Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Cassini probe celebrates 15 years in space

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124531/Cassini_probe_celebrates____years_in_space

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Forward-Thinking Family House with Volumes Integrated

Play of Volumes  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes Integrated

Masahiko Sato, the architect of Architect Show?has defined the K5 house, in Kurume, Japan. With a futuristic kind of look and incredible high ceilings in one of the wings, K5 is ideal for young families, who are not afraid to embrace asymmetry and volumes, without questioning the architect?s sanity. In contrast to the rural landscape, on Sato?s project is written ? avant-garde? all over. Amazingly young spirited, the house juggles with contrasts of black and white and creates an impact on whoever ends up seeing it. Different angles, the irregularities ?in terms of volumes, every single element was designed to blend into a forward- thinking type of dwelling.

Contrasting Black and White  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes Integrated

Despite of its daring design, the place is really welcoming. By using natural wood as a main material in defining the interior, especially in the opened space kitchen- dining room area, the architect created a cozy atmosphere, ideal for family gatherings. The Western inspired interior is combined with elements of Japanese style, in order to fit the Far Eastern tradition. Due to the Japanese culture, a tatami room has been smoothly integrated into the project. The house?s irregular shape was mainly possible because of the peaceful location. A crowded urban site could not sustain under no circumstance such spatial variations. Very interesting and inspiring, K5 brings together the Western and the Eastern cultures, creating a perfect blend of style for modern families.

Exterior Wooden Detail  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedK5 Interesting Volumes  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedKitchen   Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedWooden Interior  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedView to Dining Room  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedPlants Between  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedSide View  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes IntegratedK5 by Night  Forward Thinking Family House with Volumes Integrated

Source: http://freshome.com/2012/10/16/forward-thinking-family-house-with-volumes-integrated/

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Monday, October 8, 2012

Investing The Hard Way: Why Management ... - Online Gambling News

In my third quarter review last week, I emphasized a long-running theme of this column: given the low-growth nature of the gambling sector, investors must focus on a company?s ability to execute. And the most important prerequisite for execution is good management.

For investors, judging managers is much like judging potential romantic partners: it takes a while to figure out who the great ones are, but it?s much simpler to figure out who to avoid. If you ignore your? intuition, and try to rationalize a reason for staying with someone who is clearly flawed, you are likely going to get hurt ? and potentially lose a large amount of money.

Why Management MattersThe importance of management isn?t just limited to the gambling sector, of course; over the past year, well-known stocks have been crushed by management decisions that were questionable to most observers. Whether it is?Research in Motion (RIMM), the maker of the Blackberry, whose co-CEO famously boasted, ?There will never be a Blackberry with an MP3 player or a camera,? or the management-led plunge by?RadioShack (RSH)?into irrelevance and potential bankruptcy, or the??Qwikster? debacle at?Netflix (NFLX), there are recent examples throughout the market of the often multi-billion-dollar cost of reckless management and failed execution.

What these examples show is that once evidence of management?s failure first comes to light, investors need to leave ? quickly. When an open letter to?BGR?was published in June 2011 denouncing former co-CEO?s?Jim Balsillie?and?Mike Lazaridis, RIMM stock had collapsed from $70 to about $28 per share. Too many investors saw the company?s numbers ? a single-digit price-to-earnings ratio and strong historic cash flow generation ? and rushed in at the new lower levels, while those who were already burned failed to cut their losses. But the stock kept plummeting, Balsillie and Lazaridis resigned, and RIMM is now in the single digits, closing Friday at $8.22 per share. RadioShack?s failed attempt to become a smartphone vendor dropped the stock from $12 to $5 before former CEO Jim Gooch?s delusional justifications for that strategy became public on a post-earnings conference call. It went on to fall another 60%, to barely $2 per share, with Gooch finally resigning last month. Netflix fell sharply after a botched price hike and the later-rescinded decision to re-brand its DVD service; even after all that, it was trading over $150 per share. A little over a year later, Netflix trades at just $66.

Investors must remember that they are giving their money ? hundreds or often thousands of dollars ? to the CEO to manage. The CEO and his or her team decide how much money to give back through dividends or share repurchases; how to properly invest those funds; and even how much of that cash to pay themselves. A tremendous amount of trust is required; when executives violate the trust, investors should take their money elsewhere.

Back in May, I chose the ?Five Dumbest Stocks In The Market.? Among them:?Zynga (ZNGA). While I had already noted my skepticism about the company?s real-money gaming prospects, I noted that even if I was wrong on that score, the stock was not a good play. Why? A 2011 total of $510 million in stock-based compensation to employees and an insider sell-off in March proved the company had a ?clear emphasis on favoring employees and insiders over shareholders.? Five months later, Zynga stock has fallen by some 70 percent, executives are fleeing with their stock option proceeds in hand, and the company?s bookings are declining.

Note that my bearish call on the stock was not based on economic modeling or a microscopic reading of the company?s public filings that unearthed a heretofore unnoticed detail. Zynga?s compensation policies and its secondary offering were widely covered, and widely known; too many investors simply chose to ignore those red flags. Incidentally, number two on the list was?Groupon (GRPN), which had twice revised its filing for its initial stock offering after SEC criticisms of its ?creative accounting.? It now trades at $5.25 per share, barely half of its $10 level in May. In both cases, the bear thesis was remarkably simple: if you can?t trust the management, you can?t trust the stock. It doesn?t matter how good-looking the girl in the bar is; if she spends two hours talking about how much she loves her ex-boyfriend and how much she hates her father, you should probably move on. In the case of Zynga ? which now has about two-thirds of its stock price in cash and still hopes for some type of real-money gambling profits ? the stock is starting to get better looking. But the question to ask is simple: would you give your money to CEO?Mark Pincus? Between his bias toward himself and his fellow executives, and his wasteful acquisitions, it should be clear to investors that their money is just not safe with the CEO or his company.

Zynga isn?t the only gambling stock with governance issues.?bwin.Party Digital Entertainment (BPTY.L)?has seen a 20 percent bounce since hitting all-time lows after reporting disappointing first-half earnings in late August. Even including that rise, however, BPTY shareholders have seen losses of some $2 billion in market capitalization since the merger of bwin and PartyGaming was announced in July 2010. As I noted last week ? and my fellow contributors here at CalvinAyre.com argued even before the union was completed ? the merger itself was based on seriously flawed logic. Indeed, the severe destruction in the stock price, and the market share issues at the combined entity, should have been easy to see coming. The motivation behind the plan was questionable as well; our own Steven Stradbrooke noted that executive compensation would jump sharply in the wake of the merger. ?The people at the top of the (bwin.Party) pyramid driving this deal expect to emerge with fists full of cash. We strongly suspect that the average shareholder will be left holding the bag,? he correctly predicted in January 2011.

Despite the failure of the merger, co-CEO?s?Jim Ryan?and?Norbert Teufelberger?remain at the helm, while revenues stagnate and?PokerStars?runs circles around BPTY?s?fading poker business. As I noted last month, those investors still waiting patiently for a turnaround need only listen to Oscar from the US version of The Office: ?It doesn?t take a genius to know that every organization thrives when it has two leaders?where would Catholicism be without the two popes??

Another stock to avoid for similar reasons is?Caesars Entertainment (CZR). Caesars? current public status came courtesy of a manipulated IPO in February that CNBC?s?Gary Kaminsky?called ?the dumbest thing I?ve ever seen.? The entire process was clearly orchestrated to allow Caesars? private shareholders ? the same people who bought the company out at the top of the market in 2007 ? to exit their positions at a higher, manipulated price. Indeed, CZR jumped from $9 to over $16 on the first day of trading; yet the strategy has failed. The stock has dropped almost without interruption since April; only a 4% gain on Friday to $6.58 boosted it above its low for the year.

The company has discussed the idea of spinning off its interactive business, which includes the World Series of Poker brand and game developer?Playtika, shielding those potentially valuable assets from the company?s $20 billion debt load. Indeed, a bull case for the stock at its low current levels could be made, based on the potential value of the spin-off and the possibility that Caesars? legacy land-based operations can somehow survive its crushing debt load.

But again, we come back to management. CEO?Gary Loveman?led the 2007 buyout, which he even he now admits was ?ill-timed,? according to remarks reported last month by the?Review-Journal. The question for new CZR investors is: whose side will Loveman take? The manipulated nature of the IPO makes clear that Loveman?s intent in managing Caesars as a public entity was not to look out for his new shareholders, but to take care of his old ones. The IPO was designed so that institutional investors such as?Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs,?and?Paulson & Co.?could sell their stakes on the open market at a price higher than they could get on the private market. That effort failed; but it still makes clear where Loveman?s interests lie.

Loveman also is guilty of a very common flaw found in many bad managers: the failure to take responsibility. In the conference call following Caesars? second quarter earnings release ? when the company announced it had posted a $242 million loss ? Loveman (20) complained about ?a weakening U.S. economy? and the slow pace of online poker legalization. But it wasn?t the economy or Congress who created the $20 billion debt load that is now slowly strangling Caesars; it was the leveraged buyout, led by Loveman, that will likely lead to the restructuring, if not the outright bankruptcy, of one of the world?s largest casino operators.

In all of these examples, there were clear, obvious signs from management that they could not ? or would not ? be responsible stewards of their shareholders? investments. Investors in any stock, in any sector, must carefully scrutinize management, and avoid giving their hard-earned money to managers who have not proven their clear intent to take care of their shareholders. There are thousands of stocks on markets worldwide, and thousands of excellent managers leading many of those companies. If you can?t trust your CEO, go find another one.

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Views and opinions expressed are those of the Author and do not necessarily reflect those of CalvinAyre.com

Source: http://calvinayre.com/2012/10/08/business/investing-the-hard-way-why-management-matters/

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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Romney floats radical education idea ? Joanne Jacobs

Education policy had a few moments in the Obama-Romney debate last night.

President Obama said education would be gutted, if Republican challenger Mitt Romney is elected, Ed Week reports.

?I?m not going to cut education funding . . . and grants that go to people going to college,??Romney said.

Obama touted his plan to hire an additional 100,000 math and science teachers.

Romney countered that Obama?s $90 billion invested in green energy (?You pick losers.?) would have paid for two million teachers.

Obama linked his education reform agenda to Common Core Standards, which are supposed to be a state effort,?Ed Week notes.

Obama, who doesn?t refer to Race to the Top much on the campaign stump, invoked his signature education-reform brand three times in the debate as having ?prompted reforms in 46 states.? (Clearly a reference to the common core, without naming the common-standards movement, which is a?politically dicey?thing for the federal government to support these days.)

Both candidates said improving education is a key to economic prosperity.

?Historically, affluent and white parents and school districts have gone to great lengths to keep poor, nonwhite kids out of their own kids? classrooms,? Goldstein writes.

? The Obama administration?s signature school reform program, Race to the Top, did nothing to encourage school integration or allow children to attend schools outside of their home districts?an important right, since many failing schools are located in districts where almost every school is underperforming, and those that aren?t have overflowing wait lists.

Romney hasn?t explained how his proposal would work and the chances it would happen are slim, she predicts.

What would President Romney do on education??Rick Hess looks at Romney?s record as governor of high-scoring Massachusetts.

Romney?s education record as Massachusetts governor from 2003 to 2007 looks a lot like President Obama?s has. Romney inherited a strong reform tradition ? built around standards, testing, and accountability. He maintained and strengthened this commitment by adding a science test to the state?s accountability system and supporting high school exit exams. He also pushed a controversial plan to mandate parenting classes for parents in low-performing districts seeking to enroll their kids in kindergarten.

In terms of school choice, Romney vetoed a bill to place a moratorium on opening new charter schools, and the number of charter schools increased modestly, from 46 to 59. He unsuccessfully championed merit pay for the top third of performers and for math and science teachers, offering bonuses of up to $5,000. He pushed for addressing low-performing schools with strategies that are quite similar to those favored by the Obama administration, including making it easier to replace principals and teachers in such schools or turning them into charters.

President Romney probably would push an Obama-like reform agenda, ?but would do so with a lighter touch, less spending, and more emphasis on choice,? Hess predicts.

Source: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2012/10/romney-floats-radical-education-idea/

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