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http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/chinese-imports-just-doomed-another-1200-jobs-at-alcoa/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525052119id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/01/08/chinese-imports-just-doomed-another-1200-jobs-at-alcoa/ | Chinese Imports Just Doomed Another 1,200 Jobs at Alcoa | 20160525052119 | Alcoa Inc. aa is to close the biggest active aluminum smelter in the U.S., succumbing to the flood of cheap exports from China that has trashed prices for the metal.
The company said Thursday that it will permanently shutter the Warrick Operations smelter in Evansville, Indiana by the end of March, eliminating 600 jobs. It’s also closing its remaining bauxite refining capacity at Point Comfort in Texas, cutting all but 60 of the 730 jobs there.
As a result, the company that popularized the use of the lightweight metal in everything from airplanes to drinks cans will have only one active smelter in the U.S. by the spring–the relatively small Massena West plant in New York.
“Despite the hard work of employees, these assets are not competitive,” Roy Harvey, president of Alcoa’s Global Primary Products, said in a statement. “We’re confident that these actions are the right ones in face of these challenging market conditions. We are committed to creating a resilient business ready for launch as an independent company in 2016.”
Alcoa has already announced plans to split itself up into two companies, effectively exiting the raw materials business to allow its value-adding downstream operations the chance to stay profitable by buying in cheaper primary metal.
Prices for primary aluminum have fallen to their lowest level since the 2009 recession–slumping 30% in the last year alone–and are set to head even lower: production costs in China, which accounts for half of the world’s supply and no longer needs the metal its smelters are putting out, are set to fall even further now that the country is letting its currency depreciate against the dollar.
Alcoa’s moves are the latest hammer blow to a U.S. industry that is suffering more than most from China’s slowdown, and its policy of keeping even unprofitable mills going in order to hold unemployment down and prevent social unrest. Aluminum production is immensely energy-intensive, and many of China’s smelters are indirectly responsible for thousands of coal mining jobs as well as their own large workforces.
Industry lobby group the Aluminum Association estimates that, of the 50 highest-cost aluminum smelters in the world, 37 are in China. “Unfair practices,” it says, “are putting advanced U.S. manufacturing jobs at risk.”
The aluminum industry still employs 678,000 people directly and indirectly in the U.S.. | The U.S.'s largest active smelter in Indiana will close permanently by the end of March. | 26.705882 | 0.882353 | 2.529412 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nbc.com/days-of-our-lives/episode-guide/season-51/wednesday-22416/12788 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525073133id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/days-of-our-lives/episode-guide/season-51/wednesday-22416/12788 | Wednesday - 2/24/16 | 20160525073133 | Summer explains to Brady that when Daniel heard about her upbringing, as well as what information she had regarding her birth mother, he was convinced they must be related. Brady realizes Daniel must have thought Summer was Maggie's daughter. Summer relays how she sent him a DNA swab around Christmas time, but never heard back - and now she knows why... it's because he died. Brady is more convinced than ever that it was "Daniel" who led him to her and now he wants to take Summer back to Salem - to see if what Daniel believed was true. Theresa arrives and demands that Brady come home, and Brady says that depends on Summer. Summer, clearly afraid, digs in her heels and says she's not going. Earlier, Nicole calms Theresa down and urges her not to overreact. Later, Nicole gets reacquainted with Dario Hernandez.
Kayla tries to revive Ava. The paramedics arrive and take her to the hospital. Steve and Kayla both feel Ms. Vitali is up to something. At the hospital, Kayla confronts Ava, who then tells Roman and Steve that it was Kayla who injected her with the needle!
Joey, in a bad place off of his conversation with Steve, makes a new, unlikely friend in a girl named Jade, and they decide to go to a pop-up party.
UP NEXT: Belle's gift to Claire backfires. | Ava accuses Kayla of trying to kill her! | 29.888889 | 0.666667 | 0.666667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/15/obituaries/james-storrow-jr-publisher-of-the-nation-from-65-to-77.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525103409id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1984/01/15/obituaries/james-storrow-jr-publisher-of-the-nation-from-65-to-77.html | JAMES STORROW JR., PUBLISHER OF THE NATION FROM '65 TO '77 | 20160525103409 | James J. Storrow Jr., publisher of The Nation magazine from 1965 to 1977, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 66 years old and also had a home in Stormville, N.Y.
Mr. Storrow died of a heart ailment, his family said. He had had an operation to replace a heart valve in 1982 and had had a heart attack last March.
A descendant of Thomas Jefferson and of families long prominent in business and public life in Boston, Mr. Storrow was a lifelong liberal in politics and on civil liberties and other issues, having had his interest whetted by the Sacco-Vanzetti case during his youth.
He was born in Boston and graduated from the Milton Academy and, in 1940, from Harvard College. In World War II, he served in the Navy in the Pacific.
After the war, he attended Harvard Business School and joined with a former Harvard roommate, Irving Chase, in founding the General Microfilm Company, an early microfilm service concern, becoming treasurer as well as a co-owner. He also became treasurer and co-owner of the Henry Thayer Company, a food and drug concern.
Mr. Storrow went on to become an executive of Trident Films, which made documentaries about Norman Rockwell, Currier & Ives and other subjects. In the early 60's, Trident also made two feature-length films, ''The Crooked Road,'' based on a Morris West novel, and ''Kid Rodelo,'' based on a novel by Louis L'Amour.
In 1940 Mr. Storrow married Patricia Blake, who died in 1962. Late that year he married Linda Eder Jamieson.
He and his wife bought The Nation in 1965, and she was its associate publisher. They sold the magazine in 1977.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Storrow is survived by three sons, Gerald B., of Boston; Peter, who has been living in Scotland and Wales, and James J. 3d, of New York; a daughter, Margaret R., of Boston; two stepdaughters, Margot Jamieson Witty of New York, and Frances Jamieson of Washington, and two grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at noon Jan. 28 at the Unitarian Church of All Souls, Lexington Avenue and 80th Street.
photo of James Storrow Jr. | James J. Storrow Jr., publisher of The Nation magazine from 1965 to 1977, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 66 years old and also had a home in Stormville, N.Y. Mr. Storrow died of a heart ailment, his family said. He had had an operation to replace a heart valve in 1982 and had had a heart attack last March. | 6.197183 | 0.985915 | 34.619718 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/24/danish-supermarket-only-sells-expired-food/21318106/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525180458id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/02/24/danish-supermarket-only-sells-expired-food/21318106/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000058&intcmp=hplnws | Danish supermarket only sells expired food | 20160525180458 | Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
It's an accepted, and now often discussed, fact that the world has a serious and pressing food-waste problem. Along with chefs like Dan Barber and Massimo Bottura bringing attention to it through their platforms, other entrepreneurs and civic leaders have started tackling the issue. While some are, say, turning food waste into renewable energy through a recycling plant, others are bringing that perfectly good food to people through a grocery store that only sells food nearing its expiration date and a food-delivery service that uses ugly produce that would otherwise be tossed.
That pragmatic model appears to be catching on — at least a little. On February 22, a Danish nonprofit group called Folkekirkens Nodhjaelp opened a supermarket, WeFood, that only sells food past its (questionable) expiration date or which has damaged packaging and thus would've been thrown out. The owners of the store, which is billed as the country's first surplus-food market, hope to attract the environmentally conscious as well as the needy through low prices, and WeFood has already been praised by the country's food minister, Eva Kjer Hansen. Denmark has cut food waste by 25 percent over the last five years and the average citizen of Copenhagen throws out about 273 fewer pounds of food per year than the average Chicago resident.
More from Grub Street: Judge Denies Lawsuit to Block NYC's Salt Warnings Watch a 15-Person Battle Royal Break Out at Chuck E. Cheese's Living Legend Changes His Legal Name to 'Bacon Double Cheeseburger' | A nonprofit group opened a store that only sells food past its (questionable) expiration date or which has damaged packaging and would've been thrown out. | 10.642857 | 1 | 8.142857 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/10/20/the-best-states-for-an-early-retirement/21251484/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525181340id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2015/10/20/the-best-states-for-an-early-retirement/21251484/? | The best states for an early retirement | 20160525181340 | Thinking about an early retirement? If so, you'll need to plan carefully. There are a number of financial challenges for early retirees that those who wait until 65 or later don't need to worry about.
For instance, while you can start claiming Social Security benefits as early as 62, doing so will cut into the benefit you receive throughout retirement. Furthermore, while retirees who are over the age of 65 receive numerous retirement tax benefits at both the state and federal level, younger retirees are often ineligible for these same advantages.
Plan for your early retirement with SmartAsset's super-smart retirement calculator.
Another consideration when deciding to retire early is healthcare. While people who are at least 65 years old qualify for Medicare, younger retirees will have to buy their own insurance on the private market. This can cost thousands of dollars a year.
To find the best states for an early retirement, SmartAsset looked at six separate metrics for each state, emphasizing taxes and living costs in our analysis. We started by calculating effective state and local tax rates for retirees age 55-64, using our retirement income tax calculator to simulate over 600 different tax scenarios in each state.
We also considered sales tax rates, property tax rates and living costs such as health insurance and housing. (Read more about our methodology below.)
From the rolling crests of the Cumberland Mountains to the lush fields of the Bluegrass Region, Kentucky can be a great place to spend an extended retirement. Though the state does collect its own income tax, few retirees pay the full tax and many pay nothing at all.
Why? The state allows taxpayers to claim a tax deduction of the first $41,110 in retirement income, from sources such as a 401(k) or IRA. And unlike similar rules in other states, there is no age restriction on who can claim the deduction.
In addition to that tax deduction, early retirees in Kentucky will appreciate a low cost of living. Average annual housing costs in Kentucky are just $8,544, fourth lowest in the U.S. Likewise, living expenses in Kentucky's largest cities, including Louisville and Lexington, compare favorably to other major U.S. cities.
While some future retirees might take pause with South Dakota's chilly winters, it may be worth it to give the Mount Rushmore State a close look when planning early retirement. Across the board, South Dakota's taxes rank close to the lowest in the U.S.
That means every dollar you stash away will go that much further when you stop working – key for a successful early retirement. Likewise, housing costs in South Dakota (which has the sixth lowest population density of any state) rank as the fifth lowest in the U.S.
A Wyoming retirement is ideal for retirees who want to spend a good piece of their golden years in the outdoors. The state has some of the country's most breathtaking scenery, from the wildlife of Yellowstone National Park to the peaks of the Grand Tetons and the slopes of Jackson Hole.
Retirees in Wyoming will also enjoy state and local taxes that are among the lowest in the U.S. Wyoming has no state income tax and its sales tax ranks as the eighth lowest in the U.S.
Early retirees should be aware that buying health insurance on the individual market in Wyoming can be pricey, however. We found that the average annual cost for a silver plan in Wyoming could be over $11,000 per year, second only to Alaska.
The Volunteer State offers early retirees a little bit of everything. Memphis and Nashville both have rich histories, great food and some of the country's best live music. Those seeking natural wonders need look no further than Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 522,419 acres of mountains and forest. Sports fans can drop in for a game at one of the world's largest stadiums, the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium, which has an attendance record of 109,061.
All of that can be enjoyed without feeling the stress of a budget restricted by high taxes or living expenses. Tennessee has no income tax and its cost of living ranks among the lowest in the U.S. Retirees who love to shop should take note, however. Tennessee has the highest sales taxes in the U.S.
The early retirement math can be hard to work out. While other retirees can rely on Social Security for a source of income, early retirees need to rely entirely on savings for the first few years or retirement. Meanwhile, they have fewer years to build up their nest egg.
Retiring in Mississippi can make all that calculus a little easier. The state has the lowest cost of living of any U.S. state, with living expenses more than 15% below the national average. Furthermore, seniors living off of income from a 401(k), IRA or pension will benefit from an extremely retiree-friendly tax system. All retirement income is exempt from state and local taxes in Mississippi.
While retirees who are 65 or older are eligible for Medicare, early-retirees may need to buy their own health insurance on the individual market. Health insurance rates for seniors are limited to three times the rates for 20-year-olds, which means seniors will no longer face exorbitant premiums. Nonetheless, in some states, average annual premiums on seniors can be more than $10,000 per year.
Not so in New Mexico. We found that a 60-year-old buying a silver plan in New Mexico would pay $5,150 annually on average. That's the third lowest rate in the U.S.
Unlike most of the other states in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, Pennsylvania rates quite well as a destination for those who want to get a jump-start on retirement. The state exempts all income from retirement accounts, like a 401(k), from taxation. For taxpayers over the age of 59.5, pension income is also exempt.
Calculate your retirement taxes in Tennessee.
If you want your retirement to feature a back-porch view of moose and snow-capped peaks, Montana might be a good – and affordable – choice. There is no sales tax in Montana and housing costs average just $8,928 per year, eighth lowest in the country.
While early retirees will have to pay state taxes on their retirement income, the rates are relatively low. For example, we found that a 60-year-old with $40,000 in income from retirement accounts would pay $1,483 in state taxes in Montana, which can also be deducted from federal taxes.
The Sunshine State is a favorite among retirees because of its warm weather, endless beaches and friendly income tax environment. There is no state income tax in Florida, saving retirees hundreds or thousands of dollars a year as compared with most other states on the east coast.
For early retirees, living expenses are especially important. In this regard, some parts of Florida rate well while others do not. For example, housing costs in the Miami area are quite high, while panhandle cities like Tallahassee are far more affordable. Early retirees will have to choose carefully when settling down to make sure their nest egg can meet their retirement expenses.
The largest of the lower 48 states, Texas offers a wide variety of geographical and cultural options when early retirees choose to settle down. There are major cities like Houston and Dallas. San Antonio and Austin have history, music and great food. There are beach towns along the gulf and mountain ranges like the Chisos and the Guadalupes in west Texas.
Early retirees in the Lone Star State will benefit from the state's relatively low cost of living. Texas has no personal income tax, although property tax rates are among the highest in the U.S.
SmartAsset's ranking of the best states for an early retirement focused on two financial considerations most important to early retirees: taxes and living expenses. We looked at six metrics overall, as listed below:
To calculate effective income tax rates, we ran over 30,000 simulations of our retirement income tax calculator. We simulated the state and local income taxes paid in every state for persons age 55, 60 and 64, with retirement income ranging from $20,000 annually to $80,000 annually.
Likewise, to calculate the average cost of health insurance plans in every state, we used the Kaiser Family Foundation's health insurance calculator. We calculated the cost of a silver plan for a 60-year-old in the five largest counties in every state. We did not incorporate any potential subsidies, which vary depending on income.
Lastly, we ranked every state on these six metrics. We then averaged those rankings, giving double-weight to the effective income tax rates and equal weight to all other metrics. Scores from 0-100 were calculated based on that average ranking. A state that ranked first for every metric would have scored a perfect 100, while a state that ranked last would have scored a zero.
Data on property taxes and housing costs comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. Data on the cost of living comes from the Council for Community and Economic Research.
Questions about our study? Contact us at blog@smartasset.com.
The post The Best States for an Early Retirement appeared first on SmartAsset Blog. More on AOL.com: Half of food-industry staffers won't skip work when sick At 100, woman still working 11 hours a day, 6 days a week Don't throw out that old sweater just yet: 10 genius hacks for repairing ruined clothes | Thanks to low living costs and a large retirement income tax deduction, one Southern state rates as the best states for an early retirement. | 69.730769 | 0.884615 | 2.5 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-to-honor-25-leaders-in-huge-sculpture-3204187.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20160526014754id_/http://www.sfgate.com:80/bayarea/article/Oakland-to-honor-25-leaders-in-huge-sculpture-3204187.php | Oakland to honor 25 leaders in huge sculpture | 20160526014754 | Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle
Artist Mario Chiodo admired Helen Keller enough to carve her into his "Remember Them Champions for Humanity" 9/11 monument that is in the its final stages prior to going to the refinery to get bronzed. Thursday Dec 17, 2009
Artist Mario Chiodo admired Helen Keller enough to carve her into his "Remember Them Champions for Humanity" 9/11 monument that is in the its final stages prior to going to the refinery to get bronzed. Thursday
Artist Mario Chiodo stands in front of his 9/11 monument that's been ten years in the making. A clay model that will form the mold for the bronze statue features four of the Remember Them Champions for Humanity, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mother Teresa and Thich Nhat Hanh. Others including Rosa Parks, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Coreta Scott King and Cesar Chavez just to mention a few will be featured as well. Thursday Dec 16, 2009
Artist Mario Chiodo stands in front of his 9/11 monument that's been ten years in the making. A clay model that will form the mold for the bronze statue features four of the Remember Them Champions for
Artist Mario Chiodo admired Abraham Lincoln enough to give him center stage in one of his "Remember Them Champions for Humanity" 9/11 monument. Other in this piece includes Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Sir Winston Churchill and Susan B. Anthony. Thursday Dec 17, 2009
Artist Mario Chiodo admired Abraham Lincoln enough to give him center stage in one of his "Remember Them Champions for Humanity" 9/11 monument. Other in this piece includes Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Cesar Chavez,
Oakland to honor 25 leaders in huge sculpture
Oakland's version of Mount Rushmore will rise this year in an Uptown park: a towering, ponderous monument to great leaders that organizers hope will inspire schoolchildren and awe tourists.
The $7 million monument, "Remember Them," features 25 famous people who fought for peace or human rights. They're an unlikely crew, ranging from Winston Churchill to Malcolm X to Harvey Milk to Mother Teresa, soon to be joined in eternity.
The monument, to be installed in a park next to the Fox Theater, will be one of the largest bronze sculptures in the United States. It will be three stories tall, weigh about 25 tons and span 90 feet - a third the length of a football field.
"People don't usually pay attention to public artwork. But the artwork that people get excited about - it's big," said Oakland artist Mario Chiodo, 48, who until now was best known for his horror masks and Las Vegas sculptures. "If I had my way, it would have 300 people. But you've got to start someplace."
The first piece of "Remember Them" will be installed this month. It features Maya Angelou and Ruby Bridges, the Louisiana girl who, in 1960, was the first African American student at an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. The rest of the monument will be installed by the end of the year, if Chiodo can raise about $4 million needed to finish the project.
The monument is likely to be a popular field trip destination for East Bay schoolchildren, thanks to a high school curriculum created by the King Institute at Stanford. The curriculum focuses on the 25 figures in the sculpture, their work and historical impact.
Angelou, along with Bill Clinton and Martin Luther King Jr.'s son, are among the project's ardent supporters.
"This is important because people my age want to know that all the things we've lived through have not been for naught," she said in a documentary about the project.
The project is funded mostly through private donations, including a $1 million gift from Kaiser Permanente. The city last month gave Chiodo a grant for $182,000, which some residents protested in light of the city's budget deficit.
The council approved the grant unanimously, in part because the fabrication and installation will create jobs for Oakland artisans and the monument is likely to draw thousands of visitors to the revitalized Uptown neighborhood.
The project's potential as a tourist attraction is not lost on the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, which is handling the project fundraising.
"This will be a centerpiece in Oakland, to help people understand the struggles of humanity," said chamber President Joe Haraburda, who helped Chiodo conceive and develop the project. "Being among the most diverse cities in America, Oakland is the perfect place for this."
Chiodo got the idea after 9/11, he said. Until then, he had created sculptures for Las Vegas casinos, the Oakland Zoo, Fairyland and other commercial enterprises around the country. But after the terrorist attacks, he said, he wanted to do something for peace.
He chose the figures to represent as many cultures as possible, in hopes that children, especially, will see leaders they can identify but also discover new role models, he said.
"You don't have to like or agree with everyone here, but hopefully you'll find someone you can relate to and learn about someone you didn't know," said Chiodo, who's donating his time for the project.
"Remember Them" is in five pieces, including a miniature version of the entire project for blind visitors to feel. The monument includes quotes from each of the 25 figures.
Leon Leyson made the trek from Fullerton to Chiodo's West Oakland studio to glimpse the clay model of "Remember Them." When he saw the likeness of Oskar Schindler, he was transported back to 1940s Czechoslovakia, where he was among the 1,200 Jews saved from the Nazis by working in Schindler's factory.
"It really does show the emotion of Schindler, with his arms outstretched," Leyson said Thursday. "It's important to remember that Schindler and these other people did the right thing when the law of the land was entirely different. What Schindler did was an enormous gamble."
"Remember Them" is the only statue of Schindler in the United States, Chiodo believes.
"It's a landmark," Leyson said. "It's a singular thing to be depicted in a statue. It's permanent. It means his message really is, as they say, set in stone." | Oakland's version of Mount Rushmore will rise this year in an Uptown park: a towering, ponderous monument to great leaders that organizers hope will inspire schoolchildren and awe tourists. The $7 million monument, "Remember Them," features 25 famous people who fought for peace or human rights. The monument is likely to be a popular field trip destination for East Bay schoolchildren, thanks to a high school curriculum created by the King Institute at Stanford. The council approved the grant unanimously, in part because the fabrication and installation will create jobs for Oakland artisans and the monument is likely to draw thousands of visitors to the revitalized Uptown neighborhood. The project's potential as a tourist attraction is not lost on the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, which is handling the project fundraising. Chiodo got the idea after 9/11, he said. [...] he had created sculptures for Las Vegas casinos, the Oakland Zoo, Fairyland and other commercial enterprises around the country. | 6.492063 | 0.952381 | 26.846561 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Alexander-Tarics-Olympic-champion-and-structural-7938907.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20160526121114id_/http://www.sfgate.com:80/bayarea/article/Alexander-Tarics-Olympic-champion-and-structural-7938907.php | Alexander Tarics, Olympic champion and structural engineer, dies | 20160526121114 | Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle
At his home in 2012, Alexander Tarics, then the oldest living Olympic champ, shows his gold medal for water polo in 1936 and Olympic participant medal.
At his home in 2012, Alexander Tarics, then the oldest living Olympic champ, shows his gold medal for water polo in 1936 and Olympic participant medal.
Alexander Tarics, Olympic champion and structural engineer, dies
Alexander G. “Alex” Tarics, who had been the oldest living Olympic champion since 2007, died Saturday at the age of 102, at his home in Belvedere, where he has lived since 1950.
Mr. Tarics was also a structural engineer whose designs and innovations influenced many familiar Bay Area buildings.
Mr. Tarics was born in Budapest, Hungary, September 23, 1913. He was on the Hungarian water polo team that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Hungary and Germany played to a tie in the championship game, and Hungary was awarded the gold medal based on greater overall goal differential in previous games.
Mr. Tarics became a structural engineer and in the ’70s, with a professor at UC Berkeley, helped design, develop and implement a system of “base isolation” earthquake shock absorbers under large buildings — something engineers had long tried to achieve. Tarics’ genius led to 530 lead-rubber isolators, or shock absorbers, being placed in the basement of San Francisco City Hall when the building was upgraded and retrofitted in 1998.
Mr. Tarics and John Reid formed the San Francisco architectural engineering company Reid & Tarics, which designed five BART stations, three UCSF Medical Center buildings and scores of schools.
Mr. Tarics was an active athlete all his life. He played tennis into his 90s and swam regularly until a couple of years before his death of natural causes.
A relative runt in the physical sport of water polo at 5 feet 8, Mr. Tarics worked during his teen years to make himself ambidextrous.
“I knew I was not strong enough,” he told The Chronicle in a 1998 interview, “and I was only an average swimmer, so I had to do something other people did not do.”
The Hungarian team trained each winter with a boxing coach, and, Mr. Tarics said, “I was never afraid to get into a fight (in the pool). ... A water polo player who is hit and is afraid is no good anymore, is useless.”
At the Berlin Olympic Village, Mr. Tarics sought out and introduced himself to Jesse Owens, the American track star, and was in the stadium when Owens won the gold medal in the long jump.
“Very nice guy,” Mr. Tarics said. “And he was a beautiful athlete. Like a jaguar.”
Mr. Tarics, one of the youngest members of the Hungarian “Golden Team” that went undefeated nine straight years, played in only one game in the ’36 Olympics, scoring six goals against Malta, thus contributing directly to his team’s eventual gold.
During that game, a Malta player passed out and sank to the bottom of the pool. He was pulled out, leaving Malta a man short. Substitutions were not allowed in those days, but the Hungarians pulled one of their players.
“We got more applause for doing that than we got for winning the gold,” Mr. Tarics said.
He did not meet Adolf Hitler at the Olympics. “In ’39, though, I was very close to him at the University Games,” Mr. Tarics said. “He probably did not want to talk to me, though. I scored seven goals (the first two left-handed, in a 9-3 win) against the German team.”
Mr. Tarics is a hero in polo-crazy Hungary to this day and was honored by Hungary at the London Olympics in 2012.
His Olympic gold medal was a story in itself. After the ’36 Olympics, Mr. Tarics was a starving college student in Budapest. He tried to pawn his gold medal, but the pawnbroker examined it and declared, “It’s not gold.”
In World War II, during the Winter 1944 Siege of Budapest, the streets were a battleground between the invading Soviets and the Germans/Hungarians. During one ferocious battle, Mr. Tarics and his first wife and child took cover in the basement of their three-story apartment villa, which was reduced to rubble over their heads.
The next spring, when the snow melted, Mr. Tarics returned and dug through the rubble until he found his medal.
His Olympic fame was little known in the Bay Area.
“For a long time, nobody knew,” Mr. Tarics said. “Then Jonny Moseley won a gold medal in skiing (at the 1998 Olympics). There was a celebration for him in Belvedere, then somehow it became known” that the city had another gold medalist.
Mr. Tarics retired from polo soon after the ’39 University Games. He earned his doctorate in civil engineering in 1943 and in 1948 was invited to America to teach. While teaching at UC Berkeley, he worked with Professor James Kelly to develop the base isolation seismic shock absorbers.
“It was the dream of engineers for hundreds of years,” Mr. Tarics said. “But there was no practical way to do it.”
More than 3,000 buildings in Japan rest on base-isolation shocks.
Mr. Tarics’ favorite hobby, into his 100s, was solving “impossible” mathematical problems.
“I am not a professional mathematician, I am a dilettante,” he said. “I am an engineer, so I can look at these problems differently and come to different conclusions. I do it for the love of the science.”
Mr. Tarics remained active until his death. He could be seen in downtown Tiburon driving his Mercedes-Benz with the license plate “Gold 36” and socializing with his many friends and admirers. In 2008, he sat down with this reporter for an interview, which can be seen on YouTube.
Mr. Tarics is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, Elisabeth; son, Robert Tarics of Scottsdale, Ariz.; daughter, Linda Gerpheide of Paso Robles (San Luis Obispo County); stepson, Joseph Groma of Hungary; and five grandchildren. His eldest daughter, Eszike Stauffer, died earlier.
Plans for a memorial are pending.
Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler | Alexander Tarics, Olympic champion and structural engineer, dies Alexander G. “Alex” Tarics, who had been the oldest living Olympic champion since 2007, died Saturday at the age of 102, at his home in Belvedere, where he has lived since 1950. Mr. Tarics was also a structural engineer whose designs and innovations influenced many familiar Bay Area buildings. Hungary and Germany played to a tie in the championship game, and Hungary was awarded the gold medal based on greater overall goal differential in previous games. Mr. Tarics became a structural engineer and in the ’70s, with a professor at UC Berkeley, helped design, develop and implement a system of “base isolation” earthquake shock absorbers under large buildings — something engineers had long tried to achieve. Tarics’ genius led to 530 lead-rubber isolators, or shock absorbers, being placed in the basement of San Francisco City Hall when the building was upgraded and retrofitted in 1998. Mr. Tarics and John Reid formed the San Francisco architectural engineering company Reid & Tarics, which designed five BART stations, three UCSF Medical Center buildings and scores of schools. A relative runt in the physical sport of water polo at 5 feet 8, Mr. Tarics worked during his teen years to make himself ambidextrous. The Hungarian team trained each winter with a boxing coach, and, Mr. Tarics said, I was never afraid to get into a fight (in the pool). ... A water polo player who is hit and is afraid is no good anymore, is useless. At the Berlin Olympic Village, Mr. Tarics sought out and introduced himself to Jesse Owens, the American track star, and was in the stadium when Owens won the gold medal in the long jump. Mr. Tarics, one of the youngest members of the Hungarian “Golden Team” that went undefeated nine straight years, played in only one game in the ’36 Olympics, scoring six goals against Malta, thus contributing directly to his team’s eventual gold. During one ferocious battle, Mr. Tarics and his first wife and child took cover in the basement of their three-story apartment villa, which was reduced to rubble over their heads. While teaching at UC Berkeley, he worked with Professor James Kelly to develop the base isolation seismic shock absorbers. | 2.861678 | 0.970522 | 31.959184 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/05/books/a-life-defined-by-a-mother-s-death.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160526130624id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1996/11/05/books/a-life-defined-by-a-mother-s-death.html | A Life Defined by a Mother's Death | 20160526130624 | Illustrated. 355 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
It happened in 1958 when James Ellroy was 10 years old: the body of his mother, Jean, was discovered lying in an ivy patch near the local El Monte high school, face-up in a blue dress, a nylon stocking and a cotton cord lashed around her neck. She had been dead less than 12 hours. ''Her face had gone slightly purple,'' Mr. Ellroy writes. ''She looked like a classic late-night body dump.''
It's disconcerting, this tone of clinical detachment, this determination to process the murder of his mother -- yes, his mother -- through the language of 1950's noir fiction, but it soon becomes clear to the reader of this unnerving memoir that these are techniques that Mr. Ellroy developed, at least in part, as a means of coping with and containing the horror of his loss. His mother's murder, Mr. Ellroy observes in ''My Dark Places,'' is what made him a writer. It gave him an obsession with crime and crime novels. It left him with an Oedipal fascination with older women. And for many years, it fueled his love affair with alcohol and drugs. With this book, he not only reopens the police files on his mother in an attempt to solve her long-ago murder, but also sets out on a quest to come to terms with this elusive woman who posthumously dominated his life.
The resulting book is half confessional memoir, half hard-boiled crime chronicle. Indeed, there are long portions of ''My Dark Places'' that will remind Mr. Ellroy's readers of his novels, novels like ''The Big Nowhere'' and ''The Black Dahlia'' that read like Chandler crossed with Tarantino, Hammett hybrid with Spillane. There's the same scabrous, staccato prose, the same eye for grisly details, the same intimate knowledge of the seamy side of life.
The setting, too, is familiar: Los Angeles and its environs, a hot, ''rough-and-ready'' place, ''built from land grabs and racial grief,'' a place defined by the brutal murders, rapes and assaults that haunt its streets.
Mr. Ellroy's parents ''met, sizzled, wed and settled in L.A.'' in the 40's. ''They were a great-looking cheap couple,'' he recalls, ''along the lines of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in 'Macao.' '' She was a registered nurse. He was a noncertified accountant. Their acrimonious marriage ended in 1954, and Jean Ellroy moved to the hick town of El Monte in the San Gabriel Valley, what her son calls ''White Trash Heaven''
''El Monte was a smoggy void,'' Mr. Ellroy writes. ''People parked on their lawns and hosed down their cars in their underwear. The sky was carcinogenic tan.''
Though Mr. Ellroy's mother sent him to church and made him do his homework, he saw her drinking on weekends and carrying on with men. He says his father fed his contempt. He depicted her as a lush and a whore. When her body was found, the 10-year old Mr. Ellroy rejoiced: ''I hated her. I hated El Monte. Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life.'' He did not attend her funeral.
Life with Father was hardly an improvement. Mr. Ellroy's dad shared his girly magazines with him and taught him how to swear. They lived in squalor in Los Angeles with a dog that soiled the floors. At school, Mr. Ellroy cultivated his ''Crazy Man'' act: he picked his nose, spied on girls and drew swastikas on his notebooks. At night, he fantasized about ''pale-skinned, red-haired women'' who looked like his mother.
Around this time, he also discovered detective stories. He began with the Hardy boys and worked his way up to Mickey Spillane and harder stuff. ''Every book I read was a twisted homage to her,'' he says of his mother. ''Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses.''
Mr. Ellroy was 17 when his father died, and he began to live like one of the low-lifes he describes in his novels. He began a decade of drinking and drugging: he could kill a half-pint of scotch for breakfast, and run through 10 to 12 Benzedrex (a type of decongestant) inhalers a day. He was arrested for petty theft, trespassing and drunken driving. He was afraid he would forget his own name: ''I wrote it on the wall behind my bed as a reminder. I wrote 'I will not go insane' beside it.''
It was writing that enabled Mr. Ellroy to channel his obsessions, his fascination with crime and his unresolved feelings about his mother into a productive outlet. He quit drinking, got a job as a caddy and began churning out books.
Mr. Ellroy's girlfriend had been urging him to find out who his mother was and why she died, and in 1994, he decided to try to reopen her police file. The remainder of ''My Dark Places'' recounts the story of his investigation. It is a search conducted with Bill Stoner, a homicide detective whose 32 years of police work had given him a view of Los Angeles that uncannily echoed Mr. Ellroy's own.
Mr. Ellroy recounts how he and Mr. Stoner tried to track down people who had known his mother and tried to reconstruct the day of her death. They struggled with senile witnesses, mendacious witnesses and witnesses who seemed to have vanished into thin air. Mr. Ellroy also set up an ''800'' number for people who might still remember something after almost 30 years.
Because Mr. Ellroy recounts all the dead ends, all the wild goose chases, all the tips that failed to pan out, his narrative sometimes feels frustratingly elliptical and static. In taking us through their work, step by step, however, he also conveys to us the painstaking nature of police work and the grueling emotions he experienced as his mother's would-be avenger.
It gradually becomes clear to the reader that finding his mother's killer is less important to Mr. Ellroy than discovering the truth of his mother's life. What was she running from when she moved to El Monte? What took her from a small farm town in Wisconsin to Los Angeles? What did she want from life?
The reader finishes ''My Dark Places'' with the sense that Mr. Ellroy is still struggling with his mother's life and legacy, that closure, as it were, may always elude him. As a result, this compelling book feels somehow incomplete: it feels less like a conclusion than a beginning.
At the very least, it should serve as an introduction for new readers to this gifted writer's disturbing oeuvre. For longtime fans of his work, it provides a revealing map to the autobiographical sources of his fiction.
Photo: James Ellroy (Marion Ettlinger/Alfred A. Knopf) | MY DARK PLACES An L.A. Crime Memoir By James Ellroy Illustrated. 355 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25. | 55.68 | 0.88 | 6.48 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/04/ibm-research-quantum-cloud/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160526204306id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/04/ibm-research-quantum-cloud/ | IBM Makes A Quantum Research Project Available On Its Cloud | 20160526204306 | IBM has a powerful new research project that anyone can use for free.
The business technology company’s research arm said on Wednesday that it’s giving everyone access to one of its quantum computing processors, an experimental technology that has the potential to quickly crunch huge amounts of data.
Anyone from university researchers to tech savvy teenagers can apply through IBM Research’s website to test the processor. IBM will determine how much access people receive to the processor depending on their technology background and how well versed they are in quantum technology, explained Jerry Chow, the manager of IBM’s experimental quantum computing group.
Generally speaking, in traditional computing, data is encoded in one of two states, as represented by the tiny transistors embedded on silicon chips being turned on or off. Quantum computing, however, uses particles called quantum bits, or qubits to handle the heavy duty processing.
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These qubits are more versatile than a typical computer bit and are not limited to being either on or off. This flexibility, in theory, allows for more powerful processing and the ability to calculate complex algorithms far faster than today’s super computers.
Still, quantum computing is in its infancy and has generally been thought of as an academic project that could one day lead to powerful quantum computers for helping scientists speed up cancer research or even crack encrypted messages. Organizations from NASA to Google goog to Microsoft msft are all researching the technology and how it can one day be used in real-world situations.
IBM ibm wants to raise quantum computing’s visibility and remove some of the mystery about the esoteric technology. The company wants the project to be “broadly accessible” in the hope that it can increase interest in the technology, said Chow.
The actual quantum processor is stored at IBM’s research center in Yorktown Heights, NY. in a complex refrigeration system that keeps the chip cooled near absolute zero, which is required for quantum activity to take place. Users can interact with the machine through the Internet much like they would access cloud software like email.
The IBM researchers developed an user-friendly web page that includes what resembles a music bar or measure that people can play with to build algorithms. In this so-called quantum composer, users can run algorithms that manipulate the processor’s 5 qbits to get a result.
“We want people to see the construction of an algorithm,” said Chow, referring to how users can run calculations tailored to the quantum processor. “To get the 17-year old kid learning that concept, I think is powerful.”
Users can then compare the quantum processor’s results to a standard processor’s results to see if the quantum processor was able to come up with the correct answer. Because quantum computing is still experimental, the processor may generate an incorrect answer.
This is cutting-edge technology, after all. Still, the fact that the processor works at all indicates that quantum research is paying off.
David Cory, who is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Information Processing at the University of Waterloo, got the chance to play around with the technology. Cory, who has former students who work on the IBM quantum project, was impressed by the machine and said the quantum processor gave the right answer “a little more than a third of the time” for a certain calculation he tried.
This particular IBM quantum technology isn’t as cutting edge as some other machines researchers use in their labs, but “it is very robust and easy to use,” he said. “I think it gives something real for people to play with,” said Cory. “That brings quantum computing a bit closer to everyone.”
For more about IBM, watch:
Chow said that IBM hopes to improve the processor and the software it built to manipulate it based on the feedback it gets from users through this project. | New quantum computing project available to play with online. | 75.9 | 0.8 | 1.6 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.nbc.com/the-blacklist/about | http://web.archive.org/web/20160526212521id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/the-blacklist/about | About The Blacklist & Cast Bios | 20160526212521 | Day and TimeThursdays at 9/8c on NBCSeason PremiereOctober 1, 2015StarringJames Spader, Megan Boone, Diego Klattenhoff, Ryan Eggold, Harry Lennix, Mozhan Marnò, Hisham Tawfiq, Amir ArisonCreated ByJon BokenkampExecutive ProducersJohn Eisendrath, Jon Bokenkamp, John Davis and John Fox, Michael Watkins, James Spader, Lukas Reiter, J.R. Orci, Daniel CeroneEpisodic Directors (as currently set)Michael Watkins, Andrew McCarthy, Steve Adelson, Omar Madha, Alex Zakrzewski, Ami Canaan Mann, John Terlesky, Mary Lambert, Bill Roe, Tim Hunter, Anton Cropper, Michael Slovis, Eagle EgilssonCo-Executive ProducersDan Knauf, Vincent Angell, Dawn DeNoon, Jonathan FilleyProducer/UPMLaura BensonCo-ProducerKat GoodsonConsulting ProducerDave ThomasExecutive Story EditorsBrandon Margolis and Brandon Sonnier, Brian StudlerCasting DirectorsBonnie Finnegan and Steven Jacobs, CSAProduction DesignerNicholas LundyDirectors of PhotographyMike Caracciolo, Eric MoynierEditorsDave Post, Christopher Brookshire, Emily E. GreeneMake-Up Department HeadAnthony PepeHair Department HeadVanessa Heshima SimsMusic SupervisorJohn BissellOriginationNew York, New YorkProduced ByDavis Entertainment in association with Sony Pictures Television | Meet The Blacklist cast and learn more about the partnership between the FBI's most wanted fugitive Red Reddington and agent Liz Keen on NBC.com. | 6.923077 | 0.115385 | 0.115385 | low | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/3449708/breast-cancer-awareness-month-domestic-violence-awareness/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160527142321id_/http://time.com:80/3449708/breast-cancer-awareness-month-domestic-violence-awareness/ | It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, But We Need 'Awareness' Awareness | 20160527142321 | October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means it’s time to briefly contemplate getting a mammogram while munching on a pink cookie. But it’s also Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so you should probably tweet angrily about the NFL. And AIDS Awareness Month, so why not finish watching The Normal Heart?
Don’t forget October is also Rett Syndrome Awareness Month, Selective Mutism Awareness Month, and Vegetarian Awareness Month. And Dental Hygiene Awareness Month, which means you should feel extra guilty for forgetting to floss. With so much heightened awareness, who needs LSD?
All these good intentions seem harmless enough, but beneath the T-shirts and cookies and colored ribbons lurks a silent threat. It’s hard to detect, harder to contain, and extremely contagious. It can lead to compulsive “liking” and hashtag abuse. In the advanced stages, it can cause Facebook profile pictures to spontaneously mutate.
It’s time to sound the alarm: we need an Awareness Awareness Month.
“Awareness” is a virus that preys on well-meaning minds. It tricks us into thinking that thought is the same as action, that acknowledging something is the same as fixing it. Awareness is a problem masquerading as a solution.
Of course, awareness is a necessary first step in getting anything done. We can’t cure breast cancer, or end domestic violence, or fight AIDS unless we’re paying attention to them. But awareness should be the first step towards action, not the last. It’s the means to an end, not the end in itself.
And that’s exactly the problem– Now that “awareness” is so trendy, we seem to have forgotten about that pesky second part, the part where we actually do something. How convenient to think that awareness is enough! How satisfying for us to think that a momentary synapse twitch in our brains counts as a meaningful step towards change. It’s part of a crisis of tangibility, where we confuse mental thoughts, or digital clicks, for real action. “Awareness” is a direct descendent of the “if you can dream it, you can do it!” mentality on which Millennials were weaned. Only we’ve got it mixed up now– we think dreaming it is doing it.
Newsflash: only Roald Dahl’s Matilda can move things with her mind.
Take, for example, the HeforShe campaign that the United Nations launched in September with a “groundbreaking” speech by Emma Watson. The goal of the campaign was to get 1 billion men to sign the HeforShe pledge, in a “solidarity movement” to stand up for gender equality. Watson’s speech was a beautiful, articulate defense of feminism that went appropriately viral. But it promised no concrete action towards educating women or stopping gender-based violence–no funding, no organized policy strategy, no legislation. More than 171,000 men have so far signed the HeforShe petition, but what does that even mean? They’ve just pressed a button saying they support women–that’s like pressing a button saying “I’m not a racist.” It’s easier than checking “agree” on the iTunes Terms & Conditions.
Meanwhile, an entire page of the program accompanying the UN event was dedicated to explaining why UNWomen had chosen a particular color of magenta to represent HeforShe: “Viscerally alive, iconic and fresh, daring and courageous, HeforShe Magenta walks the fine line between male and female, making it the ideal shade to speak to the elimination of gender inequality.”
The magenta sounds lovely, but somehow I doubt Boko Haram has been waiting to release the girls until the UN developed the perfect shade of pink.
Or look at the new testicular-cancer-awareness #FeelingNuts campaign, which was recently endorsed by Hugh Jackman when he tweeted a picture of himself holding his own (clothed) balls. The scrotum-squeeze has gone viral, but how much money has been raised to fight testicular cancer? It’s hard to tell, because the campaign doesn’t require any kind of donation, unlike the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. And there’s no evidence that the thousands who take pictures of themselves holding their balls are doing any kind of actual screening– they could easily be using the campaign as an excuse for a crotch-grab selfie.
“Awareness” has quickly become another way to be holier-than-thou. Didn’t change your Facebook picture to support marriage equality? You must not care about the obstacles gay people face. Not going topless naked in Times Square? You must not care about the censorship of women’s bodies. Have you seen how many causes I support? Were you aware that I am hyper-aware?
Of course, some awareness campaigns actually do a lot of good, like the aforementioned ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised more than $100 million to fight the debilitating disease. But for every brand that that actually donates to a cause like breast cancer research, there are dozens who “pinkwash” their products, labeling them with pink ribbons while donating only a tiny portion of proceeds or continuing to use carcinogenic chemicals. “Awareness” has become more of a branding opportunity than a public service.
Besides, issues that are well-publicized enough to have Awareness Months are usually already being addressed, somewhat efficiently, by well-funded Western organizations. When is Ebola Awareness Month? What about Child Bride Awareness Month? How about Female Circumcision Awareness Month? Might I suggest January?
See, it’s only a certain kind of cause that gets a whole month of “awareness.” Causes that are big enough to be taken seriously but not too disturbing to display on a yogurt container. Unfortunately, that means lots of big problems– problems that are too terrifying to fit onto a T-shirt — get ignored. And when we congratulate ourselves about how “aware” we are, and jump mindlessly from one cause to the next, we lose sight of the bigger issues that need fixing.
So let’s raise awareness about the danger of empty “awareness.” Let’s spread the word about only spreading the word. I propose we make October Awareness Awareness Month– and YOU can take a stand, by tweeting with the hashtag #awarenessawareness, “liking” my Facebook page, or staring mindlessly at your own hand. | Be aware. Be very aware. | 174.428571 | 0.857143 | 0.857143 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/26/in-india-the-big-salaries-are-back.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160528013351id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/08/26/in-india-the-big-salaries-are-back.html | In India, the big salaries are back | 20160528013351 | After a lull in recent years, India's labor market is enjoying a burst of activity, as euphoria over a new government, a booming stock market and improved business sentiment are encouraging employers to hire in a big way.
Salaries in recent months have gone up by up to 60 percent compared to last year in some industries with perks like sign-on bonuses, stock options and even counter offers making a comeback, experts told CNBC.
"The negativity surrounding India's political scene is gone," said Dony Kuriakose, director, EDGE Executive Search. "Hiring seems to be part of a long-term plan for India."
The sentiment is a sea change from just a year ago, when the Fed taper tantrum sparked an outflow of funds from emerging markets including India, causing local stock markets and the India rupee to plummet. This coupled with policy paralysis as the government prepared for polls created a negative business environment forcing employers to cut costs and axe jobs.
Read MoreThe man who would remake India: A 90-day scorecard
Hitesh Oberoi, CEO of Info Edge, the owner of job site Naukri.com, has seen a 20 percent year on year hike in hiring activity in July, after a tough five to six quarters. "Over the next few years India is going to have a good run," he said.
At BITS Pilani University, one of India's premier engineering colleges, there has been a 38 percent year on year increase in the number of employers visiting its three Indian campuses during the placement season that begins in August, including high profile names like Goldman Sachs to eBay and Shlumberger.
Salaries offered have risen between 7 percent and 42 percent, according to G Balasubramanian, chief placement officer of BITS.
IT, e-Commerce: We are hiring!
Positioned a tech hub, it's not surprising that the hiring frenzy in India is most pronounced in the e-commerce and IT related sectors. The country's e-commerce industry has been on an expansion drive with investors pouring in close to $2 billion in this sector this year alone, while IT services, which hires an estimated 150,000 fresh graduates every year, has benefited from the depreciation of the rupee and improving demand in western countries.
Read MoreIndia goes from fragile to fabulous
And often, salary is not a consideration in a bid to attract the best talent. One of India's largest e-commerce companies recently paid a million dollars to hire a chief technology officer, industry sources told CNBC. The 38-year-old relocated to India after 10 years in the U.S., as such salaries are "not normal even in America."
New Delhi-based online restaurant guide Zomato.com is struggling to fill positions at its rapidly-expanding firm. The six-year-old start-up is currently present in 13 countries and 100 cities and wants to expand to 10 new international markets within the next five months.
"We are scaling up…at the moment we are just 1 percent of where we want to be," Zomato's regional director Upasana Nath told CNBC, adding that the firm is adjusting salaries upwards by up to 60 percent for certain roles. "If we have more people we can expand more; we are hiring heavily."
It's a sentiment shared by India's leading online marketplace Flipkart.com, which received a whopping $1 billion from investors in July. The firm is planning to increase its technology team three-fold by the middle of next year. "We have grown 100 times in the last three years and we don't see any signs of slowing down," chief placement officer Mekin Maheswari told CNBC.
The job creation among Internet companies may be at a frenetic pace, but hiring in traditional sectors like banking and telecommunications is also picking up. According to the Naukri Job Speak Index, a monthly report on hiring activity in India, there has been a near 25 percent year on year uptick in hiring in the banking and telecom sectors in July.
Read MoreMozilla takes swipe at India market with $33 smartphone
Thirty-five-year-old Delhi-based banker Anubhav Gupta has been looking to change jobs since 2008 and his search has just ended. The MBA-degree holder with 12 years of work experience finally landed a new role recently with another financial institution with a "minor" increase in salary."Things are looking slightly better now, hopefully my next job shift won't take so long," he said.
Hiring executives also point to areas like R&D and life sciences where foreign investment is coming in after a lull period prior to the new government taking over in May. "They [foreign companies] are all looking for country managers and are offering salaries of close to $200,000 to people in their 30s," said Lakshmikanth of the Head Hunters.
It's worth noting that the battle for talent is taking place in the below-40s segment of the market, as the younger demographic have more relevant skills in the nouveau tech space. This is leaving the older unemployed population out in the cold.
Read MoreAsbestos still pushed in India and business is booming
"It is still a bad market for them…unless traditional companies in the engineering and automobile spaces start hiring, many of them are still sitting at home," said EDGE Executive's Kuriakose.
Other recruitment experts warn that the current hiring buzz is owed largely to a few industries. "There is a lot of excitement around just 10 internet companies…how many can they alone hire? 500 management graduates?" said Oberoi of Naukri.com.
And should the economy suffer from external shocks much like the battering emerging markets took last year, these tech firms – many which are built on foreign investment – could see an exodus of funds, putting jobs on the line, experts warn.
Read MoreMillennials are reshaping India's travel industry
But for 24-year-old Ravneet Kaur, who left her job with an established Indian design label to join a digital fashion start-up, it's a risk she is happy to have taken.
Armed with a Masters degree in international media business from the University of Westminster, Kaur says the excitement of being in a growth industry far outweighed the "substantial salary hike" she got when making the shift. Kaur, whose parents wanted her to stay on in London after her post graduation, chose to come back to India where she says the action is. "E-commerce is such a new thing in India, unexplored and I want to grow as the company grows," she said. | After a lull in years, India’s labor market is enjoying a burst of activity, a new government, a booming stock market and improved business sentiment. | 42.333333 | 0.966667 | 8.366667 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/meet-man-polo-player-broke-cuomos-article-1.516209 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160528031742id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/news/meet-man-polo-player-broke-cuomos-article-1.516209 | MEET THE OTHER MAN Say polo player broke up Cuomos | 20160528031742 | A wealthy restaurant owner and polo player has confided to friends that he is having an affair with Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, sources told the Daily News. Bruce Colley, 50, is the handsome - and married - co-owner of the Chelsea hot spot Man Ray and an avid horseman who has played polo with the likes of Britain's Prince Harry. He is also, or was, friends with Kerry Kennedy's now-estranged husband, Andrew Cuomo. "Bruce was aware" that people knew about the affair, which started less than a year ago, said one source close to Colley and his wife. The friend said Colley knew it was merely a matter of time before it became public. After his name first surfaced yesterday, Colley hired prominent defense lawyer Michael Kennedy. When reached at home, Kennedy, who is no relation to the Kennedy clan, declined to come to the phone. Colley did not return repeated messages yesterday. Even as sources confirmed the affair, a friend of Colley's said she talked to him and was authorized to speak for him. The friend denied that Colley had anything to do with the Cuomos' split, which was announced Monday. "It's untrue," said the friend, who did not want to be named. "He's a family man. He has two kids. His relationship with his wife is very good. He's spending this weekend with his wife on vacation. "Andrew and Kerry have been family friends. They've all known each other for years. Kerry wanted a divorce. Andrew didn't. He got angry when she went ahead with the announcement.
" Cuomo and Kennedy Cuomo announced Monday that they were separating after 13 years of marriage and three children. The failed gubernatorial candidate's lawyer issued a statement later saying he felt "betrayed" by his wife's conduct during their marriage. The next day, sources close to the couple said Cuomo had walked in on her tryst with a married man who has a home in northern Westchester County. The sources added that the two couples were good friends and had gone on family vacations together. Colley fits all those descriptions. Colley's wife is the former Ann Stevenson. They have two houses, one on the upper East Side, and one in Westchester, not far from the Cuomos in Bedford. Bruce Colley's marriage to Ann is his second. His first marriage, in 1983, to Susan Hory, ended in divorce. Still friends Susan Hory's father, Thomas, told the Daily News that his daughter and Bruce Colley are still close. "I don't know how bad the divorce was, but they've stayed close," Thomas said. Colley and his second wife have been married for less than a decade, said Thomas Hory, adding that his former son-in-law is "a hard guy not to be fond of.
" Colley's father, Eugene, was the president of the Colley-McCoy Company in Windham, N.
H., and Bruce was vice president of the Croton Falls, N.
Y., branch of the company. His father owns about 100 McDonald's restaurants and is the master of the hounds at the fox hunt in South Salem, sources said. A graduate of the upstate, upscale Trinity Pawling school, Bruce Colley graduated from Cornell University. He later went to Harvard, Thomas Hory said. Cuomo and Kennedy Cuomo, and their respective laywers, couldn't be reached for comment. | A wealthy restaurant owner and polo player has confided to friends that he is having an affair with Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, sources told the Daily News.
Bruce Colley, 50, is the handsome - and married - co-owner of the Chelsea hot spot Man Ray and an avid horseman who has played polo with the likes of Britain's Prince Harry. He is also, or was, friends with Kerry Kennedy's | 8.35 | 0.9875 | 42.3125 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/abercrombies-sales-slip-as-fewer-shoppers-visit-its-stores-1464262543 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160529050515id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/abercrombies-sales-slip-as-fewer-shoppers-visit-its-stores-1464262543 | Abercrombie’s Sales Slip as Fewer Shoppers Visit Its Stores | 20160529050515 | Abercrombie & Fitch Co. ’s turnaround efforts were derailed last quarter, as fewer shoppers visited its stores and the teen retailer tried to hold the line on discounts.
Sales at stores open at least a year fell 4% in the fiscal first quarter ended April 30, marking a reversal from the preceding quarter, when the company reported its first gain in more than three years. Analysts had expected a 1.5% increase.
Executive Chairman Arthur Martinez attributed the decline to “traffic headwinds, particularly in international markets and in our U.S. flagship and tourist stores.” Same-store sales are expected to remain challenged in the second quarter and improve in the second half of the year.
The New Albany, Ohio, company said total revenue fell 3% to $685.5 million for the quarter. Its net loss was $39.6 million, or 59 cents a share, compared with $63.2 million, or 91 cents, a year ago. Analysts had expected a loss of 51 cents a share on $709 million of revenue, according to FactSet.
As in previous quarters, the company’s Hollister brand performed better than the flagship brand. Hollister sales at stores open at least a year were flat, while that metric fell 8% at Abercrombie.
Abercrombie has been hit hard by changing consumer preferences, declining mall traffic and fierce competition from fast-fashion players. After the company’s highly sexual image cultivated by former CEO Mike Jeffries started alienating shoppers, the retailer began updating its merchandise assortment and revamping stores.
Mr. Martinez said the company has also pulled back on promotions and is now selling more merchandise at full price. Even as many retailers are anticipating a highly promotional environment in the coming months, Mr. Martinez said he doesn’t expect to change the pricing strategy at Abercrombie. Passing up short-term gains from promotions is a “price that needs to be paid” for the long-term health of the company, he said in an interview.
Abercrombie joins a growing list of retailers reporting a weak start to the year. Poor results at department stores and specialty retailers have illustrated consumers’ shift away from brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon.com Inc., meanwhile, has made an aggressive push into fashion and apparel sales.
“The traffic situation is a systemic problem for the industry,” said Mr. Martinez. “Our job is to make the most of the traffic we do get.”
He said Abercrombie hasn’t ruled out the option of selling merchandise on Amazon. “As our brands come back to their status and health, we will be looking for additional channels to take our products,” he said. “I would never say never to anything, but we have an awful lot of work to do before we can think of anything like that.”
Last week, Gap Inc. CEO Art Peck said in response to an investor’s question at the annual shareholder meeting that the company is open to selling merchandise on Amazon and other third parties.
Abercrombie has been operating without a chief executive for more than a year. Since Mr. Jeffries departed in December 2014, the company has been run by an office of the chairman, which includes Mr. Martinez.
The retailer recently promoted Hollister brand President Fran Horowitz to the role of company president and chief merchandising officer. Ms. Horowitz is seen as a top candidate for the CEO job.
On Monday, the company named Target Corp. veteran Stacia Andersen and Victoria’s Secret veteran Kristin Scott to run the Abercrombie and Hollister brands, respectively. Ms. Andersen will replace Christos Angelides, who stepped down from his role in December. The company’s chief operating officer, Jonathan Ramsden, is also departing from his role effective June 15.
Write to Khadeeja Safdar at khadeeja.safdar@wsj.com | Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s turnaround efforts were derailed last quarter as fewer shoppers visited its stores and the teen retailer tried to hold the line on discounts. | 24.827586 | 1 | 15.344828 | medium | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/26/thiel-gawker-lawsuit-hulk-hogan/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160529065802id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/26/thiel-gawker-lawsuit-hulk-hogan/ | Peter Thiel, Champion of the Little Guy, Defender of Journalism | 20160529065802 | This essay originally appeared in Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter. Sign up here.
Some billionaire venture capitalists fund research into how human beings might become immortal. Others want to set up a series of artificial islands on which people could live without being subject to the laws of a specific country. And some get their lawyers to shop around for lawsuits they can fund in order to put a news website out of business.
Peter Thiel, the man best known for his early investment in Facebook fb and for being a co-founder of PayPal pypl and Palantir, isn’t just any billionaire VC. He’s doing all of those things at the same time. The Immortality Project and the Seasteading Institute seem harmless enough, for the most part, but Thiel’s funding of a $140 million lawsuit against Gawker Media is anything but—if you have any interest in a free press, that is.
After Gawker founder Nick Denton suggested earlier this week that a wealthy benefactor was helping fund wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company, Forbes named Thiel as the one providing the cash. Late Wednesday, the billionaire came forward and admitted to The New York Times that he helped finance not just Hogan’s legal case but at least one other current case against Gawker as part of a plan he has been working on for several years.
Thiel denied that his motive was just revenge for stories that Gawker wrote about him, including one in 2007 that publicly revealed him to be gay. He said that his campaign against the site was about “deterrence,” because he believed Gawker had pioneered a “unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”
What about the threat that such a campaign might present to a free press or the First Amendment? Thiel brushed these concerns aside in his interview with the Times. “I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker,” he said. Is that going to help members of the press sleep soundly at night? It’s difficult to see how. | Thiel says his campaign against Gawker isn't motivated by revenge. | 35.166667 | 0.75 | 1.25 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2010/07/27/where-women-work/19566630/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160529153854id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2010/07/27/where-women-work/19566630/? | Where Women Work: 20 Most Common Occupations | 20160529153854 | Think back to the most common jobs that women held in your mom's day, and if that's not far enough back, think about your grandmother. Do secretaries, nurses, teachers and retail sales clerks come to mind? Now think about the most common jobs for women today: Are you envisioning managers and administrators, lawyers, marketing specialists, content producers and entrepreneurs? If so, you'd be wrong. It seems we haven't "come a long way baby" at all.
In fact, according to the latest numbers released by the United States Department of Labor, the Leading Occupations of Employed Women for 2009 are secretaries, nurses, teachers and cashiers, in that order. And in the first three, women represent over 80 percent of all those employed. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just a little surprising that even with technology and society experiencing phenomenal upheaval on a daily basis, things haven't changed much for the working woman during the past 50 years.
1. Secretaries and administrative assistants
Percent of jobs held by women: 96.8%
Percent of jobs held by women: 92%
3. Elementary and middle school teachers
Percent of jobs held by women: 81.9%
Percent of jobs held by women: 74.4%
5. Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides
Percent of jobs held by women: 88.5%
Percent of jobs held by women: 51.9
7. First-line supervisors/managers of retail sales workers
Percent of jobs held by women: 44.1%
Percent of jobs held by women: 71.6%
9. Maids and housekeeping cleaners
Percent of jobs held by women: 89.9%
Percent of jobs held by women: 67.9%
Percent of jobs held by women: 95.1%
12. Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks
Percent of jobs held by women: 92.3%
13. Receptionists and Information clerks
Percent of jobs held by women: 95.1%
14. First-line supervisors/managers of office and administrative support
Percent of jobs held by women: 71.3%
Percent of jobs held by women: 34.1%
Percent of jobs held by women: 61.8%
Percent of jobs held by women: 91.6%
Percent of jobs held by women: 41.5%
Percent of jobs held by women: 82%
20. Personal and home care aides
Percent of jobs held by women: 85.2%
It might come as some consolation that in 2010, women overtook men in the workplace, mostly because the biggest layoffs were in the male-dominated fields of manufacturing and construction, while the female-dominated fields of education and health care were considerable safer. Women now make up about 51 percent of the work force; the numbers above are from 2009, when women made up 47.4 percent of the workforce. So it's true that times, they are a-changin' -- but just at a snail's pace. | You've Come a Long Way Baby... Or Have You? Think back to the most common jobs that women held in your mom's day, and if that' | 17.545455 | 0.878788 | 11.848485 | medium | medium | extractive |
http://time.com/3946541/same-sex-gay-lesbian-marriage/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160529155124id_/http://time.com:80/3946541/same-sex-gay-lesbian-marriage/ | Gays and Lesbians Have Different Reasons to Get Married | 20160529155124 | Same-sex marriage is now legal across the United States, but research on the reasons gays and lesbians get married is sparse. Now, in a recent study published in the journal Demography, a team of researchers looked at earnings and parenting patterns over time among married Swedish couples and found that registered partnership is important to both—but for different reasons.
The researchers looked at and followed Swedish couples who entered into registered partnerships sometime between 1995—the year Sweden approved registered partnerships of same-sex couples—through 2007. (They also analyzed data from 1994 to get a glimpse of life before official partnership.) The 1,381 couples in the study—672 lesbian and 709 gay couples—were entering their first unions and were between the ages of 20 and 64. The authors analyzed demographic data—including annual earnings from the couples, the differences between the earnings of people in the couple and the number of children in each union—for same-sex couples and compared the results to 267,264 heterosexual couples.
Sweden provides an intriguing opportunity to study how policy impacts same-sex marriages; though the country approved registered partnerships of same-sex couples in 1995, it wasn’t until a 2002 law that the country’s registered partners were allowed to jointly adopt children. (Swedish law dictates that married couples can only adopt jointly, thereby making it impossible for one partner to adopt without the other if the two partners are married.)
The authors found that gays and lesbians got married for very different reasons. Most gay couples entered their union without kids, and that number remained close to zero after marriage; the authors concluded that “the main function of registered partnership for gays is resource pooling,” they write in the paper. “For lesbians, on the other hand, the right to joint or step-parent adoption allowed in 2002 raised fertility and possibly entry into partnership.”
In other words, gay couples were more likely to get married to combine incomes and resources; lesbians tended to use marriage as a stepping stool towards creating a family, further emphasized by a spike in lesbians registering for marriage in 2002, the year when joint adoption was made legal.
The decision to have children is likely a large factor responsible for these differences, said Lena Edlund, an associate professor at Columbia University and one of the economists involved with the study. “I think the asymmetry results from a much greater difficulty male couples have in finding children that they can parent jointly,” she said in an e-mail. “It is also possible that male couples have a lower desire for joint children.”
For same-sex couples, adoption laws often lag behind marriage recognition laws—as they do in many states in the United States and did in Sweden. Having kids is especially expensive for gay mean, who need to find an egg and a gestational carrier—a problem lesbian couples don’t have.
Perhaps most intriguing is the role education plays in determining mates. In heterosexual marriages, assortative mating—choosing a partner more like oneself—is often at play, where partners are matched on an education level, according to economist Gary Becker’s A Theory of Marriage. A person with a master’s degree would partner with someone with at least a master’s degree; the theory states that it’s unlikely that this person would find common ground in parenting style and life philosophy with a person with a high school education.
What’s astonishing about the new research is that it showed that lesbian couples are often not as assortatively matched as heterosexual couples, or even gay men. For lesbians, an already thin marriage market means that education might not necessarily play a role in finding a mate so much as finding a partner who is equally as interested—or not—in raising children, Edlund said.
The concept of specialization also seems to play a lesser role in lesbian marriage compared to straight marriages. In a typical heterosexual marriage, the combination of having children and unequal pay means that partners are more likely to specialize, the study notes; the partner who earns less will stay at home with the kids, for example, while the partner who earns more acts as the breadwinner. In the Swedish sample, a higher percentage of lesbian couples remained on the labor force together and, in some instances, having their incomes nearly match after marriage.
The results of the study can only provide insight into the Swedish experience of same-sex parenting, which may differ from that in America, Edlund said. “American individuals and couples have greater access to fertility treatments and sperm banks,” she said. “There are also more American couples who can afford a surrogate mother.” Swedish couples, regardless of orientation, have access to healthcare and childcare options that the American couples don’t necessarily have, which would probably play into labor market options for partners, the study notes. But what can be said for sure is that, like any heterosexual marriage, marriage has consequences far more complex than simply signing a piece of paper. | The big differences come down to kids | 138.428571 | 0.571429 | 0.571429 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/03/23/robert-gordon-u-s-economic-growth/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160529225241id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/03/23/robert-gordon-u-s-economic-growth/ | The Real Reason Your Paycheck Is Not Where It Could Be | 20160529225241 | For more than a decade, the economy’s rate of productivity growth has been dismal, which is bad news for workers since their incomes rise slowly or not at all when this is the case. Economists have struggled to understand why American productivity has been so weak. After all, with all the information technology innovations that make our lives easier like iPhones, Google goog , and Uber, why hasn’t our country been able to work more productively, giving us either more leisure time, or allowed us to get more done at work and paid more in return?
One answer often given is that the government statisticians must be measuring something wrong – notably, the benefits of Google and all the free stuff we can now access on our phones, tablets and computers. Perhaps government statisticians just couldn’t figure out how to include those new services in a meaningful way into the data?
A new research paper by Fed economists throws cold water on that idea. They think that free stuff like Facebook fb should not be counted in GDP, or in measures of productivity, because consumers do not pay for these services directly; the costs of providing them are paid for by advertisers. The authors point out that free services paid for by advertising are not new; for example, when television broadcasting was introduced it was provided free to households and much of it still is.
The Fed economists argue that free services like Google are a form of “consumer surplus,” defined as the value consumers place on the things they buy that is over and above the price they have paid. Consumer surplus has never been included in past measures of GDP or productivity, they point out. Economist Robert Gordon, who commented on the Fed paper at the conference where it was presented, argued that even if consumer surplus were to be counted, most of the free stuff such as search engines, e-commerce, airport check-in kiosks and the like was already available by 2004, and hence would not explain the productivity growth slowdown that occurred around that time.
The Fed economists also point out that the slowdown in productivity growth is a very big deal. If the rate of growth achieved from 1995 to 2004 had continued for another decade, GDP would have been $3 trillion higher, the authors calculate. And the United States is not alone in facing weak productivity; it is a problem for all developed economies. It is hard to believe that such a large problem faced by so many countries could be explained by errors in the way GDP and productivity are measured.
Even though I agree with the Fed authors that the growth slowdown is real, there are potentially serious measurement problems for the economy that predate the 2004 slowdown.
Health care is the most important example. It amounts to around 19% of GDP and in the official accounts there has been no productivity growth at all in this sector over many, many years. In part that may reflect inefficiencies in health care delivery, but no one can doubt that the quality of care has increased. New diagnostic and scanning technologies, new surgical procedures, and new drugs have transformed how patients are treated and yet none of these advances has been counted in measured productivity data. The pace of medical progress probably was just as fast in the past as it is now, so this measurement problem does not explain the slowdown. Nevertheless, trying to obtain better measures of health care productivity is an urgent task. The fault is not with the government’s statisticians, who do a tremendous job with very limited resources. The fault lies with those in Congress who undervalue good economic statistics.
Gordon, in his influential new book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, argues that the American engine of innovation has largely run its course. The big and important innovations are behind us and future productivity growth will be slow. My own view is that the digital revolution has not nearly reached an end, and advances in materials science and biotechnology promise important innovations to come. Productivity growth seems to go in waves and is impossible to forecast, so it is hard to say for sure if Gordon is wrong, but I think he is.
Fortune reported in June 2015 that 70% of its top 500 CEOs listed rapid technological change as their biggest challenge. I am confident that companies will figure out the technology challenge, and productivity growth will get back on track, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Martin Neil Baily is a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. | Here's a closer look at America's economic growth. | 78.727273 | 0.454545 | 0.454545 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/03/apple-hires-nest-yoky-matsuoka/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160530115404id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/03/apple-hires-nest-yoky-matsuoka/ | Robotics Expert Yoky Matsuoka Joins Apple to Work on Health Efforts | 20160530115404 | Apple has hired famed robotics expert Yoky Matsuoka, one of the co-founders of Google’s X lab and former head of technology at Nest, to work on the iPhone maker’s health projects.
Matsuoka left Nest last year and was headed to Twitter until she was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, according to a post she wrote on Medium last May. Treatment of the undisclosed illness was effective, she wrote.
Apple said Matsuoka is working for chief operating officer Jeff Williams, who oversees the tech giant’s growing number of health initiatives. Those efforts include the HealthKit framework for developing apps, ResearchKit for using mobile devices in medical studies, and CareKit to help individuals improve their own medical care.
Matsuoka has had a fascinating career. After moving to the United States from Japan as a teenager to pursue a tennis career, she attended the University of California, Berkeley. Injuries waylaid her future in tennis, but she became interested in building a tennis-playing robot, a pursuit that led her to MIT where she got a Ph.D. and helped develop the BarrettHand, an revolutionary robotic arm.
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She then spent a decade in academia at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington in Seattle as a professor of robotics. Among her students at Carnegie Mellon was Matt Rogers, who went on to co-found Nest with Tony Fadell.
In 2007, she won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work in neurorobotics, using technology to help disabled people and stroke victims regain the use of their limbs.
Matsuoka left UW to help Google start its X lab project in 2009—only to join Rogers at Nest in 2010 as head of technology. At Nest, Matsuoka developed the user interface and learning algorithms for the company’s automated products. Google bought Nest in 2014, and Matsuoka announced she was leaving and headed to Twitter a year later, before she changed her mind due to the illness.
To learn more about Jeff Williams at Apple, watch:
The robotics expert had said last year that she was healthy but was undecided about what to do next, according to her Medium post. “I am spending time with my family and working on some personal projects,” she wrote at the time. “But I can’t imagine leaving the world of technology and what has been a passion for me. I want to work again, but also want to take time to construct this new life I have been so blessed to be given.” | The MacArthur genius award winner was also one of the co-founders of the Google X lab. | 25.526316 | 0.894737 | 3.210526 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/cruz-steals-line-american-president-slam-trump-article-1.2574599 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160530144616id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/movies/cruz-steals-line-american-president-slam-trump-article-1.2574599? | Cruz steals line from 'American President' to slam Trump | 20160530144616 | If Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz's dig at arch-nemesis Donald Trump sounded good, that's because it was cribbed from an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
The Texas Senator used a line from the 1995 movie "The American President" to warn Trump to stop threatening his wife — only Cruz neglected to attribute the source.
"If Donald wants to get into a character fight, he's better off sticking with me, because Heidi is way out of his league," Cruz told CNN Wednesday morning.
DONALD TRUMP MAKES THREAT TOWARD CRUZ'S WIFE
That's nearly verbatim from the Aaron Sorkin-penned scene in which Michael Douglas' Commander in Chief slams a rival by saying, "If you want a character debate Bob, you better stick with me because Sydney Ellen Waid is way out of your league."
In the movie, the outburst comes when a political rival goes after the President’s girlfriend, played by Annette Bening.
Cruz is clearly a popcorn-loving movie nerd, having quoted lines from "The Usual Suspects," "The Princess Bride" and "Jerry Maguire" all along the campaign trail.
The latest soap-opera twist from the campaign trail erupted Tuesday in a Twitter battle between the two top GOP candidates.
Angered that an independent political group’s ad used a scantily clad photo of Trump's wife, Melania, from her modeling days, the former "Celebrity Apprentice" host immediately dragged Cruz's better half into the news cycle.
"Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad," Trump tweeted. "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!"
"Pic of your wife not from us. Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you're more of a coward than I thought. #classless," Cruz tweeted back.
His camp further accused Trump of spreading rumors that Heidi Cruz is suffering from mental issues. | If Ted Cruz's dig at arch-nemesis Donald Trump sounded good, that's because it was cribbed from an Oscar-winning screenwriter. | 14.333333 | 1 | 25.074074 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/katie-couric-accused-diane-sawyer-trading-sex-interviews-new-book-claims-article-1.1920349 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160530153815id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/tv/katie-couric-accused-diane-sawyer-trading-sex-interviews-new-book-claims-article-1.1920349 | Katie Couric accused Diane Sawyer of trading sex for interviews, new book claims | 20160530153815 | Katie Couric cultivated an “American Girl identity” but she was also a bully with a “chip on her shoulder.”
Diane Sawyer strived to be “America’s Aunt” but she rode her staff hard and used “staged humility” to disarm critics.
Christiane Amanpour was fearless in the field and would remind her bosses, “Do you know that I’m the world’s best-known foreign correspondent?”
And, when feeling threatened, these pioneering, primetime newswomen would sometimes bare their claws at each other, according to a tell-all book that goes on sale next month.
When Couric found out Sawyer landed a much sought-after interview with a 57-year-old woman who had given birth to twins, the publicly perky anchor reportedly snarled, “I wonder who she b--- this time to get it,” veteran journalist Sheila Weller dished in the book.
These are just some of the juicy details in Weller’s tome “The News Sorority,” which chronicles the careers of three of TV news’ top female anchors.
While Weller praises them for their fortitude and for their ability to rise to the top in a brutal business, none of these women come away blemish-free in this 471-page exposé, which goes on sale Sept. 30.
A Couric friend said Weller was “relying on classic anti-feminist caricatures, tabloid-like misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about these three extraordinary women.”
“No comment,” Sawyer’s mouthpiece said when asked for comment after her portrayal in Weller’s book.
There was also no comment from the rep for Amanpour.
Back in June, the Daily News first reported that Weller had written the take-no-prisoners book and gave a sample of what was to come.
The News described how Couric, according to the book, staged a pity party and compared herself to Hillary Clinton after she took a beating in the press for jumping ship to CBS after many years as co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.
“Katie deeply related to Hillary; she felt she was being pummeled as the first female anchor just like Clinton was being pummeled as the first major female presidential candidate,” Weller wrote.
But Couric, Weller claims, also used to psychologically pummel Ann Curry when she was the news reader on “Today.”
“Katie was a bully and Ann was the victim,” a source at ABC told Weller.
One classic Couric maneuver was to throw Curry “off balance by criticizing Ann’s clothing choices just before they went on air,” Weller wrote.
Couric’s colleagues at CBS later dubbed it the “compli- insult.”
“She would look at someone and say, ‘I really think you’re clever, but why is your script so horrible?” one staffer said, according to Weller. | Katie Couric cultivated an “American Girl identity,” but she was also a bully with a “chip on her shoulder.” | 22.12 | 1 | 11.72 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/06/28/ibm-gives-advice-how-fix-boston-traffic-first-get-app/goxK84cWB9utHQogpsbd1N/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160530161159id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/06/28/ibm-gives-advice-how-fix-boston-traffic-first-get-app/goxK84cWB9utHQogpsbd1N/story.html | IBM gives advice on how to fix Boston traffic | 20160530161159 | What’s the best way to fix Boston’s notoriously bad traffic? How about an app?
That’s what six IBM engineers worked on for three weeks this month in City Hall as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, which awarded Boston and 32 other cities around the world each with $400,000 worth of its technical know-how. The program helps cities find innovative answers to tough urban problems.
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino asked the IBM team, which also worked with experts from Boston University, to tackle two big issues: How can the city quickly spot and undo congestion while slashing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.
“We don’t do a good job of moving traffic,” said Menino. “We’ve got to modernize, and understand our carbon footprint.”
The IBM team’s answer to Menino’s task came in the form of an app. Of course there are already iPhone apps for tracking traffic, but the engineers helped the city build a prototype software application that unifies previously hard to find and disparate data from city computers, video cameras across the city, street sensors, and databases to show a real-time picture of Boston’s traffic.
Menino said the prototype would not only become a tool for city planners, but could eventually make its way onto an iPhone, too. During the next six months, the city said, it will test the application and make some of its data available to the public.
The six IBM engineers, who came from as far away as Tokyo, ended their work at City Hall on Thursday and left behind a set of preliminary recommendations that include using additional data sources such as cellphones and even Twitter posts to improve their understanding of the city’s traffic patterns.
“There are literally millions of data points per second — from GPS and cellphone technology — that can be analyzed and made intelligent,” said Steve Wysmuller, environmental management system leader for IBM Global Services, who came from Somers, N.Y., to join the team working in Boston.
For city planners, unifying all the traffic data not only gives them the ability to make on-the-spot adjustments to ease congestion, or even change traffic light patterns, it can let them know where bottlenecks regularly occur across the city. And there are a lot of them: The Boston area has the 10th-worst traffic congestion in the nation, according to the traffic analytics firm INRIX Inc.
“This kind of information lets us redesign traffic flows,” said Vineet Gupta, director of planning for Boston’s Transportation Department. “If you don’t have good data, you are not going to be able to make improvements.”
It also helps cut vehicle emissions by letting the city know where cars constantly idle in traffic, said Lucy R. Hutyra, an assistant professor in Boston University’s Department of Geography and Environment. She was on the team.
“If we are actually going to move forward and regulate CO2 emissions, we need to figure out where they are coming from in a traceable manner. And that means data,” she said.
IBM will formally present its recommendations later this year. The city did not say how much it would cost to fully implement the prototype. | What’s the best way to fix Boston’s bad traffic? How about an app? That’s what six IBM engineers worked on for three weeks this month in City Hall as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, which awarded Boston and 32 other global cities each with $400,000 in technical know-how. The program helps cities find innovative answers to tough problems. Mayor Thomas M. Menino tasked IBM with two challenges: spot and undo congestion and slash greenhouse gas emissions. | 6.89011 | 0.967033 | 15.076923 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/27/developers-with-political-connections-19-more-likely-to-win-favourable-decisions | http://web.archive.org/web/20160530205034id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/australia-news/2015/may/27/developers-with-political-connections-19-more-likely-to-win-favourable-decisions | Developers with strong political connections '44% more likely to win favourable decisions' | 20160530205034 | Researchers have quantified the value of political connections to property developers in rezoning decisions worth “many billions of dollars” across Australia every year.
A new study, “Clean money in a dirty system”, which examined the record of Queensland’s Urban Land Development Authority (ULDA), found developers connected to networks containing politicians and bureaucrats were 19% more likely – and those at the centre of networks 44% more likely – to win favourable decisions than “outsiders”.
University of Queensland economics researchers Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters said outsiders could, however, buy their way into “the right club” by paying lobbyists such as former politicians, boosting their prospects by 37%.
Murray and Frijters, who linked relationships to property gains through land, lobbyist, donor and company records, said political favours were less a result of visible acts like donations than membership of “tight-knit groups that include key decision-makers and wherein everyone knows each other”.
Political insiders were favoured in a way that had led to “very odd-shaped” rezoned areas that appeared less suitable than others nearby – right down to the opposite side of a street, the researchers said.
“We are now getting high-rise apartments and new city neighbourhoods where the cost of infrastructure is probably much higher than in areas identified as more suitable for development in the earlier (state government regional) plans, simply to accommodate a political in crowd,” they said.
John Menadue, a former senior public servant, diplomat and business executive, said the study highlighted “a very, very serious problem [where] vested interests are corrupting public debate and policy in Australia”.
“The figures frankly don’t surprise me. People with money are able to secure quite remarkable concessions on zoning from various levels of government in Australia,” he said.
The study found politically connected developers gained $410m in profits purely through rezoning decisions that had “wrong-footed” both councils footing infrastructure bills and unconnected property developers.
Connected developers owned 75% of land in areas rezoned by the ULDA between 2008 and 2010, compared with less than 12% in the areas just outside.
The ULDA, which was headed by a former executive of development company Lend Lease, was dismantled in 2012.
Murray and Frijters said Lend Lease were among the large companies which currently indicated in their prospectus they “expect new favourable rezoning decisions in areas that are unlikely to be technically optimal”.
This was “basically showing that these companies are confident they can get new favours from the current politicians that will come at the expense of the general population”, they said.
Their study found lobbyists were “extraordinarily effective at ensuring land is rezoned”, with clients owning 30% of rezoned land and none of the land just outside.
It argued lobbyists were a substitute for membership of networks in which mutual favours result from a “revolving door where property developers and the key political/bureaucratic positions are the same people, exchanging positions over time”.
“Those with advantageous positions in relationship networks are able to get preferential treatment precisely because of their ability to be involved in implicit dealings that take advantage of a missing formal market in political favours,” the study said.
Menadue said forcing lobbyists to publicly “disclose in some detail and quickly who they’ve spoken to and the nature of those conversations [would] cause some of these people to be much more careful than they are at the present time”.
“I also think it’s important that politicians and public servants who retire should not in any way take paid executive or other positions with companies with which they had an association while they were a minister or senior bureaucrat,” he said.
“Ministers and public servants who retire and God bless me, within a few months they’ve got a job with a company they were dealing with – they just change their coat from one day to the next, when there’s clearly a potential conflict of interest.”
The study claims its findings around the ULDA, involving “a tiny sample of planning activities” in Queensland, suggested a likely “avenue for allocating many billions of dollars in development rights to connected land owners annually” when applied to the rest of Australia.
It argues the public is losing out on its claim to these property value windfalls which “could be priced in a market rather than allocated politically and incurring the associated costs” of perpetuating network or lobby influence.
Options included taxes on “land betterment” or public auctions of development rights, the researchers said.
However they noted “the same relationship networks that allow current favouritism to thrive in rezoning decisions will surely hinder any systematic reform of the rezoning process”. | Creators of Queensland study say visible acts such as donations less significant than membership of tight-knit networks | 48.473684 | 0.842105 | 1.789474 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/prince-dead-sister-tyka-nelson-reaction-fans | http://web.archive.org/web/20160531055242id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/prince-dead-sister-tyka-nelson-reaction-fans?xid=rss-topheadlines | Tyka Nelson on Prince's Death : People.com | 20160531055242 | 04/22/2016 AT 12:00 PM EDT
's sister Tyka Nelson reportedly greeted fans who had gathered outside of
in Chanhassen, Minnesota, on Thursday.
"He loved all of you," Tyka (aka Tika Nelson) told the crowd,
. "Thank you for loving him back."
Hundreds of mourners had gathered outside the compound to pay tribute to the star after news of his death broke on Thursday. The music icon was
, which served as his home as well as his recording studio. The exact cause of death has not yet been confirmed.
Tyka, who lives in Minneapolis, also posted messages to fans on what appears to be her Facebook,
, "Hi, Thank U 4 Loving My Brother! He LOVED Playing His Music & I KNOW He Loved U 2." She also quoted John 15:13, writing, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."
AP Photo / Steve Karnowski
to gospel singer CeCe Winans' song, "Don't Cry for Me." The song is sung from the perspective of a person who has died, asking people not to cry over their death.
"No one is the blame/ My death was meant to be/ Don't carry guilt nor shame/ The reason why I came soon you'll see," Winans sings. "Don't cry for me/ Don't shed a tear/ The time I shared with you will always be/ And when I'm gone/ Life still carries on/ Don't cry for me/ We'll always be/ Don't cry for me." | Tyka Nelson also shared a song by gospel singer CeCe Winans | 28.090909 | 0.909091 | 2.181818 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141017-how-flowers-conquered-the-world | http://web.archive.org/web/20160531100143id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/earth/story/20141017-how-flowers-conquered-the-world | The abominable mystery: How flowers conquered the world | 20160531100143 | It was, Charles Darwin wrote in 1879, "an abominable mystery". Elsewhere he described it as "a most perplexing phenomenon". Twenty years after the publication of his seminal work The Origin of Species, there were still aspects of evolution that bothered the father of evolutionary biology. Chief among these was the flower problem.
Flowering plants from gardenias to grasses, water lilies to wheat belong to a large and diverse group called the angiosperms. Unlike almost all other types of plants, they produce fruits that contain seeds. What worried Darwin was that the very earliest samples in the fossil record all dated back to the middle of the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago, and they came in a bewilderingly wide variety of shapes and sizes. This suggested flowering plants had experienced an explosive burst of diversity very shortly after their origins – which, if true, threatened to undermine Darwin's entire model of gradual evolution through natural selection.
In fact recently published research has revealed that angiosperms evolved relatively gradually after all. Yet this still leaves a number of key questions. The roughly 350,000 known species of flowering plants make up about 90% of all living plant species. Without them, we would have none of our major crops including those used to feed livestock, and one of the most important carbon sinks that mop up our carbon dioxide emissions would be missing. How and where did they originate? And, perhaps more importantly, why did they become so spectacularly successful?
Darwin was an undoubted expert on origins. His remarkable insights helped establish a framework for the way new species form – and he was adamant that the process was slow and gradual.
"As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short and slow steps," he wrote in The Origin of Species.
But Darwin was painfully aware that there were apparent exceptions to his slow and steady rule. The angiosperms were a particular source of frustration. Angiosperms simply didn't exist for most of Earth's history. Early forests were populated by bizarre primitive tree-like plants closely related to the club mosses and horsetails that are a very minor part of today's plant communities. Later a group called the gymnosperms – plants with unenclosed seeds such as the conifers – took over. And then came the angiosperms.
Early in the 19th century, scientists like Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart began collating everything that was then known about fossil plants. Work like this highlighted the fact that a huge variety of angiosperms – often called the "higher plants" or dicotyledons in the 19th century – popped up all too suddenly in the middle of the Cretaceous geological period.
The sudden appearance of flowering plants was more than just perplexing. It was ammunition against Darwin's evolutionary model
"[The] sudden appearance of so many Dicotyledons… appears to me a most perplexing phenomenon to all who believe in any form of evolution, especially to those who believe in extremely gradual evolution," Darwin wrote to Swiss naturalist Oswald Heer in 1875.
He was well aware the sudden appearance of flowering plants was more than just perplexing. It also provided his critics with ammunition against his evolutionary model.
Darwin did suggest a solution, however. Angiosperms, he said, may have evolved gradually in a remote region of the world as yet unexplored by scientists. By the middle of the Cretaceous, something caused them to spill out of their homeland and rapidly spread across the world. This, reasoned Darwin, would give the misleading impression to researchers working in Europe and North America that a wide variety of flowering plant species had all evolved at the same time. Aware of the lack of evidence to back up his theory, Darwin described it as "wretchedly poor".
In fact, his speculation has since proved to be partly correct. Angiosperms that predate the middle Cretaceous specimens by tens of millions of years have begun to turn up in rocks from China. But Darwin didn't get the details entirely right because very rare early angiosperms have been found in Europe and the US too.
"Our knowledge has greatly increased since the end of the 19th century," says Laurent Augusto at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Bordeaux, France. Palaeobotanists may not yet agree on precisely where and when flowering plants first evolved, but their appearance in the fossil record much earlier than was previously known means they are no longer a problem for Darwin's theory of gradual evolution. Other debates about them, especially concerning their spectacular diversity, remain active, however.
"Our world is an angiosperm world," says Augusto. "In many ecosystems they dominate in species and in biomass – this angiosperm ecological dominance remains unexplained."
Clues to the ultimate origins of flowering plants are to be found on New Caledonia, a small island about 1,600 kilometres east of Australia. Here, around the time that Darwin was agonising over his angiosperm problem, botanists discovered a plant called Amborella. Careful study over the last century has shown it to be the sole survivor of one of the very earliest branches of the angiosperm evolutionary tree. This means its relationship to all living flowers is bit like that of the duck-billed platypus to all living mammals: it might look unassuming, but Amborella can tell us more than even the most elaborate orchid about how the angiosperms first evolved.
Last year, the plant finally spilled some of its secrets. The Amborella Genome Project unveiled a draft version of the plant's genome. The first angiosperms must have evolved from one of the gymnosperm species that dominated the world at the time. The Amborella genome suggests that the first angiosperms probably appeared when the ancestral gymnosperm underwent a 'whole genome doubling' event about 200 million years ago.
Flowers have been a defining feature of the angiosperms from very early on in their evolution
Genome doubling occurs when an organism mistakenly gains an extra copy of every one of its genes during the cell division that occurs as part of sexual reproduction. The extra genetic material gives genome doubled organisms the potential to evolve new traits that can provide a competitive advantage. In the case of the earliest angiosperms, the additional genetic material gave the plants the potential to evolve new, never-before-seen structures – like flowers. The world's flora would never be the same again.
The Amborella genome results strongly suggest that flowers have been a defining feature of the angiosperms from very early on in their evolution. Could the flowers themselves help explain why the angiosperms became so diverse?
Darwin was certainly open to the possibility. While he was wrestling with the problem posed by the seemingly sudden appearance of the angiosperms, he received a letter from Gaston de Saporta, a French biologist who said the apparent evidence of the 19th century fossil record suggesting the plant group appeared suddenly need not be a problem for Darwin's theory of gradual evolution. It simply showed that angiosperms were an unusual exception to his general rule. Flowering plants and their insect pollinators evolved together, reasoned Saporta, and this 'co-evolution' drove both groups to diversify unusually rapidly.
"Your idea … seems to me a splendid one," responded an enthusiastic Darwin. "I am surprised that the idea never occurred to me, but this is always the case when one first hears a new and simple explanation of some mysterious phenomenon."
But the theory runs into trouble today, says Augusto. Early angiosperms may have had flowers, but we now know from fossils that those first flowers were very plain - and probably not that attractive to pollinators. By the time the big, bold flowers that entice insects appeared, the angiosperms were already diverse.
Another theory, advanced by Frank Berendse and Marten Scheffer at Wageningen University in the Netherlands in 2009, rests on the fact that the angiosperms are much more productive than gymnosperms like the conifers. Perhaps they simply outcompeted rival plants by growing faster and gobbling up the lion's share of the nutrients, they suggested.
"Our paper was meant to be a bit provocative," says Berendse, to encourage botanists and those who study fossil plants to work together more closely on explaining the spectacular rise of the angiosperms.
There are no simple explanations for the diversity and ecological dominance of the flowering plants
In fact, the two had already begun working together. Earlier in 2009, a team led by Tim Brodribb at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, published the first in a series of papers exploring angiosperm evolution by examining fossil leaves. They found that their leaves gained many more veins during the Cretaceous, which would have provided them with more water for photosynthesis, and allowed them to grow more rapidly.
"That provided very strong support for our ideas," says Berendse. But as with the flower hypothesis, problems remain with the nutrient-based theory. For instance, while individual angiosperm leaves are more efficient at photosynthesising than conifer needles, conifers may be able to compensate because their needles collectively have a much larger surface area than that of the leaves of an average angiosperm tree.
Unfortunately, there are no simple explanations for the diversity and ecological dominance of the flowering plants. "Very probably no single theory can explain the massive rise of the angiosperms," admits Berendse.
It's more likely, says Augusto, that several factors played a role, with each being more or less important in specific places and times. For instance, Berendse's productivity theory may apply in the tropical belts, where rich soils could give nutrient-hungry angiosperms a vital edge over gymnosperms, but it might not explain what's going on in regions with poor soils, where angiosperms are potentially starved of the nutrients they need. And the simple flowers of early angiosperms may have done little for the evolution of the group, but when elaborate flowers finally appeared they probably did help drive the plant group to take over the world.
That is, if they really did take over the world. It might seem odd to suggest otherwise when there are something like 350,000 known angiosperm species and not many more than 1000 gymnosperms, most of which are conifers. But there's more to success than diversity, says Brodribb. Many of the few conifers species that do survive are super-abundant.
"In the northern hemisphere conifers rule the vast boreal and much of the temperate zone," says Brodribb. He adds that the angiosperms have not become ecologically dominant in many of these regions. This might be because the soils there are too poor for them to establish a nutritional advantage, in keeping with Berendse's ideas, or perhaps it's because temperatures drop too low for them to survive. But why even in 350,000 attempts the angiosperms haven't come up with species that can overcome these problems and outcompete those northern conifers is another unsolved mystery.
In the northern hemisphere conifers rule
Today's plant scientists understandably have a better handle on the origins of flowering plants than Darwin did, but they are still struggling to explain the group's diversity, and why despite this it has failed to become dominant in some parts of the world.
Augusto, at least, is confident that answers will eventually be found, in part because these mysteries continue to fascinate researchers. And while there is little doubt this fascination stems in part from the ecological and economic importance of angiosperms today, perhaps it is also partly down to Darwin and his way with words. "I think the 'abominable mystery' quote does contribute to the general interest in angiosperms," adds Augusto. | Charles Darwin was baffled by the speed with which flowers evolved and spread. Now genetics could solve the mystery | 111.15 | 0.8 | 1 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150305-the-birth-of-3d-computer-graphics | http://web.archive.org/web/20160531101800id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/future/story/20150305-the-birth-of-3d-computer-graphics | The future of 3D computer graphics... from 1982 | 20160531101800 | Back in 1982, computing was really going mainstream. Tron, the story of a computer programmer trapped inside a mainframe, was making millions at the box office; Commodore released the C64 – the highest-selling single computer model of all time; and an eight-year-old from Florida’s new high score on the arcade classic Pac-Man was such big news that it allegedly prompted a congratulatory letter from President Reagan.
But BBC show Tomorrow’s World was more interested in what the future of computing had to offer. In the video above they introduced viewers to the wonders of CGI. Now, by dicing TV images up into 625,000 pixels and rearranging them, three-dimensional, solid-looking images were a button push away – slashing weeks off the production time for whizzy TV animations.
For more videos subscribe to the Britlab channel on YouTube. | Back in the early 1980s, a spinning square world heralded the start of a computer animation revolution, as this archive BBC footage shows. | 6.384615 | 0.5 | 0.807692 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2010/11/02/10-things-outlet-malls-wont-tell-you/19699409/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160531164602id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2010/11/02/10-things-outlet-malls-wont-tell-you/19699409/? | 10 Things Outlet Malls Won't Tell You | 20160531164602 | Outlet stores date back more than a century, to when factories offered discounts on excess and damaged shoes and clothing to employees -- and later the public, too. Menswear manufacturer Anderson-Little opened one of the first off-site outlets in New Bedford, Mass., in 1950, and multistore centers appeared in the 1970s. In the following two decades, outlet malls took off, due to rising middle-class demand for branded apparel, says David Soberman, a University of Toronto marketing professor. Now, according to industry newsletter Value Retail News, 216 outlet centers dot the U.S., with 316 chains operating about 13,000 stores.
Outlets weathered the downturn by attracting cost-conscious shoppers. "There's been a resurgence of people looking for value," says Mark Libell, an outlet executive and author of the blog Factory Outlet Insiders. In 2009, Simon Property Group's Premium Outlet Centers, the U.S.'s largest collection of outlets, saw sales dip only slightly, to $500 per square foot from $509 a year earlier. And outlets could continue to thrive, since they give fashion labels access to millions who otherwise wouldn't shell out for designer duds.
Ready to make your holiday-shopping pilgrimage to an outlet mall? One reason outlets are out of the way is that distant land is cheaper, says David Ober, president of the Council of Developers of Outlet Centers and Retailers. It also makes sense for outlets to be in a spot that's accessible from multiple cities. And some remote towns offer tax breaks for the promise of new jobs and revenue. Most important, a brand's outlet needs to be far from its full-price stores, competitors and wholesale customers, like department stores. "Convenience is not their priority," says Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.
Consequently, a trip to an outlet mall is often a daylong affair -- not a problem for retailers, since shoppers tend to spend more once they've committed to the expense of getting to a far-off locale. How much more? One study found that visitors spent 79% more per visit at outlet centers than at ordinary malls, Soberman says. Tom Meyvis, a marketing professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, attributes this to a "sunk cost bias" on the part of shoppers. "Once you start investing in something," he explains, "you want to follow through with it."
Retailers have gotten better at forecasting demand, experts say, which has led to fewer production overruns. And because most manufacturing is now done overseas and damaged goods are weeded out before being shipped, fewer arrive in the U.S. These changes mean outlets are no longer a place to "dump the crummy stuff," says Anne Coughlan, a marketing professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. In fact, 82% of products at outlet centers are made specifically for the outlets, says NPD Group retail analyst Marshal Cohen.
Unfortunately, made-for-outlet products aren't always on par with their regular-store equivalents. They can be made of cotton instead of wool or lack details like reinforced buttonholes. Shell recommends inspecting tags for the letter F (for factory outlet) and checking the model number of small appliances online (a product modified for the outlet may have a different model number). For Shell, it's ultimately a philosophical question: If the manufacturer started watering down your favorite laundry detergent, she asks, would it still be the same as the original?
Signs, price tags and coupons touting big discounts (think "60% off") are common at outlet malls. Researchers say these visual cues plant so-called reference prices -- what folks think something is worth -- in the minds of shoppers. Because outlet shoppers pay less than the reference price, they end up feeling like they got a bargain. It's a powerful psychological effect. "Buyers perceive more value when something's discounted," says Kent Monroe, a pricing expert at the University of Richmond's Robins School of Business.
But reference prices can be misleading: An item with a suggested price of $150 may never have sold for that amount anywhere. While the Federal Trade Commission and the Council of Better Business Bureaus have detailed pricing guidelines and many states have pricing laws, Monroe says inflated reference prices are still common. The FTC's guidelines are not law and, a spokesperson says, it's often up to state attorneys general to take action. Mallory Duncan, the National Retail Federation's general counsel, says the problem exists but reputable retailers make a good effort to establish credible reference prices.
5. "Not all our stores are necessarily outlets."
In the U.S. there is no legal definition of the term outlet mall. The industry generally uses it to describe centers where at least 50% of the shops are outlets. Indeed, experts say, there are many cases where stores at outlet centers don't actually sell discounted products, which can be bad for the industry if it turns customers against outlet malls in general. "It only takes one visit and people don't shop there ever again," says Ober, of the Council of Developers of Outlet Centers and Retailers. "Consumers will only allow themselves to be fooled once."
One way outlet developers ensure that their stores are actually selling goods at a discount is through discounting requirements specified in the leases their retail tenants must sign. According to Doug Fleener, president of retail consultancy Dynamic Experiences Group, retail leases at outlet malls often require that 90% of a store's goods be discounted by at least 30%. Ober, who owns three outlet malls, says it's common for landlords like him to send teams to regularly inspect stores and the deals on offer. "We actually go in and do price checking," he says. [Story continues below.]
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6. "There may be hidden costs that come with our savings."
For big purchases, outlets offer big savings. According to the NPD Group, sales of major appliances were up 16% in the first half of 2010, compared with the same period last year. And outlets are grabbing a chunk of this business: The Appliance Outlet Center in Eden Prairie, Minn., which sells preowned, dented and scratched GE appliances for up to 40% off, has seen "at least" a 10% increase" in business since the recession, says manager Roger Pittman.
But shopper, beware. Unlike a handbag with a broken zipper, a faulty appliance can be a major headache. Just ask Jennifer Mitchell, who bought appliances from a Sears Outlet earlier this year after moving to Kensington, Md. The dryer made loud noises from day one, she says, and the washer started leaking a month after her first use. The refrigerator, meanwhile, couldn't make ice or dispense water, she says. When a replacement fridge also stopped working, "it cost us about $500 in lost food," Mitchell says. A spokesperson for Sears Outlets says it has offered to give Mitchell a full refund and that it has an "extensive" testing process in place to ensure the quality of its stores' products.
Traveling and shopping go hand in hand. According to the U.S. Travel Association, half of leisure travelers went shopping during their 2009 trips. So it's no surprise outlets are trying to become mini tourist destinations. For Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, the country's second-biggest owner of outlet malls, that means giving gift cards to bus drivers and tour planners every time they bring a group -- and about 10,000 buses a year stop at its Barstow, Calif., location alone, says Carrie Geldner, senior VP of marketing. For Premium Outlets, owned by real estate giant Simon Property Group, it means offering outright cash: According to its Web site, it gives a $1,000 prize each quarter to the travel agency or tour operator that brings the most visitors to its centers.
The outreach extends to partnering with airlines and participating in international trade shows, says Karen Fluharty, until recently senior VP of marketing for Prime Outlets. (Simon Property Group recently inked a deal to buy a majority of Prime's properties.)
Outlet-mall shoppers often use coupon books to score extra savings. Sometimes they're available for free at the customer-service desk. But often, visitors must pay: Prime Outlets charges $7 for its coupon books, while Tanger's are $5. And though the books generally provide a mix of store discounts and free gifts with purchase, they're not always worth the price. Up to 20% of stores in a given outlet center normally don't participate, the coupons may be redeemable only with a minimum purchase, and the free gifts can be cheap or useless.
For Natalie Baxter of Austin, Texas, avoiding coupon books is a matter of principle. "Part of my shopping philosophy is that I don't usually spend money to save money," says Baxter, who has been frequenting nearby outlet malls for many years. "People feel they're required to buy something once they buy the coupon book." But she doesn't rule out coupons completely. On her birthday last year, Baxter combined a 20% off coupon she found online for a Restoration Hardware outlet with a $20 gift certificate from the store's free loyalty club. She ended up paying $25 for a $56 bathroom light fixture, which the company claimed was worth $139 to begin with -- bringing her total savings to perhaps 80%.
The number of outlet malls abroad is growing. Since 2006, at least 28 have been built in China, with 15 more slated for construction this year. In Europe there are 148, says Brendon O'Reilly, head of the European Outlet Retailers and Developers Association. And he expects that number to double by 2020. European outlet malls tend to stock fewer made-for-outlet goods because of a continentwide "under capacity of outlets," he says, and some landlords prohibit such goods anyway. So shoppers there know they are getting the real thing. Plus, in certain countries like Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, it is illegal to show two prices on any item at the same time, he says, so shoppers are protected from deceptive reference pricing.
But don't expect American consumers to suddenly start doing their outlet shopping abroad. The weak dollar and unfavorable exchange rates mean foreign outlet malls mainly serve locals, O'Reilly says. And overall, "the U.S. centers are a much better experience," since they have a better mix of brands, he says. "The possible exception would be in Italy, where high brands are more prevalent."
Some companies, like Coach, already have a strong presence in outlet malls, while others, like Levi Strauss, are working to increase their outlet divisions. But experts say certain brands-usually very-high-end ones-don't have outlet stores and probably never will. Michael Levy, a professor of retail marketing at Babson College, says these brands are worried that making their products too accessible could reduce the number of customers willing to pay top dollar. "You're not going to find an outlet store for Rolex wristwatches," he says. It's the same reason why some companies take a tiered approach (think Giorgio Armani versus Armani Exchange).
Many Americans are passionate about the outlet-shopping experience itself, regardless of the shops within a center. "If I am going on a trip and I go past an outlet mall, I will make time in my schedule to stop there," says Karen Markey, a professor who lives near Detroit and no longer frequents regular malls. Not long ago, she was at a conference near a traditional mall. When she went shopping there, she was shocked at how expensive everything seemed. "I was just blown over," she says. | By Jami Makan, SMARTMONEY MAGAZINE 1. "Rece ion? We hardly noticed." Outlet stores date back more than a century, to when factories offered discounts on exce and damaged shoe | 59.974359 | 0.641026 | 6.179487 | high | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/new-balance-chinese-trademark/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160531205803id_/http://fortune.com:80/new-balance-chinese-trademark/ | How New Balance Ran Into A Trademark Wall In China | 20160531205803 | It was the kind of verdict that makes Western business leaders want to tear out their hair.
The New England shoe company New Balance had been tied up in litigation for a year and a half in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, having been sued for trademark infringement—sued for using its own name.
A man named Zhou Lelun had brought New Balance to court for using his trademark, Xin Bai Lun, a rough translation of New Balance. Zhou’s relatives had first applied for a trademark on New Balance’s translated Chinese name all the way back in 1994. At the time, it was common among a certain class of Chinese entrepreneurs to register foreign company names in the trademark office and then to propose negotiations, or file lawsuits, when the companies expanded to China.
Never mind the fact that Zhou made few, if any, shoes under the name, or that New Balance had been selling shoes out of Boston’s northwest side since the 1960s. Experts on Chinese trademark law were pretty sure the company was headed for disappointment.
Sure enough, in April 2015, the hammer came down. The Guangzhou court ruled for Zhou. And that was less shocking to the bands of lawyers working for multinationals in China than the damages New Balance was ordered to pay. New Balance’s business boomed, the judge contended, because of its name, Xin Bai Lun, and that name belonged to Zhou. The judge ordered New Balance to pay half of its profits in China from the time Zhou received the trademark, in 2011, till the time of the lawsuit in late 2013.
The total came to $15.8 million.
New Balance disagreed with the ruling for a host of reasons, one of which was that the company barely used the Xin Bai Lun name except on some advertisements and websites, never on shoes. It said the name hardly constituted a trademark. The company has hired a new counsel and appealed the decision. But so far New Balance has lost the fight it picked—and as it waits for a higher court’s ruling, it’s worth asking whether it’s time for them to bow out.
China’s trademark laws, though relatively advanced, break with Western ones in several key ways. The most important one: China is a first-to-file country. “This means that whomever files a trademark first gets it,” says Dan Harris, a partner at Harris Moure in Seattle focusing on China, regardless of whether another company is already making a product with the same name in, say, America.
New Balance is hardly the only company losing trademark battles in China. Earlier this month a Beijing court ruled that a Chinese leather goods company that has been stamping “IPHONE” onto its wallets has more rights to the word than the $500 billion maker of actual iPhones. Apple aapl has been fighting a trademark case against Xintong Tiandi since 2012 over the name it coined—so far to no avail. Last year, Michael Jordan unsuccessfully sued a Chinese shoemaker who expropriated his Chinese name Qiaodan and his famous flying silhouette to create a line of popular basketball shoes. (His Airness has appealed the case to China’s Supreme Court.) And Tesla’s expansion in China was cast in doubt two years ago before it came to an agreement with the Chinese trademark owner of its name.
New Balance stands out, though, for the sheer amount of time it has spent litigating in Chinese courtrooms—almost two decades. And despite all that history, it now finds itself fresh off its biggest court loss. The case illustrates both how far a foreign brand can go in protecting its name and the downside of an aggressive strategy in China. Other brands might want to pay attention.
New Balance has never had it easy in China. Like other apparel brands, its shoes became prime targets for counterfeiters when China’s rising middle class discovered (and then demanded) Western goods in the 1990s.
In 1995, New Balance licensed a Taiwanese factory boss named Horace Chang to make sneakers for the Chinese market from inside China. Chang found success selling ‘classics,’ a less-expensive and more stylish alternative to New Balance’s high-tech running shoes. The shoes were a hit: Soon the company’s signature slanting ‘N’ logo was spotted around China’s biggest cities.
In 1999, Chang visited New Balance headquarters in Boston and told executives he was expecting sales inside China to quadruple that year to 250,000 pairs. But the New Balance execs told him to pull back: The company wanted to scale back “classic” sales, in order to preserve its identity as a performance running shoe brand.
The response didn’t sit well with Chang. The entrepreneur doubled down on making classics once he got back to China, ordering materials to make 450,000 pairs. New Balance sought an injunction against Chang, but the company was handed two legal defeats—first in a Shenzhen court, then on appeal.
By 2000 Chang had started his own brand called Henkees, a copycat of New Balance complete with an approximation of its angled N. And by then a more worrying trend had developed for New Balance: other copycat brands were getting slicker. One appeared in 2005 called New Bar Lun, an obvious imitation of New Balance, complete with store displays and logos whose designs were practically lifted from New Balance’s U.S. materials.
Since then, the rise of Alibaba’s Taobao shopping site has made earlier counterfeiting efforts in China look quaint. As many as 90% of the New Balance listings on the huge bazaar are for counterfeit or dubious goods, New Balance estimates. In fact, New Balance says it doesn’t have any authorized retailers on Taobao: The few genuine listings come from people who may have bought the wrong size shoes. “You go onto Taobao, you see New Balance had 300,000 listings last time I looked,” says Ed Haddad, New Balance’s former vice president of intellectual property, now retired. “How do you fight them all?”
(“We will take immediate action if any suspicious listings are found out or upon notification,” said an Alibaba spokesperson in a written statement. “We thus strongly invite rights holders to work with us to identify counterfeit listings.”)
The fakes have made New Balance’s business prospects in China as mixed as its legal record. The privately held company says that its international revenues rose around 25% in 2015 as total global sales hit $3.7 billion. Legitimate versions of its shoes appear in China. But counterfeits are racking up untold tens of millions of dollars in additional sales.
Even as New Balance mulls the daily question of when and how to fight counterfeits, there’s been the long-running headache of the Zhou case.
In 2003, as the Boston footwear company’s revenues continued to grow, it began using Xin Bai Lun as its company name in advertisements. That name was slightly different than Bai Lun, the translated name Zhou’s relatives had filed for back in the ‘90s. But in 2004, Zhou went back to the trademark office to apply for New Balance’s new name. The company fought to block his registration, but it lost the case, and in July 2011, Zhou was granted rights to Xin Bai Lun. With New Balance continuing to use Xin Bai Lun in advertisements and other materials, Zhou sued New Balance for trademark infringement.
(Fortune left several messages with a person in Zhou’s Guangzhou office who said she would report the interview requests to Zhou, but Zhou never responded. The magazine also sent an interview request to Zhou’s listed home address and received no response.)
New Balance knew using the same name that Zhou had trademarked could open it to trouble. Harris, the Seattle attorney, puts it this way: “If someone else registers what you think to be ‘your’ trademark, you should not use that trademark or you are setting yourself up to be sued…and you will almost certainly lose that case.”
Many companies have avoided using “their” trademark if someone beats them to it in China. An intellectual property lawyer working in China, who asked not to be identified, was baffled that New Balance hadn’t simply picked a different Chinese translation for its brand name. Oracle and BMW, for instance, have chosen Chinese brand names that sound nothing like their English ones. BMW’s, Bao Ma, means “precious horse.” Oracle’s is Jia Gu Wen, a reference to one of the oldest languages in China.
New Balance could have avoided liability, attorneys say, by simply stripping Xin Bai Lun from the few ads and materials it appeared on.
The reason New Balance didn’t settle or change names traces back to the brand’s desire to fight for change in China. “In the end you have two choices,” says Dan McKinnon, the company’s head of global brand protection, who is based in Boston. “You play by what’s fair and ultimately get to the point to fight the fight. Or you try to play by the Chinese rules, which make no sense in the context of global trademark laws. Just because someone claims they own our house … sorry, this is ours.” In other words, settlement isn’t in New Balance’s DNA.
Customers shop for New Balance sports shoes at an outlet mall in Shanghai.Imaginechina via AP Images
That way of thinking works well in developed markets like the U.S., where trademark laws are old and backed by a mature court system. But it can backfire in China. “Taking a legal aggressive strategy like people do in the U.S. sometimes doesn’t work very well” says Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group in Shanghai. “You have to adhere to the Chinese codes, not what the international norms are. The questions in China are: Do you want to prove you’re right? Or do you want to make money?”
In court, Zhou’s argument was perfectly straightforward: New Balance knowingly violated his trademark. After all, it had fought him earlier in the decade to prevent him from getting it in the first place. That was the argument that appeared to win the day with the Guangzhou court in April 2015.
“Those are good arguments,” admits Gordon Gao, a partner at Fangda Partners in Beijing and New Balance’s new outside counsel in China. Gao is working on New Balance’s current appeal, and he says that it has become clear that New Balance’s side didn’t have all the information it needed during the previous round of litigation.
Gao found evidence that Zhou had accumulated trademarks for loose translations of several famous international brands—Dunhill, Hugo Boss, Enzo, and others—proving that New Balance wasn’t an isolated target.
He also found that Zhou had registered a phony company in Hong Kong, a common practice in the 1990s in China by businessmen who then used their “foreign company” to win trademarks or bank loans inside China. If Zhou told customers inside China that his products were foreign-made, he probably didn’t mention that the foreign owner was himself.
Why this didn’t persuade Guangzhou court falls on New Balance. “It was our own fault a little bit,” Gao says today. The new points made in the appeals case seem to support New Balance’s argument today that Zhou entered his trademark in bad faith. Bad faith is an exception in Chinese law targeting so-called trademark squatters. It holds if someone registers a trademark knowing the name is being used by others, as New Balance was using Xin Bai Lun in 2003, the trademark can be invalidated.
However, several IP lawyers today in China say the bad faith exception is difficult to prove in Chinese court, and that in this case, it’s complicated by the fact that Zhou has held Bai Lun since back in the 1990s. These lawyers generally think that New Balance’s best strategy may have been to pay Zhou for his trademark and move on–something New Balance says it has never considered.
The reason New Balance fakes are ubiquitous in China is because of the brand’s growing popularity among consumers like Wen Fei. The 44-year-old recently bought one genuine pair and one fake pair of New Balance. “I know they are copycats,” she says, “but who cares, if they are similar?”
Counterfeit consultants say Nike nke , Adidas, and Under Armour ua all suffer from roughly the same degree of counterfeiting in China. “Part and parcel, it is because of the increase in our market share in China,” McKinnon says of the rise of New Balance fakes.
New Balance admits that unpleasant reality, but denies another: its name was copied for the same reason. Just as it can’t close all the counterfeiters, it can’t stop all its trademark copycats.
The company’s appeal was supposed to have been decided by December 2015, but as of this May New Balance was still waiting. Still, the company recently got some potentially good news in a related ruling that concerned another foreign trademark case. In 2012, the largest vintner in Europe, Castel Group, was ordered to pay $5 million for violating a Chinese trademark of the translated Castel name, owned by a Chinese Spanish national. But on appeal earlier this year, China’s Supreme Court reduced the damages to $80,000, signaling that the previous fine was excessive. New Balance’s judgment could be similarly cut.
Nonetheless, a reversal of the earlier decision remains a longshot. And even if its fine is reduced, New Balance will need to change its name—and pay for a fight it didn’t need to start. | New Balance has been locked in a legal fight in China for two decades over the right to use its own name. Was fighting the right strategy? | 91.310345 | 0.965517 | 1.931034 | high | high | mixed |
http://time.com/3859212/food-mcdonalds-shake-shack/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601004838id_/http://time.com:80/3859212/food-mcdonalds-shake-shack/? | Why Shake Shack Will Never Be McDonald's | 20160601004838 | Shake Shack and McDonald’s are both in the burger business. But their differences far outweigh their similarities.
“Price in our product makes us hard to beat” sounds like something a Shake Shack executive would say today about the quality of the fast-casual concept’s food. But those comments were attributed to McDonald’s then-senior chairman in a Fortune magazine story published in late 1979.
Sound familiar? It should. This is what Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti told analysts yesterday: “Shake Shack is for people who want to understand where their food is from, and have a higher expectation of when they go out to eat a burger, where they want to get it, and are willing to pay a little more for it.” Garutti was touting the New York burger chain’s stellar first quarter, the second results issued by the company since it went public in early 2015.
At first glance, it’s easy to compare Shake Shack to McDonald’s. Will the smaller upstart one day behave like its larger rival?
The companies couldn’t be more different today. Shake Shack’s shares have tripled since going public in January, while McDonald’s shares have only increased a scant 4.4% this year. Shake Shack is projected to report a 42% sales increase for the year to total $168 million, much better than the 9% sales drop for McDonald’s, which is expected to pull in nearly $25 billion in revenue this year.
And in terms of store count, Shake Shack has no aspiration to be the next McDonald’s. The chain has cautiously said it could eventually open “at least 450″ restaurants. McDonald’s has over 36,000 locations globally.
The companies’ supply chains are also vastly different. Shake Shack utilizes just five suppliers for its beef, with about 88% of the company’s ground beef patties supplied by just one of those firms. Potato buns and custard each come from a single supplier. It’s simply impossible for a company the size of McDonald’s to rely so heavily on so few suppliers. Shake Shack also serves freshly ground, never frozen beef. McDonald’s burgers are frozen; there’s usually a space of two to three weeks between when a burger is formed and when it’s eaten. As consumers become more aware of how their food is made and aim to dine on locally-produced food, Shake Shack has a clear edge.
While Shake Shack does license its brand, it’s shown little interest in aggressively pursuing the franchise strategy that made McDonald’s so massive. It also operates in a popular fast-casual concept, lingo for restaurant chains that charge roughly $10 for a quick meal that uses ingredients consumers perceive to be fresher and healthier. It raised prices twice since September to help offset commodity costs, but that didn’t dent traffic trends at Shake Shack’s restaurants.
Shake Shack isn’t the first company to move towards the fast casual concept — it was first perfected by brands like Chipotle and Panera. Analysts believe Shake Shack’s future looks more like them than it does McDonald’s.
“Maybe not the next Chipotle yet, but pretty darn impressive,” wrote Jefferies in a research note following Shake Shack’s home run first-quarter report. Those results included a 56% jump in revenue to $37.8 million as the chain showed it can compete in new markets outside of Manhattan, including Las Vegas and Chicago. The company’s story is still “in its infancy, supporting industry-leading annual unit growth of 20%+,” Barclays said.
But Shake Shack does take a page or two from the Golden Arches. Garutti earlier this year told Fortune that the company has three main focuses: prime real estate, ingredient selection, and developing the right team as Shack expands. Meanwhile, here’s what Fortune wrote about McDonald’s in 1979: “McDonald’s real business is real estate. Buying prime locations has proven as important to McDonald’s success as the patty machine.” Shake Shack is also known for its well placed restaurants, from the Madison Square Park store that started it all to a restaurant located in New York City’s Theater District. The Las Vegas location is on the strip, while a Philadelphia restaurant is about a block away from the iconic Rittenhouse Square. Those well-placed restaurants have helped Shake Shack generate high traffic and better average unit volume than many fast-casual peers.
Shake Shack could look to McDonald’s history for some strategy advice, too. The company now finds itself in a similar battle for supremacy that McDonald’s found itself in when it was fighting Burger King, Wendy’s and chains that sold pizzas, tacos and fried chicken in a fast-food market that reached $25 billion annually by 1979. Today, Shake Shack is taking on plenty of other newly public fast casual chains that are today regional operators but one day aspire to be national brands. But Shack says it has an advantage: Americans love their beef.
“Burgers are the number one dine-out segment in America and I don’t think that is going away any time soon,” Garutti recently told Fortune. “Now when people want to go out for a burger, they say, ‘We want a good one.’”
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com. | Outside of burgers, the two fast food chains couldn’t be more different | 72.928571 | 1 | 2.714286 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/03/nyregion/03TOWE.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601082536id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2003/12/03/nyregion/03TOWE.html?ei=5007&en=a2c62eb2b42cf30c&ex=1385874000&adxnnl=1 | New Evidence Is Reported That Floors Failed on 9/11 | 20160601082536 | GAITHERSBURG, Md., Dec. 2 — Federal investigators said here Tuesday that new evidence supported earlier suggestions that the floor supports in the World Trade Center began failing in the minutes before the towers fell and might have played a major role in their collapse.
The investigators, who are carrying out a two-year, $16 million analysis of the collapses, made it clear that they had not yet settled on a final explanation. They said, though, that their findings gave new weight to a theory that the failure of the floors weakened the towers' internal structure to the point that the entire buildings came down.
S. Shyam Sunder, who is leading the investigation for the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Commerce Department, said, "We are seeing evidence of floors appearing to be sagging — or that had been damaged — prior to collapse." Still, Dr. Sunder said, "The relative role of the floors and the columns still remain to be determined in the collapse."
According to an alternative theory of the collapse, the planes that smashed into the towers damaged the towers' vertical structural columns so severely that the buildings were virtually certain to fall. In that view, none of the buildings' many structural novelties — the towers were daring engineering innovations in their day — would have played a significant role in the collapses.
Last spring, the standards institute found the first photographic evidence on the east face of the south tower that a single floor — with its lightweight support system, called a truss — had sagged in the minutes before it started collapsing. Now, detailed analysis of photos and videos has revealed at least three more sagging floors on that face, said William Pitts, a researcher at the institute's Building and Fire Research Laboratory.
In addition, Dr. Pitts said, sudden expansions of the fires across whole floors in each tower shortly before they fell suggested internal collapses — burning floors above suddenly giving way and spreading the blaze below.
Finally, an unexplained cascade of molten metal from the northeast corner of the south tower just before it collapsed might have started when a floor carrying pieces of one of the jetliners began to sag and fail. The metal was probably molten aluminum from the plane and could have come through the top of an 80th floor window as the floor above gave way, Dr. Pitts said.
"That's probably why it poured out — simply because it was dumped there," Dr. Pitts said. "The structural people really need to look at this carefully."
The investigators also said that newly disclosed Port Authority documents suggested that the towers were designed to withstand the kind of airplane strike that they suffered on Sept. 11.
Earlier statements by Port Authority officials and outside engineers involved in designing the buildings suggested that the designers considered an accidental crash only by slower aircraft, moving at less than 200 miles per hour. The newly disclosed documents, from the 1960's, show that the Port Authority considered aircraft moving at 600 m.p.h., slightly faster and therefore more destructive than the ones that did hit the towers, Dr. Sunder said.
The towers did withstand the plane strikes at first, allowing thousands of people to escape, but then the fires, stoked by burning jet fuel, softened the steel of the towers. Potentially challenging other statements by Port Authority engineers, Dr. Sunder said it was now uncertain whether the authority fully considered the fuel and its effects when it studied the towers' safety during the design phase.
"Whether the fuel was taken into account or not is an open question," Dr. Sunder said. It is also unclear, he said, "whether the extent of the loss of human life as a result of that" was taken into account.
The studies of the floor trusses and the design of the towers are just two elements of the investigation, which is carrying out computer calculations of the collapses, rebuilding pieces of the towers in order to test them in real fires, and piecing together a highly detailed chronology of the response to the attack.
In one set of laboratory tests concerning the floor trusses, researchers used earthquake simulators to violently shake assemblages much like the ceilings in the twin towers. The shaking was meant to simulate the impact of the aircraft.
The findings, said Richard Gann, a senior research scientist at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, showed that many of the fire-protecting ceiling tiles near the impact probably crumbled, exposing the undersides of the trusses directly to the fires. | Investigators said new evidence supported earlier suggestions that the supports for the floors of the World Trade Center began failing in the minutes before the towers fell. | 31 | 1 | 7.428571 | medium | high | mixed |
http://time.com/3584315/taylor-swift-video-dancing-blank-space/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601091500id_/http://time.com:80/3584315/taylor-swift-video-dancing-blank-space/ | Lipsynching, Dancing to 1989 Song | 20160601091500 | If you’re sick of watching Taylor Swift turn into a jilted, knife-wielding ex-lover in her “Blank Space” video, watch this video instead. It’s Tay-Tay rocking out to the song in a car with BBC Radio 1 DJ Greg James.
She dances, air-drums, acts, mimes and generally has the time of her life. And she obviously knows all the words since she, uh, wrote them, so her lip-syncing is pretty spot-on, too.
Read more about T-Swift in this week’s cover story: The Power of Taylor Swift
Read next: Find the Perfect Taylor Swift Lyric for Your Mood | Can't get enough of 'Blank Space'? Neither can Tay-Tay | 8.866667 | 0.4 | 0.933333 | low | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/4078604/donald-trump-halloween-mask-mexico/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601113330id_/http://time.com:80/4078604/donald-trump-halloween-mask-mexico/ | Donald Trump Halloween Mask on Sale in Mexico | 20160601113330 | Donald Trump has been the host of a reality TV show. He has also been a piñata. And now, he is a Halloween mask.
Grupo Rev, a maker of Halloween attire, has added the billionaire real estate mogul-come-nativist presidential candidate to its roster of terrifying monsters, ghouls and witches, AFP reports.
The company has turned the controversy-stirring Donald Trump into latex masks for sale to celebrate Halloween. About 250 Trump masks have been made so far, but the company hasn’t yet set a price.
Trump has achieved notoriety in Mexico, a country he has blamed for “sending” criminals to the United States and whose inhabitants he has called rapists and drug dealers. He has already been made into a piñata, which children then conveniently smack around until the piñatas break.
“There’s a little bit of criticism but we are Mexicans and we find laughter in tragedy,” Maria del Carmen Navarro, a Grupo Rev design engineer, told AFP. | Limited run of 250 latex masks available | 27.571429 | 0.571429 | 0.857143 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/04/01/fedexs-smokin-joes-contraband-cigarette-case-will-go-to-trial/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601160210id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/04/01/fedexs-smokin-joes-contraband-cigarette-case-will-go-to-trial/ | Judge Says New York's FedEx Tax Evasion Cigarette Case Can Go Forward | 20160601160210 | FedEx must face a second lawsuit claiming it shipped thousands of cartons of untaxed cigarettes in New York over roughly a decade, cheating the state and New York City out of tax revenue and undercutting their efforts to curb smoking.
In a decision made public on Friday, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan rejected FedEx’s bid to dismiss claims by New York State and New York City that it violated a federal anti-racketeering law and the Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act.
Ramos said FedEx fdx must also face claims it violated its 2006 agreement with the state, later extended nationwide, not to do business with sellers that ship cigarettes to people’s homes. He dismissed two other claims related to a state public health law.
The judge rejected FedEx’s argument that its alleged dealings with shippers such as “Your Kentucky Tobacco Resource,” “Cigarettes for Less” and “Smokin’ Joes” was too far removed from the resulting financial harm.
FedEx’s alleged involvement “was precisely the conduct that led to the plaintiffs’ losing tax revenue,” he wrote. “The alleged scheme’s entire purpose was to evade the City and State’s cigarette taxing regime.”
A spokesman for FedEx had no immediate comment. The office of state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Eric Proshansky, a lawyer for the city, said he was pleased with the decision.
The lawsuit covers Memphis, Tennessee-based FedEx’s dealings with 21 shippers, including some associated with Native American tribes such as Shinnecock Indian Nation.
It is separate from a lawsuit by the state and city over FedEx’s dealings with four other shippers.
Ramos refused to dismiss that lawsuit in March 2015, and in a separate ruling on Friday narrowed FedEx’s defenses to some claims it raised.
Both lawsuits accuse FedEx of costing the state between $15 and $43.50 per carton, and the city $15 per carton, in excise taxes through illegal cigarette shipments.
A carton usually contains 10 packs.
The state and city have also sued FedEx rival United Parcel Service Inc over cigarette shipments. In September, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan rejected UPS’ bid to dismiss that lawsuit. | New York says the shipper violated a federal anti-racketeering law. | 32.615385 | 0.846154 | 4.230769 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/16/tesla-cheap-labor/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601164538id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/16/tesla-cheap-labor/ | Tesla Accused of Using Cheap Foreign Labor in Silicon Valley | 20160601164538 | Tesla CEO Elon Musk woke up to an unwelcome surprise over the weekend: a report that his company used cheap foreign labor to build new facilities.
In a lengthy feature, The Mercury News on Sunday accused Tesla TSLA of using approximately 140 workers from Eastern European countries to build a car-painting facility at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif. plant. The report, which includes claims from “dozens of interviews,” as well as analysis of payroll data and court documents, claims that Tesla paid workers as little as $5 an hour—a far cry from the $52-an-hour average the company would have to pay an American contractor.
According to the report, the information on Tesla’s alleged use of cheap foreign labor surfaced after one of those workers, Greg Lesnik, an electrician from Slovenia, was injured on the job. Lesnik, the report claims, was recruited “by a small Slovenian company” that promised to send him to the U.S. on the promise of a job supervising a South Carolina auto plant. Instead, the report claims, Lesnik, along with many others, went to work at Tesla in Silicon Valley.
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“Lesnik, 42, and his co-workers were flown into the U.S. for months at a time, housed in nondescript apartments, and shuttled to the Tesla plant six and sometimes seven days a week, according to workers and the suit,” reports The Mercury News, referring to a lawsuit Lesnik has brought against Tesla and partners. The outlet added that Tesla itself did not hire Lesnik and the other workers directly.
The allegations come as Tesla is trying to break out from its status as a popular electric car maker for the rich to one that can appeal to people on all budgets. Earlier this year, the company unveiled the Model 3, an all-electric car that will have a projected starting price of $35,000—a far cry from the vastly more expensive Model S and Model X.
While Tesla hopes to get the mass-market sedan into production within the next year-and-a-half, the company has acknowledged that it needs to spend considerable cash to expand its Fremont factory to handle the massive demand for its cheaper car.
For more about Tesla, watch:
Tesla has enlisted the help of Eisenmann, a German-based manufacturer, to oversee the project, according to The Mercury News. Lesnik cites Eisenmann in his lawsuit, though that company denied responsibility for his injuries, including two broken legs, while working at Tesla’s facilities.
As of this writing, Tesla claims to employ approximately 6,000 U.S. workers in that factory. While The Mercury News claims to have identified 140 foreign workers, some of those say they’re pleased with their positions at Tesla and are happy to be working.
Tesla is by no means the first Silicon Valley company accused with using foreign (and cheap) labor with B1 and B2 U.S. Visas. Over the last several years, a slew of reports have cropped up, claiming that companies across Silicon Valley have brought in highly educated foreign workers to handle tasks at their companies. Some critics have likened the practice to “modern day indentured servitude,” adding that workers are often paid significantly less to do the same work as their American counterparts. The Mercury News claims that is the case with Tesla.
@margotroosevelt Only heard about this today. Sounds like the wrong thing happened on many levels. Will investigate and make it right.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2016
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday tweeted that he will look into the matter, and if necessary, fix it.
“Only heard about this today,” Musk tweeted, referring to the article. “Sounds like the wrong thing happened on many levels. Will investigate and make it right.” | Contractors were paid $5 an hour to build a plant, a report claims. | 47.4375 | 0.9375 | 2.3125 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/09/29/shell-alaska-economy/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601175053id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/09/29/shell-alaska-economy/ | Shell's Arctic Drilling Pullout Hurts Cash-Strapped Alaska | 20160601175053 | Energy giant Royal Dutch Shell RDS.A said earlier this week it has decided to abandon its Arctic drilling project off Alaska’s northern coast after failing to make any significant undersea oil discoveries.
Shell’s decision to pull out of a nearly decade-long project that represented a $7 billion investment came amid a major drop-off in global oil prices that has made it more difficult for oil companies to profit from oil exploration, narrowing the margin of error on unpromising projects.
The move was welcomed by environmentalists who have been steadfastly opposed to Shell’s Arctic drilling near Alaska for some time, but now Alaskan officials are left wondering what they can do to generate more revenue from an 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline that is currently operating at less than one-quarter capacity, according to the Associated Press. Alaska’s state government relies heavily on the oil industry, and plummeting crude oil prices have led to a statewide budget deficit that tops $3.5 billion.
Alaska Governor Bill Walker told the AP that the state needs to find another source to fill its pipeline as soon as possible to help alleviate some of the state’s budget issues. Walker has even suggested that the federal government allow natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a tough notion considering that the Obama Administration recently proposed setting aside more than 12 million acres of the area as protected wilderness, which would make drilling there off limits. | Environmentalists are happy, but the state loses out by not filling its 800-mile oil pipeline. | 15.823529 | 0.764706 | 1.117647 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/greece-hopes-for-bailout-funds-after-passing-austerity-package/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160601175210id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/09/greece-hopes-for-bailout-funds-after-passing-austerity-package/ | Greece Hopes for Bailout Funds After Passing Austerity Package | 20160601175210 | Greece’s parliament on early Monday passed a package of unpopular pension and tax reforms that the country’s leftist-led government hopes will persuade official creditors to unlock bailout cash.
The measures aim to ensure Greece will attain savings to meet a budget surplus target before interest payments of 3.5% of gross domestic product in 2018, helping it to regain bond market access and render its debt load sustainable.
The vote was a test of the ruling coalition’s cohesion, given its wafer-thin majority of three lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament. All of the coalition’s 153 lawmakers voted in favor.
Athens wants to boost tax revenues and slash pension spending to reduce the drain on the budget, hoping impressed creditors will unlock aid. But Germany and the International Monetary Fund remain deadlocked over the terms of country’s bailout plan.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ government drew fire from the political opposition during the debate on grounds the pension cuts and tax hikes will prove recessionary, dealing another blow to a population fatigued by years of austerity.
“Mr. Prime Minister, you promised hope and turned it into despair,” said Fofi Gennimata, leader of the opposition PASOK socialists, who see the package as the bill for Tsipras’ failed push to roll back austerity in last year’s clash with lenders which set back the economy and triggered capital controls.
Tsipras’ government was re-elected in September on promises to ease the pain of austerity for the poor and protect pensions after he was forced to sign up to a new bailout in July to keep the country in the euro zone.
“The measures will be a tombstone for growth prospects,” said Kyriakos Mitsotakis, leader of the conservative New Democracy party which leads in opinion polls.
Police fired rounds of teargas during protests outside parliament in central Athens before the vote began, the night before a key meeting of Eurozone finance ministers (known as the Eurogroup).
The package aims to generate savings equal to 3% of GDP and contemplates raising income tax for high earners and lowering tax-free thresholds.
It increases a so-called ‘solidarity tax’–which goes straight into state coffers–and introduces a national pension of 384 euros a month after 20 years of work, phases out a benefit for poor pensioners and recalculates pensions.
Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos defended the reforms, saying lower pension replacement rates will affect the rich and not the poor. He’ll brief his Eurozone colleagues later today at the Eurogroup meeting, seeking to conclude a key bailout review.
“We have done what we promised, and hence the IMF and Germany must provide a solution that is feasible, a solution for the debt that will open a clear horizon for investors,” Tsakalotos told lawmakers.
The Eurogroup isn’t expected to take any firm decisions regarding Greece today but conclusion of the current bailout review will inject more than five billion euros to ease Greece’s squeezed finances. | We've Done our Bit, Minister Tells Creditors | 62 | 0.555556 | 0.555556 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/11/17/remember-baby-emma-from-friends-see-what-she-looks-like-today/21267572/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160602133422id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2015/11/17/remember-baby-emma-from-friends-see-what-she-looks-like-today/21267572/ | Remember baby Emma from 'Friends?' See what she looks like today, all grown up | 20160602133422 | Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
Arguably the most well known sitcom of all time, "Friends" was a staple in most of America's lives from 1994 to 2004. Through these ten tumultuous years, we felt the ups, the downs, and every moment with this all-star cast.
One of the show's biggest moments was when Ross and Rachel's adorable baby, Emma, was born. While Emma was only on the show for two seasons, the audience was instantly infatuated with the little blondie.
Now, 11 years after the "Friends" said their goodbyes, we're left wondering, what in the world happened to little baby Emma? Well folks, what you may or may not know is that baby Emma was played by twins, Noelle and Cali Sheldon.
Noelle and Cali are now 13-years-old (feel old yet?) and are just your average pre-teens.
caught up with the pair back in February, and found out that they attend public school, play sports, instruments, and pursue acting on the side "as a hobby."
Remember baby Emma from 'Friends?' See what she looks like today, all grown up
FRIENDS -- Season 6 -- Pictured: (l-r) David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay, Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani -- (Photo by: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
Ellen DeGeneres turned down the role of Phoebe.
Tea Leoni was the first choice for Rachel, but turned it down.
Elizabeth Berkley auditioned for Rachel, too.
Eric McCormack auditioned for the role of Ross a few times.
Jon Favreau was offered the role of Chandler, but turned it down.
Jon Cryer almost auditioned for Chandler, but his audition tape got to executives too late.
Hank Azaria auditioned for Joey several times.
Lisa Kudrow beat out Kathy Griffin for the role of Phoebe.
Kudrow also beat out Jane Lynch. | Ross and Rachel's love child is no longer little 'baby Emma.' She's now 13-year-old and describes herself as a normal teen. | 14.172414 | 0.689655 | 1.310345 | low | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/3001487/aviva-drescher-real-housewives-finale-leg/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160602142044id_/http://time.com:80/3001487/aviva-drescher-real-housewives-finale-leg/ | Aviva Drescher Hurls Prosthetic Leg in 'Real Housewives' Clip | 20160602142044 | First things first: Aviva Drescher is the realest. That’s what she’d like you to believe, at least, when she takes off her prosthetic leg and hurls it across the room to make a point about authenticity in the upcoming season finale of The Real Housewives of New York City.
Drescher lost her leg at the age of six after a dairy farm accident in upstate New York, but, as the reality-star-philanthropist-memoirist explains on her website, she “has never let this tragedy define who she is.” Slamming her leg on the table and shouting the already-iconic line, “The only thing that is artificial or fake about me is this,” however, will at least be a defining moment for the Bravo show. | Aviva for vendetta | 49.333333 | 0.666667 | 0.666667 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nbc.com/shades-of-blue/episode-guide/season-1/false-face-false-heart/103 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160602193818id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/shades-of-blue/episode-guide/season-1/false-face-false-heart/103 | False Face, False Heart | 20160602193818 | The FBI picks up Harlee (Jennifer Lopez) at her house and takes her to FBI Special Agent in Charge Gail Baker (Leslie Silva), who, with no information on the leak, is ready to close the investigation. Desperate to avoid arrest, Harlee promises she'll find information for Baker within 24 hours.
Over breakfast, Wozniak (Ray Liotta) tells Harlee that Miguel Zepeda, the abusive ex she framed for murder, is seeking retrial. Wozniak promises he'll testify on her behalf, giving her reason to think twice about betraying him. Unable to get intel about the big job out of Wozniak, Harlee tries to get his black book of contacts for Stahl (Warren Kole). But while she's rooting through Wozniak's desk, ADA Nava (Gino Anthony Pesi) walks in, and she forgets to return Wozniak's key. Furious that Harlee may be the mole, Wozniak meets with Pomp (Michael Esper) in a hotel room and reveals his suspicions. Pomp encourages him to "protect his family" and kisses him, revealing their true relationship.
Meanwhile, in an effort to protect her home's value, Tess (Drea de Matteo) gets Espada's (Vincent Laresca) help moving a dead body found nearby. But when the body turns out to be an NYU student, Tess knows she messed up. Harlee offers to help her, hoping to pass the case on to the FBI. Harlee and Tess discover the boy accidentally shot himself, using a 3D-printed gun. Harlee arrests the boy's roommate, who printed the gun, and hands him and his gun stash over to Stahl.
Later, Harlee meets with Nava at a restaurant to discuss the Zepeda file, but Stahl, who's followed her, brings her to the restroom and forcibly wires her for her meeting with Wozniak. At the marina, Wozniak reveals Harlee has a tell and then pulls a gun on her, accusing her of being the FBI mole. She replies that if she were the mole, she'd be wired, and she drops her dress to prove otherwise. It's a massive gamble that pays off; Wozniak doesn't see the wire hidden on her back. After, Harlee meets Nava at his apartment and sleeps with him, leaving her wire on so the jealous and controlling Stahl can hear her. | When Tess moves a body, botching a murder investigation, Harlee steps in as fixer to buy herself some time with the FBI. | 18 | 0.64 | 0.96 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2013/08/13/crocs-and-sweatpants-you-could-wear-in-a-business-office-maybe/20691194/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160602221113id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2013/08/13/crocs-and-sweatpants-you-could-wear-in-a-business-office-maybe/20691194/? | Crocs and Sweatpants You Could Wear in a Business Office? Maybe | 20160602221113 | When we spoke to Crocs (
) CEO John McCarvel back in January, we couldn't help but notice his choice of footwear:
But we couldn't really hold it against him. McCarvel was in town to accept an innovator award from the National Retail Federation, and Crocs didn't really make anything appropriate for the occasion. You can't wear Crocs with a suit, right?
Well, that's not entirely true. As it turns out, Crocs now offers a number of shoes that are
. They've got loafers, for instance, which could work at the country club. And for the office they've got the
, which combines the molded rubber clogs with a black leather slip-on dress shoe. As the website explains, it's meant to be a "work shoe you can live with."
Around the same time we came across the Crocs dress shoe, we also became aware of another product that tries to combine stay-at-home comfort with office-appropriate wear:
. These have all the comfort and warmth of a pair of sweatpants, but are designed like a pair of dress slacks, complete with back pockets, belt loops and pinstripes.
Together, the Crocs dress shoes and sweatpants dress pants suggest a new paradigm for office wear: Dressy enough to pass muster with your boss, but comfortable enough that you can feel like you're having a pajama day working from home. But could you really pull this off in an office environment?
To find out, I got a pair of each, then put them on and headed down to the offices of
experts. I modeled my office wear for a panel of three StyleList editors: Ellen Thomas, Logan Sowa and Abby Silverman.
Their first reaction was telling -- two of them didn't realize that I'd actually changed into the sweatpants. That, I thought, meant that I could get away with wearing sweatpants without anyone noticing. But on closer inspection, doubts started to emerge.
"I don't think I'll ever be inclined to think this is acceptable in the workplace," said Sowa. "They looked like real pants, but there were a few telltale signs that something was off: They were a bit baggy, and definitely didn't look tailored."
I couldn't help but agree. I was a little disappointed with the fit, expecting it to have a more modern, slim cut. And I wasn't about to pay to have a pair of sweatpants tailored.
Still, I could see there being a small market for this sort of thing. Let's say you work at a tech startup and love the pajamas-and-sweatshirt lifestyle, but want to be prepared in case you need to suddenly meet with investors. Could these make for a nice middle ground?
Silverman was skeptical of this notion.
"Whether you are on Wall Street or at a start-up, it's important to be as professional as possible -- you never know when you'll be in an elevator pitch," she said. And Thomas wondered what was so difficult about wearing dress pants, many of which can be quite comfortable.
The Crocs were a different story.
"These actually aren't terrible for what they are -- a comfortable pair of shoes disguised as dress shoes," said Thomas. "I still would not want to see my boyfriend in them, but if you're going to invest in something like this, this particular style is pretty believable."
I was more or less in agreement. I didn't find them all that attractive, as they're a little too blocky for my taste. But if the goal here is to wear something that's comfortable, but still qualifies as a dress shoe, this definitely passes muster. I can imagine a doctor wearing these -- healthcare professionals like to wear Crocs because they're on their feet all day, and these could pair up with a shirt and tie to maintain a professional appearance when meeting with patients and families.
"If you're someone who is always on their feet for work, these Crocs are perfect for getting your feet through the day," agrees Silverman. Even Sowa, who admits she "inherently [has] a thing against Crocs," says they aren't half bad.
So there you have it. If you spend a lot of time on your feet, but still work in an environment that requires you to wear dress shoes, these Crocs could be a good compromise. But please don't try to get away with wearing sweatpants.
. Also available in grey or black, $108.
Too baggy to pass as real dress pants, and likely inappropriate at all but the most casual office environments.
Not the most stylish shoes around, but a great option for professionals who spend a lot of time on their feet. | Crocs has started making dress shoes, and one site now offers sweatpants that look like dress pants. But are they really office appropriate? | 36.538462 | 0.884615 | 1.346154 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://time.com/4351775/federal-officials-arrest-suspect-pregnant-girlfriend/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160603025335id_/http://time.com:80/4351775/federal-officials-arrest-suspect-pregnant-girlfriend/ | Man Suspected of Killing Pregnant Girlfriend Arrested | 20160603025335 | Federal officials captured a convicted felon on Sunday who had recently been added to the FBI’s most wanted list, accused of killing his pregnant girlfriend during an argument.
Philip Patrick Policarpio, 39, was arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border while crossing into the U.S. from Tijuana, NBC News reported.
He has been charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Lauren Olguin. He is accused of beating her with his hands and then shooting her in the head during an argument at a party on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 17 weeks pregnant, according to NBC News. | He was recently added to the FBI's most wanted list | 10.272727 | 0.909091 | 2.545455 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/02/north-carolina-lgbt-bathroom-law-business-criticism | http://web.archive.org/web/20160603041503id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/us-news/2016/apr/02/north-carolina-lgbt-bathroom-law-business-criticism | Pepsi chief executive joins criticism of North Carolina law on LGBT rights | 20160603041503 | The chief executive of Pepsi, a company with roots in North Carolina, has written to Governor Pat McCrory to ask him to repeal a new law preventing specific anti-discrimination rules for LGBT people over public accommodations and restroom use.
Related: A divided North Carolina draws national attention in fight over transgender law
In a letter hand delivered to McCrory on Friday, PepsiCo head Indra Nooyi called the law inconsistent with how her company treats its employees. Nooyi also said the law was undermining efforts to advance North Carolina’s interests, and she said she hoped McCrory would consider repealing the law when the state legislature reconvenes later this month.
PepsiCo developed from the merger of Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay. Pepsi-Cola was created in the late 1890s by New Bern pharmacist Caleb Bradham. Annual shareholder meetings have been held in New Bern in the past several years.
Company CEOs and city officials have joined other government and business leaders in opposition to the new law.
The Human Rights Campaign and Equality North Carolina on Friday released the names of another 10 company executives that have signed on to a letter criticizing the law and seeking its repeal, bringing the number of such names to more than 120. New executives include those from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Qualcomm and EMC.
The law, approved by the Republican legislature and Governor McCrory, responded to a Charlotte city council ordinance approved in February that would have extended protections to gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people while at hotels, restaurants and stores. Charlotte would also have allowed transgender people to use the restroom aligned with their gender identity.
Separately on Friday, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent corporation confirmed it would not invest in North Carolina startup businesses so long as the law is in place. GV spokeswoman Jodi Olson cited comments by the CEO, Bill Maris, in which he asked his firm’s partners to flag possible North Carolina investments because he is “not comfortable deploying dollars into startups there until the voters there fix this”. The decision was first reported by Re/code, a tech-focused news site.
The new state law blocked Charlotte’s rules and prevented other local governments from approving similar ordinances. Government agencies of all kinds must now require people who use multi-stall public restrooms to use the one that corresponds with their sex as identified at birth.
Also this week, the mayor of Washington DC, Muriel Bowser, and Boston’s city council banned government-connected travel to North Carolina, as a gesture of protest against the law. Similar travel bans have been issued by the governors of Washington, New York and Connecticut and by other cities.
Related: From Jim Crow to transgender ban: the bathroom as battleground for civil rights
The NCAA president, Mark Emmert, said he had spoken to McCrory about the law, making clear that if it remains in place it will affect the state’s chances to host major college athletic events.
A rally was held early on Friday night in front of the state legislative building to support transgender people and to oppose the law. Supporters of the new law held prayer vigils on Thursday night in multiple locations in eastern North Carolina. One was held across from the executive mansion, where McCrory lives.
Supporters of the law say hundreds of businesses support it and have signed on to their own letter praising McCrory and the legislature.
McCrory and a key lawmaker this week suggested some changes to the law were possible. But the Republican senate leader, Phil Berger, has no appetite for them because “an overwhelming majority of North Carolinians we’ve heard from support” the law, spokeswoman Shelly Carver said in a release. The general assembly reconvenes on 25 April. | Indra Nooyi writes to governor as corporate protest grows over law that prevents anti-discrimination rules for LGBT people for bathroom use | 31.043478 | 0.826087 | 2.826087 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/28/bali-nine-pair-executed-indonesia | http://web.archive.org/web/20160603042811id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/world/2015/apr/28/bali-nine-pair-executed-indonesia | 'Bali Nine' pair among eight executed for drug offences in Indonesia | 20160603042811 | The Indonesian government has executed by firing squad eight people for drug offences, including two Australians, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumuran, who were the subject of a years-long campaign for clemency.
The development marks the end of years of campaigning to spare the men, who were sentenced to death in 2006 for their part in the Bali Nine heroin-smuggling ring.
Also executed were four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian. All had been convicted of drug crimes.
A ninth prisoner scheduled to face the firing squad, Filipino woman Mary Jane Veloso, received a last-minute temporary reprieve.
Veloso, who was arrested in Yogyakarta in 2010 with 2.6kg of heroin in her suitcase, was granted a stay of execution after the woman she claims set her up “voluntarily surrendered” to police on Tuesday.
A spokesman for the Indonesian attorney general, Muhammad Prasetyo, said Veloso’s death sentence had been postponed so she could testify against the woman, Maria Kristina Sergio.
The killings were carried out at 12.30am, local time, on the prison island of Nusa Kambangan off the coast of Java.
Chan’s brother, Michael, said after the execution he had “just lost a courageous brother to a flawed Indonesian legal system”. “I miss you already RIP my Little Brother,” he tweeted.
I have just lost a Courageous brother to a flawed Indonesian legal system. I miss you already RIP my Little Brother
The Australian pair’s Indonesian lawyer, Todung Mulya Lubis, also expressed sorrow on Twitter, writing, “I am sorry” and “I failed. I lost”.
Hundreds had gathered at the port of Cilacap on Tuesday to watch lawyers and families make their final visits to the prisoners.
Police were forced to use dogs to clear the heavy media pack when Chan’s and Sukumaran’s visibly distressed relatives arrived. Sukumaran’s sister, Brintha, collapsed in the melee and had to be carried into the port office by her father, Sam.
Speaking after their visit, Sukumaran’s brother, Chinthu, again urged Indonesia to show mercy. “Please don’t let my mum and my sister have to bury my brother,” he said. Through tears, his mother, Raji, said: “I won’t see my son again and they are going to take him tonight and shoot him and he is healthy and he is beautiful and he has a lot of compassion for other people.
“Please president, please don’t kill him today. Please don’t. Call off the execution. Please don’t kill my son. Please don’t.”
Michael Chan said the family had gone through “torture”. “I saw today something that no other family should ever have to go to. Nine families inside a prison saying goodbye to their loved ones,” he said. “There has to be a moratorium on the death penalty, no family should endure it. Because now the family is going to have a grieving process for the rest of their life.”
Angela Muxfeldt, cousin of the Brazilian, Rodrigo Gularte, said in the hours before his execution the 42-year-old was the calmest she had seen him in three months. “He is calm. He doesn’t want I cry and doesn’t believe execution will happen,” she said, visibly emotional.
Lawyers for Gularte were still lodging an appeal on Tuesday, claiming he suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and had been unfit to stand trial when sentenced to death for cocaine smuggling in 2005.
Chan and Sukumaran, too, have outstanding legal challenges, including a constitutional appeal on 12 May to a presidential decision in January to deny them clemency, reportedly made without having even reviewed their files.
The others who were executed were Raheem Agbaje Salami (also known as Jamiu Owolabi Abashin), Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, Martin Anderson, Zainal Abidin and Okwuduli Oyatanze.
A 10th death row prisoner, Serge Atlaioui, from France, was due to be executed this week, but his sentence has been delayed pending a legal challenge.
Veloso’s last-minute stay of execution was granted after Sergio, who was wanted for human trafficking and illegal recruitment in relation to the case, handed herself in to police in the Philippines province of Nueva Ecija on Tuesday morning.
Veloso claims that Sergio enticed her to Malaysia with a job offer, where an associate known as Ike bought her a new suitcase and instructed her to run an “errand” to Indonesia, where police found the heroin stitched into the lining of her bag. Sergio has denied this account.
Tony Spontana, a spokesman for the Indonesian attorney general, Muhammad Prasetyo, said in a text message: “There was a request from the Philippine president regarding the perpetrator who’s suspected of committing human trafficking and surrendered in the Philippines. MJ [Mary-Jane] is needed for her testimony.”
The remaining eight prisoners were tied to wooden stakes and shot by 12 marksmen, three of whom carried live rounds. They aimed at crosses marked over the mens’ hearts.
Months of high-level diplomatic representations and high-profile campaigns failed to sway the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, who has described narcotics as a “national emergency” and pledged to clear the country’s death row of drug offenders.
Six people, five of them foreigners, were shot in a first round of executions in January. Official figures are unreliable, but following these most recent killings, it is estimated around 33 foreigners remain on death row in Indonesia for drug crimes.
Speaking hours before the executions, Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, said she was “deeply disturbed” by Indonesia’s handling of the matter and warned there “will have to be consequences”.
Australia has never withdrawn diplomatic staff over an execution of a citizen abroad, but on Tuesday evening the prime minster, Tony Abbott, said he was recalling Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, Paul Grigson. Abbott said Australia’s reaction could not be “simply business as usual”. “For that reason … our ambassador will be withdrawn for consultations,” he said.
The human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC called on Tuesday for some of the $600m that Australia directs to Indonesia each year in foreign aid to be redirected to Nepal.
Brazil and the Netherlands withdrew their ambassadors following the January round of executions, which included their citizens, and Brazil has refused to accept the credentials of the new Indonesian ambassador.
Plans for Wednesday’s executions attracted international condemnation, including from the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who called on Widodo to “urgently consider declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in Indonesia, with a view toward abolition”.
The Council of Europe secretary general, Thorbjørn Jagland, had also asked Indonesia to refrain, calling the death penalty “a terrible injustice which can never be put right”.
On Tuesday, Australia, the European Union and France issued a joint statement asking Indonesia to “reflect on the impact [of the executions] on Indonesia’s position in a globalised world and an international reputation”.
“We support Indonesia’s efforts to obtain forgiveness for its citizens abroad. Stopping this execution will help those efforts,” the statement said.
Vigils were held across Australia for Chan, 31, and Sukumuran, 34, whose cause had been embraced by the country in their final months. Tarred as thugs for years after their capture, on death row the pair underwent sincere transformations, Chan converting to Christianity and Sukumaran emerging as an accomplished artist.
After earlier denying the pair their choice of spiritual counsellors, Indonesian authorities relented late on Tuesday, allowing pastors Christie Buckingham and David Soper to attend to the men in the final hours.
Sukumaran continued to paint up until his last day, producing a rendering of a human heart signed by each nine of the prisoners who were scheduled to be shot in the early hours of Wednesday. It was titled, “One heart, one feeling in love”. | Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumuran among eight executed after high-level campaign for clemency failed to sway Indonesian president | 73.904762 | 0.952381 | 2.857143 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/06/02/bill-camp-second-act/NIyfskTjXa7NZOrwLoKaTL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160603223825id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/06/02/bill-camp-second-act/NIyfskTjXa7NZOrwLoKaTL/story.html | Bill Camp’s second act | 20160603223825 | Joe Tabacca for The Globe
Bill Camp, a Boston-area native, recently received a Tony nomination for his role in “The Crucible.”
NEW YORK — About 15 years ago, Bill Camp felt like a hamster spinning inside a wheel. He had just won an Obie Award for playing heroin-addicted Quango Twistleton in Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul,” and critics were praising his pulsating performances, but the joy he’d felt about acting had waned and he was questioning what it was all for.
“I think I had, in an unhealthy way, identified myself as this actor, and I didn’t really know who I was anymore. Everything was kind of an extension of this audition or that audition or this job or that job,” says Camp, who grew up in Groton, Mass., and was a regular on Boston stages in the 1990s. “I had become such an intense narcissist that it was despicable to me. It took over everything and permeated all my relationships.”
His solution? Hop off the wheel.
So in 2002 he moved to California, where his girlfriend (now wife) Elizabeth Marvel was acting in the TV series “The District.” To pay the bills, he took jobs as a landscaper, a waiter, a cook, and worked at a friend’s garage.
The sabbatical would last two years, long enough to revitalize him and, he says, make him a better actor. “I think it just helped me have a new appreciation about what it was that I was doing and why I was doing it,” says Camp, slouching sideways in a banquette at Sardi’s on a recent afternoon. “It gave me a healthy perspective in terms of looking at it as a job — a job that I love — as opposed to, ‘This is my life.’ ”
Camp has been enjoying his professional rejuvenation for years, but now there’s this: a Tony nomination — his first — for his portrayal of the Rev. John Hale, a conflicted man of the cloth, in “The Crucible.” Nominated for best featured actor in a play, Camp will square off against Michael Shannon (“Long Day’s Journey Into Night”), Reed Birney (“The Humans”), David Furr (“Noises Off”), and Richard Goulding (“King Charles III”). The 70th annual Tony Awards will be broadcast June 12 at 8 p.m. on CBS.
While Camp acknowledges that recognition for his work is immensely gratifying, he shrugs that “not much has really changed” since the Tony nod (he’s also been nominated for a Drama Desk Award). “I’ve gone to a few parties, luncheons, and stuff.”
If Camp seems unimpressed with himself, his low-key reaction to the accolades reflects a workaday actor who comes across as laid-back and not entirely at ease talking about himself so extensively, even as he proves to be open and engaging in conversation.
Camp has worked frequently both on and off Broadway. But for years, he was also seen regularly on stages in Boston and Cambridge. He won an Elliot Norton Award in 1997 for playing Jamie Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at the American Repertory Theater, where he also starred as Prince Hal in “Henry IV, Parts I and II,” in Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” and in a Robert Woodruff-directed production of “Richard II” opposite Thomas Derrah.
The lure of performing eventually beckoned Camp back onto the boards when Kushner asked him to do a new version of “Homebody” that was slated for New York and Los Angeles in 2004. But it was his return to the ART, first in a production of “The Provok’d Wife,” and then as the protagonist in the searing “Olly’s Prison” in 2005, directed by Woodruff, that really got his blood pumping again. The Globe praised Camp’s performance as “awe-inducing,” saying that he “gets to the heart of what it means to be a defeated person.”
“I think working with Robert [Woodruff] again at ART really turned the engine on again for me,” says Camp of the theater’s former artistic director. “It opened my mind. It was a spark that has yet to go out, which Robert really inspired.”
Marvel, who started dating Camp when they were students at Juilliard in the late 1980s, calls her husband “a seeker” and “a ferocious stage animal.” When they were first coming up in the New York theater world in their 20s, Marvel says, “we were both just maniacs. We were willing to dive extremely deep and show everything all the time.”
“It’s so interesting now to be further down the road and at this stage in life where we aren’t maniacs anymore. Bill still has a ferocity about him. But he also has a very profound stillness and steadiness about him, which has grown and evolved over time,” says Marvel, a celebrated stage actress who has a recurring role as Heather Dunbar in “House of Cards.” The couple has a 10-year-old son.
A graduate of the Groton School, Camp grew up on the picturesque campus, where his father was on the faculty for 25 years and served for a time as headmaster. His mother was a painter and librarian. A huge hockey fan who still plays in a men’s league, Camp participated in several sports at Groton. But as a senior in 1982, he decided to hang up his skates that winter so he could act in a school production of “The Crucible” instead.
“I kid you not,” he says, with a smile. Of that early brush with Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about the mass hysteria surrounding the Salem witch trials, he adds, “I had no idea how to look at a play then. I was 17. I’m now 51. That was a different life.”
Camp’s character, Reverend Hale, the town’s “spiritual doctor,” has perhaps the play’s most dramatic moral arc — a man who argues for the legitimacy of the witchcraft accusations and then becomes convinced they’re a pack of lies. Camp’s performance has been praised for its “marvelous nuance” and slow-burning power, as the agonizing realization that the town is sending innocent people to the gallows overtakes Hale.
“The pursuit of reason and logic is what drives him, and that ultimately is the door that then allows him to see, oh my gosh, this is totally out of hand now,” Camp says. “At a certain moment, he’s adamant that he can no longer shut his conscience to it. He has to speak up, and come what may.”
Miller wrote “The Crucible” as an allegory to McCarthyism. But the director of the Broadway production, Ivo Van Hove, who is known for radical stagings that often divide critics, swept away the play’s period trappings to underscore its timeless qualities. Indeed, Camp marvels at its contemporary resonances — about power structures, individual freedom, misguided moralism, and compliance to authority, “how we just sort of go along and before we know it, we have brown shirts on our backs,” he says, with a laugh.
Marvel says Hale fits Camp like a glove because her husband and his character are “morally and spiritually aligned.” Both share “a willingness to question oneself and one’s beliefs and one’s ideas, which can get fixed over time, and to constantly be digging and prodding and re-examining.”
Indeed, what Camp loves about acting, especially in the theater, is that “it continues to teach me and enlighten me and unfold the world in front of me.”
“I learn about history and religion and politics. It keeps me tuned in. If I hear something on the news, I’m like, oh my God, this is what somebody is talking about in the play that I’m about to do in two hours.
“The act itself — of rehearsing, failing, and still persisting and trying to create — keeps me curious, keeps me searching. And as long as I’m staying very curious, I’m happy.” | Massachusetts native Bill Camp — nominated for his role in “The Crucible” — needed a long break from the stage before he could feel excited about acting again. | 52.612903 | 0.806452 | 2.096774 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/18/us/in-testing-one-size-may-not-fit-all.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160604095812id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2002/03/18/us/in-testing-one-size-may-not-fit-all.html? | In Testing, One Size May Not Fit All | 20160604095812 | PITTSBURG, Calif.— Kyle Stofle, a 10th grader at Pittsburg High School who has dyslexia and virtually unreadable handwriting, has been in special education since second grade. But Kyle, 15, has always expected to get his diploma along with the rest of the class of 2004.
So he and his mother became worried when they learned that, starting with his class, every California student would have to pass a statewide language and math test to graduate.
''When the exit exam first came up, last year, I went to a meeting and asked what would happen to kids with learning disabilities,'' said Kyle's mother, Karen Bruno. ''They kept saying that they didn't know, that it would end up in court.''
So it has. An Oakland-based advocacy group challenged the graduation exam under federal disability laws.
On Feb. 21, two weeks before Kyle and other 10th graders were to take the test, Judge Charles R. Breyer of Federal District Court ruled that students with learning disabilities had the right to special treatment, through different assessment methods or accommodations like the use of a calculator or the chance to have test questions read aloud.
It was the first time a state had been ordered to adjust the conditions for its graduation exams for students with learning disabilities, most of whom are dyslexics with reading problems.
The question of how far to accommodate students with learning disabilities on college entrance tests like the SAT has become a familiar one, as requests for special accommodations proliferate, especially from affluent white families.
But with more than a dozen states putting graduation exams into effect in the next three years -- and others requiring new tests for promotion to the next grade -- the debate has become broader and more urgent, with some education experts predicting that new legal challenges are inevitable.
''As these laws are phased in and kids really start to be denied diplomas, it'll go to lots of courts, and lots of legislatures,'' Robert Schaeffer of FairTest, a group in Cambridge, Mass., that is critical of standardized testing. ''This is a great unexplored weakness of the whole high-stakes testing thing.''
Some education experts say they worry, however, that as more students seek special accommodations, the whole notion of standardized testing may break down. What is a diploma worth, they add, if students who cannot read, write or do arithmetic are allowed to pass academic tests?
With more than 12 percent of the nation's schoolchildren now identified as disabled -- some with physical problems, but most with learning disabilities -- concern is growing that some students say they have learning disabilities just to win easier testing conditions.
In recent years, half the states have enacted laws requiring that high school students pass standardized exams to graduate. High failure rates on the tests have prompted some states to delay putting them into effect or lower the score for passing.
These so-called exit exams create a particularly tough hurdle for students with learning disabilities. When California gave its first exit exam last year, on a voluntary basis, 9 of 10 students with learning disabilities failed.
Kyle failed the language and math sections, and because his handwriting was so bad, his essay questions were never scored.
''A lot of the questions made no sense to me,'' Kyle said. ''Some of the math was on things I've never learned.''
Kyle said he thinks he did better this year because his teacher, apparently on her own decision, read the questions to him. To earn his diploma, Kyle must pass the test by his senior year.
Many states, including New York, already allow a broad range of options for disabled students. Instead of taking the regular test, they can give oral presentations or present portfolios of their work.
But the clash between disability rights and educational standards is profound. States devised graduation exams to measure all students by the same yardstick. In contrast, the disability laws were designed to ensure that disabled children receive educations tailored to their needs. Moreover, there is little scientific data on precisely which accommodations help which learning disabilities.
''The equities here are not clear,'' said Lawrence Feinberg, assistant director of the group that administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test that rates school performance.
''Standardized tests came in because of variations in testing and grading and the notion that it's only fair if you test everyone the same way,'' he said. ''It turns that whole idea on its head, if you treat some people differently because it's fairer to them.''
Many state education officials say that including disabled students in statewide testing is a good thing.
''A student who's tested is a student who's taught,'' said Kit Viator, an assessment official in the Massachusetts education department.
Advocacy groups for the disabled do not disagree. But they say that making a learning disabled student take a standardized test without accommodations is as unfair as requiring a physically disabled child to run a race without a wheelchair. | Kyle Stofle, a 10th grader at Pittsburg High School who has dyslexia and virtually unreadable handwriting, has been in special education since second grade. But Kyle, 15, has always expected to get his diploma along with the rest of the class of 2004. So he and his mother became worried when they learned that, starting with his class, every California student would have to pass a statewide language and math test to graduate. | 11.927711 | 0.987952 | 42.048193 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/healthy-diet-country-lifestyle-health-soy-vegetables_slide_5.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160604141856id_/http://www.forbes.com:80/2010/03/02/healthy-diet-country-lifestyle-health-soy-vegetables_slide_5.html | In Pictures: The World's Healthiest Diets | 20160604141856 | This Nordic country does well despite a relative lack of fruits and vegetables. The key, says Pasternak, is a diet rich in dairy, dark breads, berries and fish. The calcium in dairy can help the body burn fat; rye and pumpernickel breads are loaded with fiber; berries have antioxidant properties; and the salmon and herring is heart-healthy. It also helps that the Swedes burn plenty of calories year-round with cross-country skiing and other winter sports.
Comments are turned off for this post. | You can learn a lot from these 10 countries with long life expectancies and healthy eating habits. | 5.611111 | 0.333333 | 0.333333 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.tmz.com/2012/01/13/vanilla-ice-foreclosure-trees/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160604231449id_/http://www.tmz.com:80/2012/01/13/vanilla-ice-foreclosure-trees/ | Vanilla Ice Stops Foreclosure -- Collaborates with Lawyers | 20160604231449 | 's Florida mansion was in jeopardy of foreclosure ... but only for a second.
Ice lives in a gated community in Palm Beach. Seems Hurricane Wilma destroyed some palm trees back in 2005, and the homeowners association levied a special assessment of around $2,800 per homeowner to cover the cost of replacement.
Ice never paid, and the figure swelled to $4,100, so the homeowners association filed foreclosure documents in order to squeeze the money from the "rapper."
Ice's lawyers, Bradford Cohen and Joseph LoRusso, tell TMZ ... "The issue stemmed from Mr. VanWinkle (aka Mr. Ice) being unaware of any outstanding charges. As soon as he was made aware of the situation it was completely resolved."
The hired guns took a shot at the homeowners association, saying, "It is surprising that the association chose to waste funds on filing an action against our client." | Vanilla Ice's Florida mansion was in jeopardy of foreclosure ... but only for a second.Ice lives in a gated community in Palm Beach. Seems Hurricane Wilma… | 5.580645 | 0.935484 | 11.903226 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/31/after-youre-gone-parents-of-special-needs-kids-bank-on-trusts.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160605025153id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/10/31/after-youre-gone-parents-of-special-needs-kids-bank-on-trusts.html | After you're gone: Parents of special needs kids bank on trusts | 20160605025153 | "Part of the estate plan for all parents with a special needs child has to be creating a special needs plan," said Michael Black, who also is a certified financial planner and principal of Michael Phillips Black Wealth Management.
Exact data on how many parents are in the Blacks' situation is hard to come by, but data from the 2010 U.S. Census show that about 18.7 percent of Americans, or 56.7 million people, have some sort of disability. Not all of them require special assistance, and not all young children with special needs will move into adulthood needing help, however.
Read MoreHusbands gone, widows leave advisors
Special needs can range from autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to cerebral palsy and genetic disorders.
Meanwhile, census data shows roughly 12.3 million people, or 4.4 percent of Americans, need help with basic daily living activities such as bathing, preparing meals or taking prescription medicine. | Advisors say a crucial step in providing for future care of a special needs child is ensuring enough money goes into a special needs trust. | 6.846154 | 0.576923 | 1.269231 | low | low | abstractive |
http://nypost.com/2016/02/07/trump-clinton-obama-actually-make-nixon-look-good/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160605041312id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/02/07/trump-clinton-obama-actually-make-nixon-look-good/ | Trump, Clinton, Obama actually make Nixon look good | 20160605041312 | Sure, the ghost of President Richard Nixon has been with us in some ways all along — we label every scandal with -gate, the mere hint of presidential secrecy earns the “Nixonian” badge — but now he’s everywhere.
Here’s the twist: This time, the comparisons — to President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz — are making Nixon look good.
Nixon’s typically thought to have set some kind of gold standard of presidential perfidy. The truth is, Obama and Clinton make Nixon look like a Boy Scout.
Start with the targeting of conservative and pro-Israel tax-exempt groups by the Obama IRS in the runup to the 2012 election, after which the agency destroyed evidence and impeded congressional investigation.
The weaponization of a federal agency as an arm of the committee to re-elect President Obama earned the “Nixonian” badge from the media, because Nixon tried to have the IRS audit political opponents.
But Nixon’s purpose was mostly revenge. Obama’s IRS silenced political speech during an election year.
Then there was the administration monitoring of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s communications with US Jewish groups opposed to the Iran deal — and with members of Congress.
Nixonian? Sure — on steroids. Nixon in 1973 pushed the increased surveillance of foreign officials and even sanctioned breaking into embassies. But Obama’s NSA was snooping on Congress.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton, whose control-freak paranoia arguably exceeds the levels that made Nixon famous. Nixon ordered the secret taping of White House conversations — an act of paranoia that ultimately did him in after the Watergate scandal came to light and the tapes produced evidence against him.
Something similar happened with Clinton. As secretary of state, she not only exclusively used a private email address but even set up a “homebrew” server at her house, putting her in total control of her communication archives — as evidenced by the fact that she tried to delete the emails from her server before investigators could subpoena them.
Nonetheless, it appears some of the emails were recovered anyway.
It also meant the information she sent and received — including classified and deeply sensitive national secrets — was unsecure.
In other words, Hillary’s paranoia and control-freak secrecy opened up our national-security secrets to the Russians, the Chinese and who knows who else.
Nixon’s secret taping of his own Oval Office conversations, by contrast, wound up endangering only . . . him.
But the private server actually fits in well with Clinton’s MO. After all, she also operated a private State Department, a parallel government of her own.
The Obama White House wouldn’t let Clinton bring hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal in at State — so she hired him anyway and put him on the Clinton Foundation payroll as a key adviser.
Sid Vicious, in turn, operated an off-the-books spy ring intended to guide America’s involvement in the Libyan civil war (while aiming to position Blumenthal and his friends to pick up future business contracts rebuilding the country).
Nixon never dreamed up the idea of operating his own parallel government, as Hillary did.
Now over to the Republican side — and different echoes of Nixon.
Donald Trump has explicitly latched onto the Nixonian idea of the “silent majority” — the Americans ignored by the social and economic elites. The point may be even more relevant today, with so many looking for someone to acknowledge the disenfranchised blue-collar workers of the Information Age.
And finally, there’s Ted Cruz — who, as Rich Lowry noted in these pages last month, seems to be aiming at a Nixonesque path to victory “as another surpassingly shrewd and ambitious politician who lacked a personal touch but found a way to win nonetheless.”
If Cruz ends up winning the Republican presidential nomination, Lowry added, “it’ll be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He’ll have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else” — just as Nixon did.
Last week, Cruz followed precisely this model to win the Iowa caucuses.
None of this excuses Nixon’s crimes or the institutional damage he did to the presidency along the way. But it’s a reminder that history’s second drafts are often kinder than the first.
With the added irony that Nixon can thank today’s leading Democrats for making him look good by comparison. | Tricky Dick is back. Sure, the ghost of President Richard Nixon has been with us in some ways all along — we label every scandal with -gate, the mere hint of presidential secrecy earns the “Nixonia… | 20.804878 | 0.878049 | 28.243902 | medium | medium | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/10/01/layoffs-jobs-september/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160605111626id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/10/01/layoffs-jobs-september/ | Job Market: Layoffs Surged In September As Big Companies Cut Back | 20160605111626 | Last month saw a surge in layoffs, primarily due to large-scale employee cuts at companies like Hewlett-Packard HPQ .
U.S. companies laid off 58,877 workers in September, according to data released Thursday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. September layoffs are up 43% from August when about 41,000 workers were let go.
In total, employers have announced 493,431 planned layoffs so far this year, a 36% jump over the same period last year and 2% more than the 2014 total.
“Job cuts have already surpassed last year’s total and are on track to end the year as the highest annual total since 2009, when nearly 1.3 million layoffs were announced at the tail-end of the recession,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The computer industry accounted for the heaviest job cuts in September primarily driven by Hewlett-Packard, which said it would cut 30,000 jobs. The job losses, which were announced in mid-September by CEO Meg Whitman, should save the company $2.7 billion annually and represented about 10% of the company’s workforce, HP said. | The computer industry was hit hard. | 31.142857 | 0.571429 | 1.428571 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.tmz.com/2012/11/09/ariel-winter-mother-chrystel-shanelle-fat/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160605120256id_/http://www.tmz.com:80/2012/11/09/ariel-winter-mother-chrystel-shanelle-fat/ | Ariel Winter's Mom -- I NEVER Called My Daughter Fat | 20160605120256 | 's mother told the court ... she NEVER trashed her daughter or called her fat ... despite allegations to the contrary ... TMZ has learned.
filed a declaration with the court, obtained by TMZ, in which she fires back at allegations made by Ariel's older sister
... that Chrystal would constantly say horrible things to Ariel.
In the docs, Chrystal says, "The allegations in [Shanelle's] petition are untrue. I have never put Ariel down or told her that she is overweight."
In fact, Chrystal says she constantly told her daughter that she is "smart, beautiful and talented."
"Since birth, I have loved and cared for Ariel in all her physiological and emotional needs," Chrystal says ... adding, "I have always been her caretaker and looked out for her best interests."
We broke the story ... Shanelle was awarded temporary guardianship of Ariel over allegations that Chrystal physically and emotionally abused Ariel. Chrystal has denied the allegations.
In the docs, Chrystal also claims Shanelle is only using Ariel as a "stepping stone to further her own career as an actress."
Chrystal says Ariel makes $75k per week from "Modern Family" alone ... and is concerned Shanelle will misuse the money to buy herself a new house.
In the docs, Chrystal says her relationship with Ariel went south when she found out her 14-year-old daughter was involved in a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old man. | Ariel Winter's mother told the court ... she NEVER trashed her daughter or called her fat ... despite allegations to the contrary ... TMZ has learned.… | 9.827586 | 0.931034 | 23.344828 | low | medium | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/03/31/microsoft-xamarin-visual-studio/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160606015444id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/03/31/microsoft-xamarin-visual-studio/? | Microsoft Puts Xamarin into Visual Studio Toolkit | 20160606015444 | Last month, Microsoft finally bought mobile software developer Xamarin after months and months of discussion. Now it’s putting Xamarin’s popular mobile development tools into (what else?) its Visual Studio toolkit.
Even the free Visual Studio community edition will include all of Xamarin and Xamarin Studio for Mac OS X, according to Microsoft corporate vice president Julia Liuson. “We want to make this technology available to as many developers as possible.”
This is an interesting development since Visual Studio has been a mainstay of the Microsoft-centric Windows and .NET world, which has long viewed Apple aapl iPhones as the enemy.
The inclusion of Xamarin, which makes it easier for mobile developers to write code that runs across different devices, including iPhones and Android devices, is thus an eyebrow raiser, although Microsoft msft has been doing its best to show the world that it is no longer “just” focused on Windows machines. That’s probably because Windows Phones have fared poorly in the market compared to the Android and iPhone juggernauts.
In addition, Microsoft is open-sourcing the Xamarin software development kit (SDK) and making it freely available.
Non-techies may not know this but when Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio more than a decade ago, it pretty much upended a development universe in which software tooling was disjointed and expensive. By adding a free version of Xamarin to what has been a bundle of Windows-centric tools, it is making a statement in mobile development as well, said IDC analyst Al Hilwa.
Fortune’s Q&A with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
The idea here is to enable development of lots of mobile apps that will (Microsoft hopes) hook into its Azure cloud. The independent Xamarin was cloud agnostic—it partnered with IBM ibm on Bluemix, Oracle orcl , and Amazon amzn Web Services. Liuson told Fortune that will not change.
Although it’s long been popular to promise developers that they can write an application once and have it run across different operating systems, the reality is typically far different, Liuson acknowledged. To take full advantage of each operating system’s perks, some different code must be written. Xamarin’s promise is that 75% or more of the code running across Android, iOS, and Windows can be shared. The rest will have to be tweaked.
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Windows Phones still lag behind the market, but Liuson said Microsoft is betting that Windows as a whole will succeed: If a developer writes an application for the desktop, that application can also target other devices running Windows.
How smartphones changed the game at Instacart
San Francisco-based Xamarin employs about 400 people who are now part of Microsoft. Co-founder Nat Friedman is now a Microsoft corporate vice president reporting to executive vice president Scott Guthrie. Friedman’s Xamarin co-founder Miguel de Icaza is also at Microsoft. | But why should anyone write for Windows Phones? | 61.777778 | 0.666667 | 0.888889 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/04/13/kindle-oasis/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160606015659id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/04/13/kindle-oasis/ | Meet Amazon's New E-Reader, the Kindle Oasis | 20160606015659 | Despite the rise of tablets, Amazon has continued to have success with its Kindle e-reader. Many people prefer reading using a device specialized exactly for that rather than using a multipurpose iPad.
Amazon unveiled its newest Kindle, Oasis, on Wednesday with the hook that what consumers want is lighter, smaller, and a longer battery life. The device is 30% thinner on average and 20% lighter than any previous Kindle, according to Amazon, while it’s battery life is measured in months rather than weeks, as was the case with the previous version.
But those updated features come with a hefty price. The new Wi-Fi-only Oasis costs $289.99, making it one of Amazon’s most expensive Kindles to date. The previous year and a half old version of the Kindle, the Voyage, currently retails for $199.99.
“To lean back and read for hours, you need a sanctuary from distraction,” said Bezos in a statement. “We want Kindle to disappear, and the Kindle Oasis is the next big step in that mission. It’s the most advanced Kindle we’ve ever built—thin and ultra-lightweight, it gets out of the way so you can lose yourself in the author’s world.”
Besides its weight and size, another big difference in the Oasis is that it has an ergonomic grip. Instead of being flat on the back where you hold the device, one side is slightly raised to make it easier to grip.
Amazon has built in sensors to detect whether you are holding the device with your left hand or right hand, and will automatically rotate the page and turn buttons to match. So if you are holding it with your right hand and switch to the other hand, the device will rotate the page accordingly, so it is right side up.
Similar to the previous versions of the Kindle, the device has a thin touch screen that lets you shop for books, access saved books, and review recommendations from book rating service Goodreads. The screen, Amazon said, is also much brighter than previous models.
For more about Amazon, watch:
The Oasis is debuting with an unusual addition for extending the battery life. It comes with a protective cover that recharges the device automatically after being connected. The cover has a battery inside that can provide months of extra battery life to the Kindle.
When the device is attached to the case and plugged in, both batteries will charge. When it’s unplugged, it will first use the case’s battery before tapping into the Kindle’s internal supply. The Oasis still has weeks of battery life, fully charged, without the cover.
The cover itself is leather, and is available in three colors: black, dark red or brown. The cover opens like a book and fits snuggly around the screen and will wake the device when opened. It also uses a number of magnets to attach itself to the side of the Kindle.
Another new feature for this version of the Kindle is a new “hibernation” mode button that will save power when you aren’t using the device. So if you are leaving it beside your bed overnight, you can turn on the sleep mode, and conserve energy without having to recharge.
The device, which starts shipping at the end of April, costs $289.99 for the Wi-Fi enabled device, and $359.99 for 3G and Wi-Fi included. This makes the Oasis Amazon’s smallest, yet most expensive piece of hardware.
For comparison, the latest iPad mini, the smallest version of Apple’s tablet, start at $399. But with the iPad, you get a full tablet that lets you browse the web, take pictures, and access apps including the Kindle app to read books.
Bezos has acknowledged that his company’s Kindle e-reader is a loss leader. Rather, the e-commerce giant makes money by selling digital books to the device’s owners. Charlie Tritschler, vice president of product management for Amazon Devices, echoed Bezos’ claims that business goals of the Kindle business is not the hardware. The focus is on providing the most diverse and comprehensive content for readers, he said. | Amazon debuted its lightest and smallest e-reader. | 81.8 | 0.8 | 2 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/04/fitbits-sound-strategy-doesnt-impress-wall-street/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160606023504id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/04/fitbits-sound-strategy-doesnt-impress-wall-street/ | Fitbit CEO James Park Looks Long Term But Investors Focus Short Term | 20160606023504 | Fitbit CEO James Park is doing what smart CEOs do, focusing resources on the best opportunities for future growth, but he can’t seem to get Wall Street to play along.
Despite reporting that first quarter sales rose 50% and again beat analysts’ expectations, Fitbit’s fit stock price lost as much as 12% in Wednesday’s after-hours trading. The culprit was Park’s profit forecast for the second quarter, with adjusted earnings per share of 8-to-11 cents less than half the 26 cents analysts expected on average.
In an interview, the CEO says the company will be spending more in the short term on research and development for several upcoming new products and increasing the company’s marketing push outside of the United States, where fewer people already wear a fitness tracker. “A lot of our media spend is going to be in markets outside of the US versus inside, which are at different levels of maturity,” Park explained.
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It’s a standard playbook for fast-growing companies to take some of the profits from the most mature markets and pour them into new opportunities. That’s exactly how Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings built modern titans, to name two of the most successful practitioners. It’s especially appropriate after a quarter in which revenue grew 50% instead of “only” the 32% analysts had forecast.
And surely Park should have earned some deference from investors, as both of his spending priorities—new products and developing markets—have done well. Almost half of the Fitbit’s $505 million of first quarter revenue was generated by its two newest trackers, the Blaze and Alta, which also helped push the average selling price up 18% from a year ago.
The new products also helped kick off the company’s first serious upgrade cycle, with some 40% of sales coming from repeat customers, Park said. Spending to build more enticing new products seems like an obvious way to go.
And Fitbit’s spending more on overseas markets is also paying off so far. While U.S. sales increased 33% to $351 million in the first quarter, sales in Asia-Pacific more than doubled off a much smaller base to $56 million. Sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa also more than doubled to $75 million.
Park’s seeming sacrifice of profits for next quarter should pay off quickly. The company on Wednesday raised the high end of its revenue expectations for the full year to $2.6 billion, up from $2.5 billion in its prior forecast, and adjusted earnings per share to as much as $1.24 from $1.20.
To learn more about Park’s strategy, watch:
Speaking of adjusted earnings per share, Fitbit includes several financial measures in its results that don’t coincide with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Such non-GAAP measures as adjusted net income, which excludes the cost of stock based compensation, have recently come under fire from regulators as potentially confusing to some investors. And some big tech companies like Amazon have moved towards offering more GAAP data.
But at least for now, Park says he remains in favor of Fitbit reporting a combo of both GAAP and non-GAAP numbers.
“Giving investors both GAAP results and non-GAAP results gives them the best overall view of the business,” he said. “Investors can them use their own judgement as to how to use those two numbers.” | Investing for the future doesn't go over well. | 66.8 | 0.6 | 1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/19/nyregion/seeing-lawless-police-behavior-state-files-civil-rights-complaint-against-small.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160606025557id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2001/01/19/nyregion/seeing-lawless-police-behavior-state-files-civil-rights-complaint-against-small.html? | Seeing Lawless Police Behavior, State Files Civil Rights Complaint Against Small Town | 20160606025557 | The New York attorney general's office has filed a federal civil rights complaint yesterday against the small upstate town of Wallkill, charging that it has failed to corral a lawless police department whose officers pull over female drivers to solicit dates, refuse to cooperate with other law enforcement agencies, and systematically harass their many critics, from town officials to the local newspaper.
With news of the aggressive action, an Orange County town formerly known best for a mall, the Galleria at Crystal Run, and the city of Middletown suddenly found itself being described as the Catskill equivalent of ''Copland,'' and the subject of unfamiliar and unwanted attention. The initial reaction of some residents was to discount the charges as minor and nothing they could not take care of themselves.
''It's just stupid stuff,'' said a waiter at the Americana Diner on Route 211, the highway that serves as the main street for this snow-encrusted town of 30,000. ''Dumb stuff, dumb.''
The attorney general's complaint begs to differ. It says officers would stop young female drivers on the road, charge them with a crime, and then offer to have the charges dismissed if they agreed to date them. It also says officers in an unmarked vehicle they called the ''stealth car'' would follow women who had caught their eye. One officer, the complaint says, was threatening a bar owner who had fired the officer's girlfriend, and another officer made repeated lewd comments to teenage waitresses at a local diner.
Meanwhile, the complaint says, police officers were harassing critics, particularly the chairman of the town's police commission, whose damning report about department practices attracted the attorney general's interest last summer. The officers closely followed cars driven by the commission chairman and his wife, and even set up a radar checkpoint at the end of the small cul-de-sac where he lives. One evening in June, the complaint says, a Wallkill patrol car drove back and forth in front of his home repeatedly; when he called the department to report the incident, the dispatcher said sarcastically that the officer ''must be lost.''
Over all, the complaint portrays the 25-member Police Department as unsupervised, untrained, and often unconstitutional in its accepted practices, and the Wallkill Town Board, comprising a supervisor and four members, as singularly uninterested in changes. Underscoring that point, state officials say, was the Town Board's decision last week to abolish the police commission.
After filing the complaint in United States District Court for the Southern District in Manhattan, Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer said in an interview yesterday that the town's refusal to cooperate with his agency's efforts to overhaul the department had forced him to go to court. The complaint asks that a federal monitor be appointed to oversee the department and that the town be compelled to make a series of changes.
''You have a total breakdown of the government structures that are supposed to ensure and enforce the rule of law,'' Mr. Spitzer said. He added, ''You have a police department out of control, a Town Board that failed to respond to the allegations that were being raised, and then retaliation by the Police Department against the very individuals who were raising the issues that needed to be addressed.''
Yesterday at Town Hall, which is within sledding distance of the mall, the town supervisor, Tom Nosworthy, tried to hustle past a reporter while hugging a copy of the complaint. When pressed for comment, Mr. Nosworthy said he was ''absolutely'' concerned about the complaint, but he declined to say anything further.
But the matter has clearly upended the community. Oscar Dino, the police commission chairman who figures so prominently in the complaint, noted that he lives a mile up the road from James Coscette, the police chief who was suspended last year amid allegations of impropriety, including a charge that he had sex with a woman in the back of his squad car.
''I know everybody here, and everybody knows me,'' Mr. Dino said. ''This has torn the town literally in half.''
Wallkill, about 80 miles northwest of Manhattan, is rooted in a small, rural tradition -- in 1960 it had only 8,000 residents -- but in recent decades it has attracted New York City emigrants and commercial development. Route 211, once a quiet country road, is now nicknamed Miracle Mile for the medley of familiar restaurant and retail franchises it offers.
But Wallkill was also known among other law enforcement agencies for its unprofessional and surly Police Department. The reputation was cemented after Halloween night in 1999, when masked men burst into an older couple's home and beat them with baseball bats and robbed them. The Wallkill police told the State Police that their services were not needed, and refused to cooperate with the Orange County district attorney's office on the case.
The district attorney's office complained about the exclusion to the Wallkill police commission, a small group of citizens appointed to oversee the department. The commission decided to investigate last January, at the same time that a federal jury was awarding $200,000 to a Wallkill police sergeant because he was harassed by colleagues for being a whistleblower; $75,000 of the payment was to come from the police chief himself. | The New York attorney general's office has filed a federal civil rights complaint yesterday against the small upstate town of Wallkill, charging that it has failed to corral a lawless police department whose officers pull over female drivers to solicit dates, refuse to cooperate with other law enforcement agencies, and systematically harass their many critics, from town officials to the local newspaper. With news of the aggressive action, an Orange County town formerly known best for a mall, the Galleria at Crystal Run, and the city of Middletown suddenly found itself being described as the Catskill equivalent of ''Copland,'' and the subject of unfamiliar and unwanted attention. The initial reaction of some residents was to discount the charges as minor and nothing they could not take care of themselves. | 7.068966 | 0.993103 | 71.724138 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/02/24/silver-run-biggest-ipo-year/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160606035803id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/02/24/silver-run-biggest-ipo-year/ | Here's What the Biggest IPO of the Year Says About the Market | 20160606035803 | It would be hard to find two parts of the market investors are more wary of these days than IPOs and energy.
Energy stocks are down 28% in the past year. And there have been just five initial public offerings in 2016. That’s down from 27 at the same time a year ago. And this year’s IPOs have raised $886 million, or roughly 20% of the $4.7 billion that was raised in the first two months of last year.
No matter. Silver Run Acquisition Corp is making a go of it anyway. The company began trading on the NASDAQ on Wednesday. Silver Run doesn’t have earnings, or sales, or actually a business yet. It’s a so-called blank check company, or a special purpose acquisition corp. It plans to use the money it raises to buy up companies or assets in the beaten down oil and gas sector. But it doesn’t have any targets yet. The company is run by Mark Papa, the former CEO of EOG Resources.
Blank check IPOs experienced somewhat of a resurgence last year, with 20 of them coming to the market, the most since before the financial crisis. But they haven’t done that well. The shares of blank check IPOs that have gone public in the past two years are up just 1.9% since their IPOs.
And yet, at least on Wednesday, the combination of the oil and gas sector, the IPO market, and a blank check company was a hit. Silver Run’s IPO price was $10. Silver Run stock SRAQU was up slightly—around $0.10—at mid-day on Wednesday. That’s far from a home run for an IPO. But it’s definitely a win, given how weak the IPO market has been, and the fact that stocks in general were down on Wednesday. Many technology IPOs traded down on their first day of trading last year, and plenty have since fallen below their initial offering prices.
What’s more, Silver Run in the weeks before the offering, raised $450 million or $50 million more than was initially expected.
To be sure, blank check IPOs draw a certain type of investors who are generally willing to take on risk. And given how far energy has fallen, buying in now or in the near future seems like a good bet. And Silver Run has at least two years to invest the money it raised, so it can wait out the oil rout for now.
Nonetheless, the fact that Silver Run went public and wasn’t trounced is a sign that, despite the recent rockiness in the market, there is some optimism out there that things will get better. The VIX vix , or volatility index, which is usually called the market’s fear index, is only trading at 21. That’s half the 40 it hit last September, and far below the 80 it hit during the financial crisis.
On Tuesday, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase jpm , said that, despite rising losses in loans the bank has made to energy companies, he thought the economy would pull through its recent bumpiness.
Investors may not be enthusiastic about the market these days, but they seem willing to take some risks, and that’s a good sign. | It's surprisingly good. | 126.4 | 0.6 | 0.6 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02wwln_safire.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160606132604id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/04/02/magazine/02wwln_safire.html | Nodding Homer - New York Times | 20160606132604 | In his Ars Poetica, written about eight years before the Common Era, Quintus Horatius Flaccus we call him Horace for short took a flaccid pop at a Greek poet who wrote a couple of best sellers eight centuries earlier (the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," grist for Hollywood screenwriters nearly three millennia later). Horace noticed the reappearance of a character whom the author killed off previously in the epic, and noted in Latin, "Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus," translated as "Even good old Homer nods."
Sometimes Homer not only nods but falls fast asleep and slips off his pedestal. Here are a few of my recent mistakes pointed out by members of the newly formed Horace Society, a group of correcting souls gentler than the Gotcha! Gang:
'You Could Look It Up'
This is a useful admonition that I attributed to the master malapropist Casey Stengel, manager of four major-league baseball clubs, even using it as a title of a collection of these columns. He indeed said it. "In his old age," reports Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes, "Stengel was asked how he was doing. He sighed and said: 'Not bad. Most people my age are dead. You could look it up."' However, a Horace Society member, Allan Silver, points out that a generation earlier, in 1941, James Thurber wrote a short story for The Saturday Evening Post (he wasn't only at The New Yorker), which Stengel presumably read, about a desperate baseball team that used a midget as a pinch-hitter. Its title: "You Could Look It Up." So thank Stengel for popularizing it, but attribute the minatory classic to Thurber.
Now about attribute, the noun. In a column about the use of the word Saddamists by President Bush in lieu of "Saddam loyalists," I opined that the change was made "because loyalty, even to a tyrant, can be seen as an attribute." No less a Horace Society member than Jacques Barzun wrote: "Of course it can, but that's not what you mean. Red hair or second sight would also be attributes. You mean favorable attribute and must use some such adjective to make your point."
Is an attribute a quality, positive or negative, ascribed to a person, as Jacques and several others insist? Or is it, as the O.E.D. reports as a second sense, "distinguished quality or character; honor, credit, reputation ascribed." Shakespeare used it that way in "Hamlet": "It takes from our achievements. . .the pith and marrow of our attribute." I think that old, upbeat sense is overtaking today's first, neutral one, but it's not my job to hasten language change; for now, I pledge to treat attribute as a characteristic that can be either good or bad.
In a column on the word cronyism, I wrote, "Compere, French for 'godfather,' is used in Britain to mean 'master of ceremonies."' No; as a legion of "Sopranos" watchers pointed out, the French word for "godfather" is parrain; that was the French title of the movie "The Godfather." Compere has a sinister connotation as "accomplice," a friendlier one as "comrade" or "crony."
We Are All Phrasedicks Now
In an exegesis of the We are all. . .now construction, I credited coinage to the Nobel economist Milton Friedman, who startled his conservative colleagues in 1965 with "We are all Keynesians now," a concession to a liberal economic thinker on a par with the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller's "I accept the universe," which drew the response "By God, she'd better!" from Ralph Waldo Emerson or Thomas Carlyle. (I don't have a dog in that dispute.)
A bunch of Horaces pointed to the use by King Edward VII in 1895 of "We are all socialists now," but Fred Shapiro, compiler of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations promised this fall, will credit coinage of that to the progressive Sir William Harcourt, leader of the Liberal Party, in the House of Commons on Aug. 12, 1887. A few putative Horacites pointed to Thomas Jefferson's attempt to impose national unity on a fractious republic in his 1801 Inaugural Address: "We are all Republicans we are all Federalists." But it doesn't count because he didn't say now.
Poinsettias, the pronunciation of which I pointed out pointedly did not start out with point nor dropped the ee (say "poyn-SET-ee-uhs"), drew hoots from fans of our eponymous diplomat in Mexico, J.R. Poinsett, as well as the poinsettia growers of Encinitas, Calif. That was because I defined the new emblem of the holiday season as "a hardy, inexpensive, red-leafed plant." "Aha!" shouted Horace members. (Their battle cry is more triumphant than the Hooah! of the Gotcha! Gang, but friendlier than the nyah-nyah of the Nitpickers' League or its rump groups, the Nitpicker's League and the Nitpickers League.)
Those seemingly red leaves are surely red, but they are not strictly leaves; red-faced botanists insist they are bracts, which seem like petals and surround the flower. The answer to "What color is a poinsettia flower?" is "Yellow." The flower is blooming down there in the center of the bracts. You could look it up.
Send comments and suggestions to: safireonlanguage@nytimes.com. | The Horace Society takes its pops. | 155.285714 | 0.857143 | 1.142857 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://time.com/3968943/ralph-wilson-foundation/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160607232549id_/http://time.com:80/3968943/ralph-wilson-foundation/ | Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation to Grant $60 Million in 2015 | 20160607232549 | The Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, named after the founder of the Buffalo Bills football franchise, will launch later this year with the goal of giving $1.2 billion to charity, according to trustees of the organization.
Wilson, originally from Detroit, sold the team for $1.4 billion in 2014 and died at the age of 95 in March of this year. Throughout his life, he also owned manufacturing, mining, insurance and other businesses.
The foundation will focus on “five pillars”: healthy lifestyles, youth development, caregivers, community development, and economic growth; the foundation will target Wilson’s hometown of Detroit and surrounding areas along with his adopted town of Buffalo, NY, and its surrounding vicinity, reported The Detroit News.
Over the past 20 years, Wilson had amassed $1.2 billion for the foundation through an irrevocable trust; $60 million in grants will be available in 2015.
“Ralph saw firsthand the impact of his generosity in his lifetime,” Mary Wilson, his widow, said. “Always thinking of others even in his own legacy, his hope with this trust was that the foundation’s work may make a direct impact in the lifetimes of those who knew him best.” | It will focus on five philanthropic areas in the Detroit and Buffalo areas. | 17 | 0.857143 | 1.571429 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/27/arts/pei-s-pyramid-design-for-the-louvre-sparks-debate-in-paris.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609003436id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1984/02/27/arts/pei-s-pyramid-design-for-the-louvre-sparks-debate-in-paris.html | PEI'S PYRAMID DESIGN FOR THE LOUVRE SPARKS DEBATE IN PARIS | 20160609003436 | PARIS, Feb. 26— Its enemies refer to it as Pharaoh Francois's Pyramid. Its supporters consider it a brilliant architectural project.
Until work begins in 1986, the passions, both real and feigned, are not likely to go away concerning President Francois Mitterrand's recent decision to start expanding the Louvre, and with it, to build a glass pyramid in the museum's courtyard.
The pyramid, designed by the American architect I. M. Pei, will house an underground entrance to the enlarged museum. Sitting in the middle of the Cour Napoleon, it is described by its supporters as having no effect on the extraordinary perspective streaming from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe.
But that kind of thinking, the detractors say, is confusing the pyramid's transparency with its emptiness as an idea.
The pyramid will be four-sided, 65 1/2 feet high and almost 105 feet wide, and clear in color. Mr. Pei has explained its conception by saying that since much of the expansion of the museum will involve underground passageways, something will be needed to enliven them and the new entrance.
Because much of the work on the overall expansion project is dependent on the departure in 1986 of the Finance Ministry from one of the wings of the Louvre, a rear-guard action against the project is expected until then. Some of its opponents, for example, have called for a mock-up of the pyramid so that people could make their own judgments on its merits.
The main opposition to the pyramid - there is wide support for the other aspects of the Louvre's expansion program - has been centered around testimony before the Historical Monuments Commission, an advisory body. Bertrand Monnet, a former chief architect for the commission, described the project as incongruous - a gigantic, shimmering gadget with monstrous volume that would spoil the courtyard's symmetry.
Mr. Monnet saved his strongest attack for the very notion of a pyramid in the middle of the Louvre. ''What is there in common between these monuments, which express life and death and the great beyond in the middle of the desert, and the Louvre?'' he asked. ''It's outside of our mental space. The Louvre has an important Egyptian collection, but it is very much something else as a museum.''
Guillaume Gillet, the chief architect for public works and national palaces, counterattacked, saying the overall plan is ''excellent, clear, balanced, perfectly classic, and one that will help move people around logically in a gigantic edifice that will discover the unity it's always been lacking.''
Some of the anger in the press about the project, a state undertaking whose cost is estimated at $250 million to $350 million, appears to have a political tinge. The strongest campaign against the project has been led by Le Figaro, a conservative newspaper that usually places any decision by the Socialist Government on the level of disaster or incoherence. However, Le Monde, which normally is far less critical of Mr. Mitterrand's policies, hardly offered its support this time, publishing a commentary by a staff member that said of the pyramid: ''You have to rub your eyes. You think you're dreaming. You would think you're back at the time of 'castles-for-sale' and Hollywood reconstructions of the temple of Solomon, and Anthony and Cleopatra.''
The problem with the opposition to the project, according to Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture, who chose Mr. Pei - no competition or submission of bids for the contract took place - is that in ''Paris, new ideas always cause polemics.''
''In France, a kind of conservatism exists that is paired with ignorance,'' Mr. Lang said. ''There's nothing like contemporary architecture to get all the vehemence going. It's a French sickness.''
But the decision on a national monument, such as the Louvre, belongs to the president. Mr. Mitterrand, in announcing his choice to go ahead with the pyramid, said it was a final one. The intensity of the complaints of the pyramid's opponents, however, suggests they still think they can modify it. | Its enemies refer to it as Pharaoh Francois's Pyramid. Its supporters consider it a brilliant architectural project. Until work begins in 1986, the passions, both real and feigned, are not likely to go away concerning President Francois Mitterrand's recent decision to start expanding the Louvre, and with it, to build a glass pyramid in the museum's courtyard. The pyramid, designed by the American architect I. M. Pei, will house an underground entrance to the enlarged museum. Sitting in the middle of the Cour Napoleon, it is described by its supporters as having no effect on the extraordinary perspective streaming from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe. | 6.464 | 0.984 | 45.832 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/world/middleeast/25egypt.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609010451id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/04/25/world/middleeast/25egypt.html?_r=1& | 30 Are Killed in Sinai as Bombs Rock Egyptian Resort City | 20160609010451 | DAHAB, Egypt, Tuesday, April 25 Three blasts tore through Dahab, a crowded resort town on the Sinai Peninsula, on Monday night, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 115.
Blood stained the road Monday night outside a shop in Dahab, after it was wrecked by a bomb. The Sinai resort is popular with budget travelers. More Photos »
The attack, the third at a popular Sinai resort in two years, once again raised the specter of one of the United States' closest allies in the Arab world facing a homegrown terrorist threat trying to destabilize the government.
There was confusion in the hours after the blasts, but what was clear was that this resort town on the Gulf of Aqaba, a quaint tourist spot frequented by back-packers and scuba divers, was awash in blood on one of the most popular holiday weekends of the Egyptian calendar.
It was the third time that terrorists struck near a national holiday. It is on this day that Egypt celebrates the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from Sinai in 1982.
"I do not think it is a coincidence that this attack happens amid celebration of Sinai Liberation Day," the interior minister, Habib al-Adli, said on Egyptian television. "The other two attacks in Taba and Sharm el Sheik also took place during celebration of national occasions; that raises question marks.
"We will catch all those responsible very soon."
Egyptian authorities at first said the bombs appeared to have been detonated by remote control. Later a local official said the explosions appeared to be the work of suicide bombers. An investigator at the scene on Tuesday morning said that the bombs were all timed explosive packs, and that there was no evidence of suicide attackers.
The bombs started going off at about 7:15 p.m., in the center of the city, where the streets were packed with tourists also celebrating the Coptic observance of Easter on Sunday and the ancient Egyptian spring festival of Sham el Nessim.
The commerical strip of this tiny resort center stretches along the azure waters of the bay, and those who planted the bombs set their deadly packages from one end of the walkway to the other.
First hit was the Nelson Restaurant, then the Aladdin Cafe and then the Ghazala Supermarket, all within five minutes. The blasts were not huge, but large enough to spread destruction up and down the walks, which were stained with blood.
As survivors ran for cover, television images showed a grisly scene with charred body parts, and merchants trying to cover the blackened boardwalk with newspaper. Ambulances rushed in a procession from Cairo, more than six hours away, to help carry the wounded to hospitals.
"Bodies were everywhere," said Ahmed el Tabakh, who said he ran into the middle of the chaos moments after the blast near the supermarket. "We carried bodies until the government came."
The wounded were ferried by cars to the local hospital, and then to a larger hospital in Sharm el Sheikh, two hours away.
By morning, as the sun rose over the bay, people had begun to clean up the mess and sort through the rubble. The windows of shops catering to tourists with names like Lotus Flower and Mona Lisa were smashed.
Investigators worked carefully scooping up forensic evidence, sweeping ashes and charred debris into bags.
"With the sound of the explosion we thought it was Judgment Day," said Addal Ramadan, who was working in a mobile phone shop near the site of one of the blasts. He said he saw at least 30 people on the ground.
Officials said that the bombings did not appear to be sophisticated, and that the blasts did not appear as powerful as attacks in Taba in October 2004 and in Sharm el Sheikh in July 2005. The Taba attack killed 34 people and the Sharm el Sheikh bombing left at least 60 dead.
"Our initial investigation proved that this operation was not sophisticated, and the explosions were not very strong," said Mr. Adli, the interior minister. "The explosives were done in a very basic way."
Dahab, which means gold in Arabic, is more out of the way than the popular Sharm el Sheik or Taba. It is effectively two villages, a Bedouin village in the south and the administrative center in the north. Like other areas in the Sinai, Dahab remains popular among Israelis. Last week, many Israelis visited during the long Passover weekend, but most had left by Wednesday.
When terrorists first struck in 2004, the government said the attack appeared to be an extension of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. When bombers struck again in Sinai, the government acknowledged that the two attacks were linked, and that they had been carried out by residents of the northern Sinai. For months, Egypt's security forces chased suspected terrorists in the craggy mountains there.
Now Egypt is once again acknowledging a pattern, though officials said it is far too soon to determine if the three blasts on Monday were connected with the earlier attacks. The one in Taba occurred one day after a holiday commemorating the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The one in Sharm el Sheik occurred on July 23, or Revolution Day.
President Hosni Mubarak called the blasts a "sinful terrorist action" and vowed to track down those responsible.
In Washington, President Bush also condemned the attacks, as did the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, the militant group that recently won control of the Palestinian government.
Early reports said that at least four foreigners had been killed in Dahab, along with many Egyptians.
Amr el-Choubaki, a military analyst with the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said the three bombings in two years demonstrated that there are small, liked-minded if independent cells of terrorists operating in Egypt.
"Since Taba we are starting to see new clusters of cells that don't have a comprehensive project," he said. "They are cries of objection aiming to harm and pain the regime."
But he also said the attacks demonstrated a failure on the part of state security, which he says has focused too much of its energy on political opposition. "The security structure is distracted and busy confronting opposition parties, judges and journalists," he said, "and is not making combating terrorist organizations its primary goal."
The attack came one day after Al Jazeera television network broadcast an audiotape said to be of Osama bin Laden. There was no evidence that Mr. bin Laden or his Qaeda network was connected to the attacks.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting for this article. | Three blasts tore through the crowded resort town of Dahab in the third attack at a popular Sinai resort in two years. | 56.086957 | 1 | 4.304348 | high | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/01/14/davos-attendees-women/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609034213id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/01/14/davos-attendees-women/ | Davos Is 18% Women This Year-Here Are the Ones to Watch | 20160609034213 | Earlier this week, Angela Merkel canceled her trip to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. That’s a blow to the famed confab, and not just because Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany and the defacto leader of Europe: She’s also one of the few women to make the cut.
Held in Davos, Switzerland, the Forum is one of the world’s largest and most high-profile annual gatherings of business and government leaders. At this year’s event, an underwhelming 18% of the roughly 2,900 attendees will be women—just one percentage point more than attended last year.
The WEF has received criticism in the past for the lack of gender parity at the annual event and has tried to remedy the issue with a “concerted effort” to get more women involved, says Saadia Zahidi, head of employment and gender initiatives at the WEF.
In 2011, group instituted a policy that required that WEF’s strategic partners, which typically bring delegations of five or more people to the event, must have at least one person with a gender different from that of the larger group (e.g. four men and one woman) in attendance. Then, in 2015, WEF launched a global initiative to push to equalize the gender split.
While these moves have prompted some positive change, ultimately the Davos crowd is “a reflection of what is happening externally,” says Zahidi. “As [industry] numbers change, we are improving as well,” she says, noting that women’s participation has increased from 15% to 18% over the last five years, and that it was just 9% in 2000.
In reality, 18% actually exceeds the representation of women in global leadership. When it comes to business, there are just 22 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—or 4.4%. Politics are not much more diverse, with 18 female world leaders and a mere 22% female national parliamentarians. Women are also globally underrepresented in academia, and even social impact organizations are male-dominated, with women comprising just 33% of nonprofits with incomes of more than $25 million.
This year, there are six co-chairs of the Forum, evenly split between men and women (last year’s split was four men and two women). “There is an effort to integrate women [in the event] whenever possible,” says Zahidi, noting that the selection of co-chairs is one area where the WEF is not reliant on external factors.
Among the three female leads is General Motors CEO Mary Barra, who came in at the top of Fortune‘s list of Most Powerful Women in 2015. Most recently, Barra has been credited with creating the first truly mass-market electric car. Joining Barra in chairing the conference are Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the world’s largest trade union; and Amira Yahyaoui, a human rights activist and the founder and chair of Tunisian social empowerment NGO Al Bawsala.
Although all 18 global female leaders were invited, only two will be attending the Forum: Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite and Norway’s Prime Minister Ema Solberg. Of course, changemakers do not necessarily have to be heads of state, and some notable political figures in attendance will include Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); Cristiana Figueres, the executive secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (in charge of making sure countries around the world abide by the UN’s environmental guidelines); and Rania Al-Abdullah, the queen consort of Jordan, who has become known for her advocacy work related to health and education.
Within the U.S. government delegation, women are fairly well-represented. Attendees include Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of Health and Human Services; Loretta Lynch, U.S. attorney-general; and Gina Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island.
Many of the business executives coming to Switzerland next week also appear on Fortune‘s MPW list. These include Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (no. 8), Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman (no. 7), Mondelez chairman and CEO Irene Rosenfeld (no. 9), Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbert (no. 21), and Ingredion president, chairman, and CEO Ilene Gordon (no. 45). “We are trying to ensure that any major companies that are Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 that have female CEOs are invited,” says Zahidi.
These CEOs, heads of state, and activists are some of the most accomplished people in the world—but they are undoubtedly not the only women out there who deserve a seat at the table. “We want Davos 10 years from now to look very different than it looks today,” says Zahidi. Here’s hoping that desire becomes a reality. | The share of female attendees ticked up 1 percentage point this year. | 71.692308 | 0.692308 | 1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/03/women-tech-ivf-pregnancy/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609040757id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/03/women-tech-ivf-pregnancy/? | Why Women in Finance and Tech Have a Really Hard Time Getting Pregnant | 20160609040757 | As more women have joined the workforce—increasingly pushing into male-dominated fields and claiming plum spots in the C-suites of the Fortune 500—we have also seen a surge in the number of women accessing fertility treatment care.
Of course, correlation is not causation. There are undoubtedly many factors driving the increase in vitro and other fertility treatments. But that’s all the more reason for us to try to get a clearer picture of how a woman’s work is related to her fertility—a task my wife and I decided to undertake, gathering data from more than 1,000 fertility patients across the U.S.
The average successful IVF patient spends more than $60,000 on a treatment cycle, and approximately 70% of those cycles fail. With that kind of financial burden, it would seem logical that women in high-earning fields, such as investment banking, who are more likely to be able to afford multiple cycles, would dramatically outperform lower-earners like teachers in IVF success rates.
And yet, counterintuitively, just the opposite is true.
Our analysis revealed that occupation is one of the most significant indicators of fertility treatment success. We found that teachers are six times more likely to be successful with IVF than their peers in other professions (after adjusting for conflating factors like age, education level, and geography).
The investment bankers? They placed next to last, faring just a hair better than technology engineers (that’s despite the well-reported fertility benefits—such as egg freezing—offered by tech giants like Facebook fb and Apple aapl ). Patients working in these two occupations were a staggering 60% less likely to have a successful IVF outcome compared with their peers.
How can we explain such a significant difference in treatment success in patients across the country? We believe it’s due to the grim reality of what it means to be a fertility patient, which requires resources money can’t buy:
Modern science has not mastered infertility: An IVF cycle requires constant monitoring by physicians, dose adjustments, and multiple surgeries, all on the tightest of timelines. The fact is, you cannot be a successful IVF patient unless you contort your existence to the rigors of the process.
“Our schedules are definitely more flexible” is a common refrain from teachers who have undergone IVF. Compare this to the life of an investment banker, a job known for its grueling pace. “There was no room in my job to take a day off, let alone a week,” commented one former investment banker.
In addition to time, teachers also typically have a large support system. As one teacher noted, she knew 10 other teachers in her school who went through IVF and had an open dialogue throughout the treatment process. As most fertility therapists, or any healthcare professional, will tell you, community helps. When that community is able to provide fertility doctor recommendations, occasional coverage at work, and emotional support, it becomes irreplaceable.
In contrast, women in high pressure, male-dominated jobs are less likely to have that workplace support system. Their treatment is too often shrouded in secrecy, with some women in research reporting that they do not dare tell their bosses or colleagues for fear of being overlooked for a promotion or relegated to the “mommy track.” That experience can be lonely and “stressful beyond belief.”
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Speaking of stress, jobs that take a psychic toll on women in fertility treatment—either due to the anxiety of hiding the process from co-workers or simply the demands of the roll—can also affect results. According to RESOLVE, a non-profit dedicated to reproductive health, 10 of the last 14 major studies on the subject suggest that “the more anxiety or depression the women expressed before undergoing IVF, the less likely they were to get pregnant.”
Given these findings, it would be easy for us to dismiss Silicon Valley and Wall Street as ruthlessly callous toward women pursuing fertility treatment. The truth, however, is that it’s easier for companies to protect the interest of working mothers than hopeful mothers.
Working mothers have undeniable competing responsibilities because they have kids. Fertility patients do not. Working mothers self-identify and have a voice. Fertility patients are often shrouded in stigma and opt not to tell a soul. Working mothers draw strength from their peers. Fertility patients are a small and often temporary community.
It can be hard for people to recognize that that infertility needs the full-time devotion required by a sick child or an illness. Indeed, companies often benefit from one of infertility’s contributing factors: an unflappable devotion to work that supplants our ability to build a family before it’s too late. Now, one in eight couples is reported to be infertile. It’s time to recognize this phenomenon for what it is: a crisis.
Jake Anderson-Bialis is a former partner at Sequoia Capital and the co-founder of FertilityIQ, an online community where patients assess fertility doctors and clinics. | They are 60% less likely to have a successful IVF outcome than their peers. | 62.0625 | 1 | 7 | high | high | mixed |
http://nypost.com/2016/03/01/two-more-executives-leave-tidal/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609052159id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/03/01/two-more-executives-leave-tidal/ | Two more executives leave Tidal | 20160609052159 | There were more distressing sounds coming out of Jay Z’s music streaming service on Tuesday.
Tidal, the troubled music service owned by the hip-hop star and some of the music industry’s biggest names, let go its chief financial officer and chief operating officer.
CFO Chris Hart and COO Nils Juell left the company as it moved its accounting and operations team from Oslo, Norway, to New York, Tidal said in a statement.
The move comes as Tidal grows and expands into 46 countries, it said.
While the company just announced the moves on Tuesday, Hart is said to have exited five months ago. Juell left on Feb. 18.
The news comes just a day after Tidal got hit with a $5 million class-action lawsuit.
The suit, brought against S. Carter Enterprises and Black Panther Bidco, claims copyright infringement and a “breach of the calculation of compulsory royalty rates owed.”
Tidal hit back, saying in a statement that it is “up to date on all royalties for the rights to the music stated in Yesh Music, LLC.”
When Jay Z and pals launched Tidal last May, they promised it would be a place that looked after artists. Madonna and Kanye West are among almost 20 equity holders in the company.
That mission has so far proved difficult to live up to.
The Post last week reported on Tidal’s issues with its royalty payments.
After the story, one music insider told The Post that Tidal did make some royalty payments, but that the “months they did pay are missing US stream counts for many artists or showing one single play per track coming from the US — which is extremely abnormal.”
Lawyer Darren Oved, head of litigation with Oved & Oved, told The Post that it was time for Tidal to get its act together, adding that Tidal needs to get the basics right before it can show growth.
Some of the issues have arisen as a result of acquiring a small streaming service based in Scandinavia that perhaps wasn’t ready to handle a huge increase in volume, sources close to Tidal said.
Tidal has also had more than a few front-office changes.
The first face of the company, Vania Schlogel, the chief investment officer at Jay Z’s Roc Nation who fronted the Tidal launch event a year ago, lasted just eight months, according to her LinkedIn page.
Two other executives — Andy Chen, who exited abruptly, to be replaced by an acting CEO, Peter Tonstad, who hit the door after a few months — have run Tidal since.
The current CEO, Jeff Toig, came from SoundCloud, where he was chief business officer. | There were more distressing sounds coming out of Jay Z’s music streaming service on Tuesday. Tidal, the troubled music service owned by the hip-hop star and some of the music industry’s biggest nam… | 13.125 | 0.95 | 18.25 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/14/health/death-of-a-president-a-200-year-old-malpractice-debate.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609053920id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1999/12/14/health/death-of-a-president-a-200-year-old-malpractice-debate.html | Death of a President | 20160609053920 | Two hundred years ago today, on Dec. 14, 1799, the first president of the United States died at the age of 67 in his bed at Mount Vernon. George Washington's doctors said the cause was ''inflammatory quinsy,'' a severe infection of the throat, but to this day controversy has surrounded his death.
That debate -- did Washington die because of medical malpractice? -- is vividly evoked, though not resolved, in an article in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. The author, Dr. David Morens, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, pulls together details about Washington's treatment from dozens of published medical and historical sources over nearly two centuries.
''What I've tried to do is describe the medical events and also set Washington's final days in a social and cultural context,'' Dr. Morens, 51, said in an interview. ''My study shows that accusations of malpractice were very much in the air during and immediately after the great man died.''
Dr. Morens writes that when Washington's throat swelled so painfully that he could not swallow, he asked his doctors to bleed him. At the time it was standard medical practice, but the amount of blood removed was staggering -- 80 ounces, or 5 pints, in a single day -- and many people questioned whether he had been bled to death.
While Dr. Morens's article does not come down firmly on one side or the other, he said in the interview: ''I would probably not call it medical malpractice in the context of today's usage. It's hard to know what his doctors meant by 'inflammatory quinsy' in that premicrobe time. I believe the symptoms point to the modern diagnosis of acute bacterial epiglottitis. No autopsy was performed.''
Further, Dr. Morens said, the bloodletting itself probably did not kill Washington. The retired president was a big man -- 6 feet 3 1/2 inches tall. (That was also the height of Abraham Lincoln, who once described himself as 6 feet 4 inches ''nearly.'')
The article notes that in 1799, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a renowned physician, signer of the Declaration of the Independence and onetime surgeon general of the Continental Army, was defending himself against allegations of malpractice because of excessive bloodletting.
He sued a journalist who accused him of killing patients. Dr. Rush won his case -- on Dec. 14, as it happened -- but the verdict did not allay the popular suspicion that bleeding could be harmful.
Still, bloodletting did not die out as a regular practice until the mid-19th century.
On Washington's fateful day, Albin Rawlins, one of his overseers and a bloodletter, was summoned. Washington bared his arm. The overseer had brought his lancet and made an incision. Washington said, ''Don't be afraid.'' That day, Rawlins drew 12 ounces of blood, then 18 ounces, another 18 ounces and a final 32 ounces into a porcelain bleeding bowl.
After the fourth bloodletting, the patient improved slightly and was able to swallow. By about 10 p.m., his condition deteriorated, but he was still rational enough to whisper burial instructions to Col. Tobias Lear, his secretary.
At 10:20 p.m., Dr. James Craik, 69, an Edinburgh-trained physician who had served with Washington in the French and Indian Wars, closed Washington's eyes. Another Edinburgh-trained physician, Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, 52, was also present. The third physician, Dr. Elisha Cullen Dick, 37, who had been appointed coroner the previous year, stopped the clock in Washington's bedroom at that moment.
''With perfect resignation and in full possession of his reason,'' Colonel Lear wrote afterward, ''he closed his well-spent life.''
Apparently, the three doctors were not unanimous about the best means to treat Washington.
Dr. Dick argued that further bleeding might weaken the patient. Nevertheless, Dr. Craik ordered the fourth bleeding. Dr. Dick rejected Dr. Craik's diagnosis of inflammatory quinsy and suggested other possibilities, including cynanche trachealis, an obstruction of the passage leading to suffocation.
But these differences appeared after the fact, in response to public criticism. The article hints that the doctors were protecting their personal reputations to avoid charges of malpractice.
Although Dr. Morens's article does not deal with them, some of Washington's contemporaries raised questions about his health and state of mind after his arduous military service and two presidential terms. In 1818, Thomas Jefferson reminisced about Washington's last years at Mount Vernon:
''General Washington's memory was already sensibly impaired by age, the firm tone of mind for which he had been remarkable was beginning to relax, its energy was abated; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquillity, had crept on him, and there was a willingness to let others act and even think for him.''
In an interview last week, James Thomas Flexner, the well-known biographer of Washington, said it was still unclear exactly what disease had killed the first president, but dismissed the idea of malpractice.
''Down the years doctors have speculated on Washington's illness,'' he said. ''One guess is diphtheria, another a virulent streptococcus infection of the throat. Either disease, in the state of medicine at that time, would have been fatal, regardless of the treatment prescribed.''
''Washington was old and sick by then,'' Mr. Flexner declared. ''It was perfectly clear that he knew he was dying, and he was getting ready to die. The doctors did what they did in those days. To believe otherwise is moonshine.''
Photo: ''Inflammatory quinsy,'' or too much bleeding? Washington on his deathbed, in an 1850's lithograph by Regnier and Lemercier. | Two hundred years ago today, on Dec. 14, 1799, the first president of the United States died at the age of 67 in his bed at Mount Vernon. George Washington's doctors said the cause was ''inflammatory quinsy,'' a severe infection of the throat, but to this day controversy has surrounded his death. That debate -- did Washington die because of medical malpractice? -- is vividly evoked, though not resolved, in an article in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. The author, Dr. David Morens, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, pulls together details about Washington's treatment from dozens of published medical and historical sources over nearly two centuries. | 8.291971 | 0.992701 | 67.868613 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/06/science/new-research-overturns-a-milestone-of-infancy.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609064456id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1989/06/06/science/new-research-overturns-a-milestone-of-infancy.html? | New Research Overturns A Milestone Of Infancy | 20160609064456 | FOR years it was considered a mark of healthy development for infants at around nine months of age to show distress at the presence of a stranger. Indeed, the dogma that ''stranger anxiety'' is a major milestone in an infant's emotional growth is still espoused in most books of advice for parents, and in many textbooks on child psychology.
But now developmental psychologists have concluded from recent research that whether an infant cries or not when a parent leaves or a stranger appears is determined by its temperament, not its level of emotional security. Some babies who cry in that situation may be emotionally healthy, while others may not.
The best measure of emotional health in an infant, many experts now say, is the day-to-day rapport between baby and parents, not the degree of anxiety when meeting strangers.
''Many infants who are quite healthy emotionally don't have stranger anxiety at all,'' said Stanley Greenspan, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating infants, and a clinical professor at George Washington University Medical School in Washington. ''Indeed, stranger anxiety, if extreme enough, can be a sign of problems, not healthy adaptation.''
Jay Belsky, a developmental psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, said that only in the last five years have a majority of experts ''begun to acknowledge that it's totally misguided to see such anxiety as a sign of security.''
The widely held if paradoxical belief that a baby's anxiety over strangers or separation from parents is a sign of emotional security followed from the pioneering work in the 1950's of John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst, and others who studied the bonds between infants and their parents. It was thought that at around 7 to 10 months of age stranger anxiety was a positive developmental step, a first indication that the infant could distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people. Such anxiety was also taken as an indirect sign of the depth of attachment the infant had formed with his or her parents.
Studies in orphanages had shown that infants raised there, who were presumed to be emotionally insecure because of lack of caring attention from an adult, often reached out to be held by any stranger, while children who were brought up in secure homes were more likely to show fear of strangers.
The most recent, and strongest, evidence against that view was published in the May issue of The Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The small but illuminating study was conducted by Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, and Nathan A. Fox, a developmental psychologist at the Institute for Child Study at the University of Maryland.
They analyzed the brain-wave patterns of 13 infants, 10 months of age, and found marked differences between those who later cried when their mothers left the room and those who did not. Those who cried tended to have far more brain-wave activity on the right front side of their brain than on the left even before their mothers left the room. Those who did not cry tended to have the reverse pattern. Negative and Positive Emotions
In other studies, Dr. Davidson has determined that activity in the right frontal area of the brain is associated with negative emotions like fear, while activity in the left frontal area is found during positive emotions like joy. They have observed these effects in infants as young as three days old.
In the new study, the brain activity was measured by a special cap, containing electronic sensors, that the infants wore while they sat at a feeding table. Their mothers then left the room. All but one of the infants who cried when their mothers went out of the room had much stronger activity on the right side, the seat of negative emotions, than the left. And every one of those who did not cry had stronger activity on the left side. The results strongly suggest that whether or not a baby cries in this situation is largely a matter of the baby's temperament.
In unpublished research done with Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard University, Dr. Davidson found that 3-year-olds who are inhibited and fearful had the same pattern of higher brain activation in the right frontal region as did the younger infants who cried when their mothers left the room. The research suggested that the pattern of brain activity was a sign of temperament, which shows up in different ways at different ages.
Experts on child development now say that security in infants is not measured by whether they get upset when confronted with a stranger but rather by whether they are able to find solace and be soothed after becoming upset. The baby's capacity to be consoled has been studied in a test called the ''strange situation,'' developed by Mary Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist at the University of Virginia.
The test involves observations of an infant as a stranger enters the room and as the baby's mother leaves for three minutes and then returns. Of particular significance is what the infant does when the mother returns, whether or not the infant cried in her absence. Managing the Temperament | LEAD: FOR years it was considered a mark of healthy development for infants at around nine months of age to show distress at the presence of a stranger. Indeed, the dogma that ''stranger anxiety'' is a major milestone in an infant's emotional growth is still espoused in most books of advice for parents, and in many textbooks on child psychology. | 14.043478 | 0.971014 | 65.057971 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/benedict-cumberbatch-dr-strange-suprise-visit-article-1.2587212 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609072737id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/benedict-cumberbatch-dr-strange-suprise-visit-article-1.2587212 | Benedict Cumberbatch as ‘Dr. Strange’ makes surprise visit | 20160609072737 | It was a "Strange" afternoon for some lucky comic book fans shopping in Manhattan.
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays "Dr. Strange" and is currently filming in New York City, marveled shoppers and store employees when he showed up unannounced at JHU Comic Books on 32nd Street.
The 39-year-old actor, who was wearing his "Dr. Strange" costume and had a movie crew in tow, arrived around 3:30 p.m. Sunday and stayed for about five minutes, according to one of the store's manager's, Rene Rosa.
"He said he came to specifically to see us since it would ridiculous not to visit a comic book store because he was filming nearby," Rosa told the News via phone.
Since it was a surprise visit, the onscreen sorcerer was able to dash in and out with little fanfare — just like his magician character.
"There were only about five or six people in the store, but everyone went crazy when they saw him," Rosa said. "One lady screamed at her boyfriend, 'Did you see what just happened?' But he was in the back looking at comics, not paying attention."
Before flying off, Cumberbatch posed for photos with the store's employees and some of their "Dr. Strange" merchandise.
"I don't usually get starstruck, but it was so surreal to have the guy playing Dr. Strange in the store," Rosa said of the mystical encounter. "It was definitely hard not to feel like a little child." | It was a Strange Sunday afternoon for some lucky comic book fans shopping in Manhattan. | 18.625 | 1 | 8.25 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/ciara-slaps-ex-boyfriend-future-15m-defamation-suit-article-1.2526060 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609112759id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/gossip/ciara-slaps-ex-boyfriend-future-15m-defamation-suit-article-1.2526060 | Ciara slaps ex-boyfriend Future with $15M defamation suit | 20160609112759 | Platinum-selling pop star Ciara is suing her rapper ex-boyfriend Future to the tune of $15 million, claiming his “venomous tweets” and press statements caused permanent damage to her career.
In her defamation lawsuit filed in Fulton County, Georgia, Ciara claims Future acted with "actual malice" when he described her as calculating and controlling and someone who would use their son for “publicity stunts.”
The exes were engaged in 2013 but broke up a few months after their son was born in May 2014.
The “Love Sex Magic” singer now is dating NFL star Russell Wilson, the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks.
Ciara claims in her filing that Future acted with “actual malice” when he falsely claimed in a highly publicized Jan. 4 Twitter rant that she blocked his access to their son despite his monthly child support payments of $15,000.
“This b---- got control problems…” one of the tweets said, according to the lawsuit obtained by the Daily News.
RUSSELL WILSON HAD HELP FROM GOOGLE FOR SWEET SOCIAL MEDIA CAPTIONS ABOUT CIARA
“I gotta go through lawyers to see babyfuture…the f---ery for 15k a month,” a follow-up tweet posted within minutes said.
The tweets “were so completely false that defendant had to know the damage he would cause plaintiff,” Ciara claims in her lawsuit.
“Defendant has never paid the plaintiff ‘15k a month’ for child support ever, but he made this statement deliberately to cast the plaintiff in a negative and disparaging light,” the filing states.
Ciara said Future has had ample access to their child and saw him on 19 different occasions over the last 13 months.
“Some of those occasions spanned several days. (Ciara) has gone out of her way to bring the minor child to Georgia to spend time with the defendant,” her filing claims.
“(Ciara) has never withheld the minor child from defendant and has offered numerous dates for visitation that the defendant has declined,” the lawsuit states.
FUTURE FANS STORM CIARA AND RUSSELL WILSON'S TWITTER ACCOUNTS WITH PURPLE RAIN EMOJIS
“Plaintiff’s name, professional reputation, reputation as a good mother and brand have been significantly injured,” the lawsuit alleges.
Ciara, whose full name is Ciara Harris, says she asked Future to delete his Jan. 4 tweets and apologize, but he largely ignored her.
He scrubbed the “control problems” tweet on Jan. 6 but left the other up, her lawsuit claims.
Ciara (l.) and her son in New York City. Rapper Future (r.) has been accused of acting with "actual malice" when he made comments about Ciara on Twitter.
She argues Future started harming her back in July 2015 when he allegedly began divulging details about their personal lives in press interviews.
She was particularly hurt by his suggestion during a radio interview with “The Breakfast Club” on Power 105.1 that she staged a paparazzi photo showing Wilson pushing their son in a stroller.
“She probably set him up. You got nannies, you got assistants around you, anybody could’ve pushed that stroller. You letting them catch that photo. I’m not for the publicity stunts. Leave my son out of all the publicity stunts,” Future said in the interview, according to the lawsuit.
Future, whose real name is Nayvadius Wilburn, also told the music magazine XXL that Ciara was “just being evil” to thwart his time in the spotlight, the filing states.
“Defendant’s false and defamatory statements were clearly published with actual malice,” the lawsuit claims.
“(Ciara) is recognized as a pillar in her community as she is extremely active in community service and philanthropy. (Ciara) is also known to be a great mother,” the filing claims.
Attempts to reach reps for Future were not immediately successful Tuesday.
The lawsuit was filed Jan. 21. | Pop star Ciara is suing her rapper ex-boyfriend Future for $15 million, claiming his “venomous tweets” damaged her career. | 29.576923 | 0.961538 | 8.884615 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/conrad-hilton-prison-family-not-surprised | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609121940id_/http://www.people.com/article/conrad-hilton-prison-family-not-surprised | Family Not Surprised : People.com | 20160609121940 | 06/07/2016 AT 09:00 PM EDT
The news that wealthy heir
for violating his parole may have shocked some, but his famous family is hardly reeling from the news.
"Of course they're disappointed," says a source of 22-year-old Conrad's parents
. "But the news wasn't a surprise for anyone. Conrad has had a drug problem for years, since he was a teen, and it's never gotten better."
and Barron Hilton, Conrad was sentenced on Monday to two months in prison for admitting that he used drugs in violation of his parole
Sadly, the Hilton family is no stranger to potentially dangerous brushes with the law. Barron, 26,
for her own parole violation. And Kathy's sister, former
"Given what the family has been through, they're almost in denial," says the insider. "The Hiltons cope by deflecting. They're very good at ignoring problems."
And for now, the family is focused on an impending new addition. Nicky, 32, will
, a girl, in July.
"Everyone is thinking about the baby," says the insider. "It's just sad Conrad won't be there for his niece's birth." | The youngest Hilton was sentenced to two months in prison for violating his parole | 17.357143 | 0.928571 | 3.642857 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/18/okcupid-data-research/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609210601id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/18/okcupid-data-research/ | Researchers Caused an Uproar For Publishing OkCupid Users' Data | 20160609210601 | Earlier this month, Danish researchers published data from the online profiles of nearly 70,000 OkCupid users—including usernames, political leanings, drug usage, and intimate sexual details—creating a privacy firestorm.
The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used data scraping software developed by a third contributor, Oliver Nordbjerg, to collect the information for a study that explored, among other things, the thinking of people on the site. They posted the database along with a draft paper on Open Science Framework, a site that encourages open source science research and collaboration.
Unlike recent incidents at Ashley Madison, a site for people seeking extramarital affairs, as well as some adult networks that cater to people with fetishes, the OkCupid research did not involve a security breach. That didn’t stop the ensuing controversy.
“Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data,” the authors wrote in the draft paper, which has since been pulled. “However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form.”
Online commenters, OkCupid users, the site’s operators, and academics attacked (and, in some cases, threatened) the researchers for making user information public. Some questioned whether such data harvesting, bundling, and broadcasting is justifiable for academic research and whether it crosses ethical and legal lines.
Although the researchers did not release the real names and pictures of the OkCupid users, critics noted that their identities could easily be uncovered from the details provided—such as from the usernames. “Your private life is a few big leaks away from being an inescapable matter of public record, once a statistician with BitTorrent gets bored,” said Scott Weingart, a digital humanities specialist at Carnegie Mellon University, mused in a post on Twitter twtr . He added that it would be easy to identify more than 10,000 of the people in the data dump and link them to their sexual inclinations.
Kirkegaard said that his group posted people’s usernames because it found the data on these self-selected pseudonyms to be scientifically interesting. (What does use of the word “hot” in an alias say about its subject, for example?) He also argued that retaining the information in the dataset would allow certain missing details—like height, profile text, or photos—to be added later.
The data, collected from November 2014 to March 2015, is indeed public—sort of. Some of it like bios, photos, age, gender, sexual orientation is easily accessible through basic Google goog searches. Answers to some 2,600 of the service’s most popular dating survey questions are restricted to people who are logged into the site and who have answered the same questions.
The site’s users can also set certain answers to “private,” which makes the responses inaccessible to others. In this case, the researchers scraped and presented the data accessible through Google and Q&A responses from individual profiles.
“We thought this was an obvious case of public data scraping so that it would not be a legal problem,” Kirkegaard wrote to Fortune.
Last week after the appearance of the dataset began inciting an uproar, Open Science Framework, the site that hosted the data, placed it behind a password-protected wall. OkCupid then filed a copyright claim on Friday ordering the site to take it down altogether. The page where the data initially appeared was initially changed to read: “Unavailable for legal reasons.” Now it simply states “Content removed.”
The editorial board at Open Differential Psychology, the journal to which the researchers submitted the accompanying paper (and where Kirkegaard is the editor), is currently reviewing the submission, Kirkegaard told the science blog Retraction Watch. “If the journal does not take the paper, we will probably publish it elsewhere,” he said.
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OkCupid, owned by InterActivCorp’s iac Match Group mtch , released a statement that complained about the published data. “This was a violation of our terms of service and we sent a take-down notice,” Mathew Traub, a spokesperson for OkCupid, told Fortune in an email. “They appear to have complied.”
Kirkegaard said in a Twitter post that he did not ask the company for permission to collect or publish the data beforehand. Some commenters have argued that the researchers breached research ethics by failing to obtain the consent of the OkCupid users, too, before gathering and republishing their information. They cite, among other things, “code of conduct” guidelines by the American Psychological Association.
Aarhus University in Denmark, the school at which Kirkegaard is a graduate student, distanced itself from the team of students, who undertook the project in their spare time. “The views and actions by student Emil Kirkegaard is not on behalf of AU,” the university said in a statement posted to Twitter. “[H]is actions are entirely his own responsibility.”
This is not the first time someone has scraped the profile data of OkCupid users, of course. At least one individual cleverly “hacked” the dating system to get more romantic matches several years ago. And the site’s co-founder, Christian Rudder, published a treatise on data science that analyzed information from the data-rich dating network. These cases are different, however, from the latest instance of scraping, packaging and releasing profile information publicly.
A better comparison would be a 2008 study out of Harvard University that relied on information culled from Facebook fb profiles. The researchers did use some anonymizing techniques, but critics said the protections were not strong enough. The scientists ultimately took down the data.
In a message sent to Fortune, Kirkegaard wrote that he did not rule out the possibility of republishing the data his team collected with more effort put into obscuring the identity of the OKCupid users. Given OKCupid’s interpretation of its terms of service agreement—and its copyright claim—it’s unlikely that the company will sign off on the proposed compromise. As with the Harvard Facebook study, the data may very well remain in limbo.
It’s no surprise that people are sensitive to having their romantic and other interests neatly presented for others to rifle through online, even if done in the name of science. In addition to questions raised about the ethics of certain data science practices, the boundaries of open science research, and the ease of identifying the members of a given dataset, the incident reveals something else, too: People continue to give up vast quantities of their personal data to sites online, expecting privacy. | Did the study overstep the line? | 183.714286 | 0.714286 | 0.714286 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/06/etihad-most-expensive-flight/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609221002id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/06/etihad-most-expensive-flight/ | The Most Expensive Flight in the World by Etihad Airways Costs $38,000 | 20160609221002 | Have an extra 40 grand? Consider flying Etihad Airways on its newest route, which connects Mumbai and New York City via Abu Dhabi. You’ll need twice that amount if you want to make it a return flight.
For $38,000, passengers can book a one-way ticket on Etihad’s infamous Residence, a private cabin that includes a bedroom, lounge, and private bathroom. The Residence exists only on Etihad Airways’ Airbus A380, which has the distinction of being the largest passenger plane in the world.
The previous record for most expensive commercial flight was also held by Etihad—for $32,000, the carrier took passengers from New York to Abu Dhabi.
Aside from 125 square feet of space, $38,000 gets a passenger a private butler, a personalized menu by an inflight chef, and concierge service—including a luxury chauffeur, private check-in, and lounge.
Check out these photos of the Residence below: | And that's just one way | 30.333333 | 0.666667 | 0.666667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/03/15/chipotle-sales/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160609233051id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/03/15/chipotle-sales/ | Chipotle's Sales Declines Are Worsening Again After a Norovirus Case | 20160609233051 | Chipotle Mexican Grill’s cmg E.Coli outbreak last year is the gift that keeps on taking.
The burrito chain said on Tuesday that comparable sales, or sales at established restaurants, fell 26.1% last month, a bigger drop than the 22% decline that Wall Street analysts were expecting, according to Consensus Metrix. Shares fell 5% in after-hours trading following the announcement.
The beleaguered company tried to put some lipstick on this carnita, saying the decline was more modest than the 36.4% drop in January, and that so far in March, the sales drop has moderated even more.
Chipotle, long a Wall Street darling for its breathtaking growth and profits, said it expects a loss of $1 per share this quarter. That is because Chipotle is spending a lot more money on additional safety protocols and throwing out more food as waste as a result of more rigorous DNA testing. It also said it would have to spend more on fully staffing stores to serve customers redeeming a free burrito offer as part of Chipotle’s efforts to get customers back. Chipotle also warned investors it will have to spend money on a federal probe into its food safety practices.
“We continue to expect that our margins and earnings potential will fully recover,” the company said in a regulatory filing.
But the company learned last week how fragile that recovery is proving to be. Though comparable sales fell 21.5% in the first week of March, that rate deepened the following week to 27.3% because of headlines about a single store near Boston getting slammed by norovirus without any customers getting sickened.
Chipotle said on Tuesday it has hired Dr. Jim Marsden as its executive director of food safety, calling him “one of the nation’s foremost authorities” in the field.
The store is still grappling with the sales and public relations fallout from an E.Coli outbreak in the autumn that affected 53 people who’d eaten at its restaurants in nine states. In December, the company took out full-page ads in several major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, to apologize, and more recently, Chipotle undertook a campaign to lure customers back. | The burrito chain forecast a first-quarter net loss on higher food safety costs. | 25.8125 | 0.75 | 1.25 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/president-obama-asks-congress-crackdown-tax-evasion-n569406 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160610033648id_/http://www.nbcnews.com:80/business/economy/president-obama-asks-congress-crackdown-tax-evasion-n569406? | President Obama Asks Congress for Crackdown on International Tax Evasion | 20160610033648 | President Obama on Friday urged Congress to enact measures to combat tax evasion by corporations and the rich, citing the Panama Papers as evidence of widespread financial corruption.
Obama, in remarks that traced his efforts to steer the U.S. economy from collapse in 2009, acknowledged that many Americans "are still hurting." Further improvements hinged on making sure everyone played by "the same set of rules," he said.
President Obama speaks about the economy at the White House on May 6. NBC News
Obama said his administration has tried to act on its own, by proposing measures that would force banks to verify the people behind shell companies — an issue raised by the Panama Papers, a trove of leaked documents that spotlight how many of the world's most wealthy and powerful people use shell companies and offshore bank accounts to squirrel away fortunes, including proceeds from illegal activities. The Treasury Department has also submitted rules to make it less appealing for American companies to move abroad for lower tax rates.
But true reform, Obama said, must come from Congress, where his own proposals have withered against Republican opposition. He called on Congress to pass a law requiring companies to report information on their owners to the Treasury Department. He said lawmakers need to pass a package of new tax treaties aimed at streamlining international business, measures that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has blocked, citing concerns about citizen's privacy. "Only Congress can fully close the loopholes that wealthy individuals and powerful corporations take advantage of," the president said.
Obama, now in his final eight months in office, is trying to combat portrayals of his economic stewardship as lackluster — despite growing consumer confidence, and despite his having steered the country away from financial disaster after taking office in 2009. Private sector jobs are enjoying a long rally, unemployment is about half of what it was when he entered the White House, gross domestic product is up, and the federal budget deficit has shrunk.
But Obama's problem, over which he has expressed frustration, is that many Americans don't see the economic turnaround as helping them. Average household incomes have fallen. Many of the unemployed say they have stopped looking for a job. And there are other signs of a slowing recovery.
That has fueled critics from the left and the right, which some analysts say account for the popularity of insurgent presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The economy is expected to play a pivotal role in the campaign.
In addition to tax reform, Obama said he needed Congress' help investing in massive infrastructure projects, from roads to water systems. He cited the lead-pollution crisis in Flint, Michigan, as an example of the need for government's continued involvement.
"We could be putting people all across this country back to work, with huge multiplying effects across the country," Obama said. | Obama, in remarks that traced his efforts to steer the U.S. economy from collapse in 2009, acknowledged that many Americans "are still hurting." | 19.75 | 1 | 28 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/orange-is-new-black-laverne-cox-talks-martha-stewart-inspired-characterd | http://web.archive.org/web/20160610152305id_/http://www.people.com/article/orange-is-new-black-laverne-cox-talks-martha-stewart-inspired-characterd | Laverne Cox Teases Martha Stewart-Inspired Character : People.com | 20160610152305 | By Lanford Beard and Aurelie Corinthios
06/09/2016 AT 09:25 AM EDT
has made it clear she
– but she might want to start because she just so happens to have provided a certain source of inspiration for the upcoming season.
, who will be introduced in season 4,
tells PEOPLE she can't give too much away but slyly promises "the storyline's really good and juicy – juicy like a Martha Stewart recipe."
Laverne Cox (left) and Martha Stewart
Matthew Simmons / Getty; Rabbani and Solimene Photography / Getty
"It's nine days away, and all of the questions will be answered," Cox added.
As for Stewart's refusal to watch the hit Netflix show because
? Cox doesn't take offense.
"First of all, I love Martha Stewart," Cox says. "I met her briefly once, and she's created an empire. Whenever a woman has accomplished as much as Martha Stewart has and is such a titan of business and lifestyle, I think that's something to be admired."
Adds Cox with a laugh, "I think if she watched our show, she might got addicted like everyone else seems to."
And according to Cox, who has starred on the show since its first season, the upcoming season "is really incredible."
"I'm so proud to be a part of this show, and I've never been prouder than this season coming up," she says. "The show has always felt relevant, but it feels even more relevant to the world and what's happening right now, and that is just a huge, huge honor."
"Hold on to your weaves and eyelashes and edges," she adds with a laugh. "This season will take your hair away."
premieres June 17 on Netflix. | "Hold on to your weaves and eyelashes and edges – this season will take your hair away," Cox tells PEOPLE | 15.695652 | 1 | 7.086957 | medium | high | mixed |
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/world/asia/bangladesh-rana-plaza-murder-charges.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160610204737id_/http://mobile.nytimes.com:80/2015/06/02/world/asia/bangladesh-rana-plaza-murder-charges.html | Bangladesh Police Charge 41 With Murder Over Rana Plaza Collapse | 20160610204737 | DHAKA, Bangladesh — The police in Bangladesh filed formal murder charges on Monday against 41 people accused of involvement in the 2013 collapse of a building that housed several clothing factories, leaving more than 1,100 people dead in the worst disaster in garment industry history.
Among those charged were Sohel Rana, the owner of the building; his parents, the owners of several factories in the building; and at least a dozen government officials, according to a state prosecutor, Anwarul Kabir, who is part of the legal team that will pursue the case.
If convicted, the accused could face the death penalty, said Bijoy Krishna Kar, the investigating officer who filed the charges on Monday.
The collapse of Rana Plaza led to an international outcry, and to a commitment by Western retailers to widespread inspections of Bangladesh’s thousands of apparel factories.
Mr. Kabir said the investigating officer for the police had also submitted to a court in Dhaka, the capital, charges against 18 people for building code violations. Of those 18 people, 17 were among those charged with murder on Monday, including Mr. Rana and his parents.
A high-level state report released in 2013 found that the building was constructed with substandard materials in violation of building codes, and recommended bringing formal charges against the owner, Mr. Rana, as well as against the owners of five factories in the building.
The report stated that owners of the factories urged employees to return to work even after an engineer inspected the building the day before the collapse and deemed it unsafe. The upper stories of the building were illegally constructed, and heavy generators installed there caused the building to shake, it said.
“The workers were scared of losing their life or getting injury from the day before the building collapsed,” said Mr. Kar. “The building and factory owners and others accused in cool head compelled the scared workers to join the work.”
Bangladesh has more than 5,000 garment factories, handling orders for nearly all of the world’s top brands and retailers, and is second in garment manufacturing output behind China. It has the lowest wages for garment workers in the world, and the collapse at Rana Plaza drew attention to unsafe practices in the industry.
The formal charges are a significant step toward the prosecution of garment factory owners, who often enjoy impunity in the country because of the economic heft and power of the industry.
But at least one victim did not believe that justice would come speedily. Mili Khatun, 25, a worker in one of the factories in Rana Plaza, was caught in the collapse, but locals rescued her from the rubble. Her husband, a cutting master in the same factory, was killed.
“I wanted punishment of the culprits, I wanted justice. I am not alone, all the victims wanted the same thing,” said Ms. Khatun. “I have doubts that the culprits will be punished.”
Taslima Akhter, the coordinator of Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity, a worker’s organization, pointed out that it took the police two years to file charges.
“Now our concern is we are not sure how long it will take to complete trial to ensure final justice for the victims of the Rana Plaza tragedy,” she said.
Mr. Rana was arrested days after the disaster, apparently while hiding near the Indian border. He was a powerful businessman in the country, and some landowners in the Savar municipality, where Rana Plaza was located, said that he bullied them into giving up their land to build the structure.
A hearing for the case is scheduled for June 28 in a court in Dhaka, Mr. Kabir said.
Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Nida Najar from New Delhi. | More than 1,100 people were killed in the 2013 collapse of the building, which housed several clothing factories, in what is the garment industry’s worst disaster. | 24.033333 | 0.933333 | 2.866667 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/04/08/game-of-thrones-13-characters-most-likely-to-die-in-season-6/21340790/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160610213055id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/04/08/game-of-thrones-13-characters-most-likely-to-die-in-season-6/21340790/ | 'Game of Thrones': 13 characters most likely to die in season 6 | 20160610213055 | [Warning: The following story contains some spoilers from the books on which HBO's Game of Thrones is based.]
When Game of Thrones embarks on its sixth season, viewers will be more in the dark than ever before about the fates of their favorite characters.
Unlike seasons past, the 2016 edition of Thrones will largely focus on stories currently unpublished in George R.R. Martin's source material. The Wall, King's Landing, Meereen -; all of these locations and more could crumble in an instant in season six, and book readers won't have any advance warning at all. Still, based on where many stories and characters landed at the end of season five, it's not much of a leap to imagine which heroes and villains are likeliest to join Ned Stark, Stannis Baratheon and Jon Snow in the great Game of Thrones graveyard.
Before the new season premieres, here are 13 individuals fans should worry about in the year ahead.
Melisandre (Carice van Houten) The future is dark and full of terrors for the red priestess, stranded on The Wall without clear cause or purpose -; unless she's playing a pivotal role in the resurrection of Jon Snow (Kit Harington), of course. But such a development could prove fatal for Melisandre, if bringing Jon back requires personal sacrifice. Even then, her safety is far from guaranteed, thanks to her role in the death of Shireen Baratheon (Kerry Ingram), news that's sure to reawaken Davos Seaworth's (Liam Cunningham) desire to see Melisandre dead.
Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie)
This wandering warrior runs into some very dangerous enemies during her most recent appearances in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, and it's not out of the question that the same could happen on Thrones -- especially because Christie recently booked a starring role in season two of Top of the Lake. Is Brienne's death likely? Not especially, but not off the table, either.
See photos from season 5:
'Game of Thrones': 13 characters most likely to die in season 6
Exiled first from Westeros and next from Daenerys Targaryen's heart, Jorah now wanders Essos in search for his missing Khaleesi, willing to die in order to save her life. He just might get the chance this season, thanks to the ever-growing spot of bother on his forearm known as Greyscale -; a nasty disease that drives good men sick and insane.
If Jorah's a marked man, then so is his fellow traveler, Daario, also on the hunt for the lost Queen of Meereen. Though his life isn't in as much imminent danger as Ser Mormont's, Daario's cavalier attitude toward danger hovers the line between courageous and reckless; not exactly a great combination given his current situation on the back roads of Essos.
"I choose violence." Heed Cersei's ominous words, uttered in the season six trailer, were hurled in the direction of her sweet cousin. The Faith Militant loyalist's life could end right there in that very scene, crushed under the might of Ser Robert Strong, the newest addition to the Kingsguard, and the monster formerly known as the Mountain.
Like Lancel, the pious holier-than-thou man at the heart of King's Landing isn't especially likely to survive the series, and possibly not even season six. It's not hard to imagine the aforementioned Strong pulling a Red Viper against the High Sparrow, crushing his head like Gallagher wails on watermelons.
SEE MORE: 'Game of Thrones'' Gruesome Deaths: From Robert Baratheon to Jon Snow
The Knight of Flowers has seen better days, currently incarcerated by the High Sparrow's Faith Militant. In the books, Loras is on the verge of death for very different reasons, but close all the same. Making matters worse, Jones recently won the title role in Marvel's Iron Fist, strongly suggesting his days in Westeros are numbered.
Henwick has also booked a role on Iron Fist, as leading lady Colleen Wing -; which is not a lock for her imminent Thrones demise, but surely someone from Dorne will pay the price for Myrcella Baratheon's death. Why not the Sand Snake with a new TV gig?
The Night's Watch mutineers who killed Jon Snow are destined for a reckoning, and the leader of that movement is the likeliest candidate on the board. The scowling master at arms loathed Snow from their very first encounter, but it's a good bet he'll soon rue the decision to kill the Lord Commander even more.
Much like Thorne, the big-bearded Tormund stands out as a prime target for The Stranger come season six, given the tenuous situation at The Wall, and boiled-over tensions between members of the Night's Watch and the wildlings currently inhabiting Westeros.
Bad things so rarely happen to bad people on Thrones, but it's getting high time for the Bastard of Bolton's luck to run out. Iwan Rheon's skin-flaying felon won't rest until he's reunited with his Reek and his bride, but if there's any such thing as karma on Thrones, Ramsay's story won't end on his own terms.
Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) Never forget the prophecy of Maggy the Frog, who predicted the eventual deaths of all three of Cersei Lannister's children. As of the season six premiere, two are dead, and the lone survive sits on the Iron Throne...; but Tommen's days of ruling Westeros are doomed to end soon, potentially as soon as the end of the coming year.
The number one pick on the board, the Lord of the Iron Islands is destined for death when season six rolls around. His demise in the books paves the way forward for Euron Crow's Eye, a scheming rogue with his one good eye on the Iron Throne. With Pilou Asbaek already cast as Euron, Balon's season six death is as close to guaranteed as it gets.
Game of Thrones returns on April 24. Keep up with all the Game of Thrones coverage here.
Check out more from Game of Thrones in the gallery below!
'Game of Thrones': 13 characters most likely to die in season 6 | When Game of Thrones embarks on its sixth season, viewers will be more in the dark than ever before about the fates of their favorite characters. | 43.142857 | 1 | 28 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/28/magazine/food-totally-cool.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160611101739id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1996/07/28/magazine/food-totally-cool.html | FOOD - Totally Cool - NYTimes.com | 20160611101739 | MINT IS A MOMENT OF GRACE AND CHEER, A perennial that climbs up toward the sun unbidden. Should you forget that you once planted a clump in your garden, mint returns year after year to remind you.
At its best, mint tastes cool, refreshing and vibrant. Its aroma moves up the nostrils like a sharp wind through a pine grove. Mint is many things, but the sum of its parts is ebullience. On the tongue, it both awakens and overshadows. Blame this on menthol, although mint tastes of lemon, vanilla and pepper as well. The pepper note is doubtless its most subtle, lingering in your mouth the way a smile can stay on the face.
Mint has been unappreciated in the West, but in Greece and Turkey and other parts of Asia, it is used with abandon. Indeed, the fiery peppers in Thai cooking are cooled with a flurry of fresh mint. In Middle Eastern tabbouleh, mint is balanced by a strong dose of lemon. And in Indian dishes simmered with coriander, cumin, cayenne and mace, a sprinkling of mint makes all the difference.
But it's not so easy introducing an herb into a cuisine in which it has played no part. As Elizabeth David points out in "Summer Cooking," restricting a particular herb to a particular dish has its origins in tradition, bordering on superstition, and she envisions a scenario in which someone discovered that basil with tomatoes, say, casts one kind of spell, while fennel with fish another.
Which makes you wonder: What kind of spell has left the French so utterly ill disposed toward mint? What black magic keeps the English from experimenting beyond mint jelly for lamb? And what demons have so offended America's Calvinist roots that mint is confined here mainly to iced tea, alcohol and mouthwash?
According to Waverley Root in "Food," mint acquired its name from a nymph called Minthe, who was coveted by Pluto. His jealous wife, Persephone, threw her to the ground and began to trample her until Pluto intervened and turned her into a plant. Since the word "mint" signifies virtue in the language of flowers, maybe Minthe's metamorphosis was actually a punishment for spurning a predator's unwanted advances.
Certainly, in today's culinary ethos virtue and indulgence happily coexist, a fact that portends well for mint's future in America. Indeed, if you just consider virtue, you discover that mint acts as an antibacterial and an antiparasitic, an antispasmodic in the digestive tract and a good topical anesthetic for burns.
Both the Greeks and the Romans revered mint as a general tonic. Virgil said that wounded deer sought out mint to heal themselves; Ovid praised the herb as an aphrodisiac.
Peppermint and pennyroyal are the strongest-tasting members of the mint family and are generally dried and used for tea. Fresh spearmint, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. It is strong and less overbearing than peppermint, and it is an excellent seasoning for lamb, pork, beef, chicken and duck.
It is difficult to do better by a lean piece of fish than to steam it under fresh mint leaves, add a squeeze of lemon, a little salt and pepper and serve. An oily fish will soar in a marinade of lemon, olive oil, garlic, black pepper and lots of fresh mint.
Mint also strikes a fresh note with fried foods -- a favorite example being deep-fried Vietnamese spring rolls. That's because Indochinese flavorings like coriander, basil and scallions are particularly felicitous with mint, a combination that also seems to accommodate almost anything made with coconut milk.
Spearmint's affinity to garlic and yogurt is well known to the children of Greece and Turkey, who enjoy it in yogurt-based and tomato soups. In fact, if you add some mint to fresh gazpacho, it nearly jumps out of the bowl.
Those who have not traveled far into Asia might be surprised by what fresh minced mint can do for scrambled eggs or an omelet, for summer soups, purees or lightly marinated vegetables. Spearmint will hold its own when cooked with garlic or chili peppers and is a definite asset in vinegary or lemon-based sauces.
Since strongly acidic ingredients will blacken its leaves, it is best to add mint a minute before serving. This, of course, reveals my prejudice toward using fresh mint at the height of its season, which is now, as opposed to dried. However, when mint is part of a slow-cooked medley, the dried version does impart its expected lively tone.
As mint is proficient at mitigating the richness of fatty foods and freshening deeply complex dishes, I think it should be used with the relish of a secret ingredient. That is, use it freely but with restraint, which is not as contradictory as it sounds.
Think of mint as part of a musical ensemble. It has a large sound that simultaneously connects and stands apart from other herbs. It is a very jazzy note.
1 cup sugar 1 cup water 3 cups strained fresh pink-grapefruit juice (3 to 4 medium pink grapefruits) 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice 3 tablespoons chopped fresh mint Mint sprigs, for garnish.
1. Combine the sugar and water in a small saucepan and place over high heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil and boil without stirring for 1 minute. Let cool. Refrigerate syrup until cold. 2. Stir together the syrup, grapefruit juice, lemon zest, lemon juice and mint. Put in a shallow nonreactive pan and place in the freezer. Stir every 20 to 30 minutes until frozen throughout, about 3 hours. Scrape into glasses and serve garnished with mint sprigs. Yield: Five to six servings.
6 large lemons 1 cup water 2 1/2 cups sugar 1 teaspoon crushed red-pepper flakes 5 large sprigs of mint, tied in cheesecloth 2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint. | MINT IS A MOMENT OF GRACE AND CHEER, A perennial that climbs up toward the sun unbidden. Should you forget that you once planted a clump in your garden, mint returns year after year to remind you. At its best, mint tastes cool, refreshing and vibrant. Its aroma moves up the nostrils like a sharp wind through a pine grove. Mint is many things, but the sum of its parts is ebullience. On the tongue, it both awakens and overshadows. Blame this on menthol, although mint tastes of lemon, vanilla and pepper as well. The pepper note is doubtless its most subtle, lingering in your mouth the way a smile can stay on the face. | 8.511111 | 0.977778 | 39.437037 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/04/05/ford-mexico-election-year/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160611104028id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/04/05/ford-mexico-election-year/ | Ford Boosts Investments in Mexico Despite Election Year Controversy | 20160611104028 | Ford Motor Company, criticized by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump for manufacturing outside the United States, announced on Tuesday that it would invest $1.6 billion to build more small cars in Mexico, starting in 2018.
The automaker made the announcement as Trump, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Governor John Kasich competed in a primary in Wisconsin seen as crucial in the race to become the Republican presidential candidate in the November election.
Trump, who has criticized U.S. companies for “sending jobs to Mexico,” has singled out Ford for some of his harshest remarks.
A senior Mexican official said Mexico had stepped back from a high-profile announcement on the Ford plant to avoid stoking tensions in the U.S. election debate stemming from Trump’s comments.
“Due to the (election) debate, they (Ford) don’t want to be in the spotlight,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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Joe Hinrichs, Ford executive vice president and head of the Americas, said on Tuesday that the automaker is investing more money in Mexico “to improve our small-car profitability.”
In Detroit, United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams described the new Ford investment in Mexico as “a disappointment and very troubling.”
A spokeswoman for Trump said he did not have an immediate comment on the announcement.
Hinrichs declined to say what products Ford plans to build at the San Luis Potosi plant, which is slated to open in 2018 and will employ 2,800 by 2020.
U.S. supplier sources have said the plant is expected to build the next-generation Ford Focus compact, as well as a Focus-based hybrid gasoline-electric model aimed at rival Toyota Motor Corp and described as a “Prius fighter.”
The investment had been rumored for months.
Ford joins a growing list of automakers investing billions in new production capacity in Mexico, where lower labor costs and favorable currency exchange mean companies have a better chance of turning a profit on low-margin small cars.
Sean McAlinden, chief economist with the Center for Automotive Research, said that Ford’s Mexico workers make about $8.25 per hour in wages and benefits, compared with Ford’s U.S. workers, who get $60 per hour in wages and benefits.
Two weeks ago, Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields defended the automaker’s global investment strategy, saying: “We will invest to keep us competitive and we will do what makes sense for the business.”
For more about Ford Motors, watch:
At the time, he did not comment directly on reports about the planned Mexico investment.
During contract talks last summer, Ford confirmed that it would move Focus production out of its Wayne, Michigan plant in 2018. The UAW said at the time that Ford planned to build the next Focus in Mexico.
Hinrichs on Tuesday reiterated that Ford is planning to build two new vehicles at the Wayne plant, beginning in 2018, but declined to provide details.
Hinrichs also noted that Ford built more vehicles in the United States last year than larger rival General Motors Co and employs more U.S. hourly workers. He said Ford builds fewer vehicles in Mexico than GM or Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. | Ford's new plant is expected to build a Focus-based, hybrid gasoline-electric model. | 33.105263 | 0.947368 | 3.684211 | medium | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2012/12/19/mark-zuckerberg-donates-500-million/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160611124855id_/http://fortune.com/2012/12/19/mark-zuckerberg-donates-500-million/ | Mark Zuckerberg donates $500 million | 20160611124855 | FORTUNE — Mark Zuckerberg donated Facebook shares worth $500 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a non-profit organization that works with donors to allocate funds according to their interests. The gift is the largest ever received by the foundation, which finances projects locally and around the world, and Zuckerberg said he planned to focus his giving in health and education.
Zuckerberg announced the gift in a post on Facebook, where he noted that he and his wife Priscilla Chan had previously signed the Giving Pledge, an effort led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to encourage billionaires to donate most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. In 2010, Zuckerberg pledged to donate $100 million in Facebook FB shares to an effort to improve public education in Newark, New Jersey.
“Today, in order to lay the foundation for new projects, we’ve made a contribution of 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation,” Zuckerberg wrote. At Tuesday’s closing price of $27.71, the shares are worth $498 million. “Together, we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to have as positive an impact in our next set of projects,” Zuckerberg wrote.
In a statement, Emmett Carson, CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation said: “Mark’s generous gift will change lives and inspire others in Silicon Valley and around the globe to give back and make the world a better place. We are pleased and honored that he has chosen to continue to partner with us to help him achieve his philanthropic goals.” | The Facebook founder spreads the wealth. | 44.142857 | 0.714286 | 0.714286 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2009/10/14/aftershark-gayla-bentleys-plus-size-fashion-empire-starts-here/19194559/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160611155019id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2009/10/14/aftershark-gayla-bentleys-plus-size-fashion-empire-starts-here/19194559/? | AfterShark: Gayla Bentley's plus-size fashion empire starts here | 20160611155019 | Gayla Bentley made quite an impression Tuesday on
. She's a big lady with a big vision: to create the first globally successful
for women of size 12 or larger. In fact, now that she's got the investment she needs, you may be hearing from her again.
WalletPop's Jason Cochran talked to Bentley about her success in obtaining the capital she needs to bring her garments to a wider market, and we got the video interview on tape as part of our popular
Here's what happened on the show last night: The designer said 60% of women in America wear size 12 or above, and she wanted a piece of that market.
Speaking slowly and clearly, the way you might address a group of kindergartners before nap time, she asked first for the Sharks' wisdom and experience. "What about the money?" O'Leary piped in. Oh, yes, she also wanted $250,000 for 20% of her company, which aimed to make clothes for large women cool and easily accessible. She wanted to open her own store, starting in Houston.
Kevin O'Leary wasted no time in stepping in a big pile of poo, by asking if larger women really cared about fashion, implying that if they let themselves go to the point of getting big, they really weren't going to go for nice clothes.
Bentley, brimming with high spirits, said it's because there hasn't been a pioneer in the luxury space yet. Luxury clothes manufacturers didn't make larger than a size 12, she said, a fact that Daymond John (a clothing manufacturer himself) ruefully confirmed. "Luxury is not plus sizes!" she said. "We need someone to be a pioneer." She even tossed in a few winks to the Sharks, and made jokes about eating lots of carbs.
Barbara Corcoran praised the clothing and its attention to detail. Kevin Harrington was in the process of going out when she halted him, saying she's seen similar stuff sell thousands on QVC, and that's when Bentley belatedly dropped her biggest piece of bait yet: "I have, right now, a home shopping network pursuing me. I did not want to sign any contracts until I came to see you all cause I need someone with your wisdom and experience to make sure I make the right deal."
Robert Herjavec said opening stores was the wrong way to go, and he left the negotiations. O'Leary followed because he was once again too afraid of entering a crowded market (this time, clothing retail). Harrington finally seized his opportunity to go out for sure.
Corcoran tried to make him regret it, saying he'd have been sure sure to rake in the bucks on TV, and she said she'd go in 50-50 with John if Bentley could convince him to put up the other $125,000.
Bentley reminded John that since he already has a huge clothing empire (FUBU and others), he already has many larger-sized women who already buy his clothes, and that this deal would be a natural fit. John looked uneasy, standing up and hitting the oriental rug to say she couldn't blow this if she got the money.
Then he almost looked like he was going to cut Corcoran out of the deal entirely, before admitting he needed her female expertise. They joined forces and offered to partner in Bentley's company, keeping half the company (and not the 20% originally pitched), contingent on them being able to work a deal with his women's garment partners.
Bentley said she wanted to keep creative control, and that she would rather keep 55%.
"Keep in mind that normally I ask for 51%," John warned, fluttering his eyelids in what could have been annoyance, saying his offer for 50% was so she could retain creative control. Bentley was talked into it. She grabbed the deal, and a few of the women in her entourage started crying. "Let's go eat!" she exclaimed, and she left the Tank blowing kisses to the camera.
This week, Jason Cochran also talked to Dan Mackey of Chill Soda, whose big pitch nearly went flat (
). For more video interviews with the people who've been on Shark Tank, visit our AfterShark series at | Gayla Bentley made quite an impre ion Tuesday on ABC's Shark Tank. She's a big lady with a big vision: to create the first globally succe ful luxury fashion line for women of | 22.675676 | 0.837838 | 8.135135 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/3878646/steve-mcqueen-and-neile-adams-life-photos-by-john-dominis-1963/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160611202649id_/http://time.com:80/3878646/steve-mcqueen-and-neile-adams-life-photos-by-john-dominis-1963/? | Portraits of a Couple in Love and in Lust | 20160611202649 | We live in an age filled with way too much information about celebrities—much of it shared by celebs themselves: tweets, photos, press releases, you name it, blithely chronicling marriages, affairs, divorces, sex tapes, public spats and all the other sordid and exalted endeavors that flesh is heir to. And yet, despite this unending torrent of information, it’s somehow rare to see portraits of famous couples who not only genuinely like one another, but are comfortably, obviously attracted to one another.
Yes, of course, actors, actresses, musicians and reality TV mediocrities are more than happy to flaunt their sexuality. But their exhibitions often feel cartoonish or desperate, rising from a place of cold calculation rather than from good old-fashioned, grown-up lust. To quote Mark Twain (who was commenting on another subject entirely), the difference between faux, manufactured sexuality and the real deal is the difference “between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
Consider, then, these portraits (above and below) of Steve McQueen and his then-wife, the actor, singer and dancer Neile Adams, sharing some smoldering moments together in 1963. Here are two adults—comfortable in their own skins and clearly at ease with one another’s bodies—captured in postures recognizable to anyone of a certain age lucky enough to have enjoyed an intense emotional and physical relationship or two with another human being.
In other words, these two people are hot for each other. And that’s cool.
Far from the studiously audacious antics of today’s stars, the casual, evident pleasure that McQueen and Adams take in one another in John Dominis’ photos comes across, paradoxically, as quite innocent. Steamy, yes. Carnal, absolutely. But innocent. Or at the very least, unfeigned.
That Dominis was able to make such informal, revealing pictures—especially of an actor as guarded in his personal life as McQueen so often was—speaks volumes about the photographer’s talent; about the unprecedented access that LIFE magazine enjoyed during its heyday; and, finally, about the predictable, closely managed and utterly bogus “allure” of so many of today’s stars and pop-culture power couples.
Through Dominis’ lens, we’re reminded of what sexual attraction feels like, and what it looks like.
Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
[In a video exclusive, McQueen’s ex-wife, Neile Adams, shares her memories of the ups and downs of their intense 16-year marriage] | LIFE pays tribute to grown-up love and sex -- in all its messy, unkempt glory -- in stark contrast to the manufactured teen-centric pseudo-eroticism of today's stars. | 13.611111 | 0.583333 | 0.805556 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Jessamyn-Lovell-builds-gallery-show-out-of-her-ID-5822170.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20160611232103id_/http://www.sfgate.com:80/art/article/Jessamyn-Lovell-builds-gallery-show-out-of-her-ID-5822170.php | Jessamyn Lovell builds gallery show out of her ID theft | 20160611232103 | Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle
Jessamyn Lovell’s show at SF Camerawork uses 34 framed images with descrip tions under each of the woman she says stole her identity.
Jessamyn Lovell’s show at SF Camerawork uses 34 framed images with descrip tions under each of the woman she says stole her identity.
Jessamyn Lovell places a personal letter into a display case for her photo exhibit at the SF Camerawork gallery.
Jessamyn Lovell places a personal letter into a display case for her photo exhibit at the SF Camerawork gallery.
Jessamyn Lovell builds gallery show out of her ID theft
Five years ago, photographer Jessamyn Lovell was at SF Camerawork discussing her upcoming show when she put down her wallet just long enough for it to disappear. Then she became a victim of identify theft, a scam that brought her mysterious bills and an unwarranted summons to appear in court on theft charges.
This is not an unusual story — about 16 million Americans are victims of identity theft every year, subject to a bureaucratic nightmare of reclaiming what was theirs all along — but what is unusual is that Lovell decided to turn her frustrations into a photo project.
The subject is a San Francisco woman who Lovell believes used her ID and credit cards to steal her identity. Lovell used a private investigator to track the woman down, then Lovell used her camera to capture the woman’s identity.
The result is “Dear Erin Hart,” a solo exhibition at SF Camerawork, which runs through Saturday.
“I wanted to build a portrait of her as a way to understand the choices she made that led to our paths crossing,” Lovell says. “Those were her choices, not mine.”
The gallery walls look like something from a cable TV show about CIA operatives, with surveillance photos shot by Lovell, photos of various residences, mug shots, arrest reports and letters from vendors demanding payment.
Erin Colleen Hart served a year in county jail in 2011 for Lovell’s case and other crimes, including check fraud, forgery and second-degree burglary. According to the office of District Attorney George Gascón, Hart pleaded guilty recently to another charge of identity theft, a felony for which she was sentenced Oct. 1 to three years in custody. (She has been released from custody to serve her sentence under mandatory supervision. Any infraction will result in jail time.)
The Chronicle is publishing images that do not identify Lovell’s exhibition subject because the newspaper cannot independently verify that the woman in Lovell’s photos is Hart.
“I base all of my work on a fact that I experienced,” says Lovell, 37, a lecturer in art at the University of New Mexico. She now lives in Albuquerque, but she was living in Oakland the day her wallet was stolen in 2009. At the time, Lovell was at Camerawork for another project: a photo essay of her tracking down her estranged father on the coast of Mendocino. She hadn’t seen him in 12 years before the photography project that became “No Trespassing” in 2010.
Lovell’s investigation into who stole her identity started on Feb. 6, 2011, when San Francisco police called to tell her that Hart had been arrested trying to check into the Hotel Vitale on the Embarcadero, under the name Laurel Jessamyn Lovell. Soon after, bills started arriving for rental cars, parking tickets and toll evasions under Lovell’s name. Then she had to appear in court in Alameda County to answer the theft charges.
It took a flight from Albuquerque to Oakland to clear that up. “I sat there for an entire morning while people were carted away in handcuffs,” she says. “I was very scared I might be taken away.” The charges against Lovell were dropped, but the hassle was still there.
“I got really, really mad, like I’d never been before,” Lovell says. “That’s when I decided to retrace her steps and make a project out of it.”
Hart was hard to trace because she was in San Francisco County Jail on the ID theft conviction — information that Lovell could not obtain until she hired private eye Pete Siragusa.
He got Hart’s release date, March 21, 2013, and Lovell and Siragusa staked out the Hall of Justice.
“I went into the day wanting to approach her and meet her,” Lovell said. “Pete convinced me that was not a good idea.”
So Lovell waited behind tinted windows in a sport utility vehicle. Through a telephoto lens, she saw a person who fit Hart’s description come through the door. She also used her iPhone to make a selfie of herself photographing the woman, because the photographer is unavoidably part of the story.
“It was high-speed adrenaline. I’m jumping in and out of the SUV photographing her,” Lovell says. “She hops on the bus, she gets off the bus. She goes to Goodwill.” Eventually the woman in question sensed that she was being followed and took evasive measures, stepping into a maze of a building in the Mission.
Lovell went back to New Mexico and built a dossier on Hart, who is 43. She was born in Colorado and received a Social Security number a year later. She ended up in South Dakota and left an arrest record as she moved to New York and then San Francisco.
Hart seemed to be a person who moved around a lot, and Siragusa dug up the addresses. Then Lovell returned to San Francisco in March to resume the search.
“I mostly was going to these places to just get a feeling of her, a closeness,” she says. “I interviewed landlords, I interviewed security guards. She lived in some pretty nice places.”
Lovell waited at an address in Glen Park for three days, and was in her rental car when the woman she recognized from before finally came out. Lovell got several images from across the street, then pulled in behind as the woman was walking.
“She definitely knew that she was being followed, and I could tell she deliberately lost me,” says Lovell, who mailed the woman in question an invitation to the opening reception for the gallery show.
Lovell made it a point never to invade the woman’s private space: She may wait in front like a paparazzo, but she’s only attempted to photograph the woman in public places.
There are 34 framed images in the show, with typed descriptions under each, so you can follow the mystery.
“This woman entered my life without my permission,” Lovell says, “and I then used that experience without her permission to create something new.”
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf
Dear Erin Hart: Noon-6 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Through Saturday. SF Camerawork, 1011 Market St., S.F. (415) 487-1011. www.sfcamerawork.org. | [...] she became a victim of identify theft, a scam that brought her mysterious bills and an unwarranted summons to appear in court on theft charges. Lovell used a private investigator to track the woman down, then Lovell used her camera to capture the woman’s identity. The gallery walls look like something from a cable TV show about CIA operatives, with surveillance photos shot by Lovell, photos of various residences, mug shots, arrest reports and letters from vendors demanding payment. Erin Colleen Hart served a year in county jail in 2011 for Lovell’s case and other crimes, including check fraud, forgery and second-degree burglary. According to the office of District Attorney George Gascón, Hart pleaded guilty recently to another charge of identity theft, a felony for which she was sentenced Oct. 1 to three years in custody. [...] Lovell was at Camerawork for another project: a photo essay of her tracking down her estranged father on the coast of Mendocino. Lovell’s investigation into who stole her identity started on Feb. 6, 2011, when San Francisco police called to tell her that Hart had been arrested trying to check into the Hotel Vitale on the Embarcadero, under the name Laurel Jessamyn Lovell. Soon after, bills started arriving for rental cars, parking tickets and toll evasions under Lovell’s name. [...] Lovell waited behind tinted windows in a sport utility vehicle. “She definitely knew that she was being followed, and I could tell she deliberately lost me,” says Lovell, who mailed the woman in question an invitation to the opening reception for the gallery show. | 4.299363 | 0.942675 | 31.171975 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-edge-california-cliffside-properties-1465483086 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612001817id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/on-the-edge-california-cliffside-properties-1465483086 | On the Edge: California Cliffside Properties | 20160612001817 | Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two half-baths
The 3,500-square-foot home sits above a rocky cove and has sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. The master bedroom on the top level is newly remodeled and includes a spa tub and a shower with an ocean view. Other amenities include a wet bar, wine cellar and two-car garage.
Agent: Diane Cannon of Berkshire Hathaway Homeservice
Five bedrooms, six bathrooms, two half-baths
This Moroccan-inspired home sits atop Southern California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula. The home measures about 6,279 square feet and has a glass-atrium entryway, library, media room and wine cellar. The master suite has ocean views, and the backyard has a kitchen, fireplace, pool and spa.
Agent: Christine Solomon of NW Real Estate Brokers
Six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, two half-baths
Set on 1.8 acres, this 8,625-square-foot, gated property sits on a ridge that overlooks wooded canyons and has city views. The living spaces open up to a covered terrace with outdoor kitchen and pool. The master bedroom has one of the home’s six fireplaces.
Agent: Joshua Altman and Matthew Altman of Douglas Elliman Beverly Hills | Three California homes—in Laguna Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes and Calabasas—that combine high-end amenities with sweeping views of the ocean or the city. | 7.766667 | 0.6 | 1.066667 | low | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/09/14/rose-marcario-patagonia/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612004708id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/09/14/rose-marcario-patagonia/ | The woman driving Patagonia to be (even more) radical | 20160612004708 | Rose Marcario is recalling the year that she left her old life behind. “So it was, you know, an Eat, Pray, Love moment—without the eating and the love,” she says.
Then she laughs, not so much at the joke but at herself and that period of her life—the weeks she spent meditating alone in Rishikesh, India, the temple town along the banks of the Ganges that the Beatles once visited and made famous. Marcario, 50, is telling the story of how she ended up at Patagonia, where she’s now CEO. It’s a roundabout tale that begins with her burning out on a private equity job in 2006 and ends with her here at Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, Calif., north of L.A., leading the iconic outdoor clothing and equipment maker through the most profitable and expansive era in its history. Sitting in a small conference room near her desk—she has no office—and casually dressed in a Patagonia down vest with prayer beads on her wrist, she couldn’t seem more at peace with her journey.
But back to the burnout and to India. It’s key to understanding Marcario’s nature and how she approaches the problem of running a company that sells outdoor apparel, sure, but would also like to help out with the minor task of saving the world.
By the time she bolted to Rishikesh, Marcario had been a practicing Buddhist for 20 years. She grew up among Italian Catholics on Staten Island and then, after her parents divorced, in Southern California. Her manner of speech and general demeanor are a mix of these different worlds: a laid-back SoCal lilt bundled into direct, no-nonsense sentences. With the practice of Buddhism, she says, “comes looking really deeply at things, looking beyond just your generation, looking at how your actions impact broader groups of people.” This way of thinking did not match up with the short-term focus of her daily grind.
As part of its Worn Wear program, Patagonia employs 45 full-time repair technicians in Reno and sends a biodiesel-fueled repair truck around the country.Photograph by Donnie Hedden—Patagonia Archives
Before joining private equity firm Capital Advisors as an executive vice president, she had worked at a couple of tech companies—including as CFO of General Magic, a spin-off from Apple AAPL that closed in 2002—and in all of those positions her job was to obsess over quarterly results, meeting demands of investors. It all seemed, to her, to fuel a level of greed and poor decision-making that was not just unethical but also bad for people and the planet.
As Marcario became more successful, she says, “I felt myself more and more divided from my values.” She was learning more about herself through her study of Buddhism. “I felt like, ‘Wow, I’m transforming as a person, but my work isn’t reflecting that,’ ” she says. So she quit, went to the banks of the Ganges, meditated, and pondered what to do with her life. After some time in India and Nepal, she flew back to Los Angeles, not sure what was next.
A friend mentioned that Patagonia was looking for a CFO. By now it was 2008. Marcario was skeptical at first. Wouldn’t jumping back into the same role at a different company really just be more of the same? People around her whom she trusted told her that Patagonia was different. But how could she be sure? Then Yvon Chouinard called her up.
Chouinard describes himself as a “dirtbag at heart”—by which he means that he’s a millionaire for whom material things hold little appeal. He founded Patagonia in 1970 as an extension of his business forging pitons and other rock-climbing tools. Chouinard never took Patagonia public, and his iconoclastic ways have spawned a kind of cult around him and his business—a company that tells its customers not to buy what it’s selling and ends up more in demand as a result.
He mentions his dirtbaggery by way of explanation: It’s a big reason he thinks that Marcario was intrigued enough to come onboard. “We have kind of a gonzo company,” he says by phone from Wyoming, where he spends most of the summer fly-fishing. “I come up with crazy ideas. I have these eco things that people think I’m nuts to want to do, and she’s right there on it, into it.” Chouinard, 76, still comes into work when he’s in town, and his beat-up wooden desk is across a small room from Marcario’s. It’s noticeable because it has no computer, only a Reagan-era landline phone.
Marcario says that from her initial conversation with Chouinard she was awed both by his commitment to his causes and trueness to himself and by how that was reflected in his company. This was something she aspired to—was in fact searching for. He is, she says, someone who “has exemplified living the examined life.” Chouinard, for his part, says Marcario is the best leader his company has ever seen—including himself and the seven CEOs who followed him before her.
When Marcario arrived as CFO in June 2008, she launched a rigorous review of Patagonia’s supply chains—looking for ways to streamline production and save costs by identifying waste, both financial and environmental. Instead of shipping items in a bulky box, for instance, Patagonia switched to mailing stuff in recyclable bags. She also pushed the company to cut back on its expanding selection of leisure wear and return the focus to its core outdoor products. (It was decided that men’s capri pants, for example, were a mistake.) And she devoted a lot of resources to improving the company’s e-commerce capabilities. Patagonia had historically grown sales carefully and methodically. The company owns only 32 stores in North America and 36 more worldwide. (The rest of its retail sales come from its many partnerships with other retailers). But since Marcario’s arrival e-commerce sales have skyrocketed—though the company, which remains closely held, declines to disclose detailed figures.
It quickly became clear to Chouinard—who with his family owns 100% of Patagonia—that he had found someone special in Marcario. She moved into the job of COO and then, in 2013, succeeded Casey Sheahan as CEO. She has continued to deliver results. Patagonia is on track to have the most profitable year in its history in 2015, according to the company, with expected sales reaching $750 million. All told, the compound annual growth rate since the year after Marcario joined as CFO has been 14%, and profits have more than tripled since her arrival.
If Patagonia were a larger company, Marcario’s track record would surely merit a spot as one of the Most Powerful Women in Business ranked in this issue. The executives on our list typically run operations with billions in sales. But Marcario earns recognition for both her success and the outsize influence the Patagonia brand holds in the business world—as well as her role in extending that sway.
Her approach represents a middle way in which business success doesn’t mean ignoring your community or leaving the planet worse off than you found it. “Rose is really a whole person, a well-integrated person,” says Etsy’s Chad Dickerson ETSY , a fellow socially conscious CEO (and fellow adoptive parent). She’s “not just a business person—she brings a full perspective.” Chouinard praises her in more radical terms: “She understands the need for revolution.”
The revolution begins, on this morning, with a meeting of the Footprint Council. This group of 10 Patagonia leaders gathers once a month to scrutinize the company’s “scale of operations”—which has doubled under Marcario. One striking fact: seven of the 10 executives in attendance are women. Indeed, Patagonia employs nearly as many women (755) as men (760) and is close to parity at the top. It also has some of the most forward-thinking child-care benefits around, including an award-winning on-site day care and preschool that opened in 1984.
“Rose understands business better than I ever did, and she understands the need for revolution. She’s the one who’s going to lead us there.”—Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia
The Footprint Council is the company’s vehicle for staying on top of the rigorous sustainability goals it has set for itself. Four years ago Patagonia formalized its commitment to sustainable practices by becoming a B Corp—meaning that it is certified by a nonprofit called B Lab as a company committed to socially and environmentally responsible practices. What Fair Trade status is to coffee, B Corp certification is to enlightened companies.
Marcario keeps the council meeting moving at a steady clip. They look at the proposal for a study—commissioned by the council—to be conducted by UC–Santa Barbara graduate students about the possible effects of microplastics from Patagonia’s recycled polyester materials entering the water supply after washing. Marcario asks about microfibers, which come from recycled poly, and how they fit into the larger problem of microplastics, particularly the small beads in soaps. The goal is to identify just how large the problem might be (the science so far has been spotty) and then define best practices, alert suppliers, and get ahead of the situation. There is a lot of talk about leading by example. “We aren’t Nike,” NKE Marcario says at one point, musing about how her small company can maximize its influence. “But how do we make it uncomfortable for other businesses not to follow us?”
It isn’t just that Marcario and everyone else at Patagonia think their processes and practices might be better; it’s that there’s real financial strength in numbers. Patagonia invests heavily in new manufacturing and sourcing processes, many of which don’t make fiscal sense if they can’t scale—which means that others must join to make them work. When the company released its Yulux brand of wetsuits, which uses a material made from a desert shrub native to the Southwest, it made its patented “biorubber” available to the whole wetsuit industry rather than keep it proprietary.
The same basic principle applies with B Corps. Patagonia has helped guide dozens of other companies through the process of becoming B Corps over the past few years, including Natura, a publicly traded company and Brazil’s largest cosmetics manufacturer (see box “Building a ‘B Corp’ Network” at the end of the article). Marcario and Chouinard launched a VC arm of Patagonia called $20 Million and Change to identify and assist ecologically minded startups. One company Patagonia has funded makes skateboard decks out of melted-down plastic from discarded fishing nets.
Not that Patagonia is immune to problems. In 2011, the same year that it became a B Corp, the company audited its tier-two fabric suppliers in Taiwan and found that migrant workers in some factories were being held under forced-labor conditions. Patagonia partnered with Verité, a nonprofit that works to create fair conditions for workers globally, to create a comprehensive migrant-worker standard and explain it to all of Patagonia’s suppliers.
Near the end of the Footprint Council meeting the group stares at a huge grid of pie-in-the-sky ideas—the company’s “planetary goals.” They stretch as far out as 2050 and include all the usual buzzwords about fair trade and sustainability, but also living wages for workers and influencing animal-welfare policy. “I look at 2050,” Marcario says, “and I feel like it’s way too late. Too late for the planet. Too late for us.” They begin to talk about issues they can latch onto quickly through Patagonia products. Each new material or source that comes up is the beginning of a conversation about better, more sustainable processes.
As Marcario plows through more meetings—on marketing, finance, employee activism—she makes it a point to give equal weight to two ideas: profitability and world improvement. Observing her dual focus, one is reminded of the Buddhist precept about two contradictory truths, and how it is possible for both to be true only after you have learned to hold them in your mind.
It’s not easy to think about the business and the holistic benefit at the same time, and Marcario is often tested. During the meeting on employee activism, she brings up an issue that recently arose at some stores in Japan, Patagonia’s second-largest market after the U.S. All employees at Patagonia are encouraged to engage with their communities, either through volunteer work or by marching for a cause or hosting a meeting at a store (after hours). Activism is so ingrained in company culture that it hosts an annual conference, called Tools for Grassroots Activists, that brings together instigators of all types, including many who work at Patagonia.
The problem, Marcario says, is that sometimes this kind of corporate encouragement can send a confusing message to workers. What seems like a gentle push or show of support can, through a different lens, be interpreted as mandatory. In Japan a few stores had recently hosted civil-disobedience and nonviolence training before a protest at a nearby dam. (A recent Chouinard-produced film titled Damnation covers the environmental devastation wrought by dams around the world.) Some Japanese employees felt as though they had to get arrested to prove their loyalty to the company cause. “We should be asking them, ‘What kind of activist are you?’ ” says Lisa Pike Sheehy, who oversees activism at the company. “What are the options, if not on the frontlines picketing, holding signs? Because not everyone is going to be comfortable being there.” Marcario, agreeing, says they should explain this clearly, and if it takes a meeting after normal work hours, “we should pay for their time to stay longer and listen.”
Patagonia’s activist-friendly vibe can lead to unplanned endorsements. Perhaps the most visible ambassador for the Patagonia brand at the moment is a gay black man named Deray McKesson, who has emerged alongside the #BlackLivesMatter movement and now has 224,000 Twitter followers. His signature piece of clothing is a blue Patagonia down vest, similar to one that Marcario wears. The vest is famous enough to have its own Twitter handle: @deraysvest (though it has a mere 3,000 followers). He has said he wore it because it felt like a shield—he feels invincible in it. “I kind of feel like that when I wear my vest too,” Marcario says. McKesson, a twentysomething former educational consultant, says he was absolutely aware that Patagonia was a good company when he bought the vest. “I knew they had a commitment to social justice,” he says. But mostly he wanted something warm, light, and packable. He liked the fact that the company would repair the vest if it ever got damaged. “I just felt good about buying it,” he says.
This sentiment is exactly what’s so powerful about Patagonia’s brand—the general good feeling—and why the company’s SoHo store in New York City is now as prominent as its Boulder location, or why its brand ambassadors aren’t only famous climbers and outdoor types but Alice Waters, the chef, as well. Activism is hip right now. But the last thing that Marcario wants is for her customers or employees to get too comfortable. “It’s not about maintaining the status quo,” she says.
Marcario’s mission is to make the most of this moment. She wants to keep growing Patagonia to prove that her view of capitalism can work—that a company can achieve even more success when it thinks about future generations as shareholders alongside current investors. She says she will never work anywhere else. “This is my last stop,” she says, chuckling again at the situation she finds herself in. “It’s my way to keep myself from becoming so completely disillusioned, you know?”
In 2011, Patagonia restructured, altered its bylaws, and went through a rigorous “impact assessment” to re-incorporate as a benefit corporation, or B Corp. Though there is no tax advantage to the status, the designation codified and made even more rigorous and transparent the company’s efforts to be environmentally friendly. Being part of the B Corp network, now more than 1,300 companies worldwide, is perhaps the greatest asset. B Corp companies share information and resources and strive for goals beyond maximizing shareholder profit. Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario has championed this network, offering guidance to companies making the move. Here are a handful of the B Corp businesses that Patagonia has helped foster.
Warby Parker New York eyewear company’s glasses are carbon-neutral, and for every pair sold it donates another.
Ben & Jerry’s Vermont ice cream maker, owned by Unilever, uses locally sourced dairy and cage-free eggs.
Klean Kanteen California reusable-bottle maker uses 100% renewable energy and 75% recycled material.
New Belgium Colorado brewery recycles or composts nearly all its solid waste from brewing.
Method San Francisco cleaning-product maker focuses on a “cradle to cradle” approach.
To see Fortune’s International Most Powerful Women lists, visit MPW: Europe, Middle East & Africa and MPW: Asia-Pacific.
A version of this article appears in the September 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline “The Tao of Rose.” | CEO Rose Marcario is leading the rebellious outdoor-clothing maker into a new era of growth—and planet-friendly practices. | 141.875 | 0.958333 | 1.541667 | high | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/08/07/yankees-biometrics-stadium-clear/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612063112id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/08/07/yankees-biometrics-stadium-clear/ | Yankees offer Clear fingerprint system for faster stadium entry | 20160612063112 | If you’ve ever spent a long time in line outside a stadium, you know the frustration. You’ve already paid for a ticket, only to wait for the privilege of going inside—where you’ll probably spend more of your money. The New York Yankees know it too. And so the baseball club has partnered with the tech security company Clear to ease stadium entry.
Based in New York City, Clear calls itself a “secure identity platform” and uses biometrics—your fingerprint—for faster entry at airports and other venues. Here’s how it works: Skip the traditional line, step up to a screen or mounted tablet, and lay down your finger. Clear recognizes you and your information and authorizes entry. You still need to present your ticket to a ticketing agent, but you can skip the security line. (There are still random screenings.) Think of Clear as a TSA Pre-Check or Walt Disney FastPass for the ballpark.
Clear is available at 12 airports in the U.S. (including San Francisco, Denver and Las Vegas) but only began appearing in ball parks this season. After a “soft launch” with the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park last September, it officially debuted there at the beginning of this season. Since then, it launched at Coors Field (home to the Colorado Rockies) in late July, and now at Yankee Stadium beginning on Friday. The Yankees are putting Clear at only two gates to start—one of them is the entrance to the suites, the other is a public gate near the main lobby—but there will be tents this weekend where fans can sign up.
The technology continues to attract attention in the world of sports and entertainment. Clear CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker says the company is in talks with other ball parks as well as non-sports venues like concert halls. (Long lines, of course, are not exclusive to airports and baseball games). “It’s simple: this is a way for our fans to get inside more quickly,” Yankees SVP of strategic ventures Marty Greenspun tells Fortune. “We already knew that the Giants beta-tested it last year. Our hope now is that other venues in the marketplace also adopt the Clear model, and then there will be certain synergies that can happen.”
Those synergies would come with a cost. Fans can sign up for the baseball version of Clear (called Fast Access) for free, giving them access not just to Yankee Stadium events (including NYCFC soccer games and concerts) but to other Clear-equipped baseball venues, like AT&T Park. But the full Clear membership, which includes airports, costs $15 per month. There are currently 400,000 full members, all of whom get the stadium access without re-enrolling.
Seidman-Becker says that the Clear system appeals to ballparks for safety purposes as much as it does for fan experience. Clear is recognized as anti-terrorism technology by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Sports stadiums are starting to look a lot like airports,” she says. “Yankee Stadium holds 49,000 people and the majority of those people show up 30-45 minutes within the start of a game. It’s a lot of traffic at once. Our technology enables them to get in safely and securely.” Clear’s ambitious goal: Installation in all major sports stadiums, domestically and internationally.
Many fans may not care to sign up for Clear, may not notice it, or may decide it won’t save them a significant amount of time. (You still need to do bag check if you have a bag; you still need to hand your ticket to a human being.) But the authentication technology could have bigger implications beyond entry. Other parts of a venue could use Clear systems to talk to each other and make other verification processes go faster, such as checking age for alcohol consumption or I.D for a souvenir purchase.
With luck, Clear could even alleviate the mounting difficulty professional sports venues face in enticing fans to come to a game in the first place. The experience of watching at home has become so good, and the drawbacks of going live so many (high cost, transportation time, wait times at the door), that some fans don’t see the value of paying to go. Shorter lines could sweeten the deal.
“In general, getting in and out of a stadium, everyone grouses that it’s worse than it used to be,” says Seidman-Becker. “You’re seeing friction in this area in so many places, and our technology can be a great cure to the bottleneck. In a digital world where people are staying home on their computers, sports stadiums have to do better. Lots of baseball teams are seeing that now and reaching out to us. We love all of our baseball partners, but as a New York City company, we are especially ecstatic to be partnering with the Yankees.”
Subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology. | The baseball club says it's to speed up lines. But that's not the only reason. | 51.473684 | 0.789474 | 1.210526 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/02/style/dr-william-hapworth-weds-mada-steinberg.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612112301id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1982/07/02/style/dr-william-hapworth-weds-mada-steinberg.html | Dr. William Hapworth Weds Mada Steinberg | 20160612112301 | Mada Steinberg, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Herman J. Steinberg of New York, was married yesterday to Dr. William Emery Hapworth, son of Emery Herbert Hapworth of West Caldwell, N.J., and Vero Beach, Fla., and the late Catherine Hughes Hapworth. The ceremony was performed in St. Jean Baptiste Roman Catholic Church by the Rev. George W. Moore and Rabbi Joseph Gelberman.
The bride, a psychoanalyst, was graduated from Boston University and received master's degrees in psychology from New York University and Yeshiva University, where she is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology. She is working at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.
Her father is a vice president of Steinberg Brothers Inc., leather tanners in New York, and a technical adviser to the Armed Services Commission of the Department of Defense.
Dr. Hapworth is completing his psychiatric residency at the New York University Medical Center. He was graduated from St. Benedict's Preparatory School, Fairfield University and the New Jersey Medical School. His father, who is retired, was manager of the international marine department-Eastern Seaboard of the Shell Oil Company. He is serving as vice chairman of the board of variance and appeals of Vero Beach. | Mada Steinberg, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Herman J. Steinberg of New York, was married yesterday to Dr. William Emery Hapworth, son of Emery Herbert Hapworth of West Caldwell, N.J., and Vero Beach, Fla., and the late Catherine Hughes Hapworth. The ceremony was performed in St. Jean Baptiste Roman Catholic Church by the Rev. George W. Moore and Rabbi Joseph Gelberman. | 3.2 | 1 | 70 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/06/09/jm-smuckers-shares/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612112543id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/06/09/jm-smuckers-shares/ | J.M. Smucker Sales Beat as Demand Rises for Coffee, Pet Foods | 20160612112543 | J.M. Smucker’s sjm quarterly net sales jumped 25 percent, beating analysts’ estimates, as demand rose for its Folgers and Dunkin’ Donuts branded coffee and the company benefited from the acquisition of pet foods maker Big Heart Pet Brands.
Shares of Smucker, which also makes Jif peanut butter, rose about 7 percent to $143 in trading on Thursday.
Smucker said its U.S. coffee sales rose 9 percent and profit surged 39 percent in the fourth quarter, mainly due to lower green coffee costs and higher sales of Dunkin’ Donuts K-Cup pods.
Last year, Smucker started selling Dunkin’ Donuts K-Cup pods, which yield higher margins than packaged coffee.
The biggest U.S. coffee roaster said last month that it would cut prices for its packaged coffee by 6 percent.
The company reported net income of $191 million, or $1.61 per share, for the quarter ended April 30. A year earlier, Smucker had a net loss of $90.3 million, or 82 cents per share.
Excluding a deferred tax benefit, Smucker earned $1.44 per share, beating the average analyst estimate of $1.20, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Net sales rose to $1.81 billion, topping the average estimate of $1.75 billion.
Smucker said its U.S. pet foods business, which includes Meow Mix and Milk-Bone pet foods maker Big Heart, accounted for a nearly a third of total sales. | Nearly 8% on Thursday | 55.4 | 0.6 | 1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/books/review/02OCONNT.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612154234id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2004/05/02/books/review/02OCONNT.html? | 'The Jane Austen Book Club': Mr. Darcy Is a Boorish Snob. Please Discuss. | 20160612154234 | At first, the other women are stiff-necked about Grigg. Why did Jocelyn include him? He's not only a male and a newbie to Austen but he also has the bad taste to bring to the meetings an omnibus edition of the novels -- brand-new, no less, suggesting that ''Austen was merely a recent whim.'' As if that weren't enough, Grigg is (gasp!) a science fiction fan. (This is a sly joke, if a bit insidey, since Fowler is a science fiction writer herself. In addition to her novels, ''Sister Noon,'' ''The Sweetheart Season'' and the fantastical ''Sarah Canary,'' she has published two collections of stories, many of them combining science fiction, fantasy and satire.)
In fact, as Grigg reveals during a discussion of ''Northanger Abbey,'' he met Jocelyn at a science fiction convention the year before. ''I was at the Hound Roundup,'' the dog-loving Jocelyn quickly reassures the others. ''Same hotel.'' Fowler's flashback describing that weekend is one of the funniest diversions in the book. At one point, Jocelyn and a stranger fall into conversation at the hotel bar, not realizing they've just come from different seminars. He thinks she's a science fiction fan, she thinks he's a breeder of bassets, and they converse at cross-purposes in a scene worthy of Preston Sturges.
Jocelyn's Emma-like obsession with mating is another running joke: ''In the kennel . . . you didn't have to ask them. You timed their encounter carefully, and leashed them together until the business was done.'' At a book club outing, she observes Grigg and his sister, who's visiting: ''It was obviously a good bloodline. Both brother and sister had good teeth, neat little ears, deep chests, long limbs.''
Each of the members brings something different to the club, something at once comic, affecting and lyrical. Sweet, good-natured Bernadette, in her caftans and flowered yoga pants, delights in Austen's nasty, sour characters, the ones who make life hell for everybody else. In a discussion of ''Sense and Sensibility,'' she tells the group, ''I don't think there's anything better in all of Austen than those pages where Fanny Dashwood persuades her husband, step by step by step, not to give his stepmother and sisters any money.''
Prudie, who considers herself the club's ''true Janeite,'' records her observations on index cards for later reference and likes to inject French phrases into the discussions, a habit the others find annoying: ''If only she would stop speaking French. Or go to France, where it would be less noticeable.''
Allegra wonders why that nice Charlotte Lucas, in ''Pride and Prejudice,'' marries a blister like Mr. Collins. Why didn't Austen invent a good man for her? ''What I was thinking was that Charlotte Lucas might be gay,'' Allegra tells Sylvia.
''Are you saying Austen meant her to be gay? Or that she's gay and Austen doesn't know it?'' Sylvia asks. Then she muses: ''There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.''
This is a surprising novel, and there isn't a boring line in it. Most intriguing of all is the occasional narrator who steps in to describe the group's meetings in an unexpectedly cozy first-person plural: ''We were quiet for a minute, listening to the fly buzz, thinking our private thoughts.'' But the speaker isn't any one of the six book club members. Then who is it? Some ghostly collective presence? Jane herself? Reader, is it . . . us?
FOWLER has played with this kind of notion before. The heroine of ''Sister Noon'' is a voracious reader of novels (including Austen's) who imagines ''an unseen narrator'' hovering behind her, ''marking her every move.'' In ''The Jane Austen Book Club,'' the characters aren't just characters in a novel; they're readers too. Not only does each have a private Austen. Each is the leading character in her (or his) own novel.
Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. There's no better letter of introduction. The questions Fowler raises are endlessly fascinating. Is Austen all about love and courtship? Or money and class? Is she about second chances? Having it all or settling for less? And what of the characters who don't have happy endings? For that matter, what is a happy ending? ''What if you had a happy ending and didn't notice?'' Sylvia wonders.
Inevitably, reading groups will pounce on this novel. (There are even ''questions for discussion'' at the end, though some of them are more than a little tongue-in-cheek.) Talk about parallel universes -- just imagine a book club discussing a book about a book club discussing a book. That Jane! For a quiet spinster who rarely ventured farther than Bath, she does get around.
Patricia T. O'Conner is the author of three books about language and writing, ''Woe Is I,'' ''Words Fail Me'' and ''You Send Me'' (written with Stewart Kellerman). | In Karen Joy Fowler's novel, each member of a reading group has her (or his) own | 56.15 | 0.85 | 2.65 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.nbc.com/law-and-order-special-victims-unit/episode-guide/season-17/sheltered-outcasts/1718 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160612215733id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/law-and-order-special-victims-unit/episode-guide/season-17/sheltered-outcasts/1718 | Law & Order: Special Victims Unit | 20160612215733 | Carisi lives undercover at a homeless shelter to determine if one of its sex offender residents is a serial rapist. Directed by Mariska Hargitay.
Tags: Law and Order SVU, SVU, svu season 17, svu episode 18, mariska hargitay benson, ice t fin, peter scanavino sonny carisi, watch sheltered outcasts, kelli giddish rollins, raul esparza barba, andy karl dodds, watch svu, svu video, watch svu episodes, svu streaming
S17 E18 | 41:55 | Full Episode | Drama | Primetime | Carisi goes undercover in a halfway house with known sex offenders to catch a serial rapist. | 5.705882 | 0.529412 | 1.235294 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/business/bernard-goldhirsh-63-magazine-innovator-who-started-inc.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160613005919id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2003/07/03/business/bernard-goldhirsh-63-magazine-innovator-who-started-inc.html | Bernard Goldhirsh, 63, Magazine Innovator Who Started Inc. | 20160613005919 | Bernard A. Goldhirsh, who started a newsletter-publishing business in his basement that grew into Inc. magazine, one of the first publications to profit by aiming at owners of small businesses, died on Sunday in Boston. He was 63.
The cause was complications from a brain tumor, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Goldhirsh's success in magazines began with Sail, devoted to the practical interests of owners of small sailboats, and quickly grew to include other nautical periodicals. But he found that his passion for sailing was not enough to deal with the business problems he encountered.
It dawned on him that other business people faced similar challenges, from bank financing to obtaining office supplies, and he started Inc. in 1979 to help them. Its success was evident from the imitators who have addressed the same market.
His intended readers were more broadly defined than those of many other start-up magazines of the time, which went after distinct groups like joggers, apartment dwellers or roller skaters. Also, small businesses were growing as a proportion of the overall economy.
''He found exactly the right niche and exploited it beautifully,'' Robert Gardner, senior vice president of the Magazine Publishers Association at the time, told The Christian Science Monitor in 1980.
Mr. Goldhirsh was born in Brooklyn on March 22, 1940. He graduated in 1961 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he learned to sail on the Charles River. He taught at a private school in Cambridge, Mass., before leading a group of 12 paying students on a sailing expedition in the Caribbean.
He then worked as an inventor for Northrup Aviation and Polaroid, and taught celestial navigation to sailors. He noticed that sailors had little practical information on their sport, and in 1967 he began publishing an annual directory comparing various sailboat designs, The New York Times reported in 1979.
He also began publishing 16-page booklets dealing with practical questions like how to handle a boat in a storm. The publications were popular, and within two years advertisers were knocking on his door, The Times reported.
By January 1970, Mr. Goldhirsh had borrowed $20,000 from friends and put out the first issue of Sail. In 1973, he introduced Motorboat, a how-to magazine for boat owners. In 1978, he started Marine Business, a trade journal for boat-equipment makers.
''I had no publishing background, and it was all 'figure it out as you go,' '' Mr. Goldhirsh said in an interview with The Associated Press in 1985. ''I found myself managing a small, growing company. I didn't know anything about managing a company.''
So he decided to publish the kind of how-to business magazine he felt he needed. That magazine, Inc., was aimed at owners of companies with annual sales of $1 million to $25 million.
Bolstered by a survey of business people that suggested there would be interest, he sold his nautical magazines for more than $10 million to start it.
Within two years, Inc. was profitable, and by 2000, when he sold it for an estimated $200 million, circulation was around 650,000. He gave 10 percent of the proceeds to his employees, to whom he had also freely lent his yacht. His easy personal style emerged, among other ways, through his penchant for going sockless and hiding in the shadows even at banquets at which he was being honored.
In 1981, he published High Technology, which he sold in 1987. In 1986, he bought Dun's Review, said to be the nation's oldest continuously published business publication, and renamed it Business Month. It closed in 1990. He also started, bought, sold and closed other magazines.
Mr. Goldhirsh's wife, Wendy Jo, died in 1999. The Boston Globe reported that he is survived by one daughter, Elizabeth; one son, Benjamin, both of Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.; two brothers, Stewart and Neil, both of Boston; and his parents, Leonard and Sylvia of Boston. | Bernard A. Goldhirsh, who started a newsletter-publishing business in his basement that grew into Inc. magazine, one of the first publications to profit by aiming at owners of small businesses, died on Sunday in Boston. He was 63. The cause was complications from a brain tumor, The Associated Press reported. | 13.166667 | 0.983333 | 37.016667 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/us/disenfranchised-florida-felons-struggle-to-regain-their-rights.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160613092915id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2004/03/28/us/disenfranchised-florida-felons-struggle-to-regain-their-rights.html | Disenfranchised Florida Felons Struggle to Regain Their Rights | 20160613092915 | Gov. Jeb Bush looked out over a roomful of felons appealing to him for something they had lost, and tried to reassure them.
''Don't be nervous; we're not mean people,'' the governor said as some fidgeted, prayed, hushed children or polished their handwritten statements. ''You can just speak from the heart.''
And they did: convicted robbers, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and others, all finished with their sentences, standing up one by one in a basement room at the State Capitol and asking Mr. Bush to restore their civil rights. Their files before him, Mr. Bush asked one man about his drinking, another about his temper, and so on.
Four mornings a year, this unusual scene unfolds in front of the governor and his cabinet, as they review the requests of some of the thousands of felons whom Florida has stripped of their rights to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office.
Since daybreak on Nov. 8, 2000, when the nation awoke to the shock of a presidential race ending in a virtual tie, Florida's voting laws and practices have been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. The disputed election results led the state to adopt sweeping changes in how votes are cast and counted and how voter rolls are maintained.
Yet as Florida becomes an election-year battleground again, with Governor Bush vowing to ensure victory here for his brother and Democrats eager to reclaim the state, its electoral practices -- including its felon disenfranchisement law -- are drawing renewed attention.
In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.
Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote. A 2001 report by a University of Minnesota sociologist counted more than 600,000 in Florida, not including those still in prison, on parole or on probation. More than one in four black men here may not vote, the report found. The state says it is impossible to know how many disenfranchised felons live here, because some have died or moved.
Although the Democratic Party here has not made fighting the ban a priority since 2000, to the frustration of civil rights groups, Scott Maddox, the party chairman, said he had followed the issue closely and believed the governor and legislature supported the ban for partisan reasons.
''It's amazing to me that these Republicans that keep quoting the Bible seemingly don't believe in redemption and forgiveness when it comes to restoring civil rights,'' Mr. Maddox said through a spokeswoman.
Florida is the largest of the seven states that permanently take away the voting rights of all felons. While other states have scaled back similar bans in recent years, Governor Bush and the Legislature call their law a necessary consequence for citizens who commit crimes, and point out that many are eventually granted clemency. ''The governor believes this is a fair process,'' Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, wrote in an e-mail response to questions about the ban. He pointed out that more criminals were getting their rights restored without hearings under a smoother process set in place by the governor.
Partly because the ban drew widespread attention after 2000, the backlog of felons whose applications for rights restoration are under review -- 35,585 as of March 15 -- is more than five times what it was in July 2001. The state automatically restores the rights of some felons after reviewing their records, while others need only fill out a short application. But others, including convicted drug traffickers, sex offenders, violent offenders and those guilty of public corruption, must go through an investigation and wait for a hearing in Tallahassee, which can take years.
Many felons apply not just to regain voting rights, but because they cannot qualify for certain state-issued professional licenses -- nursing or contracting licenses, for example -- unless their rights are restored.
Julio Lima, who was convicted on cocaine trafficking charges in 1997 said he had since gone to school to become an insurance adjuster but could not get a license without civil rights. Mr. Lima, 34, said he applied for restoration in 2002 and was still waiting for a hearing date.
The clemency board, which consists of the governor and his three cabinet members, has files on each applicant. The State Parole Commission recommends before their hearings whether to accept their applications, based partly on investigations that might include interviews with employers, neighbors and victims. But the board does not always follow the recommendations.
''How's the anger situation going?'' Mr. Bush asked one man after leafing through his file on the most recent hearing day, March 18, when the clemency board considered 57 voting rights cases.
''You've stayed clean?'' the governor asked another.
Over the course of that morning, board members seemed especially interested to know whether former alcohol and drug abusers were now sober. They had little patience for multiple traffic violations, domestic violence records and blame passing.
They rejected the application of a man convicted of killing a pregnant woman while driving drunk in 1989 (her mother was there, tearfully saying that he had never apologized) and a man convicted of a lewd act against a child in 1993. They restored the rights of a former drug addict who now helps AIDS patients and a convicted drug trafficker who said he wanted to make his young daughter proud by voting. | Florida's electoral practices, including its felon disenfranchisement law, are drawing renewed attention as state again becomes presidential election-year battleground; Democrats have made fighting disenfranchisement priority; charge Gov Jeb Bush and legislature back ban, which bars over one in four black men in state from voting, for partisan reasons; Florida is largest of seven states that permanently take away voting rights of all felons; voting rights map; photos (M) | 13.780488 | 0.926829 | 2.463415 | low | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/04/19/hyundai-cisco-connected-car-tech/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160613135628id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/04/19/hyundai-cisco-connected-car-tech/ | Hyundai Taps Cisco to Develop Connected Car Tech | 20160613135628 | Hyundai Motor Company is partnering with IT and networking equipment company Cisco to help develop the next generation of Internet-connected car services, which relies on lots of data shared at high speeds.
The partnership, which will focus on a network that will speed up and improve the transfer of large amounts of data within the vehicle, is part of the Hyundai’s wider strategy of working with tech firms to create a connected car platform for its vehicles. Hyundai hymtf and Cisco csco say they also aim to make communication between the numerous systems within a car more effective. For instance, an advanced driver assistance system that has automated brakes and lane steering needs to be able to communicate with cameras and sensors as well as send information to the driver through a dashboard display in the car.
For autonomous driving to progress, these systems have to communicate efficiently with each other and the driver in real time.
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The companies will also cooperate on basic research and develop a test environment for vehicle simulation. Hyundai Motor says it will invest in cloud, big data analytics, and connected car security technologies. The company did not how much it was planning to invest in cloud computing or big data analytics.
Earlier this month, Hyundai outlined its plan to develop smarter cars that can receive and use data faster than ever before. The automaker needs to be able to transfer data at high speeds to roll out several next-gen features in its cars, including the ability to remotely diagnose and fix vehicle maintenance issues and to communicate with city and road infrastructure—a key development for self-driving cars. Hyundai is also developing a “smart traffic” feature, in which the car will pick a better route based on real-time data on traffic and road conditions as well as security and data management for all elements of the car.
Are Internet-connected cars worth the risk?
In recent years, automakers have thrown a lot of technology into cars in a bid to catch up to the functionality of smartphones, on which people have come to rely. But adding more technology hasn’t always translated into car sales. It’s no longer enough to have a car with Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth connection that allows a driver to pair their smartphone to the car.
Now automakers are focused on doing more with the data they’re capturing from drivers to develop tech and Internet-connected features in the car that are easy to use, intuitive, and integrated with other apps or services. Just a few weeks ago, Toyota announced a new entity named Toyota Connect, which will use Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure to crunch data and help develop new products for drivers, businesses with car fleets, and even dealers. | Because autonomous driving and other smart car features can't exist without high-speed data. | 31.294118 | 0.705882 | 0.823529 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/03/16/sidecar-uber-innovation/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160613143029id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/03/16/sidecar-uber-innovation/ | Why Sidecar Stalled Even Though it Beat Uber in Innovation | 20160613143029 | When Sidecar launched an app in 2012 that connected private vehicle drivers with people looking for a ride, Uber had been in business for two years but was only connecting riders with the for-hire, black car drivers. The first of the true “ridesharing” companies, Sidecar labeled itself as the “innovation leader” in the industry, and it was. It continually rolled out advances that improved the service, raised the bar for quality and safety, and shaped the regulatory vision and broader perception of the industry. In the words of Sidecar co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul, “People loved it. It was safe, convenient and affordable, and it quickly caught on.”
It quickly caught on for all the reasons that Paul said, and it disrupted the industry. But today it is Sidecar, not Uber, that is shuttering operations. Last December, Paul posted a short farewell letter on Medium announcing that the company was ceasing operations. And in January, GM announced its acquisition of Sidecar’s technology, assets, and some employees for a price tag Automotive News estimated at $39 million, far less than the $5.5 billion valuation of competitor Lyft, or the $62.5 billion value placed on Uber.
Today, as the auto industry faces a sea change in how people think about mobility, it’s facing a big question: How does a company, new or old, position itself to remain relevant and vibrant as not just the industry’s products, but also the underlying assumptions, transform? As the Sidecar story illustrates, being innovative isn’t enough. Displacing incumbents, creating new markets, or pushing an entire industry forward isn’t enough. Companies need to focus not just on creating value but on capturing the value they create.
As technology fundamentally changes the relationship between businesses and consumers and dramatically lowers barriers to entry across the economy, companies in many industries—not just automotive—will soon confront the same question: How can we capture value?
To answer that, companies have to start by asking themselves some hard questions:
— Where is new value being created, and where will it be created over the coming years?
By focusing on value capture, we don’t mean to imply that value creation isn’t important. In any industry facing massive change, companies need first to identify the likely drivers of future value based on larger trends affecting the industry and the economy. For example, as more of us move into dense urban areas, we have more options in terms of places to go, but at the same time we wrestle with how best to spread our time among these options.
In this environment, increasing “return on mobility” for each of us becomes more important. How do we maximize the value of our destinations while also reducing the time and cost of getting there? Traditionally, the automotive industry has been focused on the denominator of that equation—increasing safety and comfort and providing cost effective options—but it has left the numerator (the value we might realize at our destination) up to us. There’s an opportunity here for someone to create far more value by both helping us pick the best possible destinations and by helping us get there quickly, safely, and cost-effectively.
— How will value be measured by consumers and what types of new roles and market structure will be required to improve it?
In our example, return on mobility—helping customers not only get from point A to point B but also get more out of the destination—creates an opportunity for brands that can follow a customer to act as a trusted advisor. A diverse set of companies, established and new, might reasonably try to claim this role. Automotive brands might see themselves as ahead of the game in having visibility regarding where customers go in their cars, but others outside the automotive industry—Google with its vast location-behavior data, Amazon with its intimate knowledge of consumer buying habits—might equally lay claim to having the insight and capabilities to assist the consumer.
While becoming a trusted advisor to the mobility consumer is one new way to create value, there are three other big opportunities emerging on the shifting mobility landscape: data aggregator, mobility fleet operator, and horizontal operating system provider (see our recent paper for more detailed discussion about mobility).
— Which roles are defensible and sustainable for capturing value?
Product companies such as the automotive OEMs will need to choose where to play, quickly building relationships with a wide variety of partners and delivering value from their roles in the resulting ecosystem. The positive side of working with third parties rather than controlling all of the elements of serving customers is that companies can generate more value with a limited investment of their own resources. The downside is that the platforms that enable the ecosystem can also make it more difficult to capture value over time: By giving customers and suppliers greater visibility into their options, they could make it easier for customers and suppliers to switch from one participant to another.
As more industries are transformed by platforms, connectivity, and data, companies will likely have to look for roles—such as that of a broker in a market platform or a provider of a horizontal operating system—that provide significant and rapidly evolving services to the rest of the market. Relationships and value will tend to concentrate around these roles. A key to capturing value is to identify and occupy these influence points in business ecosystems.
— Can my company move quickly enough?
Given the need to create entirely new business models in an industry facing as much change as the automotive industry, it isn’t surprising that established companies are cautious. However, moving slowly increases the risk that aggressive new entrants will occupy positions that capture the highest value first.
These emerging roles are driven by network effects. They involve building specialized ecosystems within the broader market, where the value of the platform increases as the number of users and depth of engagement with those users grows. Once these ecoystems reach a critical mass of participants, they tend to consolidate and become increasingly difficult to unseat. Ultimately, for Sidecar, although they were first in the market, they didn’t build critical mass as quickly as their competitors.
In these kinds of businesses, if you aspire to capture value, you need to become the first to create value—and capture it—to build critical mass. Being a fast follower in either of those roles could be a risky proposition.
John Hagel III, Deloitte Services LLP, is the co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge based in Silicon Valley. John Seely Brown is the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. | Disruptive ideas aren’t enough to take advantage of rapid change. | 107.666667 | 0.583333 | 0.75 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/north-carolina-bathroom-law/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160613143439id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/09/north-carolina-bathroom-law/? | North Carolina's Governor Fires Back at the U.S. Over Bathroom Law | 20160613143439 | On Monday, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory filed suit against the federal government in his fight to keep the state’s controversial bathroom law on the books. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department demanded that the state back away from the law, called House Bill 2 or HB2, which it said violates the Civil Rights Act.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department informed the Governor and other state officials that failure to back down could cost the state millions in federal funds for its universities and highways. The letter set a Monday deadline for North Carolina to back down.
In a statement, McCrory said President Obama’s administration bypassed Congress in trying to set restroom policies for public and private employers in North Carolina and beyond.
“This is now a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level. They are now telling every government agency and every company that employs more than 15 people that men should be allowed to use a women’s locker room, restroom or shower facility.”
The issue erupted in March when North Carolina legislators, in an unprecedented 12-hour-session, passed HB2 which mandates that people use public bathrooms that match the “biological sex” listed on their birth certificates.
Read More: North Carolina’s Top Lawyer Calls Bathroom Law ‘an Embarrassment’
Members of the LGBT community promptly cried foul, and the ACLU of North Carolina and others filed lawsuits against the state. North Carolina’s own attorney general, Roy Cooper, a Democrat who will run against McCrory next year, said he would not defend the law against these suits.
Big-name state institutions, including Duke University, registered their displeasure as did major companies and in-state employers including Charlotte-based Bank of America bac and IBM ibm . Celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé weighed in against the law while McCrory stood his ground.
McCrory is slated to speak more on the action at 1 p.m. ET on Monday. | And sues the Justice Department | 75.2 | 0.8 | 2 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/10/20/google-nexus-phone-reviews/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160613145220id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/10/20/google-nexus-phone-reviews/ | LG Nexus 5X and Huawei 6P: Reviewers On Google's New Android Phones | 20160613145220 | Reviews of Google’s latest batch of Nexus phones are in. The verdict? Pretty good.
The Nexus 5X—made by South Korean electronics giant LG—is a little cheaper, smaller and made of plastic. The Nexus 6P—made by the Chinese telecom giant Huawei—is slightly larger, more expensive, and encased in aluminum. Everyone seems to agree that the latter is the preferred choice of the pair, but that superior quality comes with a cost: the base price is $120 more.
Early reviewers have praised a few particular features on the new phones. Namely, greatly improved cameras (never Nexus’ strong suit), convenient fingerprint sensor placement (on the backside of the devices, rather than the front), and, above all, bargain prices (starting at $379 for the 5X and $499 for the 6P).
Both run Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google’s GOOG latest mobile operating system, and come with Google Now on Tap, a contextual search tool that acts like Apple’s AAPL Siri.
Both devices go on sale at the end of October, and they’re available now to pre-order. Here’s a rundown of what the early reviewers are saying.
“For those who yearned for the days of budget- and pocket-friendly Nexus handsets, the 5X is for you.” (Engadget)
“…it looks like Google (and LG) have finally narrowed the camera gap with Apple’s iPhones. The Nexus 5X’s cameras, while not significantly better than the iPhone 6S’s, are very capable shooters. That alone is a huge win for the Android camp.” (Mashable)
“Hardcore fans may be difficult to please and even fickle at times, but if you give them what they want, they can be your biggest supporters. With the Nexus 5X, Google is giving those die-hard Nexus 5 fans all that and then some.” (Verge)
“The more time I held it in my hand, the cheaper it felt. I’ve tried out a boatload of devices and being light is a good thing…but feeling like cheap plastic totally turns me off. Google and LG calls it ‘premium injection molded polycarbonate,’ but that’s not changing my mind.” (TechCrunch)
“Price alone is a huge driving factor in making the 5X so compelling, but it needs so much more to captivate a wider audience, especially when we’ve been spoiled by so many great-performing, low-cost premium phones.” (PhoneArena)
“I wouldn’t call it a particularly attractive phone compared to the iPhone 6s Plus or the newest Galaxy Edge phones from Samsung, but it’s not ugly either. It comes in aluminum, graphite (black) and frost (white).” (Forbes)
“It’s a sleeker, smaller, more powerful take on the phablet formula Google and Motorola tried to crack with the Nexus 6, and it seems to hit all the right notes. Hell, with a price tag that starts at $499, it’s even cheaper than its predecessor.” (Engadget)
“When Google imagined hardware and software working in perfect harmony one day, the 6P was the device they unknowingly fantasized about.” (TechCrunch)
“For a first stab at a Nexus phone, Huawei hit the ball out of the park.” (Mashable)
“[T]he 5X is very obviously the lesser one. Compared to the larger (and pricier) 6P, it has compromises in both performance and design. And though it fights really well in its mid-tier price bracket, if you bump it up to the next weight class, it doesn’t quite hold up to the true flagships from companies such as Apple or Samsung.” (Verge)
“The Nexus 5X and 6P are two of the best Nexus devices ever produced. It’s a common line that people say every year, but these are the first Nexus devices that don’t have a huge deal breaker attached to them. Google and its partners have finally nailed two of the things Nexus devices have traditionally been poor at. The camera is actually good—great, even—and can hold its own against the best mobile shooters out there. And the battery life is just as good as any other flagship as well.” (Ars Technica)
Follow Robert Hackett on Twitter at @rhhackett. Read his technology and cybersecurity coverage at fortune.com/author/robert-hackett. And subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology, where he writes a weekly column.
For more on Google’s recent product announcements, watch this video. | The reviews of the new Nexus phones are in. | 90 | 1 | 3.4 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/singer-johnny-mathis-mansion-56-years-ravaged-fire-article-1.2421511 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160614015423id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/gossip/singer-johnny-mathis-mansion-56-years-ravaged-fire-article-1.2421511 | Singer Johnny Mathis' mansion destroyed by fire | 20160614015423 | A fire destroyed iconic singer Johnny Mathis' Hollywood Hills mansion Monday night.
Mathis, an 80-year-old crooner known for pop hits such as “Misty” and “Chances Are,” learned the 5:30 p.m. blaze had ravaged his cherished home of 56 years when he landed in Los Angeles after a concert in Cleveland.
“Someone said that there was a fire at the house,"Mathis told KTLA-TVafter seeing the extent of its damage. "I was thinking a little fire."
“It’s the only house I’ve ever had," he added. "There’s nothing left."
Narrow roads prevented fire crews from accessing the residence in the 1400 block of Stebbins Terrace, officials said. Firefighters hiked up the hill to Mathis’ home to save what they could from the estate.
“Due to the fact the neighbors had said something, we immediately got all his trophies and some of his memorabilia that was irreplaceable,” Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Dean Zipperman told the TV station.
It’s not clear what started the fire. A Fire spokesman said the fire spread from outside, but another Los Angeles Fire Department official placed the inferno's origin in a room filled with aquairum equipment.
Much of Johnny Mathis' home was destroyed Sunday night when a fire blazed through the Hollywood Hills mansion. Firefighters saved what they could from the estate.
The loss of Mathis’ home comes as the singer tours the United States to celebrate a musical career spanning 60 years. He's expected to perform in Branson, Mo. next week.
Mathis, wearing a New York Yankees hat, remained optimistic while looking through the fire’s damage alongside firefighters, whom his publicist thanked in a tweet just before midnight local time.
Thank you @LAFD for your swift response, and everyone for your support! Johnny wasn't home at the time of the fire, and nobody was hurt.
“I'm OK, nobody got hurt — that's always important. We can always replace things," Mathis added. | A fire at the longtime home of Johnny Mathis destroyed the legendary singer’s Hollywood Hills mansion Monday night. | 19.6 | 0.9 | 3.2 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://nypost.com/2016/05/07/fdnys-low-dropout-rate-raises-questions-about-rigor-of-training/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160614022339id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/05/07/fdnys-low-dropout-rate-raises-questions-about-rigor-of-training/ | FDNY’s low dropout rate raises questions about rigor of training | 20160614022339 | The FDNY’s latest graduating class of 310 probationary firefighters had the lowest drop-out rate in years, but some question whether the training was watered down.
The class started with 324 and lost only 14 due to resignations, failure or injuries — a 4 percent drop-out rate, sources said. The usual dropout is 10 percent or more.
Insiders cite a shake-up at the FDNY training academy with brass pushing for greater numbers of minority and female probies to pass. The city is under a court order to boost minority hiring.
“Everybody graduates,” one described the mandate.
Another source familiar with FDNY training believes the overall regimen, which includes academics, individual firefighter tasks, and an obstacle course with multiple challenges, has eased.
“The current administration has put people in place who have relaxed the instruction intensity. If there’s a focus on just passing instead of trying to excel, you reduce the risk of injuries that result in fewer graduating,” he said.
“I feel we’re sending out some firefighters who are not as competent as they should be,” he added. “We need to train firefighters for what to expect on the worst possible day — like having to rescue three kids trapped in a fire.”
‘We’re sending out some firefighters who are not as competent.’
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the new crop of probies “represents the growing diversity of the department with 40 percent of graduates identifying as people of color – 17 percent as black, 20 percent as Hispanic and 3 percent as Asian.”
In addition, three graduates are women, bringing the total number of female firefighters to 52 – the highest in FDNY history, but still only about 0.5 percent of the 10,500-member force.
One of the women is Wendy Tapia, 34, who The Post reported was allowed to conditionally graduate from the Fire Academy in May 2013, even though she had failed to run a required 1.5 miles in 12 minutes or less. Supporters said suffered stress fractures because she was “overtrained.”
The tenacious Tapia rejoined the FDNY academy in December 2015 with fellow emergency medical technicians.
Under new rules, probies who fail the run can demonstrate aerobic capacity on Stairmaster machines, which experts say shows if candidates can climb stairs with heavy equipment.
FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon dismissed the critics.
“These pathetic and disgraceful complaints are not just sour grapes – they are a dishonest and outrageous portrayal of an exceptional program that trained and developed one of the hardest-working and successful classes of firefighters in Department history, including 49 veterans and 4 members whose fathers died in service to the city.” | The FDNY’s latest graduating class of 310 probationary firefighters had the lowest drop-out rate in years, but some question whether the training was watered down. The class started with 324 … | 14.305556 | 0.972222 | 25.694444 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/simon-cowell-returns-grand-american-idol-finale-article-1.2592805 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160614192600id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/tv/simon-cowell-returns-grand-american-idol-finale-article-1.2592805 | Simon Cowell returns for grand ‘American Idol’ finale | 20160614192600 | The final notes rang out and the curtain came down Thursday night on the long-running singing competition “American Idol.”
The Fox reality competition show wrapped on a high note, tinged with nostalgia, as past winners, contestants and some celebrity judges joined host Ryan Seacrest to bid adieu.
Before the lights went dark forever, with Trent Harmon being named the last Idol winner, the grand finale kicked off with a surprise taped message from President Obama urging viewers to vote.
“I believe it should almost be as easy as voting on 'American Idol,' he said. “Not all of us can sing like Kelly Clarkson, but all of our voices matter.”
Mississippi farm boy Trent Harmon defeated La’Porsha Renae to be crowned the 15th and final winner.
“I know that I have a God-given ability, but I didn’t want to take it for granted. I wanted to work so, so hard, and she pushed me to do it,” a tearful Harmon said of Renae, who stood poised and smiling by his side.
The show opened with a harmonizing chorus of white-clad winners and contenders including Scotty McCreery, Taylor Hicks and Diana DeGarmo.
Other familiar faces from years past popped up in solos and group numbers, including Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, David Cook, Fantasia, Ruben Studdard, Jordin Sparks and Kimberley Locke. Even the off-pitch viral sensation William Hung appeared to reprise his Internet hit “She Bangs.”
Also returning was Season 1 co-host Brian Dunkleman, who made a brief appearance alongside Ryan Seacrest — the only constant presence on the show — and congratulated the show “for struggling along for another 14 seasons without me.”
Judges got in on the act as well. Keith Urban and Underwood dueted, while Harry Connick Jr. saluted a music center in New Orleans’ Katrina battered-Ninth Ward by inviting a young student, Marley Fletcher, to join him on “It’s a Wonderful World.”
The top marks of the night went to an explosive performance by judge Jennifer Lopez of her single, “Ain’t Your Mama,” followed by her classic hit, “Let’s Get Loud.”
Clarkson, the show’s first winner, appeared in a pre-taped performance. The very pregnant hit maker couldn’t make it to the live airing, but she recorded an epic mashup of her hit songs.
Even curmudgeonly judge Simon Cowell stopped by for the sendoff. The 56-year-old, who left the show in 2010 and promised he wouldn’t return, came back to roaring applause during the grand finale.
“I think Paula and Randy should apologize for being so mean to the contestants over the years,” Cowell said, adding a final dig at fellow judges Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson.
After some banter, Cowell offered a sincere send off.
“Thank you for inviting us into your homes,”he said.
“Idol” debuted in June 2002, an imported singing contest based on producer Simon Fuller’s hit British series, “Pop Idol.”
Viewers ate up the contestants’ performances and personalities, good, bad or downright ridiculous. They relished the bickering of Cowell and Abdul and Jackson’s reassuring “Dawg” that prefaced his critiques.
The emotional night ended with a moving performance by new victor, Harmon, as confetti poured over him.
“Good night, America,” he said. Then as the screen faded to black, he added, “For now.” | It went out on a high note with none other than a surprise appearance by curmudgeon judge Simon Cowell. | 34.3 | 0.85 | 1.85 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/pnc-bank-arts-center-charges-music-fans-parking-fee-6-don-car-article-1.364644 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160614235723id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/music-arts/pnc-bank-arts-center-charges-music-fans-parking-fee-6-don-car-article-1.364644 | Parking fee tix them off N.J. venue is rockin' us, say fans | 20160614235723 | Music fan have something new to rage at: $6 parking fees per ticket whether you come alone or pack six into your car - or even take a bus.
The unseemly fee is slapped on every ticket for shows at New Jersey's 17,500-seat PNC Bank Arts Center.
"I passed on buying six tickets to the Def Leppard concert because I don't want to pay six times for parking," said Gary Kane, 39, of Brooklyn.
"I know people that drop off their kids when there's a show like the Jonas Brothers, and then pick them up," he noted. "Why should they have to pay - and on every ticket?"
Concertgoers were already fuming over how quickly Ticketmaster sells out their favorite shows but mysteriously has plenty of higher-priced tickets at their secondary resale sites, TicketsNow and TicketExchange.
Live Nation, the company that oversees shows at PNC, which is in Holmdel, refused to discuss the newest way to gouge fans. Under its per-ticket parking fee scheme, a vehicle carrying three people gets charged $18 to park a single car. If six people arrive together, they pay $36.
By contrast, Nassau Coliseum charges a flat fee of $7 per car, the Meadowlands' venues take $15, and Jones Beach doesn't charge anything.
Vincent Torre, 42, of Brooklyn, said he sometimes takes the bus to PNC, formerly known as the Garden State Arts Center.
"I'm already paying bus fare," he said. "Why should I pay for parking? I think it's disgraceful."
PNC also tacks on an involuntary, and unexplained, "charity fee" of 25 cents per ticket.
"Isn't charity supposed to be voluntary?" Torre asked.
Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert trade mag Pollstar, said fans are right to be mad.
"It's really a disingenuous way of doing business to have all these add-on fees," he said.
"If, in the end, the ticket costs $80 instead of the $65 it originally seemed, they should just say that from the start."
Rocker Bruce Springsteen is among the performers who've railed at the bilking of fans.
He took aim at Ticketmaster when the $65 to $95 seats to his shows went on sale at TicketsNow for up to $5,000.
"The abuse of our fans and our trust by Ticketmaster has made us as furious as it has made many of you," he wrote to fans on his Web site. "We condemn this practice." | Want to see the Jonas Brothers, get ready to pay a $6 parking fee - even if you don't drive. | 21.333333 | 0.833333 | 1.833333 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/latest-reviews/test-drive-review-2015-tesla-model-s-p85d-article-1.2183569 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160615032058id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/autos/latest-reviews/test-drive-review-2015-tesla-model-s-p85d-article-1.2183569 | Review: 2015 Tesla Model S P85D | 20160615032058 | Positioned at the starting grid of a runway, with the gleaming borough of Manhattan visible in the distance, the 691-horsepower Tesla Model S P85D looks like an earth-bound rocket, even while standing still.
Perhaps that’s why it felt at home at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Park, one of our first stops in an extended test of the electric wunderkind. Of course, an empty runway also sounded like it could be the perfect venue to test the Model S P85D at its theoretical limits.
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Fat chance. The defunct airport’s crumbling runway is off limits to high-speed maneuvering, but it made for an incredible backdrop for this sophisticated sedan with unbelievable power. If Superman had to trade his airborne capabilities for an equally powerful motor vehicle that doesn't draw too much attention to itself, the Model S P85D would be that car.
We learned that very quickly during a brief first drive of the Model S P85D, in which repeated zero-to-25 stoplight street drags were the bulk of our testing. Tesla Driving 101 dictates a modified approach to driving, owing to one-pedal acceleration and braking, a dashboard bereft of buttons, and the attention paid to maintaining charge. With the opportunity to really test the Tesla’s capabilities over three days of road trips, however, we wanted to finally see if there was everyday excitement beyond the hype.
Our first day of testing consisted primarily of city driving, with the anticipated round-trip grind from Brooklyn to Manhattan putting pressure on the high-performance Tesla to act as a sensible commuter car. With no need to let the Model S P85D warm up in sub-30ºF temperatures, our first impressions were unusually brisk and pithy as we settled in. The dashboard is expansive but spare, leaving the 17-inch center display to shine. Even equipped with the optional “next generation”leather seats, the driving position in the Model S P85D is rather flat and upright.
Several years into production and with little change to its styling, the Model S still received its share of smartphone camera snaps and finger-pointing along Madison Avenue. Over the suspension joints being repaired on the Brooklyn Bridge, we raised the air suspension to its highest position, giving us near-SUV forward visibility. The ride also remained admirably comfortable while negotiating Manhattan’s end-of-winter potholes.
We left Manhattan, to allow the big Tesla to stretch its legs, and headed for the woods of Connecticut as winter’s death grip finally began to subside. As impressive as the Model S P85D’s acceleration was from a standstill, so were its passing sprints on the highway. A couple of wrong turns off the Merritt Parkway, and we found ourselves in some of the tightest, twistiest, and hilliest roads outside our favorite secret testing grounds in southern California.
Where the sizable Tesla should have floundered, it impressed, with minimal body roll through the corners and plenty of power in reserve. Yet the Model S differs from a true performance car in one very important area: the human-meets-machine interface. The steering effort, while natural-feeling, isn't very communicative. Braking was linear, but lacked confidence compared to a more traditional (i.e. not electric-powered) sport sedan.
The romp through the woods made a significant dent in the Model S P85D’s estimated range, which read over half-full when we left the city. After our driving fun it was obvious a recharge for the 50-mile return journey would be necessary. A nearby Tesla Supercharger was available, thankfully, and coveniently located in the parking lot of a gas station along the highway. About half an hour and a cup of coffee later, the Tesla was recharged with more than enough range to get home.
Suddenly, we realized that we were treating the Model S P85D just like any gas-powered car with a range of about 250 miles. Another electric 'top-off' at the Supercharger station at John F. Kennedy airport revealed the location is a popular hangout for the Model S fraternity of New York City. That's because, at the moment, this happens to be the sole Supercharger in the five boroughs.
The next morning, impressed by the Model S P85D’s outright performance on the highway and usability in the city, we embarked to test its longevity on a one-day run to Montauk and back. We headed out toward the East End, with another jolt of electric juice provided at the Syosset Supercharger, to guarantee we'd have the range to reach Lond Island's easternmost point.
Not everything went according to plan. The original idea was to replenish the Model S’energy supply at a charger in Montauk - but the charger was offline when we arrived. With only low double-digit mileage remaining, we reached out via smartphone to a local Tesla evangelist in the Hamptons. This allowed us a comfortable place to wait while the P85D recharged to just under 100 miles of range on his personal charger. Who says smartphones don't help people make real connections?
With enough range to at least make it back to the JFK Supercharger, now about 85 miles away, we set the adaptive cruise control to the Island’s stiflingly low speed limit of 50 mph. We turned most major accessory systems off to increase range, and watched the energy graph to keep track of range when traffic slowed.
By the time we reached the Supercharger, all that careful driving had actually beaten the anticipated range estimate. Unlike some EVs, the Tesla has no “greenest”driving setting, leaving it up to the driver to add efficiency to the equation. We smugly refilled at JFK once more before parking back home in Brooklyn.
No test of the Model S P85D would be complete without at least a casual mention of Insane Mode. Yes, we spent a portion of each test day entertaining family and friends with the Model S P85D’s stupefying acceleration. The feature definitely lives up to its name.
We had a delightful time scaring doubtful passengers with neck-snapping acceleration runs. Although the aforementioned winter weather had no major effect on the Model S’performance, the cold temperatures presumably cut the sedan’s ability to use all 480-KW of forward thrust.
That’s little cause for consternation, however. Short of the appearance of flying cars on public roads, the Model S P85D is the closest thing to a personal jet that you can procure today. At $106,200, it’s not an inexpensive proposition, but the cost is well worth it.
Over several hundred miles of driving, we paid nothing to recharge the Tesla - savings that could add up over the long run. A less-expensive dual-motor Model S, the 70D, should further increase the value equation, and the sedan’s ubiquity, when it goes on sale soon as the new base model.
Better find your own runway now.
Did you find this article helpful? If so, please share it using the "Join the Conversation" buttons below, and thank you for visiting Daily News Autos. | Clark Kent, your car has arrived. Take flight in the 691-horsepower Tesla Model S P85D, an electric car with a supercar spirit. | 52.5 | 0.769231 | 2 | high | low | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/12/space-companies-claim-to-fix-broken-promise-over-rural-broadband/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160615224531id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/business/2016/06/12/space-companies-claim-to-fix-broken-promise-over-rural-broadband/ | Space companies claim to fix ‘broken promise’ over rural broadband | 20160615224531 | “We’ve been piloting the 30Mbps in 1,000 homes across England to see if we could stage a wider roll-out, and it’s worked beautifully,” said Mr Williams.
Avanti now plans to launch two more satellites in its orbit over the next two years, which will provide broadband and mobile services. It is also pushing into mobile data, having struck a £20m contract with mobile giant EE to boost its 4G services in remote areas.
Not every property is covered by BDUK’s scheme, however, which is being rolled out area-by-area and administered by local councils. Europasat says around a quarter of its satellite services installed without any public investment, as the costs of superfast satellite services has come down.
One business to dish out for its own satellite is Planters, a group of garden centres and greetings cards shops based across Derbyshire and Staffordshire that has began installing Europasat dishes last month.
Group manager Dave Mann said the business recently invested £1.2m in building new restaurants in its Tamworth and Bretby garden centres - but that with an internet connection of just 1 Mbps, they could barely access company emails.
“We made a nine-minute promotional video that took nine hours to upload to Facebook,” he said. “And when you open a restaurant the diners expect to be able to access some Wi-Fi.”
Mr Mann tried to apply for local council funding to get a fibre connection, but said that six months down the line the application had gone nowhere. “Meanwhile, we were unable to advertise the business on social media or update our website – which is crucial for a rural business,” he said.
But a new satellite dish installed last month now gives them 17Mbps speeds. This is still below the Government’s “superfast” standard but a dramatic improvement for businesses like Mr Mann’s. “Now all we need is for the weather to improve so people will get their gardening gloves one,” he said. | There’s a new space race and it’s not aimed at Mars or the Moon - but Britain’s remotest dwellings, according to satellite entrepreneur Andrew Walwyn. | 12.966667 | 0.533333 | 0.866667 | low | low | abstractive |
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