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Maximizing the benefits of business transformation
Cross-border transactions are what we do, every day, around the world. And we're one of a few global law firms with a team dedicated to corporate reorganizations. Our broad experience, skillset, and geographic reach ensures we design and implement legal structures and business operating models that get measurable results.
Keeping pace with today's fluid, fast-moving global markets can mean business reorganization becomes inevitable. A transformation brings challenges but also strategic opportunity. We help clients solve a broad range of issues while maximizing the benefits: realizing operational improvements, streamlining processes, and ensuring tax efficiency.
Our lawyers, economists, and project managers have many years of experience advising on complex and strategic reorganizations, and frequently work on projects that span up to 100 countries. Whatever the challenges, it's likely that we've seen them before and know how to overcome them.
We advise on the feasibility, structure, documentation, and implementation of a variety of global transactions, including carve-outs, spin-offs, pre- and post-acquisition integration, and legal entity rationalization projects. We often collaborate with our Transfer Pricing group, which performs necessary valuations and assists with transfer pricing workstreams.
"The team is incredibly responsive, patient and intelligent. They are able to explain complex concepts in a way that is easy to understand."
With offices in 45+ countries and relationship firms in more than 100 jurisdictions, every member of our team provides in-depth local knowledge while seeing the global picture. And close collaboration across our practice groups including Corporate, Employment, Regulatory, Real Estate and Intellectual Property, means we provide a comprehensive, strategic approach.
Many members of our team have significant in-house experience in Fortune 500 or FTSE-listed legal and tax departments, so they understand that your goal isn't only to implement change, but to do so with minimal disruption to your in-house team and day-to-day operations.
Our centralized leadership team manages global projects seamlessly. And our robust project management platform drives efficiencies and reduces costs through central coordination and communication, quality review, central billing, globally aligned documentation, and tailored technology and tools.
When there's a need for transformation, we'll be there to help you make the most of change.
Awards and recognition
- A Fortune 100 insurance company on post-acquisition integration plan of a transaction valued at more than USD5.5 billion and implemented across more than 40 jurisdictions; the deal team was responsible for all corporate, regulatory, employment and real estate actions required
- On a post-acquisition reorganization following the USD3.4 billion acquisition of a global professional services business; this involved a significant number of mergers and business transfers
- On a post-acquisition reorganization arising out of a takeover in the IT services sector; this was a global transaction of USD3.1 billion designed to increase business process outsourcing capabilities and improve and increase the client's infrastructure platform
- A leading publicly traded software company on its tax-efficient post acquisition integration plan that balanced commercial, corporate, IP, operational and employment matters with the following areas of focus: IP integration, legal entity rationalization, and transfer pricing planning and documentation
- A publicly traded technology and medical device company on the post-acquisition integration of all recent global acquisitions including alignment of tax, IP, employment, regulatory, commercial, and corporate considerations in Asia, Europe, and the Americas
- A publicly traded technology and manufacturing company on the planning and post-acquisition integration of several global acquisitions including alignment of tax, transfer pricing, valuation, IP, employment, data privacy, regulatory, commercial, and corporate considerations in Asia, Europe, and the Americas
- A leading biopharmaceutical solutions company on its post-acquisition integration program across the Asia Pacific region
- A leading globally diversified conglomerate specializing in life sciences, diagnostics and environmental solutions, on the post-acquisition integration of a biotechnology company
- A leading diversified industrial technology conglomerate on implementing a regulatory program across 62 jurisdictions
- A US-based financial ratings agency on post-acquisition integration
- A leading diversified conglomerate on all carveout activities in connection with the execution of a series of disposals (as part of a USD30 billion asset disposal program) that required us to instruct and co-ordinate teams across over 100 jurisdictions
- A leading diversified industrial technology conglomerate company on its USD3 billion acquisition of an advanced sterilization business, spanning 57 jurisdictions
- A leading globally diversified conglomerate specializing in life sciences, diagnostics and environmental solutions, on its USD2 billion carveout of various minor business lines to private equity as well as a carveout across eight jurisdictions of a digital imaging business to private equity
- A publicly traded dental company in a carveout of its digital imaging business across 20 jurisdictions
- A leading diversified conglomerate on all aspects of the pre-completion reorganization and carveout undertaken in connection with its USD21 billion disposal of a pharma business
- A leading producer of specialty chemicals and cosmetic actives marketed globally on its carveout of a significant business line involving 32 jurisdictions including corporate, tax, employment and regulatory
- A large multinational conglomerate (the seller) on a carve-out sale of a multi-jurisdictional business from a larger division
- A leading globally diversified conglomerate specializing in life sciences, diagnostics and environmental solutions, on the spin-off that resulted in the separation of a USD80 billion diversified industrial company into a USD60 billion life sciences company and a USD20 billion manufacturing business
- A leading globally diversified conglomerate specializing in life sciences, diagnostics and environmental solutions, on the spin-off of its USD8 billion dental business, which now trades on the New York Stock Exchange
- A leading diversified industrial technology conglomerate on implementing a complex spin-off of its USD2 billion transportation and mobility business, which now trades on the New York Stock Exchange
- An industrials company on the separation of the global group into two independently-listed NYSE-traded companies
- A leading diversified industrial technology conglomerate company on the USD3 billion disposition of its automation business
- A leading globally diversified conglomerate specializing in life sciences, diagnostics and environmental solutions, on the USD2.3 billion disposition of its communications business
- A Fortune 100 insurance company on a legal entity rationalization program that eliminated more than 400 entities across 20 jurisdictions
- A major international hotelier on a legal entity rationalization project
- A large multinational insurance brokerage company on creating a new holding structure for its non-US subsidiaries to better manage the internal cash needs of the group and to repatriate funds to the US as efficiently as possible
- A global professional services firm, leading the segregation of its EMEA, LATAM, Caribbean and Asia Pacific subsidiaries into new regional holding companies, followed by a sophisticated leverage transaction involving 40+ countries
- A medical devices company that provides infection prevention services on a director change program across 57 countries
- A provider of application and network performance management products on ongoing corporate subsidiary support
- A global industrial technology company focused on smarter transportation and mobility on a director change program across 46 countries
- A Brazilian food processing company on the international reorganization of its holding company structure, trading structure (including transactions and intragroup pricing), and IP structure and pricing
- A multinational professional services firm on a global reorganization of intragroup transactions, implementation of a global cost sharing arrangement and master license, new legal agreements and transfer pricing documentation in 80+ countries, including three bilateral APAs
- A company developing strategy execution software, on its admission to AIM and associated GBP10 million secondary placing, including advice on a pre-IPO group reorganization
- A multinational media company on implementing a streamlined distribution model for its international business, valued at approximately USD10 billion


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Posts Tagged 'innocent dead'
World Affairs Daily, March 10
China's Nervous Neighbors Play the America Card By Richard Weitz China's increasing military power and aggressiveness has raised alarms in Southeast Asia. Richard Weitz explains how the region, together with the US, has begun to recalculate, adjust, and realign policies and relationships to counter China's increasingly menacing posture. Read More The Arms Trade, Dictators, and the Innocent Dead Michael Zantovsky Blog As Qaddafi murders his subjects, the moral relativism, ... Full Story

subset: commoncrawl


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Date: 1701
"Search all the close recesses of the mind, / And leave no vice, no ruling passion there, / Nothing to raise a blush, or cause a fear; / Their memories with solid notions fill, / And let their reason dictate to their will."
preview | full record— Chudleigh [née Lee], Mary, Lady Chudleigh (bap. 1656, d. 1710)


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Ok, 1.3.4 is out. The major changes were on the debugger (fixing bugs that were introduced in 1.3.3, given some major refactorings in its structure -- mostly to achieve a better performance -- so, all should be working again).
Also, I've downloaded and installed Eclipse 3.3 to start trying pydev with it. Mostly the experience has been nice...
The new diff is what I liked best. It now gives you not only the lines that changed on a first glance, but also shows you what actually changed, without having to go to 'next change' all the time -- pretty nice.
There were also some new things to learn: the startup.jar is now gone, so, if you do headless builds like me, you have to use eclipsec.exe instead of java -jar startup.jar -- which is something nice, but knowing which jar it uses is still something that may be handy (if you're doing profilings and need that jar, you can probably go to the configuration details and see how it was actually launched to use the same command-line -- haven't tested it, but it should work).
And the weirdest thing I found was that Ctrl+F11 doesn't always rerun the last run, it tries to find a configuration or something like that (probably for the project?) -- as I do tons of unit-tests and usually just do F9 in pydev to run the current editor and then just do Ctrl+F11 to re-run it again, I think that the modus operandi was nicer before for me -- fortunately, that is something that can be set in the preferences, so, I got to the old style and it works again as it used to.
Also, it seems that the java process is still alive when I finish eclipse. That may actually be a pydev bug (I've already had a report about it), so, I'll start to check if I can fix it (or if that's unrelated to pydev).
All in all, pydev seems to be behaving nicely with Eclipse 3.3 (aside from that bug), I've been able to build it without any code-changes, so, it seems pretty backward-compatible (but that's something that only time will tell).
Thursday, May 31, 2007
2 comments:
Hey, did you do something magical to code completion in version 1.3.4? Suddenly, code completion is lightning fast, and is doing completions that it was missing before.
It's back to being awesome again.
Keep it up,
Scott - 5:16 PM
- Fabio Zadrozny said...
This release had some performance optimizations... nice that you could 'feel it' ;-)
Fabio - 6:06 PM
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Regular price $27.99 $27.99 Sale
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Cotterman Series A - 5 Step x 18" W - A3 Tread - Handrails
(Product image may not represent actual product)
Cotterman Series "A" Welded Aluminum Ladders - 5 Step x 18" W - A3 Tread - Handrails
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There is an ongoing three way debate between those who believe the Fed should do more to strengthen the recovery, those who believe that the recovery is strong enough to continue on its own, and those who believe that the economy has been so fundamentally altered by the recession that no amount of stimulus can succeed in pushing unemployment down to pre-crash levels. As usual, they all have it wrong (although some are more wrong than others).
The false conclusions are being made by the likes of bond king Bill Gross, who has suggested that the economic fundamentals have changed. They argue that a "new normal" is now in place that sets an 8% unemployment rate as a floor below which we will never fall. This is absurd. America can once again prosper if we put our trust in first principles and let the free markets work. Unfortunately, that is not happening. Government is taking an ever greater role in our economy where its efforts will continue to stifle economic growth. A close second in cluelessness comes from those who believe that we are currently on the road to a real recovery. I'm not sure what economy they are looking at, but in just about every important metric, we continue to be essentially comatose.
More accurate are the opinions of those who believe that without a more serious intervention from the Fed, which can only mean another round of quantitative easing (QE III), the current quasi-recovery will soon fade and the tides of recession will overtake us once again. They are correct. And even though this time the water will be rougher and deeper than it was four years ago, it does not mean that the Fed will do the economy any good by breaking out its heavy artillery once again.
In his widely anticipated speech at Jackson Hole last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke sounded a supremely optimistic note: "It seems clear, based on this experience, that such (easing) policies can be effective, and that, in their absence, the 2007-09 recession would have been deeper and the current recovery would have been slower than has actually occurred."
The simple truth however, is that our economy has a disease that all the quantitative easing in the world can't cure. And while the wrong medicine may make us appear healthier in the short term, we will continue to deteriorate beneath the surface. Not only should the Fed not provide additional QE, but it should remove the accommodation currently in place. Although these moves would most certainly send us back into recession, it would simultaneously provide a needed course correction that would put us finally on the road to a sustainable recovery.
The recession the Fed is trying so desperately to prevent must be allowed to run its course so that the economy that we have developed over the last decade, the one that is overly reliant on low interest rates, borrowing and consumer spending, can finally restructure itself into something healthier. By enabling this diseased economy to overstay its welcome, QE does more harm than good. To recover for the long haul, the market must be allowed to correct the misallocations of resources that resulted from prior stimulus. Additional stimulus inhibits this process, and exacerbates the size of the misallocations the markets must eventually correct.
In the interim, any GDP growth or employment gains that result from stimulus actually compounds the difficulty in restructuring the economy. Any jobs created as a result of cheap monetary stimulus are jobs that won't be able to survive absent that support. They will require a continual misallocation of resources in order to survive. Unfortunately, these jobs must ultimately be lost before a real recovery can actually begin.
Holding rates of interest far below market levels (which is the goal of stimulus) alters patterns of consumption, savings, and investment. Fed intervention short-circuits the market driven process that resolves misallocations. The more stimulus that is provided, the harder market forces must work to try to restore equilibrium. As the misallocations grow over time, the efficacy of monetary measures diminishes. In the end, the market will overwhelm the Fed. The only question is how long it will take.
The Fed is trying to build skyscrapers on a bad foundation. Each subsequent structure it builds not only collapses, but also weakens the foundation that much more. The result is that subsequent structures collapse at increasingly lower heights and require more effort to build. Instead of trying to build, the Fed could concentrate on repairing the underlying foundation. That might delay construction, but in the end the buildings will be much sturdier.
Because the Fed has kept interest rates too low for too long, Americans have saved too little and borrowed too much; consumed too much and produced too little; and imported too much and exported too little. Too much of our labor is devoted to the service sectors and not enough to goods production. Too much capital goes to Wall Street speculators and not enough to Main Street entrepreneurs. We built too many homes but not enough factories. We have developed too many shopping centers, and not enough natural resources. The list of Fed induced misallocations goes on.
By trying to preserve the jobs associated with this old economy, the Fed prevents the market from creating the ones we actually need. Unfortunately no one seems to understand that, and we continue to chase blindly after failed economic models. Look for such misunderstanding to be on high display this week in Charlotte as Democrats gather to call for even greater intervention to perpetuate a failed economic model.


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walking tour
If you are a person with a disability and desire any assistive devices, services or other accommodations to participate in this activity, please contact Theresa Long at 757-787-1361 ext. 14 during business hours of 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. to discuss accommodations 5 days prior to the event. *TDD number is (800) 828-1120.
Virginia Cooperative Extension programs and employment are open to all, regardless of age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, genetic information, veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. An equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Issued in furtherance of Cooperative Extension work, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia State University, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture cooperating. Edwin J. Jones, Director, Virginia Cooperative Extension, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg; M. Ray McKinnie, Administrator, 1890 Extension Program, Virginia State University, Petersburg.


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The Rolling Stones Fake Book includes 167 classic Stones songs recorded between 1963 and 1971 — from early blues covers (Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly songs) to the psychedelia of Their Satanic Majesties Request. All songs are in complete, professional-style lead sheets with fundamental instrumental riffs and figures included. There is also a special guitar-tab section, featuring the pivotal guitar riffs and solos from 29 of their most legendary songs, an introductory essay, a full-color ABKCO years discography (with album art), and 40 pages of classic early sheet music covers reproduced in full color. The ultimate Rolling Stones songbook!
The Rolling Stones Fake Book


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Josh Buckholtz wants to change the way you think about psychopaths — and he's willing to go to prison to do it.
An Associate Professor of Psychology, Buckholtz is the senior author of a study that relies on brain scans of nearly 50 prison inmates to help explain why psychopaths make poor decisions that often lead to violence or other anti-social behavior.
What they found, he said, is psychopath's brains are wired in a way that leads them to over-value immediate rewards and neglect the future consequences of potentially dangerous or immoral actions. The study is described in a July 5 paper in Neuron.
"For years, we have been focused on the idea that psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that's why they do all these terrible things," Buckholtz said. "But what what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don't have, it's the choices they make. Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole.
"And even though psychopaths are often portrayed as cold-blooded, almost alien predators, we have been showing that their emotional deficits may not actually be the primary driver of these bad choices. Because it's the choices of psychopaths that cause so much trouble, we've been trying to understand what goes on in their brains when the make decisions that involve trade-offs between the costs and benefits of action.," he continued. "In this most recent paper…we are able to look at brain-based measures of reward and value and the communication between different brain regions that are involved in decision making."
Obtaining the scans used in the study, however, was no easy feat — where most studies face an uphill battle in bringing subjects into the lab, Buckholtz's challenge was in bringing the scanner to his subjects.
The solution came in form of a "mobile" scanner — typically used for cancer screenings in rural areas — that came packed in the trailer of a tractor trailer. After trucking the equipment to a two medium-security prisons in Wisconsin, the team — which included collaborators at the University of Wisconin-Madison and University of New Mexico — would spend days calibrating the scanner, and then work to scan as many volunteers as possible as quickly as possible.
"It was a huge undertaking," he said. "Most MRI scanners, they're not going anywhere, but in this case, we're driving this inside a prison and then in very quick succession we have to assess and scan the inmates."
The team ultimately scanned the brains of 49 inmates over two hours as they took part in a type of delayed gratification test which asked them to choose between two options — receive a smaller amount of money immediately, or a larger amount at a later time. The results of those tests were then fit to a model that allowed researchers to create a measure of not only how impulsive each participant's behavior was, but to identify brain regions that play a role in assessing the relative value of such choices.
What they found, Buckholtz said, was people who scored high for psychopathy showed greater activity in a region called the ventral striatum — known to be involved in evaluating the subjective reward — for the more immediate choice.
"So the more psychopathic a person is, the greater the magnitude of that striatal response," Buckholtz said. "That suggests that the way they are calculating the value rewards is dysregulated — they may over-represent the value of immediate reward."
When Buckholtz and colleagues began mapping which brain regions are connected to the ventral striatum, it became clear why.
"We mapped the connections between the ventral striatum and other regions known to be involved in decision-making, specifically regions of the prefrontal cortex known to regulate striatal response," he said. "When we did that, we found that connections between the striatum and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex were much weaker in people with psychopathy."
That lack of connection is important, Buckholtz said, because this portion of the prefrontal cortex role is thought to be important for 'mental time-travel' — envisioning the future consequences of actions. There is increasing evidence that prefrontal cortex uses the outcome of this process to change how strongly the striatum responds to rewards. With that prefrontal modulating influence weakened, the value of the more immediate choice may become dramatically over-represented.
"The striatum assigns values to different actions without much temporal context" he said. "We need the prefrontal cortex to make prospective judgements how an action will affect us in the future — if I do this, then this bad thing will happen. The way we think of it is if you break that connection in anyone, they're going to start making bad choices because they won't have the information that would otherwise guide their decision-making to more adaptive ends."
The effect was so pronounced, Buckholtz said, that researchers were able to use the degree of connection between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex to accurately predict how many times inmates had been convicted of crimes.
Ultimately, Buckholtz said, his goal is to erase the popular image of psychopaths as incomprehensible, cold-blooded monsters and see them for what they are — everyday humans whose brains are simply wired differently.
"They're not aliens, they're people who make bad decisions," he said. "The same kind of short-sighted, impulsive decision-making that we see in psychopathic individuals has also been noted in compulsive over-eaters and substance abusers. If we can put this back into the domain of rigorous scientific analysis, we can see psychopaths aren't inhuman, they're exactly what you would expect from humans who have this particular kind of brain wiring dysfunction."
Source: Harvard
Original Research: Abstract for "Disrupted Prefrontal Regulation of Striatal Subjective Value Signals in Psychopathy" by Jay G. Hosking, Erik K. Kastman, Hayley M. Dorfman, Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin, Arielle Baskin-Sommers, Kent A. Kiehl, Joseph P. Newman, and Joshua W. Buckholtz in Neuron. Published online July 5 2017 doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.030


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In 1985, ZKTeco (previously ZKSoftware) was established and began research and development of fingerprint algorithm which made us a leading global developer of security and time management. Over the past decades, ZKTeco specializes in the manufacture and development of time & attendance and access control technology and sold more than 8.5 million units in over 180 countries.
ZKTeco have been awarded 80 patents and earned a reputation for technical innovation, quality, speed-to-market and reliability. We are the reader-manufacturer's choice for many OEM's software developers, ODMs, distributors, integrators, and dealers all over the world.
At our state-of-the-art 500,000 sq. feet ISO9001 certified manufacturing facility, we control manufacturing, product design, component assembly, and logistics/shipping -- all under in one roof. ZKTeco offers local business service and support with its offices in USA, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Dubai, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and China. We are your "one-stop" partner and that allows us to respond much more quickly to our customers. With more than 1,500 employees solely dedicated to the customized design and delivery of biometric and RFID readers, ZKTeco can integrate everything to meet your specific reader requirements and provide multi-platform integration.
Today we have 80% market share in China and over 75% in rest of the Asia Pacific area and our very goal is to share our highly developed, revolutionary biometric technology to benefit businesses and people.


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Blue Box
This is the crazy effect heard on Jimmy Page's Fool in the Rain solo. The Blue Box Octave Fuzz takes your guitar signal and duplicates it two octaves down for a huge, subterranean tone. The Blend knob lets you control how much of the fuzz tone is mixed with the two octaves down signal. Not for the timid-there is truly nothing like the Blue Box.


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This calculator does not adjust for leap years and assumes an even number of days in each payment period. Your credit union loan and savings figures may be different for these reasons or because of Credit Life or Credit Disability Insurance.
The accuracy of our calculators and their applicability to your circumstances are not guaranteed. You should consult with a qualified professional regarding your particular circumstances.
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Should high school athletes be screened for heart trouble before taking to the practice field?
Once thought to be exceedingly rare, sudden cardiac death is far more prevalent among young athletes than previously believed, recent research has shown. In a policy statement published in the journal Pediatrics last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics estimated that 2,000 people under the age of 25 die from sudden cardiac arrest in the United States every year.
While it can strike those who are sedentary, the risk is up to three times greater in competitive athletes. According to some experts, a high school student dies of cardiac arrest as often as every three days. Only the most sensational cases make headlines, said Darla Varrenti, executive director of the Nick of Time Foundation, which promotes awareness of sudden cardiac arrest in young people and provides free screenings. The condition received worldwide attention in March when Fabrice Muamba, a star soccer player in England, nearly died after suddenly collapsing in cardiac arrest during a televised game.
Ms. Varrenti started her foundation six years ago after her son, Nick, 16, a varsity athlete, died in his sleep after playing in a game. In January and February of this year alone, 29 young athletes went into cardiac arrest at schools across the country, Ms. Varrenti said. Only four survived.
"There's a lot of press when the cases are spectacular," she said. "But this happens all the time."
Sudden cardiac arrest in a young person usually stems from a structural defect in the heart or a problem with its electrical circuitry. The most frequent cause, accounting for about 40 percent of all cases, ishypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, a thickening of the heart muscle.
The problem is that those who are at risk are hard to spot. Warning signs, like dizziness and shortness of breath, can be rare or dismissed by young athletes used to overworking themselves.
But an electrocardiogram, or EKG, can detect HCM and other potential causes of heart trouble by looking for abnormal electrical signaling in the heart. Though EKGs are not as thorough as imaging tests like an echocardiogram, which shows a 3-D view of the heart, they are cheaper and easier to conduct on a wider basis.
An EKG can cost as much as $150, according to the American College of Cardiology. But many insurers will cover 80 to 100 percent of the costs, and in some areas, high schools offer student athletes EKGs at deeply discounted rates.
Still, the American Heart Association does not support wide screening. Under its guidelines, high school athletes get a physical exam, which includes listening to the heart and a blood pressure check, and fill out a questionnaire about personal and family medical history. More extensive testing takes place only if the student's physical or history raises red flags.
For years, the argument against EKGs was that for something as rare as sudden cardiac death, there is no sense in mandating costly tests. EKGs can be unreliable, too, producing false-positive results 20 percent of the time, critics say.
But that argument pivots on old data, including outdated numbers on the prevalence of sudden cardiac death, and fails to take into account improvements in the standards for interpreting EKG results, said Dr. Jonathan Drezner, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Washington and vice president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.
Even physical exams that include extensive medical histories typically fail to identify 60 percent to 80 percent of student athletes at risk, Dr. Drezner said. Adding an EKG to the sports physical would flag many young athletes whose heart defects would otherwise go unnoticed.
"No one is recommending you only do an EKG," he said. "It really is the combined protocol of history and EKG that provides the more advanced heart screening that we should aim for."
In a study published in 2010 in Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. Matthew T. Wheeler and colleagues at Stanford University found that adding EKGs to sports physicals for young athletes would create "a large benefit in a small number of individuals." But they would save enough lives to be considered cost effective, with a net cost of roughly $89 per person screened.
Based on their analysis, however, Dr. Wheeler said that EKGs make sense only for high school and college athletes — in children and adolescents, the risk of sudden cardiac death is lower — who compete in high-intensity sports like basketball, football and soccer. (Low-intensity sports, he said, include golf and bowling.)
"We are not advocating this as a mandatory test for all students or all athletes," said Dr. Wheeler, a fellow in cardiology at Stanford Medical School.
Some experts think the time has come for thorough heart screenings for all young athletes. Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute are even looking at the prevalence of heart abnormalities in middle-school students and the feasibility of complete screenings, combining EKGs and imaging tests.
The goal of the project, which is financed through a $5 million private grant, is to screen 10,000 students in Houston middle schools, said Dr. Jim Willerson, the lead investigator and president and medical director of the Texas Heart Institute. "If we save even one life, it will be worth it," he said.
Dr. Willerson said his hope was that school districts elsewhere would start to consider detailed screening of children "before they are involved in competitive athletics and probably even as they enter school."
In the meantime, hundreds of groups like Ms. Varrenti's have made it their mission to provide free EKGs and heart examinations to young people at community screenings around the country. Parents who are interested in a heart screening can reach out to their family doctors, or find out about free screenings in their area at Web sites like parentheartwatch.org.
"You can either open the dialogue with your pediatrician or look into free screenings," Ms. Varrenti said. "No one should go through what our family went through."
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 5, 2012
An article on Tuesday about sudden cardiac death in young athletes misstated the cost of an electrocardiogram test, or EKG, which can detect potential causes of heart trouble. An EKG generally costs less than $150, according to the American College of Cardiology — not $1,400, a figure cited as an average cost to uninsured patients.
*Republished via RSS from The New York Times


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Porto, Technological City
The FSF and the FSF Europe participated in this year's Porto, Technological City, an event dedicated to Free Software in Portugal. This year's edition was held on October 12th, in a historic old market in the riverfront of the northern Portuguese city of Porto, an area which has been declared world heritage by Unesco.
This year the event consisted of an exhibition by Institutions and Companies that develop and work with Free Software, a GNU/Linux Installation Party and a series of lectures. The lectures were held in a conference room installed in the middle of the bulding, around which the exhibition booths and a cyber-cafe were set up.
National Association for Free Software
Among the highlights of the event was the announcement of the creation of the "National Association for Free Software" (in Portuguese: "Associação Nacional para o Software Livre"), ANSOL. The announcement was made by a group of free software advocates who have been working during the last months towards the participation of Portugal in the recently created Free Software Foundation Europe.
The association will be a non-profit organization committed to the promotion, development, research and study of Computing Freedom and its socio-political, cultural and technological implications. A Web site for the association has been created, and a first draft of its bylaws has been written. The initiative has awakened the interest of free software enthusiasts in Portugal, who are discussing in the association's mailing list the schedule for the first General Assembly at which the governing boards will be elected.
FSF participation
The vice-president of the FSF, Bradley Kuhn, and the vice-president of the FSF Europe, Loïc Dachary, were the two special international guests in the event. Bradley Kuhn gave a talk on "Software Freedom, the GNU Generation and the GNU General Public License" and Loïc Dachary spoke on "Free Software Development and Associations Throughout the World."
A booth was set up for the FSF and the FSF Europe. The event was also a good opportunity for the founding members of ANSOL to meet and exchange ideas with the vice-presidents of the Free Software Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Europe.
Free Software and the Portuguese government
The Portuguese government has taken some important steps in defense of the Free Software movement in Portugal. The mayor of the city of Oporto, Nuno Cardoso, has supported the initiative of a group of Professors and students of the School of Engineering of the University of Porto, that last year launched the idea of this event. Porto's City Hall has provided the organizational infrastructure of the event.
The Portuguese minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Mariano Gago, attended the event and in an interview to the local media talked about the importance of non-proprietary systems in public administrations throughout Europe and in the Portuguese school system. Alberto Martins, the Portuguese Minister of Public Administration and Reform of the State, delivered a talk on "Technology in the Public Administration and in the Reform of the State." Several other public officials were present, including the president of the School of Engineering of the University of Porto, Dr. Carlos Costa.
- Jaime Villate and Loïc Dachary prepare for a busy day at Porto, Technological City 2001.
- Portuguese Minister of Science and Technology, Mariano Gago, Mayor of Porto, Nuno Cardoso, Jaime Villate and Bradley Kuhn.
- Bradley Kuhn talks about Software Freedom, the GNU Generation and the GNU General Public License.
- Loïc Dachary talks about Free Software Development and Associations Throughout the World.
- Raul Oliveira (Engineering School and ANSOL) talks about GNU/Linux in teaching and in the develpment of a software industry.
- ANSOL members Miguel Gonçalves, João Neves, Jaime Villate, Hugo Nogueira, João Pedro Jacob, Ruben Mendes and Raul Oliveira, have lunch with Bradley Kuhn.
- Organizer António Rodrigues and Bradley Kuhn.
- Professor Pedro Guedes de Oliveira and Bradley Kuhn.
- Bradley Kuhn and two members of the board of directors of the School of Enginneering (FEUP).


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In 1970, the voters of Indiana approved a constitutional amendment providing for merit selection of Indiana Supreme Court justices and Indiana Court of Appeals judges. This system has been used to select all of the current members of the Indiana Supreme Court and the Indiana Court of Appeals.
Indiana's system relies upon a state Judicial Nominating Commission consisting of seven members. Three members of the Commission are lawyers elected by the legal community; three are non-lawyers appointed by the Governor; and the seventh member is the Chief Justice of Indiana, who chairs the Commission. When there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, or Tax Court, interested judges and lawyers submit applications to the Commission and the Commission nominates the three applicants it considers most qualified. The Governor makes the final appointment from among the Commission's nominees. Once appointed, a justice or judge must stand for a retention election at the first statewide general election after the justice or judge had served for two full years and, if retained, every 10 years thereafter. [During the retention vote, the voters are presented with the question 'Should Justice (or Judge) John B. Jones be retained in office?' If the justice or judge receives a majority of "yes" votes, he or she is retained.]
Some states, notably Missouri, have systems of selecting appellate judges quite similar to Indiana's. Other states rely on conventional elections in which candidates for justice or judge run against each other, in some states (including Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Kentucky) on partisan ballots and in other states (including Wisconsin) on non-partisan ballots. Still other states provide for appointment without any election or retention vote process at all.
Of the various methods of selecting appellate judges used in this country, Indiana's system best furthers the goals of impartiality and accountability. In many states, elections of appellate judges have become dominated by special interests that contribute literally millions of dollars to the campaigns of the candidates. This creates at least the appearance that the justice or judge who is elected will not be impartial when it comes to matters in which his or her principal supporters have a stake. It also creates at least the appearance that an incumbent justice or judge will cast his or her vote in certain cases in a way calculated to improve his or her chances of being re-elected. (Two stories in the New York Times detailed these concerns with Supreme Court elections in Ohio in 2006 and in Illinois and West Virginia in 2004. See "Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings" and "Case Studies: West Virginia And Illinois," New York Times, October 1, 2006.)
In contrast, justices and judges in Indiana decide cases fairly and impartially, free from any campaign finance considerations, need to attract votes, or fear of partisan attack.
At the same time, Indiana's system provides for accountability in several ways. First, the justices and judges selected are unlikely to be outside the mainstream with respect to their judicial philosophy and temperament precisely because appointees of the Governor and the Governor himself are involved in screening and appointing them. Furthermore, there is a check on their performance shortly after their appointment and at periodic intervals thereafter by means of the retention election process.
Judges who are candidates for retention are not permitted to campaign or solicit public support or campaign funds unless there is organized opposition to their retention.
The men and women who serve on Indiana's Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, and Tax Court enjoy superior reputations both nationally and within the state for the quality of their decisions and for their impartiality, fairness, integrity, and hard work. This is directly attributable to the merit selection process Indiana uses to choose and retain these justices and judges. The voters of Indiana made an extremely wise decision when they put this system in place in 1970.


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The first step to winning in online casinos is to identify the correct type of slot machine. Not all players are the same and not all slot machines are the same. Beginners do not always understand the differences between the different slot machines and they also do not know the correct bets to maximize their winnings.
In general the largest payout is only paid when the maximum number of coins has been bet. What this means is that if a slot machine accepts different coin denominations, it is always better to play the maximum number of small coins instead of a lesser number of larger coins. In a machine that accepts up to five coins you are better off playing five nickels than a single quarter. This is especially true in the case of progressive machines. Progressive slot machines pay out at a lower rate for all hits accept the jackpot. The jackpot is only paid if the maximum coins are played. Next you need to know the different types of machines.
If you were only going to play with one coin or you wanted the same payout percentage no matter how many coins you played then you would want to play a multiplier slot machine. Multiplier machines pay out a certain amount of coins for certain symbols. This amount is then multiplied by the number of coins bet. So, if three cherries pay 10 coins for a one coin bet, it will pay 50 coins for a 5 coin bet. This type of machine does not penalize the player for not playing the maximum number of coins allowed. There are no big jackpots in this type of machine. If you are looking to get the most playing time out of your money then this is the machine for you.
The bonus multiplier is very similar to the multiplier machine except when it comes to the largest payout. On the bonus multiplier machine when the jackpot is hit with the maximum number of coins played it pays a jackpot. So, the machine may pay out 1000 coins when the top symbols come out for one coin, 2000 for two coins and 10,000 for three coins when three coins is the maximum.
Another type of slot machine is the multiple pay line machines. Most slot machines only pay out when the symbols are on the center line. Multiple pay line machines pay out on many different lines. sbobet These machines are very popular as nickel and penny machines. The most popular configurations include nine pay lines, but there are machines with as many as 96 pay lines. You can play more than one line on these machines. The more coins you add the more lines that will be activated up to the machine maximum number of lines.
The highest paying slot machine is the progressive. Progressive slot machines take a small percentage of each play and put it into a pool or jackpot. The lucky player who plays the maximum coins and hits the jackpot wins the whole pool. Progressive pools typically can get to be over $1 million. Many times several casinos will group machines together in order to increase the jackpot.