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Monday, June 7, 2010
To blog or not to be
I've been struggling lately with the raison d'etre of this blog. I tend to write about a variety of topics, usually medically related, but it seems the best posts have been the ones based on actual patient encounters in my practice. And I've been wrestling with the significance of that fact to such an extent that I had to just shut things down for a while.
Blogging is by nature an extraordinarily solipsistic expression of individuality. It isn't enough for the blogger to privately fill notebooks with his ramblings---no, he must publish them to a world wide audience. It takes a certain degree of pompous audacity, let's be honest, to embark on such a task. One has to believe that what one is writing is unique, interesting, important enough to be read by strangers. I've always hated this implication of blogging. To blog is to cry out for attention.
The stakes are much higher for medical bloggers who go beyond writing about healthcare policy and reform. To write about a meaningful patient encounter is to cheapen it somehow. And I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the exploitative, self-aggrandizing solipsism inherent in writing about patients. I grown tired of Myself and the Voice I provide on Buckeye Surgeon. I'm always constructing these narratives where I'm some super-compassionate doctor of mercy, unique in ability to identify those anecdotal moments of human connection. I'm tired of the narrative, the underlying message of I'm a nice guy and a superb clinician that runs through the thread of posts. The blog dangerously veers toward being more about me and my supposed superior compassion and diagnostic acumen rather than about the patients or functioning as some sort of edifying source of inside medical information. It's irritating as hell. I'm a real person, with real shortcomings and faults. I ought to be writing more posts about how I was rude on the telephone late night with some nurse or how I was impatient with a patient's relative because she kept asking the same damn question over and over or the time I made a delayed diagnosis. It wouldn't be such a glowing portrait of me, but at least it would be an honest one. (But then you ask yourself, why do I even need to be painting accurate self portraits for strangers to peruse on the internet? Wouldn't that hurt my career? Isn't it better to concoct some alternative personality that people can read about on line?)
I feel this blog has unintentionally created a Doppelganger Dr Parks who is always kind and wise and decent, who never makes errors, who always sees the little streaks of humanity glimmering under the veil of illness in his patients. I mean I have tried to write honestly about things over the past three years. I wasn't intentionally trying to manipulate facts. But you cant help writing in such a way that makes you look maybe better than what you really were, in retrospect. In the act of writing, I'm able to capture my life and my experiences in such a fashion that I see myself as an agent of good. That isn't a bad thing I suppose. We all have our private little forms of solace as we navigate through unwieldy, unpredictable life. But a blog isn't private. It ends up being a slanted representation of a real person. I can do the same thing and derive the same benefit in a private journal, just perhaps more honestly and with more perspective.
The one good thing about the blog is that its mere existence has forced me to contemplate my life as a surgeon on a more consistent basis. A blog is always starved for material and the experiences I've had have been a fruitful fodder to fill the hungry beast. My reflections on specific encounters have changed me more than the encounters themselves. But I don't want to keep repeating myself. I don't want Buckeye Surgeon to devolve into a bunch of sappy, regurgitated tales from the front lines of the hospital. That's not what this was supposed to be about. It was supposed to transcend its author, a medium through which author and reader alike could possibly make some sense of illness and death and human fallibility.
One thing I've discovered on these travels is this idea that the patients don't so much need me as I need them. The authenticity of a meaningful patient encounter fills some indescribable void in my life (pathetic as that sounds). I need them. I need the 88 year old guy recovering from a perforated bowel surgery who tells me he prayed last night for the first time in 50 years. I need to see the lonesome mother holding the hand of her prodigal son, suffering in the ICU with severe alcohol-induced necrotizing pancreatitis, whispering for him to open his eyes. I need the brash 77 year old Senior Olympian (diskus and hammer throw) recovering from a bowel obstruction who gives me shit every morning about how I played soccer in high school instead of wrestled. But I don't want to exploit them or splash their vulnerability all over some public blog anymore. Conversely, if I dont write about them, I lose them; they slip from the tenuous realm of my active memory. They strike me like those big beautiful snowflakes in early November that quickly melt and dissipate on your sleeve. I want to keep as many of them frozen and crystalline and perfect for as long as I can. I want to be like that kid in the book Snowy Day who hides a snowball in his pocket, hoping it will be there when he wakes in the morning.
I'm not entirely certain what will happen with Buckeye Surgeon. I'm still grappling.
35 comments:
- rlbates said...
And I want you to tell me about them.
- June 8, 2010 at 3:05 PM
Hey thats cool, even my favorite President, Richard Nixon quit, and look how he turned out...
and I hate these Narsicistic bloggers who have to tell you how great there blog is, like mine, for instance, where just last week I revealed the 3rd Secret of Fatima...
Seriously, I feel your pain, because while Soccer is sort of gay, try being a 9th grade Tennis player who traveled with the Baseball AND Wrestling team...
and it didn't matter that I played baseball too, didn't keep em from givin me an Atomic Melvin, which really sucked when you remember those tight tennis shorts that were in style back in the 70's...
and when you feel depressed, just go down to Jacob's Field and take in a good Ball Game...
HAHA! seriously, only 12 weeks till Ohio State underperforms again...
Frank "Don't Worry be Happy Drackman" Drackies.blogspot.com - June 8, 2010 at 3:15 PM
- Yitz said...
I hope you continue blogging.
- June 8, 2010 at 3:37 PM
I stumbled upon your blog last summer while looking up "thyroidectomy". "A fun little operation" I think is how you characterized it. Oddly enough that reassured me that while it might seem like a major life-changing event to me, to the pros it was all part of a day's work - something very do-able, and to be done with professionalism. It would be okay. (And it was okay)
I have enjoyed reading your posts and have not come away with the impression that you have an inflated opinion of yourself or that you are "using" your patients, rather that you and probably md's generally care bout doing a good job. I hope you don't stop blogging.
(only one problem - I've started visiting Frank D's site too, it's curiously addictive. Please keep blogging for our balanced reading!) - June 8, 2010 at 4:42 PM
I will read whatever you want to write. Whenever you want to write. Your wordsmithing and thought-provoking blogs have made me think, laugh, puzzle, contemplate, and sometimes laugh-out-loud in my cubicle. Hoping you will continue, fellow Buckeye, whenever the spirit moves you and the story needs to be written.
Peggy, RN, in Ohio. - June 8, 2010 at 4:42 PM
- Bianca Castafiore? said...
I never thought to see the day, Buckeye, when you would underestimate the acumen of your readership...
I hope I don't have to go elsewhere to read sappy medical vignettes, warm and witty ministrations before the bodies are even cold.
Lighten up. We've got your back. I mean, if Buckeye Surgeon blogs in a forest, and no one is around to read his schtuff, does he make any sound at all (much less the sound he imagines making)? - June 8, 2010 at 5:45 PM
- Josh said...
I am incredibly sensitive to the issues you touch on here and why its difficult to blog about our profession - I couldn't agree more with the justifiable self-doubt and apprehension you express (hell, I don't blog about my day at work for some of the same reasons you touch on). However, from a purely self-interested position: please don't stop. As a current surgery trainee, I actually consider yours to be one of the voices I hear in my head that motivates me to be a better practitioner and holds me to a higher standard. This despite the fact that I've never met you, and even if, as you point out, you may present an aggrandized version of yourself for me to get to know. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Why do people go to church? To hear the same stories again?, because they already know all the stories. I would like to think that ts because living up to a standard is hard, and people may need to be reminded what this is all about to keep motivated, and I feel that's what this kind of medical writing, when its good, has been for me and what it might be to other people. We may often get distracted by health care policy, billing woes, malpractice, whats new on chromosome 11q yadda yadda yadda, but its spiritually fulfilling to get that reminder, which you have been so kind as to provide me, of why we care so much to do what we do in the best way we know how to do it. So please don't write anything like this ever again.
Side story: I was on a particularly spirit-crushing rotation when David Foster Wallace died and you posted about what his writing had meant to you and how lessons you had taken from his perspective had a profound impact on how you experienced some of what happened to you at work. I had never read anything by him before, but I was very moved with what you had written and so I made a quick trip to the used bookstore to fix that and have been grateful ever since. - June 8, 2010 at 6:57 PM
- iloveac said...
Yes, please don't stop. You are one of my favs....why, because you are real. I sense your feelings when you talk about certain patients. We all need to feel connected and your writing makes me think I'm right there next to you making rounds. You make me feel like the young RN I was instead of the 71 year old I am now. I've been checking everyday to see if you have posted...please don't stop. In addition to the 'feeling' part of your posts.....you are a great teacher. I learn and relearn from your postings.
/Patti - June 8, 2010 at 9:15 PM
Yes, both blogging and being a surgeon require hubris.
Your musings have brought insight and changed my thoughts on my own patient care, so yes you do transcend the self sometimes and meet the reader at some higher actualization.
So grapple with blogging, and then continue with the creativity that writing allows you. Bring us to new thoughts at deeper levels. And I challenge you to be real. Write truth and irony and all that is healthcare today. And work on not being rude to RN's in the meantime:) - June 8, 2010 at 11:21 PM
- shadowfax said...
You gotta listen to your muse. If you're not into the writing, there's no obligation and forcing it is not beneficial. On the other hand, you are good at it and I very much enjoy reading your stuff, so I hope you find it in yourself to keep at it.
Blogging doldrums happen. Been there more than once. Take a walk (which you already sort of did) and see if the gusto comes back.
Also remember the fall-back of the lazy blogger: linking. Link to me, link to Bongi, link to whoever you read and thought "that was pretty good." And when the next good case or good story comes by you have a little bit of momentum to put a good post together.
Hope you keep at it; if not be sure to drop by and say hi from time to time. - June 9, 2010 at 2:49 AM
Such a great blogger to quit. I happened to stumble on your blog today and I'm saddened because even as a fresh reader of your blog I know you will be a great loss to the blogger community and even men and women in hospital scrubs who are reading your posts will gonna be frustrated. Hope you continue writing posts on this blog. Yeah blogging has disadvantages but it has also so many benefits eh.
- June 9, 2010 at 3:40 AM
It would be a waste to lose you as a blogger.
Chelsea - June 9, 2010 at 3:46 AM
I sincerely hope that you keep blogging. I find your writing very entertaining, although I suppose that when you start to second guess yourself, it seems to be the beginning of the end of the blog. Besides, I never realised that surgeons were so thoughtful, maybe it was just their sleep deprived personas who I met.
- June 9, 2010 at 4:32 AM
- #1 Dinosaur said...
Echoing Josh, Bianca, and Anon 4:42.
Also: there's nothing wrong with needing your patients. None of us lives in a hermetically sealed vacuum. Everyone needs things to survive. The car mechanic needs damaged vehicles, regardless of the drunken tragedies that led them to his shop. The dry cleaner needs dirty clothes, regardless of the rowdy circumstances that stained them. In fact, what higher calling than to "need" other people to suffer (which they always will anyway) for the express purpose of relieving it. Nothing mundane about that. I'd call it noble. - June 9, 2010 at 6:43 AM
I have honestly spent some significant effort trying to think of something intellectually compelling to say. I have failed. So, I will fall back on a couple simple statements.
One - you are a surgeon writer. I look forward to everyone of your posts (and I don't agree with everything you say... but you say it well and with logic). Without your words in print, I am left with Atul Guwande's drivel. Thanks.
Two - There is no reason why you can't be a self-promoter. As long as its the truth. Its all about truth. It is well known that you are not anyone else's priority - therefore, you need to be you're own - there's nothing wrong with that.
hmmmph.. I really wanted to come up with something poignant.
well... here's to shameless self-promotion:
FaST Surgeon - June 9, 2010 at 7:05 AM
- james gaulte said...
My first impression of your recent comments is that you are way too hard on yourself.The good and better than good physicians I have known and worked with over the years all seem to be that way.I hope I was.
- June 9, 2010 at 7:15 AM
I vote you keep blogging particularly about the times that you "made a delayed diagnosis." Make sure to post within the statute of limitations, and include the name and phone number of the patient. Thanks.
- June 9, 2010 at 12:49 PM
Oh, for Pete's sake. What you write in a blog is really no more meaningful than you say in a conversation. It's not very likely that students and wise men centuries hence will be studying your blog for insight into the secrets of the universe and debating over whether you reveal the truth or The Truth.
What happens is that you, in essence, issue a standing invitation to join you for a cup of coffee and a chat, and a lot of us accept that invitation because we enjoy these chats. We even bring our own coffee. You tell us what's on your mind. We respond in whatever way we choose. Maybe we leave a comment. Maybe we tell someone we know, over a cup of REAL coffee, "So I was reading this blog the other day...". Maybe we just nod to ourselves and go on with life. But that's all we expect the transaction to be -- an interesting story you tell over coffee.
As long as you feel you have stories to tell, tell them. You're an interesting guy, you write well, and I'll bet you will always have an audience. - June 9, 2010 at 1:49 PM
If you ask me, your takin this whole LeBron James thing way too seriously....
- June 9, 2010 at 3:13 PM
What Bianca Castafiore said (exactly), and what Anon 1:49 said. I can't say it better.
Since you've been gone, all I've been doing is being cruel to some poor whiney second career er doc... heh. All your fault.
Please, please don't go.
(Your favorite closet general surgeon wanna be) - June 9, 2010 at 7:16 PM
Although I do not have a medical background, I do enjoy reading your blog. Whether you are explaining a rather interesting procedure or talking about someone that made a deep impression on you --- your compassioin for your profession comes through. I am a faithful reader.
- June 9, 2010 at 8:22 PM
That is OK.
Many of my favorite blogs have had about a two-year lifespan, so you have done well to last so long. You did good, Doc, but you already know that.
It has been a wonderful thing to read you, even if I do not grok it all, and I look forward to a stray post from you now and again. - June 10, 2010 at 5:44 AM
please don't give yourself too much pressure.
it is your blog, write when you feel like writing, and it doesn't have to be a story about patients or anything.
hope u won't quit=) - June 10, 2010 at 7:16 AM
It'd be a shame to see you go--you're the best surgeon blog I've found and it was fun to read.
However, after reading that post, it seems like you're probably done. If so, thanks for the great tidbits. If not, I look forward to more in the future. - June 10, 2010 at 4:54 PM
first of all if you were really a solipsist, someone who believes the self is the only real thing existent, then why would it matter whether you wrote it down in a notebook, or published it on the internet? it would be the same result either way. (aren't you going to miss snarky usage corrections?)
second, your patronizing your readers. We're cynical and able to identify saccharine tripe for what it is. You write; we internally criticize; we praise; and we enjoy your writing.
Honestly the most aggrandizing thing i've read on your site was this post. - June 10, 2010 at 7:28 PM
- Jeffrey Parks MD FACS said...
Thanks for all your thoughts.
- June 11, 2010 at 10:06 PM
Thanks for laying out these issues. Those of us who have tried to write about our work run into them every time, at least we do if we are honest with ourselves. One of the first books about being a doctor was Dr. X's Intern. The reason it was, and still is, so good is that it does include the times Dr. X and his resident did the wrong thing. Times when the patient died, times when he refused to go see the patient yet again, times when all hell broke loose and he had no idea what to do. (Fortunately the nurse did.) Please find a way to keep talking to us. Some of us need you, very much.
- June 11, 2010 at 11:53 PM
Don't you stop writing!
- June 13, 2010 at 1:17 PM
By the nature of writing -- a given point of view at a particular point in time -- one builds a Doppelganger. I'm not in medicine, but I've enjoyed many of your entries, and have not found them to be false, manipulative or self-aggrandizing. Continue if it satisfies something, or don't, if it has run it's course for you.
- June 13, 2010 at 4:35 PM
- Kacey said...
Some people just have to write... the muse is upon them. The fact that you are a surgeon does not make you any less a writer. I found that the main problem with writing is when your readers know who you are. Then, you become defensive with your words and thoughts, the sparkle leaves your keyboard and your literary juices become a veritable Saraha. Don't quit...take a respite, because someday (hopefully soon) there will be an ocean of words just waiting to spill out. Your readers will be here, because we need to read as badly as you need to write.
- June 13, 2010 at 4:54 PM
- the_red_star said...
2 years ago, I found some groundbreaking information here when researching on treatment for my dad's cancer, which the doctor did not inform me.
I hope you will keep this going. - June 15, 2010 at 6:49 AM
Everyone benefits from a look in the mirror now and then--why should you be different just because you are a doc?
That you are aware of and willing to articulate some of your shortcomings just makes you ....well....grounded in reality!
My rules of the road
* Dont just do something-stand there-good surgeons know when not to operate
* Hospital personnel do not try harder or get smarter when you call them stupid
* Good coaches create good teams-
* Think your job is hard, try doing it with people who don't like to work with you
* Clinical competence is not an of set for poor social skills
* Quality like patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel - June 16, 2010 at 7:05 PM
Glad you are back Buckeye! I have enjoyed reading your posts over the last several months (first time commenter). I hope you will continue to update this blog in the future.
- June 22, 2010 at 4:02 PM
- DKV said...
Awesome post.
Beer's on me if you're ever in New Haven. - July 19, 2010 at 10:00 AM
- cheap nursing scrubs said...
Nice buddy keep it up.
- July 1, 2011 at 10:08 AM


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subset: commoncrawl


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As the post-crisis thoughts of executives turn to mergers, acquisitions, and disposals, the familiar idea of "best owner" takes on renewed urgency. Discerning readers will be well aware that best owners are those companies whose distinctive characteristics enable them to create more value in a given business than other potential owners could. But the pace of rapid recovery in equity market valuations may be causing some executives to worry too much about being preempted by better-prepared competitors and too little about acquiring businesses where they themselves would hold a distinct advantage.
The risk is considerable. Reactivating deals that were put on hold may be unwise in some industries where fundamental changes during the crisis have weakened the competitive position of deal targets or hurt the structural attractiveness of their markets. Companies may also discover that they have lost competitive advantage in businesses they already own. Moreover, boards and management teams that assess the fundamental attractiveness of their potential acquisitions and disposals solely by growth and returns increase the likelihood that they will enrich only the sellers of the businesses they buy—or the buyers of the businesses they sell.
If a board and management team want to create the most value for their own shareholders, they must be clear about how their company will add more value to a business than other potential owners can. If that isn't the case, the company might best serve the shareholders' interests by selling the business—or by not buying it in the first place.
What makes a better owner?
In reality, we can never know who the very best owner of a business might be; we can only know who is probably the better owner among competing alternatives. A better owner could be a larger company, a private-equity firm, a sovereign-wealth fund, or a family. It could also be an independent public company listed on a stock exchange, a mutual (owned by its customers), or even a government- or employee-owned entity. As better owners, each of these types of companies may add value to a business in a number of ways.
Valuable linkages with other businesses
The most straightforward way that owners add value is through the links they can offer to other businesses they own, especially when such links are unique. Suppose, for instance, that a mining company has the rights to develop a coal field in a remote location far from any rail lines or other infrastructure, except for those built by another mining company, which already operates a coal mine just ten miles away. The second mining company might well be the better owner because its incremental costs to develop the mine would be lower than the first company's. It could afford to purchase the undeveloped mine at a higher price and still earn an attractive return on capital.
These unique links can occur across the value chain, from R&D and manufacturing to distribution and sales. A large pharmaceutical company with an experienced oncology sales force might, for example, be the best owner of a small pharmaceutical company with a promising new oncology drug but no sales force or commercialization capacity.
In most cases, these linkages (and the value they create) are not unique to a single potential owner. IBM, for example, has successfully acquired dozens of small software companies to take advantage of the power of its global sales force. IBM as an owner was better able to sell the products globally than the previous owners were. Other companies, such as Oracle or SAP, may also have been better owners; ultimately, the best depends on both the theoretical potential—the specific matches of products and sales forces—and the effectiveness of postacquisition merger management.
Distinctive skills
Better owners may also have distinctive and replicable functional or managerial skills,1 which can be found anywhere in the business system, from product development to manufacturing processes to sales and marketing. The skill set has to be a driver of success in the industry, however. A company with great manufacturing skills, for example, probably wouldn't be a better owner of a consumer-packaged-goods business, because manufacturing costs aren't large enough to affect its competitive position.
In contrast, distinctive skills in developing and marketing brands often make a packaged-goods company a better owner. Take P&G, which as of 2009 had 20 brands with over $500 million in net sales and 23 with over $1 billion, all spread across a range of product categories, including laundry, beauty products, pet food, and diapers. Almost all of the billion-dollar brands rank first or second in their respective markets. What's special about P&G is that it developed these brands in different ways. Some, such as Tide and Crest, have been P&G brands for decades. Others, including Gillette and Oral-B, were acquired during the past ten years, while a number, such as Febreze and Swiffer, were developed from scratch. As a group, sales of these brands grew by 11 percent a year, on average, from 2001 through 2009.
Better governance
Owners can also add value through better governance of a business, without necessarily having a hands-on role in its day-to-day operations. Better governance refers to the way a company's owners interact with the management team to create the greatest possible long-term value—perhaps the way the owners appoint managers, structure their incentives, or challenge them on strategy. The best-performing private-equity firms excel at governance—giving them a crucial advantage over those that rely heavily on financial leverage. Indeed, prior McKinsey analysis found that in almost two-thirds of the transactions of the top-quartile funds we examined, improving the operating performance of a company relative to its peers created more value than financial leverage or good timing did.2
Better governance is a key source of this outperformance. Private-equity firms don't always have the time or skills to run their portfolio companies on a day-to-day basis, but they govern these companies very differently from the way listed companies do. Typically, private-equity firms introduce a stronger performance culture and are quick to bring in new managers when necessary. In addition, they encourage managers to abandon sacred cows and give those managers leeway to focus on improvements over a five-year horizon rather than the typical one-year time line common among listed companies. Private-equity directors also spend, on average, nearly three times as many days on their roles than directors at public companies do, and they spend most of those days on strategy and performance management rather than compliance and risk avoidance.3
Better insight or foresight
Companies that have insights into how a market or industry will evolve may be better owners of businesses that don't even exist yet, if they can use those insights to innovate and expand existing businesses or to develop new ones. In the late 1990s, for example, Intuit noticed that many small businesses were using its Quicken software, originally designed to help individual consumers manage their personal finances. That observation led to an important insight: most accounting software was too complex for small-business owners. So Intuit designed a new product for them and within two years had claimed 80 percent of this burgeoning market.
A decade earlier, the US oil and natural gas concern Williams Companies had the foresight to see that fiber-optic networks would be the future of communications. But unlike other companies that anticipated the shift, Williams had an additional insight—and a key advantage: fiber-optic cable could be installed in its decommissioned oil and gas pipelines at a fraction of the cost its competitors would have to pay for comparable infrastructure. By combining its own network with those it acquired from other companies that had fiber-optic networks, Williams eventually gained control of 11,000 miles of cable and could send digital signals and natural gas from one end of the country to the other.
Williams's insight, combined with its pipeline infrastructure, made it a good or best owner of this network in the emerging digital-communications industry. Williams also reduced its stake in fiber-optic cable at the right time—when prices were highly inflated: it sold most of its telecommunications business in 1994 for $2.5 billion.
Distinctive access to talent, capital, or relationships
This category applies primarily to companies in emerging markets, where running a business is complicated by inherently smaller pools of managerial talent, underdeveloped capital markets, and high levels of government involvement in business as customers, suppliers, and regulators. In these markets, diversified conglomerates, such as Tata and Reliance in India and Samsung and Hyundai in South Korea, can be better owners because their size, stability, and relatively abundant opportunities make them more attractive employers and because they have better access to capital or distinctive relationships with governments.
The best-owner life cycle
Better ownership is not permanent or static but rather can change over the life cycle of a business. Too many companies don't recognize that even if their own distinctive capabilities remain the same, the needs of a business naturally change as it matures and the industry it competes in changes.
Typically, a business's founders are its first best owners. Their entrepreneurial drive, passion, and commitment to the business are necessary to get the company off the ground. As it grows and requires larger investments, a better owner may be a venture capital firm that specializes in helping new companies grow by providing capital, improving governance, and enlisting professional managers to handle the complexities and risks of scaling up an organization. Eventually, the venture capital firm may need to take the company public, selling shares to a range of investors to finance further growth. As the public company grows, it might find that it can no longer compete with larger corporations because, say, it needs global distribution capabilities far beyond what it can build in a reasonable amount of time. It may thus sell itself to a larger company that's the better owner because of an existing global distribution network, thereby becoming a product line within a division of the larger company.
As the division's market matures, the larger company may decide to focus on faster-growing businesses. In this case, it might sell its division to a private-equity firm—a better owner if the firm can eliminate corporate overhead that's inconsistent with the business's slower growth and thereby leave the division with a leaner cost structure. Once the restructuring is done, the private-equity firm can sell the division to yet another better owner: a large company that specializes in running slow-growth brands.
Managerial implications
The best-owner life cycle means that executives must continually seek out new acquisitions for which their companies could be the best owner while at the same time divesting businesses for which they no longer are. Since the best owner for businesses constantly changes, any corporation, large or small, should acquire and dispose of them regularly. Indeed, companies that do so generally outperform those that do not.4
For acquisitions, applying the best-owner principle often leads acquirers toward targets very different from those that traditional target-screening approaches might uncover. Traditional ones often focus on targets that perform well financially and are somehow related to the acquirer's business lines. But through the best-owner lens, such characteristics might have little or no importance. It might be better, for instance, to seek out a financially weak company that has great potential for improvement, especially if the acquirer has proven performance-improvement expertise. Or it might be better to focus attention on tangible opportunities to cut costs or on the existence of common customers than on vague notions such as how related the target may be to the acquirer.
Keeping the best-owner principle front and center can also help with negotiations for an acquisition by keeping managers focused on what the target is worth specifically to their own company—as well as to other bidders. Many managers err in M&A by estimating only an acquisition's value to their own company. Because they are unaware of the target's value to other potential better owners—or how high those other owners might be willing to bid—they get lulled into conducting negotiations right up to their breakeven point. Of course the closer they get to it, the less value the deal would create for their own shareholders. Instead of asking how much they can pay, they should be asking what's the least they need to pay to win the deal and create the most value.
Consider the example of an Asian company that was bidding against a private-equity firm to purchase a European contract pharmaceutical manufacturer. The Asian company estimated the target's value to itself and also to the private-equity firm, which could add value by reducing overhead costs and attracting customers that hadn't used the target's services because it was owned by a competitor. The Asian company estimated that the contract company was worth $96 million to the private-equity firm.
The Asian company could make the same overhead cost reductions and add similar customers—but on top of this, it could move some of the manufacturing to its lower-cost plants. As a result, the target's value to the Asian company was $120 million, making it the best owner and enabling it to pay a higher price than the private-equity firm would, while still allowing it to capture significant value. As a side note, the value of the target to its European parent was only $80 million.
Knowing the relative values, the Asian company could afford to bid, say, $100 million, pushing out the private-equity firm and gaining $20 million in potential value creation. The Asian company could further increase its share of the value to be captured, by announcing plans to enter the business even without making the acquisition. If the seller and the private-equity firm were convinced, they would have to reduce their estimates of the target's value, and the Asian company could reduce its bid, capturing more value still.
For divestitures, including both sales and spin-offs, the best-owner principle allows managers to examine how the needs of the businesses they own may have evolved in different directions. For example, most pharmaceutical companies grew up as parts of diversified chemical companies because the basic manufacturing and research requirements were the same. But as the two industries specialized, their research, manufacturing, and commercial requirements diverged so much that they became distant cousins rather than sisters.
Today, running a profitable commodity chemical company demands scale, operating efficiency, and the ability to manage costs and capital expenditures. But creating value in a pharmaceutical company requires a deep R&D pipeline and large local sales forces, as well as specialized expertise in areas such as the regulatory-approval process and dealing with large public and private purchasers. While having both kinds of businesses under one owner made complete sense 50 years ago, it no longer does. That is why nearly all former chemical and pharmaceutical combines have split up over the past three decades; Zeneca, for example, separated from ICI in 1993, and Clariant and Sandoz parted ways in 1995.
Executives may worry that divestitures are seen as an admission of corporate failure or as a consequence of a company's relatively small size. Yet the research shows that stock markets consistently react positively to divestitures—both sales and spin-offs.5 Research has also shown that spun-off businesses tend to increase their profit margins by one-third during the three years after the completion of the transaction.6
To maximize value for shareholders, a company's board and management team must be clear—and current—about how they do or could add value to each business in their portfolio. At the very least, they must understand what makes them the best owner of what kinds of businesses and be prepared to act accordingly.


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In this article, we'll discuss everything about unlocking the bootloader of HTC First step by step. By unlocking the HTC First bootloader you can do a lot of things like, install custom ROM, recover files, and root your device.
In short unlocking, the bootloader is the first step that you need to do in order to customize your android device. Without unlocking the bootloader you can't do anything mentioned above.
The unlocking process of the bootloader is a really easy process if you are already familiar with the custom world. but if you are new is ROMs, root world then we're sure that it'll fly away from your mind.
Say your device is rooted and you have the bootloader unlocked but now you have an issue that requires a firmware update from the manufacturer. Updates can only be applied to devices that are unlocked.
But, what are the benefits of unlocking your device's bootloader? This article will discuss how it's possible to save time and money by not having to wait for carrier approval, getting access to features like overlays, custom ROMs, and more without needing root rights.
But before going to the next step we want to educate you about the pros and cons of the bootloader.
What is Bootloader?
A bootloader is a small piece of software that helps your phone startup. It's responsible for loading the operating system (OS) and other programs into memory, and it usually protects your phone against unauthorized changes. Some phones come with bootloaders that are unlocked, which means you can use different OSes or ROMs on your phone. unlocking a bootloader can sometimes be necessary if you want to install a new OS or firmware.Benefits of Unlocking Bootloader
Unlocking the bootloader gives you multiple benefits. As mentioned below –- You can install TWRP recovery on HTC First.
- You can easily Root HTC First easily.
- Install custom ROM on HTC First device
- Easy to install a third-party application without system permission.
Demerits of Unlocking Bootloader
With pros unlocking the bootloader contains a number of demerits. Which should not be neglected. First, You lose the device security. Which is one of the main points why people don't want to unlock the bootloader. Secondly, your device may show false behavior like lagging, closing apps automatically without permission, and more. Last but not least you can't use a bank or finance-related applications.Guide To Unlock HTC First Bootloader
Follow the exact step-by-step process to unlock the device bootloader properly.Vital Steps
This process doesn't require lots of work before unlocking. You have to prepare your device by enabling the Developer option and OEM unlocking.- Enable USB Debugging
- Unlock OEM
Steps To Unlock Bootloader
- First, download the depth test application.
- Next, open the app and tap on Query Application Status Request submission
- Now wait for a few minutes and then click on the back button
- Open the Query Application Status
- After that, it'll show Review successful shows on your screen. Then click on start in-depth test
- Your device will automatically enter into the fastboot mode after this process.
- Next, connect your HTC First device with a PC/Laptop
- For this, you need to download and install fast boot into your PC/Laptop
- After installing fastboot move the folder named "platform-tools" to the desktop
- Next, open the platform-tools folder and then Right click + Shift
- After that select the open command window here
- Type "fastboot flashing unlock" in cmd window
- Finally, press the volume button (UP & DOWN) to unlock the HTC First bootloader.


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«Convenient search. Instant price comparison.»
«Qualified support, fast search. Helpful tips.»
«Got a dream car! Memorable drive!»
«Plenty of info. Easy instant booking. »
«Wide car range. High service standards. »
What method of payment can you use for car hire? What are the differences between them? All answers are below.
There are 3 ways of paying for the car hire:
In most cases you can't choose the way of payment on your own, because it depends on each particular car hire company. All payment methods have their own strengths and weaknesses for you and for car hire company.
Can I pay in cash?
The answer is Yes and No in the same time.
Why do car hire companies require your car hire credit card Barcelona, Spain?
The car rental involves certain risks for the car hire company.
Any way the company wants to get the income and the car hire credit card Barcelona, Spain is the best way to do this. So, as you understood, the car rental companies need a credit card as a security deposit in case you damage the vehicle.
Can I use the car hire credit card Barcelona, Spain of my parents or friends?
No, you can't. The car hire credit card Barcelona, Spain should be on driver's name. In other case you won't get your car rental vehicle.


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France's Rating Downgrade a Warning for Banks
French banks were reminded of risks to their own growth and credit ratings when Moody's stripped France of its triple-A badge because of an uncertain fiscal and economic outlook.
Lenders such as BNP Paribas, Societe Generale and Credit Agricole have spent the past year trying to contain their exposure to peripheral troublespots in the euro area like Greece by dumping assets and cutting costs.
But the sector was singled out as an economic risk by Moody's and analysts said cuts to the ratings of individual banks most exposed to the French economy could follow.
"It is likely that Moody's will cut its outlook on SocGen and Credit Agricole in coming weeks," said Yannick Naud, fund manager at Glendevon King Asset Management.
Larger BNP is seen as more financially robust, with regulatory capital levels above most big global banks under "Basel III" accounting methods.
Moody's warned in its overnight announcement of the downgrade that French banks remain vulnerable to a further deepening of the eurozone debt crisis, both via their cross-border exposures and their reliance on wholesale markets, rather than deposits, to fund operations.
The French government said the criticism of the banking sector was unjustified since it has already taken steps to reduce exposure to the southern European economies that are worst affected by the crisis.
"I don't think that it is fair by Moody's to flag an increased weakness in the French banking sector, I think that it's the contrary," Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said.
French banks have strengthened their balance sheets over the past year by cutting staff, costs and dividends. They have also sold assets including peripheral euro sovereign bonds and entire business lines to help meet tougher capital requirements under Basel III banking rules.
Monday's Moody's downgrade was not a huge surprise because it followed Standard and Poor's decision to cut France's AAA rating in January.
French debt hardly reacted and there was also little impact on banking stocks which have soared some 30 to 50 percent year-to-date on the back of support from the European Central Bank.
Shares of BNP, SocGen and Credit Agricole, France's biggest banks, were up 0.1 to 1.2 percent at 1530 GMT, outperforming a 0.7 percent drop for the STOXX 600 bank index.
But a stagnating domestic economy, rising unemployment and consumer belt-tightening have started to hit revenues and analysts expect more problems ahead.
SocGen said that the French economy had "slowed to a crawl" when it announced an 86-percent drop in third-quarter net profit on Nov. 8, while Credit Agricole took $4.6 billion in writedowns for the same quarter on investments in Greece, Italy and Spain.
"It's not good news, it will lead to other downgrades and it is bad for both the French banks and other holders of French sovereign debt," said Hugues Le Maire, head of asset manager Diamant Bleu.
BNP's rating was recently cut to A+ by Standard & Poor's, citing economic headwinds. France accounted for nearly a third of BNP's loan exposure at end-2011, while at SocGen it was nearly half.
French banks are also important holders of sovereign debt: BNP had about 10 billion euros ($12.8 billion) in French government bonds in its banking book at end-June, while SocGen had around 16 billion. Relative to their balance sheets, however, the figures are low - in the low single-digit percent.
BNP did not respond to requests for comment about the downgrade, while SocGen, Credit Agricole and Natixis' parent declined to comment.
Analysts said smaller banks may feel the biggest pressure from the Moody's decision.
"It's a non-event for sovereign debt ... But it means further downward pressure on the weakest entities in the French banking system," said Naud.
Credit-rating downgrades have already caused problems for smaller bank entities that rely on securitization vehicles to raise funds on the market. Property lender Credit Immobilier and auto-loans provider Banque PSA Finance, part of Peugeot , both got state guarantees after ratings downgrades.
Copyright 2012 by Reuters. All rights reserved.


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Peter Chou cannot be sleeping well, as of late. As CEO of the embattled smartphone maker HTC, he has laid everything on the line for the One. He's so invested and confident in his company's new flagship smartphone that he told senior executives that he would step down as CEO if it failed, according to the WSJ.
He may want to start packing his bags.
The HTC One is, most likely, not going to turn things around for HTC. It doubles down on the exact same strategy that HTC used to push its flagship phone, the One X, last year. And that one didn't sell too well.
It's a beautiful Android phone, but like the One X:
- It has a name that sounds strange and confusing when you say it out loud
- It has a great camera, but its 'revolutionary' features (Ultrapixels and Zoe) come up short
- It has a custom interface that looks good, but annoys some users
- It isn't being released on all major carriers
- It's been delayed for various reasons (last year, the One X and Evo 4G LTE were delayed due to a patent lawsuit)
- It has no winning advertising or marketing campaign behind it
- It's going head to head with a new Galaxy S flagship phone
You could argue any one of these points, but all together it's the same old song and dance for HTC. We aren't particularly enthusiastic about the One ourselves (read our full review). While Samsung has successfully built its smartphone brand around a line of "Galaxy" phones, releasing them on every major wireless carrier in the U.S. and abroad, HTC has been unable to keep up. Its sales have been so bad for the last year that the One actually saw delays this year because parts manufacturers downgraded HTC's importance. Now it faces an uphill struggle to even construct the phones it needs to compete with the Apples, LGs and Samsungs of the world.
HTC's historic rise and fall
It's sad, really. HTC, co-founded by Chou, is one of the pioneering companies behind smartphones, and paid its dues for more than a decade, pushing smartphones toward the culture-changing devices they have become today. HTC made some of the first touch and wireless mobile devices in the late 1990s, and created the first Windows Mobile smartphone in 2002. Remember the Treo? HTC made that. It even had the foresight to bet on Google. Chou and company released the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1 here in the States) in 2008 – the device that kicked off the era of Android. As BlackBerry was twiddling its thumbs and Samsung was releasing crappy iPhone ripoffs like the Instinct, HTC was already investing in the post-iPhone market. It's early adoption of Android helped it finally become a top-tier manufacturer.
So what happened? In 2010 and 2011 Chou rode the Android wave with the Motorola Droid, and saw wide adoption of its phones. Everyone seemed to be buying Sensations, Desires, Incredibles, and Evos. The HTC EVO 4G on Sprint was even the first 4.3-inch Android phone, kicking off the race toward big screens.
High on the sales growth it saw on Android, HTC went crazy, producing an "incredible" number of Android phones in 2010 and 2011:
- 2009: 4 Android phones released
- 2010: 12 Android phones released, 4 Windows Phones
- 2011: 22 Android phones released, 3 Windows Phones
- 2012: 11 Android Phones released, 2 Windows Phones
- 2013: 1 Android phone almost released
HTC's tagline is "quietly brilliant," but in these two years it was quietly flooding the market with devices.
A lot of HTC's early phones had problems, both because of buggy early versions of Google's Android OS and because of HTC's Sense user interface, which continually grew more complicated and buggy. Many HTC phone owners complained of lack of updates and bug fixes. Early LTE phones like the HTC ThunderBolt also suffered horrifically poor battery life, among other problems. HTC turned itself into a powerful phone factory, but neglected users after its phones launched.
In late 2011, Samsung began to push its signature Galaxy S2 phone on all carriers, stealing momentum from HTC across the board. It invested heavily in Apple attack ads and pushed its Note and Galaxy S2 and S3 phones to go viral. HTC, on the other hand, has never had a very strong marketing campaign or a crystal-clear brand image. Like it's tagline, it can, at times, be "brilliant," but it is almost always too quiet.
After Samsung started gaining momentum, instead of just going into a store and buying the neatest looking Android phone, which was often an HTC, people began specifically wanting a Galaxy. To respond, HTC attempted to refocus around its new "One" brand in 2012, and halved its phone output to only 11 Android phones and 2 Windows Phones, but its sales continued to drop and its profits fall. The One brand failed to take off in the shadow of the Galaxy S3, which became so popular that it rivaled the iPhone. And in 2013, HTC really has released only One device.
Don't double down on a loss, Peter
The HTC One is a good phone, much like the One X was a good phone, but HTC has no identity. HTC rode to success by being an early adopter of Android, but it fell off the grid the moment it had to exert any muscle to defend its position. We can't say if HTC users have largely abandoned it due to issues they had with early phones or if it's a branding and advertising issue (probably both), but few people seem to be desiring HTC right now. Even it's Windows Phones have been largely eclipsed by Nokia's Lumia line.
Peter Chou has made a lot of good decisions as CEO of HTC, but with Android, he got overzealous. Users are fickle. But doubling down didn't work in 2011 when Chou literally doubled the number of phones HTC released, and it won't work this year. The One brand didn't take off last year, and a fancy new aluminum chassis isn't going to stem the tides of Samsung and Apple this year. If Chou sticks to his promise, he's soon going to need a new job. Because, in a crazy market like mobile, One day you're in, and the next day you're out.
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- The best camera phones in 2023: our top 9 photography picks
- Want to turn your iPhone into a Galaxy S23? This app is for you
- The 15 most important smartphones that changed the world forever


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Washington, D.C. - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is launching an Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program that builds on the successes of the Agency's long-standing programs in disease surveillance, training, and outbreak response, particularly those addressing avian and pandemic influenza. The focus of the EPT program is to pre-empt or combat, at their source, newly emerging diseases of animal origin that could threaten human health.
WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Grameen Foundation today announced a new collaboration that will make up to $162.5 million in local currency financing available to microfinance institutions (MFIs) throughout the developing world. The twelve-year program is the largest credit guarantee to date under USAID's Development Credit Authority and also marks the first time that a non-governmental organization has been approved to serve as facilitator.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A Purdue University professor, whose research was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), received the 2009 World Food Prize Oct. 15 for his concerted effort in the development of drought and parasitic weed resistant varieties of sorghum which has increased the food supply to millions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Baghdad - Iraqi Deputy Minister of Industry Muhammed Abdullah and USAID/Iraq Mission Director Chris Crowley joined officials from the Government of Iraq (GoI) and representatives from Iraqi universities and the private sector at a conference Oct. 13 that focused on ways to enhance awareness of quality management concepts, services and products and to illustrate their role in Iraq's national development.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) airlifted a shipment of emergency supplies to Indonesia on October 10th from its stockpile in Dubai. In coordination with the Indonesian Red Cross, approximately 20,000 internally displaced personnel will benefit from 45 metric tons of emergency relief supplies including 34 pallets of plastic sheeting, 6,720 hygiene kits, 7,200 jerry cans and 6 generators.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A researcher for an international program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her work on how community institutions can prevent conflict.
Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the prize in its 40-year history, is a researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP), managed by Virginia Tech.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded a five-year grant, Strengthening Health Outcomes through the Private Sector, to Abt Associates Inc. Sub-recipients under the grant are Banyan Global, Jhpiego, Marie Stopes International, the Monitor Group, and O'Hanlon Health Consulting, LLC. The $95 million grant will build upon USAID's decades of support for and leadership in private health sector programming, and on the work of its predecessor projects, Private Sector Partnerships-One (PSP-One) and Banking on Health.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA) was named Employee Resource Group (ERG) of the year by Out & Equal Workplace Advocates. GILFAA is the first federal employee organization to receive an award from Out & Equal. Ajit Joshi, Program Director for United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance and Policy Director for GLIFAA, will accept the award on behalf of GLIFAA.
Washington D.C. - In order to respond more rapidly to global food emergencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the expansion of its worldwide food aid warehouse program last week. The Agency awarded a contract valued at up to $50 million to Agility Logistics, Inc. of Virginia.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), announced over $10.5 million in grants to seven organizations working in six countries in Africa to extend malaria prevention and control activities in communities most affected by the disease, particularly children under age 5 and pregnant women. The grants were provided through the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), an interagency initiative led by USAID with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as key partners.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Acting Administrator Alonzo Fulgham, along with representatives from USAID's Latin America and Caribbean Bureau, will participate in a Hispanic Heritage Month Celebration at the Hubbard Place Community Center, located at 3500 14th Street NW, Washington DC, on Oct. 5, from 3 to 5 p.m.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided $300,000 immediately following the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra at 5:15 PM local time on September 30, 2009. This initial money was provided to help with the most pressing emergency needs. USAID has also set aside an additional $3 million to provide further assistance once rapid assessments help better identify needs.
WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has allocated an additional $1 million in emergency assistance for the people of the Philippines in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Ketsana, bringing the total assistance provided by USAID to $1.1 million.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Mission Director in Amman, Jordan, Jay L. Knott, signed five agreements Sept. 28, providing $411.4 million in grants from the United States to Jordan.
NEW YORK – At the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting on Friday, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), and JP Morgan Chase announced a joint commitment to develop a set of standards that will rate the social and environmental return on financial investments. The Impact Reporting Investment Standards (IRIS) initiative will provide a common framework for defining, tracking, and reporting the performance of impact investments.
WASHINGTON D.C. - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), recently awarded 30 grants totaling $8.6 million to 23 U.S. based non-profit, private and voluntary organizations (PVOs), under USAID's International Food Relief Partnerships (IFRP) program.
The IFRP program enables USAID to administer grant awards to U.S. based PVOs for the preparation and storage of shelf-stable pre-packaged food and for the delivery and distribution of those commodities in developing countries.
HARARE, ZIMBABWE - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Standard Chartered Bank of Zimbabwe (Stanchart) signed an agreement that will enable the bank to expand its lending by $20 million over five years. The program, made possible under USAID's Development Credit Authority, is targeted at the agricultural sector and will allow Stanchart to increase the number of loans it makes directly to farmers and enterprises.
NEW YORK, N.Y.,- On Friday, a public-private partnership with General Mills, a leading U.S. food company, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was announced at the closing of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Health Initiative. This partnership will improve the capacity of small and medium-sized food businesses across sub-Saharan Africa to produce healthy, fortified food products.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - This week (Sept. 21), the U.S. Agency for International Development contributed $6 million to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) trust fund facility, administered by the World Bank. The U.S. Government is now the second largest donor to the trust fund, behind the United Kingdom. Other major donors include Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France and Norway.
WASHINGTON, DC - Amy Meyer, director of the Office of Economic Growth at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) field mission in Pakistan, was awarded the National Security and International Affairs Medal at the Partnership for Public Service annual gala event September 23. This award recognizes a federal employee for a significant contribution to the nation in activities related to national security and international affairs (including defense, military affairs, diplomacy, foreign assistance and trade).


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Chris Capuano (10-6, 3.13) vs. Wade Miley (11-6, 3.11).
The Dodgers are clinging onto a share of first place (thanks to a string of well-timed losses from the Giants), while the Diamondbacks are quickly closing the gap (now 3.5 GB). So tonight's question is, what sort of impact will the self-pleasuring Kirk Gibson Bobblehead Figure have on tonight's game?
Will it be a talisman for the team that made Gibson immortal, commemorating the time when improbable impossibilities became realities? Or will it be an inspiration for the team that Gibson currently helms? Stay tuned, true believers!


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WEDNESDAY, June 17, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A combination of healthy habits -- such as a good diet and regular exercise -- may lower your risk of Alzheimer's disease by as much as 60%, a new study suggests.
Data from nearly 3,000 people in the United States was scored on five beneficial lifestyle factors: high-quality diet, physical activity, not smoking, brain-challenging activities, and light-to-moderate alcohol consumption.
Compared to people with none or just one of the healthy lifestyle factors, the risk of Alzheimer's was 37% lower in those with two to three, and 60% lower in those with four to five healthy lifestyle factors.
The study, which was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA), was published online June 17 in the journal Neurology.
"This observational study provides more evidence on how a combination of modifiable behaviors may mitigate Alzheimer's disease risk," NIA director Dr. Richard Hodes said in an institute news release.
"The findings strengthen the association between healthy behaviors and lower risk," according to Hodes. They also support the value of controlled clinical trials to directly test the ability of interventions to slow or prevent development of Alzheimer's disease, he noted.
Dallas Anderson is program director of the neuroscience division at the NIA. "This population-based study helps paint the picture of how multiple factors are likely playing parts in Alzheimer's disease risk," he said.
"It's not a clear cause-and-effect result, but a strong finding," Anderson explained.
Here's more on the five healthy lifestyle factors that could help your brain:
Exercise your body. Get at least 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity. The NIA suggests talking to your doctor about the best ways to keep active.
Quit smoking. Research shows that even in people 60 or older who have smoked for decades, quitting improves health, according to the NIA.
Limit your alcohol consumption. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, moderate drinking is up to one drink per day for women and up to two drinks per day for men.
Mind what you eat. The NIA says there are benefits to sticking to the MIND diet -- a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diets. This focuses on plant-based foods associated with dementia prevention.
Give your brain a workout. Stay intellectually engaged by keeping your mind active. Try reading, playing games, taking a class or learning a new skill or hobby.
More information
The Alzheimer's Association has more on Alzheimer's prevention.
SOURCE: U.S. National Institute on Aging, news release, June 17, 2020


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95 homes available
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I just could not let blueberry season slip away without making blueberry pancakes at least once. Luckily there were still a lot of blueberries at the farmers market on the weekend and I picked some up. For a recipe, I started with the banana buttermilk pancakes that I had made a while ago and really liked. I have been trying to work more whole wheat flour into my baking lately so I swapped some in for some of the all purpose flour. I replaced the remaining all purpose flour with some ground rolled oats as I had done in the blueberry maple oatmeal muffins that I had just made. The blueberry oatmeal pancakes turned out pretty good. They were a bit more difficult to flip than normal pancakes but they had a nice light texture and they were really moist. I served the pancakes with some maple syrup, blueberries and pecans as garnish. I enjoyed the pancakes so mush that I made them again on the weekend. The second time I made them I enjoyed them with the remaining blueberry maple syrup from the blueberry and shrimp salad from earlier in the week.
Blueberry Oatmeal Pancakes
- 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
- 1/2 cup rolled oats (ground in food processor)
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 egg
- 2 tablespoons butter (melted)
- 1 overripe banana (mashed)
- 1/2 cup blueberries
- Mix the flour, rolled oats, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.
- Mix the maple syrup, buttermilk, egg, butter and banana in another bowl.
- Mix the wet and dry ingredients.
- Mix in the blueberries.
- Heat a pan and melt a touch of butter in it.
- Pour 1/4 cup of the mixture into the pan and cook until the surface starts to bubble and the bottom is golden brown, about 2-3 minutes.
- Flip the pancake and cook the other side until the bottom is golden brown, about 1-2 minutes.


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Chapter 18
Jesus gives the parables of the unjust judge and the Pharisee and publican—He invites little children to come unto Him and teaches how to gain eternal life—He tells of His coming death and resurrection and gives sight to a blind man.
1 And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought aalways to bpray, and not to cfaint;
2 Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man:
3 And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.
4 And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;
5 Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.
6 And the Lord said, Hear what the aunjust judge saith.
7 And shall not God aavenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with bthem?
8 aI tell you that he will bavenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
9 And he spake this parable unto certain which atrusted in themselves that they were righteous, and bdespised others:
10 Two men went up into the temple to apray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
11 The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am anot as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
12 I afast twice in the week, I give btithes of all that I cpossess.
13 And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a asinner.
14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that aexalteth himself shall be abased; and he that bhumbleth himself shall be exalted.
15 And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them.
16 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little achildren to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
17 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.
18 And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit aeternal life?
19 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is agood, save one, that is, God.
20 Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit aadultery, Do not bkill, Do not steal, Do not bear cfalse witness, dHonour thy father and thy mother.
21 And he said, All these have I kept from my youth up.
22 Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the apoor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.
23 And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.
24 And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, he said, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!
25 For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
26 And they that heard it said, Who then can be saved?
27 aAnd he said, The things which are impossible with men are bpossible with God.
28 Then Peter said, Lo, we have left all, and followed thee.
29 And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake,
30 Who shall not areceive bmanifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.
31 ¶ Then he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are awritten by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished.
32 For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be amocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on:
33 And they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall arise again.
34 And they aunderstood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.
35 ¶ And it came to pass, that as he was come nigh unto Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the way side begging:
36 And hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant.
37 And they told him, that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.
38 And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.
39 And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me.
40 And Jesus stood, and commanded him to be brought unto him: and when he was come near, he asked him,
41 Saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.
42 And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy asight: thy bfaith hath saved thee.
43 And immediately he received his sight, and followed him, aglorifying God: and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto God.


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In order to use the XML Data Access Service for Service Data Objects, you will need to understand some of the concepts behind SDO: the data graph, the data object, XPath and property expressions, and so on. If you are not familiar with these ideas, you might want to look first at the section on SDO.
The job of the XML DAS is to move data between the application and an XML data source, which can be either a file or a URL. SDOs are always created and maintained according to a model which defines type names and what property names each type may have. For data which is from XML, this SDO model is built from a schema file written in XML schema language (an xsd file). This schema file is usually passed to the create method when the XMLDAS is initialised. The » SDO 2.0 specification defines the mapping between XML types and SDO types. There are a number of small limitations in the PHP support - not everything which is in the specification can be done - and these limitations are summarised in a later section.


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Awful Announcing is brilliantly running a Sports Blogger Mock Draft. Here's a link to the post unveiling the order and participants.
I lucked into picking for the Raiders*, which means I have the first overall pick in the draft.
Obviously, I'm not making this pick without your input, so it's on the table (and you're on the clock): Who should I (uh, the Raiders) take?
(Or should I trade the pick? If so, to who? How far down? And what should I ask for in return?)
I have to get AA my pick by end-of-day tomorrow, so let's work on this until mid-day tomorrow.
I figure that if I/we keep the pick, there aren't THAT many choices: Calvin Johnson (per FanIQ)? JaMarcus Russell? Someone else? (Especially if you're arguing I should trade down.) Please offer up some type of argument of why I should take a particular player.
(But if you see the argument made previously in the comments, no need to repeat. Just reference the argument in shorthand or say the player name and "what so-and-so said" as the reasoning.)
-- D.S.* - If you're curious: Yes, I originally asked to pick for the Jaguars, but they were claimed. Can you believe that? Obviously, my fandom -- which began, as you might remember, last September -- has inspired a massive crush of fellow bandwagoneers.


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In Trafficking Report, A Stark Warning About Thai Fishing Industry
In Trafficking Report, A Stark Warning About Thai Fishing Industry
The U.S. state department has issued its annual report on human trafficking. According to the report, Thailand, Malaysia and Venezuela have not been doing enough to combat modern slavery. And the report includes a warning to American importers of seafood: Clean up supply chains that include Thailand, where fish may be caught or processed using slave labor.
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. The State Department issued its annual report on human trafficking today. And Thailand is now on the list of countries flagged for not doing enough to combat modern-day slavery. That's in part because of Thailand's fishing industry, as NPR's, Michele Kelemen, reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: The author of the report, Luis Cdebaca, says American consumers and seafood importers have a role to play in combating human trafficking.
LUIS CDEBACA: Nobody can say that it's sustainable seafood if the hands that are pulling the nets are themselves enslaved.
KELEMEN: In an interview with NPR, the ambassador at large for combating trafficking in persons paints a grim picture of the seafood industry in Thailand, where he says authorities are not doing enough to punish businesses that violate labor laws.
CDEBACA: Because right now, frankly, if all you get is a small fine for having six-year-olds deveining shrimp for the American export market, taking peoples passports away or even basically kidnapping these men and having them on the boats for two or three years - if all you get is a small fine for that, then you just absorb that as the cost of doing business.
KELEMEN: And that's one reason why Thailand landed on the so-called tier three list - countries that are failing to combat human trafficking. The Thai embassy says it's disappointed by the ranking which, it says, ignores the progress the country has made. Cdebaca tells NPR that there are some bright spots, including a social development minister, who once ran a group that saved Thai women enslaved in the Middle East as domestic servants and prostitutes.
CDEBACA: So we see that there are a number of actors in the Thai government who care and are trying to address this, but political will and corruption seems to be almost an anchor around their necks.
KELEMEN: Unlike most State Department reports, this one also looks inwards, and Melissa Sperber of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking says there's a lot of room for improvement for the U.S. when it comes to funding the fight against modern-day slavery.
MELISSA SPERBER: It is embarrassingly small in terms of the amount that the U.S. is investing compared to the scope of the problem and the increasing demand for services.
KELEMEN: Ambassador Cdebaca, a former prosecutor, though, thinks the U.S. is making strides. There are anti-trafficking laws in all 50 states. And, as he puts it, the word is out among pimps, farm labor recruiters and others. But he says there is more work to do to help the more than a million and a half victims of trafficking in the Americas - many of them enslaved in their own countries.
CDEBACA: It's not just Colombian women who might end up enslaved in Miami, it's Colombian women in Colombia, in their own neighborhoods - just as the bulk of the victims in the United States are just as likely to be U.S. citizens as they are foreign migrants.
KELEMEN: He wants this year's State Department report to give those victims a voice in Washington and in their states and cities. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.


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Extensions, widgets & badges
Find out more about the TinEye official browser extensions and widgets to make your searching easier and faster.
What the heck is this?
This is a fun embeddable widget that demonstrates the image identification technology behind TinEye, our reverse image search engine.
What you are seeing is several edited variations of the same image. They were all found on the web using TinEye reverse image search, simply by searching for the a version of the original image. We took the results of our TinEye search and put them into this image-flow interface, which allows you to scan through the different images and see the differences between them.
How does TinEye's reverse image search work?
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, there are images in our image database.
When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.
TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.
How do I use the widgets?
Choose the widget you want to play with from the selection on the right. To quickly scan through the TinEye result versions of the original search image, just click the play button. You can also view the image results one at a time, by using the next and previous buttons. The web address below each image is clickable, and will take you to the web page where that particular version of the image was found.
To embed this widget on your website or blog, just click the 'Embed' link, then cut and paste the html.


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It's difficult to hold in one's mind the notion that two opposed statements can be true at the same time: that the glass, for example, is both partly full and partly empty.
The concept of regression toward the mean is one of the more paradoxical notions ever discovered. Although it's a fundamental aspect of everyday life, it took until Sir Francis Galton in the late 19th Century to be recognized.
In 2005, Jim Holt wrote an excellent review in The New Yorker of a tendentious biography of Galton, putting Galton's historic achievement in proper perspective:
Galton might have puttered along for the rest of his life as a minor gentleman scientist had it not been for a dramatic event: the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," in 1859. Reading his cousin's book, Galton was filled with a sense of clarity and purpose. One thing in it struck him with special force: to illustrate how natural selection shaped species, Darwin cited the breeding of domesticated plants and animals by farmers to produce better strains. Perhaps, Galton concluded, human evolution could be guided in the same way. But where Darwin had thought mainly about the evolution of physical features, like wings and eyes, Galton applied the same hereditary logic to mental attributes, like talent and virtue.
In other words, Galton's thinking evolved from qualitative to quantitative.
"If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvements of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!" he wrote in an 1864 magazine article, his opening eugenics salvo. It was two decades later that he coined the word "eugenics," from the Greek for "wellborn."
Galton also originated the phrase "nature versus nurture," which still reverberates in debates today. (It was probably suggested by Shakespeare's "The Tempest," in which Prospero laments that his slave Caliban is "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.") At Cambridge, Galton had noticed that the top students had relatives who had also excelled there; surely, he reasoned, such family success was not a matter of chance. His hunch was strengthened during his travels, which gave him a vivid sense of what he called "the mental peculiarities of different races." Galton made an honest effort to justify his belief in nature over nurture with hard evidence. In his 1869 book "Hereditary Genius," he assembled long lists of "eminent" men—judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers—to show that excellence ran in families. To counter the objection that social advantages rather than biology might be behind this, he used the adopted sons of Popes as a kind of control group. His case elicited skeptical reviews, but it impressed Darwin. "You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense," he wrote to Galton, "for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work." Yet Galton's labors had hardly begun. If his eugenic utopia was to be a practical possibility, he needed to know more about how heredity worked. His belief in eugenics thus led him to try to discover the laws of inheritance. And that, in turn, led him to statistics.
Statistics at that time was a dreary welter of population numbers, trade figures, and the like. It was devoid of mathematical interest, save for a single concept: the bell curve. The bell curve was first observed when eighteenth-century astronomers noticed that the errors in their measurements of the positions of planets and other heavenly bodies tended to cluster symmetrically around the true value. A graph of the errors had the shape of a bell. In the early nineteenth century, a Belgian astronomer named Adolph Quetelet observed that this "law of error" also applied to many human phenomena. Gathering information on the chest sizes of more than five thousand Scottish soldiers, for example, Quetelet found that the data traced a bell-shaped curve centered on the average chest size, about forty inches.
As a matter of mathematics, the bell curve is guaranteed to arise whenever some variable (like human height) is determined by lots of little causes (like genes, health, and diet) operating more or less independently. For Quetelet, the bell curve represented accidental deviations from an ideal he called l'homme moyen—the average man. When Galton stumbled upon Quetelet's work, however, he exultantly saw the bell curve in a new light: what it described was not accidents to be overlooked but differences that revealed the variability on which evolution depended. His quest for the laws that governed how these differences were transmitted from one generation to the next led to what Brookes justly calls "two of Galton's greatest gifts to science": regression and correlation.
Although Galton was more interested in the inheritance of mental abilities, he knew that they would be hard to measure. So he focussed on physical traits, like height. The only rule of heredity known at the time was the vague "Like begets like." Tall parents tend to have tall children, while short parents tend to have short children. But individual cases were unpredictable. Hoping to find some larger pattern, in 1884 Galton set up an "anthropometric laboratory" in London. Drawn by his fame, thousands of people streamed in and submitted to measurement of their height, weight, reaction time, pulling strength, color perception, and so on. ...
After obtaining height data from two hundred and five pairs of parents and nine hundred and twenty-eight of their adult children, Galton plotted the points on a graph, with the parents' heights represented on one axis and the children's on the other. He then pencilled a straight line though the cloud of points to capture the trend it represented. The slope of this line turned out to be two-thirds. What this meant was that exceptionally tall (or short) parents had children who, on average, were only two-thirds as exceptional as they were. In other words, when it came to height children tended to be less exceptional than their parents. The same, he had noticed years earlier, seemed to be true in the case of "eminence": the children of J. S. Bach, for example, may have been more musically distinguished than average, but they were less distinguished than their father. Galton called this phenomenon "regression toward mediocrity."
Regression analysis furnished a way of predicting one thing (a child's height) from another (its parents') when the two things were fuzzily related. Galton went on to develop a measure of the strength of such fuzzy relationships, one that could be applied even when the things related were different in kind—like rainfall and crop yield. He called this more general technique "correlation."
The result was a major conceptual breakthrough. Until then, science had pretty much been limited to deterministic laws of cause and effect—which are hard to find in the biological world, where multiple causes often blend together in a messy way. Thanks to Galton, statistical laws gained respectability in science.
His discovery of regression toward mediocrity—or regression to the mean, as it is now called—has resonated even more widely. Yet, as straightforward as it seems, the idea has been a snare even for the sophisticated. The common misconception is that it implies convergence over time. If very tall parents tend to have somewhat shorter children, and very short parents tend to have somewhat taller children, doesn't that mean that eventually everyone should be the same height? No, because regression works backward as well as forward in time: very tall children tend to have somewhat shorter parents, and very short children tend to have somewhat taller parents. The key to understanding this seeming paradox is that regression to the mean arises when enduring factors (which might be called "skill") mix causally with transient factors (which might be called "luck"). Take the case of sports, where regression to the mean is often mistaken for choking or slumping. Major-league baseball players who managed to bat better than .300 last season did so through a combination of skill and luck. Some of them are truly great players who had a so-so year, but the majority are merely good players who had a lucky year. There is no reason that the latter group should be equally lucky this year; that is why around eighty per cent of them will see their batting average decline.
To mistake regression for a real force that causes talent or quality to dissipate over time, as so many have, is to commit what has been called "Galton's fallacy." In 1933, a Northwestern University professor named Horace Secrist produced a book-length example of the fallacy in "The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business," in which he argued that, since highly profitable firms tend to become less profitable, and highly unprofitable ones tend to become less unprofitable, all firms will soon be mediocre. A few decades ago, the Israeli Air Force came to the conclusion that blame must be more effective than praise in motivating pilots, since poorly performing pilots who were criticized subsequently made better landings, whereas high performers who were praised made worse ones. (It is a sobering thought that we might generally tend to overrate censure and underrate praise because of the regression fallacy.) More recently, an editorialist for the Times erroneously argued that the regression effect alone would insure that racial differences in I.Q. would disappear over time.
Did Galton himself commit Galton's fallacy? Brookes insists that he did. "Galton completely misread his results on regression," he argues, and wrongly believed that human heights tended "to become more average with each generation." Even worse, Brookes claims, Galton's muddleheadedness about regression led him to reject the Darwinian view of evolution, and to adopt a more extreme and unsavory version of eugenics. Suppose regression really did act as a sort of gravity, always pulling individuals back toward the average. Then it would seem to follow that evolution could not take place through a gradual series of small changes, as Darwin envisaged. It would require large, discontinuous changes that are somehow immune from regression to the mean.
Such leaps, Galton thought, would result in the appearance of strikingly novel organisms, or "sports of nature," that would shift the entire bell curve of ability. And if eugenics was to have any chance of success, it would have to work the same way as evolution. In other words, these sports of nature would have to be enlisted to create a new breed. Only then could regression be overcome and progress be made.
In telling this story, Brookes makes his subject out to be more confused than he actually was. It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a statistician at the University of Chicago, "should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science—at a level with William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood and with Isaac Newton's of the separation of light." By 1889, when Galton published his most influential book, "Natural Inheritance," his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. Regression to the mean held even between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall. In fact, as Galton was able to show by a neat geometric argument, regression is a matter of pure mathematics, not an empirical force. Lest there be any doubt, he disguised the case of hereditary height as a problem in mechanics and sent it to a mathematician at Cambridge, who, to Galton's delight, confirmed his finding.
Read more.
Keep in mind that Galton was born in 1822 and was in his later 60s by the time he published "Natural Inheritance." Indeed, the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" begins with an anecdote about a major conceptual breakthrough that Galton came up with when he was 85.


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I will declare a first and final dividend on 22 July 2013 for the Company.
Creditors whose debts or claims have not already been admitted are required on or before 22 July 2013 formally to prove their debts or claims. If they do not, they will be excluded from the benefit of the dividend.
Adam Edward FarnsworthLiquidator


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