bennett Miller, ‘‘Foxcatcher"; Wes Anderson, ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; Morten Tyldum, ‘‘The Imitation Game.’’
‘‘Ida"; ‘‘Leviathan"; ‘‘Tangerines"; ‘‘Timbuktu"; ‘‘Wild Tales.’’
Jason Hall, ‘‘American Sniper"; Graham Moore, ‘‘The Imitation Game"; Paul Thomas Anderson, ‘‘Inherent Vice"; Anthony McCarten, ‘‘The Theory of Everything"; Damien Chazelle, ‘‘Whiplash.’’
Alejandro G. Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo, ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; Richard Linklater, ‘‘Boyhood"; E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, ‘‘Foxcatcher"; Wes Anderson (screenplay) and story by Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; Dan Gilroy, ‘‘Nightcrawler.’’
‘‘Big Hero 6"; ‘‘The Boxtrolls"; ‘‘How to Train Your Dragon 2"; ‘‘Song of the Sea"; ‘‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.’’
‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘The Imitation Game"; ‘‘Interstellar"; ‘‘Into the Woods"; ‘‘Mr. Turner.’’
‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘Ida"; ‘‘Mr. Turner"; ‘‘Unbroken.’’
‘‘American Sniper"; ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; ‘‘Interstellar"; ‘‘Unbroken"; ‘‘Whiplash.’’
‘‘American Sniper"; ‘‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)"; ‘‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"; ‘‘Interstellar"; ‘‘Unbroken.’’
Original score: ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘The Imitation Game"; ‘‘Interstellar"; ‘‘Mr. Turner"; ‘‘The Theory of Everything.’’
Original song: ‘‘Everything Is Awesome’’ from ‘‘The Lego Movie"; ‘‘Glory’’ from ‘‘Selma"; ‘‘Grateful’’ from ‘‘Beyond the Lights"; ‘‘I'm Not Gonna Miss You’’ from ‘‘Glen Campbell ... I'll Be Me""; ‘‘Lost Stars’’ from ‘‘Begin Again.’’
Costume design: ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘Inherent Vice"; ‘‘Into the Woods"; ‘‘Maleficent"; ‘‘Mr. Turner.’’
Documentary feature: ‘‘CitizenFour"; ‘‘Finding Vivian Maier"; ‘‘Last Days in Vietnam"; ‘‘The Salt of the Earth"; ‘‘Virunga.’’
Documentary (short subject): ‘‘Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1"; ‘‘Joanna"; ‘‘Our Curse"; ‘‘The Reaper (La Parka)"; ‘‘White Earth.’’
Film editing: ‘‘American Sniper"; ‘‘Boyhood"; ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘The Imitation Game"; ‘‘Whiplash.’’
Makeup and hairstyling: ‘‘Foxcatcher"; ‘‘The Grand Budapest Hotel"; ‘‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’’
Animated short film: ‘‘The Bigger Picture"; ‘‘The Dam Keeper"; ‘‘Feast"; ‘‘Me and My Moulton"; ‘‘A Single Life.’’
Live action short film: ‘‘Aya"; ‘‘Boogaloo and Graham"; ‘‘Butter Lamp (La Lampe Au Beurre De Yak)"; ‘‘Parvaneh"; ‘‘The Phone Call.’’
Visual effects: ‘‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier"; ‘‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"; ‘‘Guardians of the Galaxy"; ‘‘Interstellar"; ‘‘X-Men: Days of Future Past.’’
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The nominations for the Academy Awards were announced Thursday morning by Chris Pine, Alfonso Cuarón, and J.J. Abrams.
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A portrait of the artist as a technophile
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The Internet has been an important distribution platform for artists, but piracy is having a chilling effect.
By Ted VanCleave, co-founder and executive vice president, ImageRights International.
As a professional fine arts photographer, I depend on my website to market and sell my images. In fact, my site outsells galleries 10 to 1 for my work.
This is the case for many photographers, artists, musicians and content creators today: the Internet offers an unparalleled medium for global distribution and marketing of art and entertainment at a low cost.
But there’s a dark side to free distribution: piracy is rampant. Various studies indicate that the music and entertainment industries lose billions of dollars per year from piracy and copyright infringement. In the business of photography, image theft accounts for hundreds of millions of lost revenue per year.
Unfortunately, it’s easy for anyone with a computer (or increasingly, mobile phone) to steal content– but difficult for the copyright owner to monitor unauthorized usage and recover lost income. Ongoing revenue loss due to Web-enabled infringement raises the broader question around the future of creative content.
Most photographers, artists and content creators do not have high levels of income and every dollar counts. So when it becomes too complex and time-consuming to protect the revenue that you do earn, there’s a disincentive to produce valuable work and place it online. Talented content professionals will choose other lines of work, and young people out of school may not choose to enter creative fields in the first place.
This is a disturbing trend: if photographers and artists are unable to adequately protect and control their content’s copyrights, the world of professional art, music and film will become diluted with amateur works, sold for pennies online. This trend, of course, has already been occurring over the past several years.
Watermarks, thumbnails and metadata, oh my!
There are ways to protect creative works online, yet none are foolproof and all have inherent drawbacks. To protect online images, for instance, one can make them small, so that they are not easily reused elsewhere. This is not optimal as a seller, however, because a potential customer misses the detail and scale of an image when it is too small.
Watermarks are another protection method which can easily be added through software programs, yet I find them visually distracting for a potential customer, and nearly ruining the visual impact of an image if you can’t easily crop them.
Metadata in the form of embedded text can be added to an image, although it’s time-consuming if you have hundreds or thousands of images. And like small watermarks, the metadata can easily be stripped from the image by an infringer. Other companies have developed technology for embedding visual codes in images, which in some instances may be used to track an image’s use. Again, it’s time consuming to add embedded codes into your images and costs associated with these services can be prohibitive on a large scale.
The solution that I’ve chosen over the years has been to simply add my URL to a corner of my images.
This too, is not foolproof: it can easily be cropped out of the image but since large watermarks blight the image, it all boils down to tradeoffs.
I find my work being used illegally on blogs and other commercial sites on a regular basis, as well as on non-commercial Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
Sometimes the theft can be downright shocking: a blogger once posted my images on his site, and replaced my name with his as the copyright owner. Months of emails and phone calls later, I was able to persuade him to remove all of my content from his site. The process was laborious, lengthy, and frustrating. It didn’t warrant a lawsuit, but it did require considerable action on my part to resolve the issue.
As the music industry has so painfully learned, if someone wants to steal your work, they will do it; there are always new ways to get around infringement barriers. Without any indication of ownership and rights associated with unattributed works online, there’s nothing stopping others from sharing or reselling them to hundreds of others with relative ease.
The answer for creative people, then, is to take reasonable steps with prevention but also focus on monitoring the unauthorized usage of your works and determining when and how you want to pursue infringers.
I have often used Google Alerts or any other number of online search tools to help automate the process of discovering my work online. But the reality is, as an individual artist, I only have so much time to spend researching the sites where my images have been posted. Then I need to evaluate if it’s worth following up with the infringer.
Legally pursuing a teenager on Facebook or a non-profit blogger is not financially viable, but since such individuals have the ability to help me gain additional exposure for my work, I always insist that they include a link to my site. The sites I’m most interested in pursuing are those that have gained financially from the use of my images: typically, for-profit sites owned by media companies and businesses. And I want to catch these infringers quickly, before my image has been shared and possibly reposted elsewhere.
In the world of images, there are services now available that help image libraries and photographers monitor usage of their work online by matching their content against a database of images downloaded continuously from the Internet and stored on a Web server. The trick is, the search must be backed up by sophisticated image recognition technology and advanced search tools for optimal accuracy, and targeted at site owners who are able to pay.
Ideally, we need services that are affordable for individual artists and content creators, giving control to the creators instead of just large agencies and corporations. In addition to affordable monitoring and tracking services, we also need service providers who will help content owners, for a reasonable cost, pursue and recover fees for their work from the infringers.
I still believe in the power of the Internet as an incredible tool for building community around creative works, and for helping small and relatively unknown artists and other content creators gain notoriety and generate income. But we have to strike a balance: broad, cheap distribution comes at a price. The future of digital art and media depends upon technology, services and appropriate regulation that can protect copyrights and support revenue generation for photographers, artists and content creators around the world.
VanCleave is co-founder and executive vice president of ImageRights International, which uses search and image-recognition technology to help rights holders act on unlicensed use of their works. He also is an award-winning photographer.
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The Internet has been an important distribution platform for artists, but piracy is having a chilling effect. By Ted VanCleave, co-founder and executive vice president, ImageRights International. As a professional fine arts photographer, I depend on my website to market and sell my images. In fact, my site outsells galleries 10 to 1 for my…
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A blessing of unicorns
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On the wall of our offices in Midtown Manhattan hangs a Fortune cover dated September 1929 that never made it to the newsstands. It was a prototype, created five months before the magazine’s launch, featuring a drawing of a white stag that fulfilled Henry Luce’s vision of “as beautiful a magazine as exists in the United States.”
So when we began discussing a February issue devoted to “unicorns”—the Silicon Valley term for startups that have achieved billion-dollar valuations—we were drawn to that primordial illustration. This month is the 85th anniversary of our first publication, and a nod to history seemed appropriate. Moreover, white stags and unicorns occupy a similar place in mythology—they are both elusive symbols of purity. With a few adjustments, the stag became a unicorn.
In the end, we decided that a hoodie-wearing unicorn rendered by artist Jeremy Enecio better captured the theme of the issue. The white stag remains office bound, but we offer you a glimpse above.
The Valley’s unicorn metaphor is imperfect. The mythical unicorn was rarely seen, whereas the metaphorical ones have become frighteningly common, totaling more than 80 by our count. It’s also hard to think of the likes of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick or Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel as “elusive symbols of purity.”
But metaphors aside, this group of startups deserves serious attention, as they are not only fattening the wallets of venture investors, but also rapidly changing the way we live and the way we do business (see our cover package). Many of the current crop are selling to companies, not consumers. Box, Cloudera, and Palantir, for instance, are helping large enterprises share, store, and analyze massive amounts of data, pointing the way to a new design for the modern corporation heralded elsewhere in this issue by Ram Charan’s insightful essay on “The Algorithmic CEO.”
Which brings me back to the stag. The prototype was conceived at a brief moment of unbounded optimism in this country, when, as historian William Leuchtenburg tells us, there was “a contagious feeling that everyone was meant to get rich.” Within a few weeks that optimism had been crushed. By Nov. 13, the great bull market had lost half its value, and it continued to decline for another two years as an era of unimagined austerity set in.
Does the current blessing of unicorns suggest we are again at such a turning point? There’s no doubt that some of these creatures will prove as ephemeral as Snapchat’s photos. But there is more going on here than another bout of irrational exuberance. It’s hard to think of a single business that won’t be either transformed by one of the unicorns or disrupted and displaced by them. Ignore them at your peril.
This story is from the February 2015 issue of Fortune.
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Our February issue is devoted to unicorn companies.
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Ex-Thai PM Yingluck impeached by junta-backed lawmakers
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This article is published in partnership with Time.com. The original can be found here.
Thailand’s military-stacked legislature voted en masse on Friday to impeach former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was deposed through a court ruling days before the kingdom’s armed forces launched a full-scale putsch on May 22.
However, the ill-fated plan, which paid farmers above market prices for their crop regardless of quality, backfired and blew a $15 billion hole in the Thai economy.
On Thursday, Yingluck derided her impending impeachment and accompanying five-year banishment from the kingdom’s political landscape as a violation of her “basic rights,” during an address to the country’s Parliament.
The 47-year-old has kept a low profile since General Prayuth Chan-ocha seized power and launched an unprecedented campaign to bridle dissent and quell a half-year of polarizing, and often deadly, street demonstrations.
Following Friday’s vote, analysts say the political persecution of Yingluck and her supporters will likely calcify the ever widening divide in the country between the rural and working-class masses, who largely back the populist Shinawatra political machine, and the royalist establishment based in Bangkok.
“They are trying to ban these people from politics for as long as they can so that there’s basically no opposition to whatever the military junta and its allies are going to do politically for the foreseeable future,” Saksith Saiyasombut, a Thai political analyst and popular blogger, tells TIME.
Yingluck also faces a maximum of 10 years in prison after the country’s attorney general pledged Friday to indict her for negligence and abuse of power over the same botched rice scheme.
The impeachment and imminent criminal prosecution of Yingluck now runs the risk of enraging the Shinawatra clan’s partisan supporters, better known as the Red Shirts, who have remained largely dormant in the wake of the coup and its accompanying crackdown.
“This will only exacerbate the political schism we have right now,” says Saksith.
Thailand has been bogged down in unceasing episodes of political discord since Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, was first removed from power during a bloodless coup almost a decade ago. Political parties deemed loyal to Thaksin have been deposed through two putsches and three controversial court decisions since 2001, despite being undefeated at the polls.
“Today Yingluck joins her brother as another ‘undying political martyr,’” says Verapat Pariyawong, a Thai legal expert and visiting scholar at the University of London, by email. “While the Shinawatra camp may face some difficulties in the coming years, it has now become even more difficult for millions of Thai people to move beyond them.”
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Vote threatens to deepen the rift between Thailand's rural masses and its conservative ruling elite, backed by the new military government.
| 21.291667 | 0.625 | 0.708333 |
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http://fortune.com/2015/01/23/box-soars-trading/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20150123215940id_/http://fortune.com/2015/01/23/box-soars-trading/
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Online file storage service Box soars on its first day of trading
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20150123215940
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Shares of Box, the online file storage company, soared nearly 70% in their first day of trading Friday following its initial public offering.
Investors snapped up the stock, which originally priced at $14, and sent it up to $23.15 by the close.
At the end of the day, Box had a market capitalization of over $2.7 billion. It marks the first big IPO of 2015 and another sign of the huge appetite for tech IPOs.
Box BOX is a decade-old company led by 29-year-old CEO Aaron Levie, who spoke with Fortune Friday about the IPO. The company filed for the IPO in March, but delayed it because of pricing concerns. Eventually, the company decided to restart the process as tech valuations continued to rise.
“We’ve always taken a very long-term view of the business, and had planned to go public both when we were ready and when the market was ready for us,” Levie said. “It wasn’t always the most straight-forward path, but we’re thrilled to be where we are today.”
Box, which has 32 million users, offers users 10 gigabytes of online storage for free, with additional charges for more space. It’s main competitors include Dropbox, Google GOOG and Microsoft MSFT , which also offer online file storage.
For more, check out Fortune Live in which senior editor Andrew Nusca and senior editor-at-large Shawn Tully discussed the IPO.
Reuters contributed to this report
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Shares gained 70% after going public in yet another sign of the huge appetite for new tech stocks.
| 14.65 | 0.7 | 2.9 |
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http://fortune.com/2015/01/21/exclusive-big-moves-at-pg-as-taylor-up-henretta-over/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20150124084702id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/01/21/exclusive-big-moves-at-pg-as-taylor-up-henretta-over/
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Big moves at P&G as a contender for CEO emerges and another recedes
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20150124084702
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CEO A.G. Lafley’s quiet overhaul of P&G pg continues. The latest: an internal announcement today, the contents of which were read to Fortune, that David Taylor, currently group president of global health and grooming, has added the beauty business to his list of responsibilities. The elevation, which puts him in charge of two of the company’s four business units, would make him the apparent front-runner to succeed Lafley when he tires of his second stint running the consumer products giant.
Taylor will inherit the title from longtime P&Ger and Fortune MPW (No. 23 in 2014) Deb Henretta, who was named global president for e-commerce, a new role. Patrice Louvet, who previously ran the prestige business, will now become group president of Global Beauty, reporting to Taylor. Taylor, a lifer who started as a production manager in Greenville, N.C., has been a rising star for a long time, but he must now turn around beauty, P&G’s biggest problem child and a challenge that Henretta apparently was unable to meet.
Henretta will continue to report directly to Lafley, but it’s hard to see Taylor’s elevation and Henretta’s horizontal move as anything but a confirmation that she is out of the running for the top job. Henretta and Taylor wouldn’t comment, but a spokesman says: “These leadership changes are another step forward in improving strategies, capabilities and plans on key business priorities where P&G needs to win. It will continue to make us a simpler, more focused company that is faster growing and creating greater value for consumers and shareholders.”
The moves also seem to signal that there are no longer any women left in the running for the top job at P&G, just months after two of them were considered serious contenders. In October, Melanie Healey, another Fortune MPW (No. 18 in 2014) and possible successor, announced her retirement in June (link to our story on her). Certainly, there are plenty of up and coming women at the company, including Carolyn Tastad, who just succeeded Healey in North America, R. Alexandra Keith, who runs skincare, Colleen Jay, who heads up hair care and Mary-Lynn Ferguson-McHugh, group president for global family care, but only Tastad reports to Lafley.
Responds a P&G spokesman, “We continue to have a deep and strong bench of women leadership at P&G. In fact, women lead some of P&G’s most critical businesses and functions—North America SMO, several of our business categories, Legal, Research & Development, IT, and now e-Business… just to name a few. We are also fortunate to have women represent 50% of our Board of Directors.”
In any case, Lafley has given no indication that he’s ready to leave yet. Says a spokesman: “We have a CEO and he is fully focused on the business.”
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A new contender emerges to succeed Lafley as CEO, while a previous one recedes.
| 35 | 0.625 | 1.125 |
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http://fortune.com/2009/07/09/dr-lsd-to-steve-jobs-how-was-your-trip/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20150130022216id_/http://fortune.com:80/2009/07/09/dr-lsd-to-steve-jobs-how-was-your-trip/
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Dr. LSD to Steve Jobs: How was your trip?
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20150130022216
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“Dear Mr. Jobs,” begins the 2007 letter from Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann to Apple’s AAPL CEO. “I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I’m interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.”
Hofmann, as students of the sixties will recall, was the chemist who first synthesized, ingested and experienced the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide.
Steve Jobs, as readers of John Markoff’s “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry” may remember, dabbled in psychedelics in the 1970s and has called his LSD experiences “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”
“I’m writing now,” Hofmann’s letter continues, “shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser’s proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.”
Hofmann, who died last year at age 102, was writing at the request of his friend Rick Doblin, founder of the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Doblin was hoping for a financial contribution from the billionaire co-founder of Apple. What he got instead, according to Ryan Grim, who posted the previously unpublished letter Tuesday in the Huffington Post, was a half-hour telephone conversation with Jobs. As Grim describes it:
“[Jobs] was still thinking, ‘Let’s put it in the water supply and turn everybody on,'” recalls a disappointed Doblin, who says he still hasn’t given up hope that Jobs will come around and contribute.
Grim got permission to publish Hofmann’s letter from the chemist’s estate. Grim’s Huffington piece is adapted from his book “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”
See also: Top 10 moments in Steve Jobs’ career
Albert Hofmann photo courtesy of Stefan Pangritz via Wikipedia Commons.
Below the fold: a snapshot of the letter.
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"Dear Mr. Jobs," begins the 2007 letter from Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann to Apple's CEO. "I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you." Hofmann, as students of the…
| 6.089552 | 0.895522 | 14.119403 |
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