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Muniarajan RamakrishnanPsychologie
E-Mail: 912584{at}uni-wuppertal.de
This is Muniarajan Ramakrishnan presently I am doing my Doctoral program Clinical Psychology (Promotion/PhD) in Faculty-G, Department of clinical psychology and psychotherapy, University of Wuppertal- Germany. My research title is 'sleep and problem solving in schizophrenia'. I started my PhD/Doctorate in year April 2009. I have completed my post graduation in psychology (Clinical psychology stream) from Bharathiar University. I have also acquired two other Post Graduate Diplomas related to Clinical Psychology and one in Human Resource Management. I have extensive work experience in areas of Psychology, Health care, scientific, administrative and human resource.
Titel und Abstract des Dissertationsprojektes
Sleep and problem in schizophrenia (A neuro psychological and polysomnographical study)
Betreuerin: Prof. Dr. Gudrun Sartory (Wuppertal)
The aim of the present PhD dissertation is to study sleep-related consolidation of problem solving processes in patients with schizophrenia. Previous studies in healthy individuals indicate that sleep facilitates problem solving. Other areas of improved cognitive function during sleep such as the consolidation of memory suggest that it is the phases of deep sleep, i.e., slow-wave sleep (SWS) that have the beneficial effect. Patients with schizophrenia showed evidence of sleep disorder, in particular a deficit in deep sleep (SWS).
Executive functions are amongst the most impaired neurocognitive domains in schizophrenia (along with memory impairment and attention). Sleep related processes may be needed for distinct improvement in problem solving. In the earlier studies on memory it has been shown that people who learn tasks in the morning and recalled them later on the same day showed no increase in performance. Conversely, if the task was learned in the evening and recalled in the morning after sleep there was an increase in performance.
Thus it appears that it is not the time but specifically sleep that contributes to the improvement in cognitive function. In this proposed study, twenty patients with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls will be investigated. Half the patients will undergo testing during day-time first and over a night of sleep afterwards and the other half of patients will be tested over night first and during the day afterwards. All will be given a problem solving task before and after the day-time versus night-time interval. Healthy controls will be submitted to the day-time condition only. It is expected that the night-time interval will be more beneficial to the problem solving ability of the patients than the day-time interval and additionally, that the benefit incurred during sleep will depend on the duration of slow wave sleep (SWS). Health controls will show better problem-solving abilities than patients with schizophrenia.
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Sonstige wissenschaftliche Aktivitäten/Mitgliedschaften
- American Psychological Association – Member (Since 2005)
- British Psychological Society – Graduate Member with GBR registration.
- Association of Clinical Psychologist - India – Member.
- Created and moderating active communities like psychologist community (online), Indian psychology students community (online), world mental health community (online), clinical psychology (online), mental health help (online) and 20 other communities related to psychology and mental health field which has membership strength of More than 19,500+ national and international members. Vast number of topics is discussed in all this communities. Networked 9,500 psychology students, psychologists, professors and experts in psychology and mental health field. These communities benefit all. Currently working to develop a home page for Indian psychology student's community, psychologist community, clinical psychology, mental health help and other communities too.
- Organized and conducted number of awareness programs to various SES groups and students (The need of mental health, public awareness campaign on psychiatric diseases, HIV – prevention and awareness, drug addiction complications).
- Assisted students with career research and exploration activities. Provided students with information and decision-making strategies related to major and career choices. Administered career counseling to various student groups and prepared and given handouts and career planner and HS study plan.
- Actively assisting psychology students all over India by addressing their enquiries by mails, giving career information, networking and knowledge sharing.
- Addressed 9500+ personal enquiries from psychology students and patients. If I get an enquiries from distance patients, after asking their problem classifying and providing the information and details about right mental health professional who is expert in the specific subset field in their locality.


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I was honored to be invited by Kamehameha students to a brush-up rehearsal of "Our Time" last week. It was the first event I had ever attended at the facility. Wow! It's a mini Castle Theater. The state-of-the-art amenities blew my mind; most colleges do not have these luxuries. I was thoroughly impressed by the acoustics combined with the quality singing voices of the cast.
When I choose to single one performer out, it does not mean others are inferior, but Rachel Bega is immensely talented. Although I hope we all have the chance to see her perform in future musicals on Maui, I hope for her sake she moves on to bigger and better opportunities, because she has a legitimate shot. If you, like I, have never attended a Kamehameha production, do, if for no other reason than to appreciate the sound quality alone.
My three favorite moments of the student-created revue were the boys (Kapa Gormley, Ryan Foree, James Krueger and Mason-Mahoe Pallazar) singing "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" from "Kiss Me Kate;" the girls (Rachel Bega, Amber Kama, Hoku Krueger, Kamalani Makua, Kaili Mossman, Kalani Ruidas, Kaylee Thompson and Lindsey Watson) singing "For Good" from "Wicked," and an incredibly cute scene called "Looking for Corky Johnson" with Kaylee Thompson and Amber Kama. The two girls debate what makes a boy cute. They both have different tastes. It was all so very sweet, real and simple that I felt as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation at the mall.
Article Photos
The cast of "Our Time" at Kamehameha Schools Maui
Kamehameha Schools Maui photo
Cera Souza heads the cast as Tracy Turnblad in Baldwin High School's "Hairspray."
Baldwin Theater Guild photo
Gregory Saydah (from left) is Gaev, Celina Bekins is Lyubov Ranevskaya, Gabrielle Bega is Anya, Ryan Noufer is Trofimov and Laura Mayron is Varya in Seabury Hall's "The Cherry Orchard."
ERIC ROLPH photo
Each Maui high school has developed a philosophy for its drama department and no one program is superior to the other. Kamehameha lets the kids pick their show and lets the adults assist the kids at being their best.
The Seabury Hall philosophy seems to encourage students to push themselves into college-level challenges and beyond. When it comes to an acting challenge, it doesn't get any more difficult than Chekhov and Stanislavski. When attending high school productions, one must remember that it is a class. Most adults would not pass an AP Physics class; Anton Chekhov is AP Physics. The teen who attempts any AP class is better prepared to graduate from college.
The artisan team that created "The Cherry Orchard" scenery needs to be praised to the utmost. Director Todd Van Amburgh's set and lighting design was one of the most beautiful, if not the best, artistic designs of the season thus far. In addition, Van Amburgh's sound design choices of Russian music were impeccable. Chekhov is the genesis of method acting. It is hard for me to believe that any teen is capable of finding these characters in the manner that Constantin Stanislavski (the play's original director) intended.
There are several scenes that worked very well, especially in the second act. The confrontation between Lyubov (Celina Bekins) and Trofimov (Ryan Noufer) was quite captivating. The on-again, off-again romance of Varya (Laura Mayron) and Lopakhin (Zeb Mehring) built and crescendoed nicely into their final not-getting-together scene. Taka Tsutsui as the loveable and ancient Firs, a servant, was wonderful. Tsutsui should be very proud of his commitment, consistency and focus.
There are many lessons that all teen actors will learn and build upon from show to show, class to class and year to year. Listening to each other and reacting to the lines is more important than memorizing incredibly difficult lines. For whatever my opinion is worth, there is a line of how much challenge a young person can handle. Pride in achieving excellence can go a long way toward taking on bigger risks and future college challenges.
The granddaddy of Maui high school theater is Baldwin. At the risk of being too blunt, the Baldwin approach seems to be, it's a dog-eat-dog world, because if you plan on going into showbiz, you'd better learn how to take care of yourself. Adults are not going to fix it for you at Baldwin. The students make the costumes, build the set, design and run all things technical, sell tickets, manage the concession stand and clean the theater at the end of the night. In all honesty, that's showbiz, so you might as well get used to it sooner than later.
My high school weekend culminated with the Maui premiere of "Hairspray." The colorful and fun show was a major audience pleaser from the moment Tracy (Cera Souza) hits the stage with the opening number "Good Morning, Baltimore." Souza is a delight to watch and by her stage enthusiasm, I'm guessing this is the part she's always wanted to play. "Hairspray" could be a logistical nightmare with the number of scene changes, but the Baldwin teens pull it off better than some adult productions. Scenery flies in from the rafters, flats roll on and off, and bedrooms and living rooms are constantly being assembled manually.
I was equally impressed by the full orchestra made up of students and alumni. The 13-piece band encompassing flute, clarinet, trombone, two percussionists and more was the most complete I've heard since MAPA's "The Music Man."
In addition to Souza's fine portrayal, three other Baldwin seniors should be praised for their work. Sienna Minnock was simply perfect as Amber Von Tussle, so much so I could easily see her being cast in the role had it been produced by Maui OnStage or MAPA. Julianna Scharnhorst plays a great villain in the role of Velma Von Tussle, and Kenny Komatsu is awesome as Edna Turnblad. Komatsu may have been a bit type-cast, but I can't imagine any other Maui teen who could have done a finer job at playing the big, loud, ridiculous and cartoonish, Edna.
Where director Linda Carnevale's "Hairspray" gets a little awkward is that "Hairspray" is supposed to have 15 to 20 African-American cast members. The power of the story revolves around 1960s segregation. It takes some getting used to and it can be slightly confusing to keep track of which characters are black unless you already know the story. TJ Idemoto, however is very good as Seaweed and very believable as a young black man, plus he's got some pretty sharp Jackie Wilson moves to boot.
Andre Morrisette choreographs what appears to be the original Broadway choreography, altering it only slightly to allow the Baldwin dancers to look their best. There may be a handful of missteps and missed notes here and there, but "Hairspray" is a joy to watch. Ecspecially its closing number, "You Can't Stop the Beat," which will be stuck in your head for several days after. Ironically a color-blind production of "Hairspray" is the reality of that 1962 dream. Motormouth Maybell (Vida Falon) belts, "There's a road we must travel worth the risks and the chance we must take," and that is the lesson of teen theater.
n Baldwin High School Performing Arts Learning Center and Baldwin Theatre Guild present the Maui premiere of "Hairspray" at the Baldwin Auditorium through Sunday. Performances are at 7 p.m. Friday, 1 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are available at the door only: $12 for adults, $9 for seniors, and $7 for 17 and younger. The box office will open one hour prior to showtimes and seating begins one half hour prior to the performance.
Also this week
Don't miss the final weekend of "Grease" through March 11. Book, music and lyrics are by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey; New York's Brian Swaseyis the guest director/choreographer. The Maui ensemble cast features Eric Peterson, Jacqui Sherwood, Lia Krieg, Rueben Carrion, Patty Silva, Jonna Ahn, Aly Cardinalli and Jerry Eiting.
n Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays at the Historic Iao Theater. Tickets are $40 and $22; keiki 12 and younger are $15 for all performances. Dinner packages are available with Caf O'Lei and Bistro Casanova. For tickets or more information, call the Maui OnStage box office at 242-6969 or visit mauionstage. com.
ONO! returns to the Historic Iao Theater with "Songs For a New World" by Jason Robert Brown. The musical revue features Lia Krieg, Dale Button, Aly Cardinalli, Lina Aiko Krueger, Charles Cook, Eric Peterson, Alison Mikes, Jonna Ahn, Steven Dascoulias and Vania Jerome. The free one-night-only performance is at 6:30 p.m. Monday.
MAPA's 16-member advanced teen acting troupe presents "Snow Angel," a funny and eerie play about teen angst and friendship, directed by Sally Sefton. When the quiet town of Deerpoint, Vt., is hit by the biggest blizzard in 107 years, a mysterious girl named Eva steps out of a snow bank.
Told through journal entries of the students over the course of a single day, it is a tale of the power of believing. "Snow Angel" is the creation of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire whose credits include the Tony Award-winning "Rabbit Hole" and the book and lyrics for the Broadway hit "Shrek: The Musical."
* Performances of "Snow Angel" are at Steppingstone Playhouse in Queen Ka'ahumanu Center March16 through 25. Tickets are $8 for students 18 and younger, and $12 for adults. For tickets or more information call MAPA at 244-8780.
Maui OnStage presents its second annual "Sneak Peek" fundraiser. Be the first to get a glimpse at the 2012-'13 season. The event is an all-inclusive dinner party at the home of Hal Jobe and Gary Mohrlang in Wailuku Country Estates. Cocktails at 5 p.m.; dinner buffet and peeks at 6 p.m.; season announcement, dessert and music at 7:30 p.m. The menu will feature four buffet stations offering Brazilian, Mexican, Mediterranean and local cuisine. Spirits by Pau Vodka, fine wines by Whole Foods and local beers by Maui Brewing Co.
* For tickets or more information, call 244-8680 or visit mauionstage.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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Thousands of teenagers missed out on the highest A-level results as awards of top grades slipped for the second consecutive year. The proportion of candidates awarded A* and A grades dropped slightly to 26.3 per cent, down 0.3 percentage points on last year.
The fall coincides with a resurgence in popularity of traditional academic subjects such as maths, physics, geography and economics, which are perceived as harder subjects. Entries fell sharply in previously popular subjects such as critical thinking, general studies and physical education.
Awarding bodies have also for the past three years been placed under greater pressure by the


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I wanted to publicly thank the people of West New York, Weehawken and Guttenberg for their support in my selection as your freeholder candidate for District 7.
I look forward to meeting my constituents, many of whom have already provided tremendous support and encouragement to me and my family over the past month. I hope to have the opportunity to thank them personally for their kindnesses.
Equally important, I am very anxious to continue working to improve our county and our cities together with County Executive Tom DeGise, our district's new senator, Nicholas Sacco, who is also mayor of North Bergen, Weehawken Mayor Richard Tuner, Guttenberg Mayor Gerald Dresheff, and West New York Mayor Dr. Felix Roque.
My motto continues to be the same as when I first got elected, and that is to put people first! If I could help you in any matter, my cellphone number is (201) 320-1273. I would also like to ask for you to continue support for my running mates and me in the November election!
Thank You!


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Rochester police searching for Walgreens robber
Police say someone robbed the store Thursday night
UPDATED 8:27 AM EST Feb 22, 2013
Rochester police are searching for a man accused of robbing a Walgreens Thursday night.
Surveillance video showed the man walking into the store, handing the cashier a note and demanding money.
Police say he may have fled in a silver Honda Civic hatchback.
The robber was a white male, with a thin build and about 6 feet tall. He was last seen wearing a dark jacket with black pants and tan shoes.
Copyright 2013 by WMUR.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Dinner Date in Brooklyn Runs $300 at Gwynnett St.: Review
Gwynnett St. is an ambitious, sometimes forward-thinking restaurant turning paprika into streusel and pistachios into tofu.
It's where a $115 wine-paired tasting menu will end up costing you and your date $296 after tax and tip.
Yet it's in East Williamsburg, down the block from a 99 cent store.
Brooklyn fine-dining has become as expensive as Manhattan dining. Get used to it.
Luxury rarely comes cheap. Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare is in a supermarket annex; Blanca is in a converted garage. Dinner for two often exceeds $650.
So I suppose Gwynnett St. represents an affordable option to a privileged cohort. The eight-course tasting, which draws from cheaper a la carte selections ($5-$30), is $85 before wine, tax, tip and bread. Bread is a $5 supplement.
Don't expect foie gras, truffles, caviar -- or for the moment, Kobe beef.
Roe Speckles
Of six available appetizers, four are vegetarian.
The two outliers contain a modicum of seafood protein, a luscious gem lettuce soup ($11) with speckles of trout roe, and cubes of watermelon ($12), garnished with gossamer slices of cured fluke. The fish isn't so much the main event as a salty seasoning for the sweet fruit.
Michael White might use lardo, but this is Gwynnett St., where there's no pork or beef (at the moment).
And that's just fine by me. Chef Justin Hilbert makes vegetables brilliant with expert cooking and modernist platings. And don't worry: there's enough chicken, lamb and duck entrees to sate carnivorous inclinations.
I recommend the bean curd (made without bean curd). Hilbert takes pureed pistachio and jiggles it up with gellan gum and kuzu starch. The result is a nutty, creamy, elegant "tofu."
If this all seems like a cross between the chemistry experiment that is WD-50 crossed with the locavore temple that is Blue Hill, you're correct, because Hilbert worked for the former and sous-chef Owen Clark worked at both.
Whiskey Bread
The room is simple: brown woods and bar stools with backs. It looks like a pub and sometimes eats like a pub; that $5 bread is spiked with whiskey. It's dense, nearly as sweet as corn bread and stings of spirit.
The cocktails are well-balanced -- just a whisper of almond in the Rye-Tai (a riff on the Mai-Tai), a hint of peaches in the whiskey sour.
Champagne? It starts at $30 by the half bottle (about time we caught a break here). And easy breezy Lambrusco is $7 the glass.
Carrots ($14) are sweet enough to qualify as dessert, which is perhaps why Hilbert pairs them with a savory dehydrated carrot cake spiked with cumin.
The root vegetables -- some pickled with coriander, others glazed and still others infused into a yogurt -- suffuse the restaurant with a heady perfume.
Ask for the summer beans ($12) on your tasting; the kitchen takes requests. Gwynnett tosses haricots verts with smoky bits of paprika streusel.
Lobster mushrooms don't taste like lobster. To be fair, they're not supposed to, but I'm reasonably certain these guys possess the culinary whiz-bangery to make that happen. No matter. The earthy fungi sit atop a hash of sweet corn, sweeter husk cherries, tomatoes and a light corn puree. Love it.
Oddball Combos
Crispy-skinned dorade ($27) collapses in the mouth with the ashen ease of a toasted marshmallow, while monkfish ($28), the poor man's lobster, actually tastes like lobster.
Roast duck brined in peach pits and paired with peaches, faro, chanterelles and pecans is even better than it sounds. Lamb is fussy and complex in the best possible way: tender loin, crispy belly, red pepper juice and aubergine in various incarnations (smoked eggplant puree, grilled fairytale eggplant and charred japanese eggplant).
Finish with the raspberry dessert, a loose salad of berry mousse, beet meringue and minty shiso. It would make Paul Liebrandt, the brilliant master of oddball combos, quite proud.
Let's just hope Gwynnett raises the tasting to $90 and tosses in the bread. No one wants to be nickel and dimed at these prices. It's not a 99 cent store, after all.
Rating: ***
The Bloomberg Questions
Price: Mains at $30 or less; tasting at $85.
Sound Level: Around 70-75, about average.
Date Place: Worked for me.
Inside Tip: Skip the wine pairings; order cocktails.
Special Feature: Try roast chicken marinated in oil made from roasted garlic and burnt hay ($22).
Back on My Own Dime: Especially for the tasting.
Gwynnett St. is at 312 Graham Avenue. Information: +1-347-889-7002; http://www.gwynnettst.com.
What the Stars Mean: **** Incomparable food, service, ambience. *** First-class of its kind. ** Good, reliable. * Fair. (No stars) Poor
Sound-Level (in decibels): 51 to 55: Quiet enough to converse. 56 to 60: Speak up. 61 to 65: Lean in if you want to hear your date. 66 to 70: You're reading one another's lips. 71 to 75: You're yelling. 76 to 85: Ear-splitting din.
(Ryan Sutton writes about New York City restaurants for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Muse highlights include Jason Harper on a $2.5 million Bugatti and Rich Jaroslovsky on tech.


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Al Castro |
Q. My three freshwater tropical fish aquariums, two of 55 gallons and one of 10 gallons, are installed in my garage where, in the summer, the water sometimes reaches temperatures in the high 80-degree Fahrenheit range. I wish to avoid the purchase of species that might succumb to these high temperatures next summer. Please suggest some not otherwise unusual species that would be more likely to survive high temperatures.
A. This is a relatively easy question to answer, but there is related information to pass along as well. Almost every tropical fish in the hobby can take water temperatures in the high 80-degree Fahrenheit range for a short period of time (perhaps two or three months). Remember, they are tropical fish. The difficulty is not in the fishes' inability to withstand the temperature, but rather in the side effects of the higher temperatures.
Increased temperatures bring a decrease in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the water. This means that the aquarium must be clean and have no extra organic material buildups that will deplete the oxygen levels further. The fish aquarium should be well aerated, with lots of surface agitation to ensure that there is adequate gas exchange to release harmful gases and acquire maximum oxygen content under the adverse conditions.
As a source of additional problems, the fish have an increased metabolism and require somewhat more food at higher temperatures. This added organic material and the resulting waste products will require more work to maintain good water quality. An extra water change or two during the hot period will help alleviate most of the problems, but remember to ensure that the new water is the same temperature as the aquarium water to prevent problems. One last thought on the oxygen levels — if you anticipate higher temperatures, you should think about reducing the fish load in the aquarium. Purchase a few less fish than you feel the aquarium will hold, thereby giving all of the fish a chance to do better.
The real problem occurs when the air temperature drops back to the normal range. If the water temperature falls too rapidly, the fish will be stressed and prone to any of the various disease-causing organisms that are present in the aquarium. The secret to combating this is to use an aquarium heater to maintain the high temperature and to gradually (no more than 1 degree every two days) lower the temperature until it is back to normal.
LJ Olympia, WA
Good advice! Remember the larger the tank the easier the adjustments will be to the water changes because the larger body of water will take longer to heat up or cool down. Acrylic tanks will also help with this because they provide a little bit of insulation while glass provides no insulation.
theron robinson. ill, IL
my wife and i just started a 10 gallon tank we pruchased red eye tetra zebra tetra and a pocasamus. within 2 days the red eyes died and in a week and a half are pocasamus is dying. seem to be no affect on the zebra tetra??? not sure whats going on ?
Dave Erie, PA
Very good article
makes sense
Hi, my tank is
Nature in a glass box.
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Counting since 15.10.2005
Salmi, Timo and Ilkka Virtanen (2001). Economic Value Added: A simulation analysis of the trendy, owner-oriented management tool. Acta Wasaensia No. 90, 33 p.
The value-based management performance measure EVA® introduced by Stern Stewart & Co. is an incarnation of the underlying residual income (RI) concept. The concept is evaluated and compared with traditional profitability measures within a controlled simulation framework. It is observed that EVA is very sensitive to its cost of equity component, but it is unexpectedly insensitive to its cost of debt component under regular conditions. EVA and its variability are observed to be strongly affected by the firm's growth policies because of leverage effects. EVA is observed to be much more unstable than the traditional return on investment and directly related to the return on equity measure. Methodologically, the paper demonstrates the advantages of using a controlled simulation approach in financial research.
Timo Salmi, Department of Accounting and Finance, and Ilkka
Virtanen, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of
Vaasa, P.O. Box 700, FIN 65101 Vaasa, Finland.
Key words: Simulation; Residual income; Economic Value Added; Return on investment; Return on equity
Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Jenny and Antti Wihuri foundation for the research. Our thanks are due to professors Teemu Aho and Erkki K. Laitinen for useful insights.
The firm has a number of stakeholders with differing, sometimes conflicting goals. The stakeholders include the owners, lenders, management, personnel, customers, suppliers and creditors, government and regulatory agencies. In corporate governance agency theory the managers are regarded as agents of the owners in stockholders' wealth-maximization. Among the management tools EVA, in particular, emphasizes the interests of the owners.
The concept of the economic value added is similar to the traditional accounting concept of Residual Income (RI); see Stark and Thomas (1998:446) and their references. The concept emerges in several variations and incarnations including the trade-marked Stern Stewart & Co's EVA® with its copious accounting adjustments (Stewart 1991, Stewart 1994, Stern, Stewart & Chew 1995, and Stern Stewart & Co. 1997).
In line with the theory of finance the RI derivative EVA is commonly advocated as a management tool because the goal of the firm is to add to the value of the owners' wealth. In other words, the owners expect a maximum compensation over the cost of the capital invested in the firm. A central question concerning EVA is how sensitive this management tool is to the changes in its various components, management policies and external economic factors.
Despite the unambiguous theoretical definition, applying EVA even in its pure, theoretical format is not straight-forward. EVA is defined as the difference between the firm's profit and cost of all capital employed, i.e. the weighted average cost of debt and equity. Measuring the profit of the firm and measuring the components of the cost of capital is problematic both in theory and in practice. In particular, measuring the cost of equity is a highly involved issue. A simulation approach is used in this paper to better facilitate investigating the behavior of EVA under varying management policies and cost conditions.
In the simulation model the capital investments are generated by the following multiplicative process with an exponential trend, a sinusoidal cycle, and an irregular variation made up of a normally-distributed noise component and a potential shock component
The symbols are listed in Appendix 1. Using this capital investment generating process produces financial time series which closely resemble the time series profiles observed on actual business firms. See e.g. the sample of the time series drawn in Salmi et al. (1984:46-48).
The capital investments gt induce subsequent cash inflows which can be defined in terms of a set of contribution coefficients bi. The contribution coefficients fix a capital investment's cash flow pattern. The total contribution ft in year t cumulates from the contributions from the capital investments made in the earlier years
The run of the simulation years t = 1,...,T has been omitted for brevity since Formula (1).
Assuming constant returns of scale and constant profitability in the customary fashion, the contribution coefficients define the profitability of the firm in terms of the internal rate of return
In the numerical simulation a distribution pattern i.e. the shape of the contribution coefficients must be fixed. The negative binomial distribution corresponding to a typical product life cycle is used (see Salmi & Virtanen, 1997)
(4) bi = s(i+1) q2 (1-q)i , i = 1,...,N.
Other distribution patterns, such as a uniform pattern or a steadily declining pattern could also be adopted. Such alternatives are not, however, presented in this paper, since we observed that they do not substantially affect the nature of the numerical results.
The profit of the accounting period is defined by a simple income statement as the cash inflows less depreciation less the interest on loans
(5) pt = ft - dt - ht.
The common straight-line depreciation method is applied by the simulated firm. Hence the depreciation, assuming a life-span of N years, is defined by
The same goes for the alternative depreciation methods as goes for alternative contribution patterns. They can be omitted from the presentation, since they are not crucial from point of view of the nature of the numerical results. The interest payments in (5) are defined later by Formula (9).
The simplified balance sheet of the simulated firm is depicted by Figure 1.
Ever since Salamon (1982:294) in defining the long-run profitability of the firm it has been conventional to regard the firm as a series of repetitive capital investments with a fixed life-span and a fixed cash-flow pattern. Furthermore, it is customary to assume that the working capital of the firm has the same profitability level as the firm's capital investments. Hence, we combine the simulated firm's plant assets and its working capital under the same caption. We define
(7) Pt = Pt-1 + gt - dt.
Debt on the ending balance sheet of a year is defined by the beginning debt balance less the amortization on the old loans plus the new loans
(8) Bt = Bt-1 - at + lt.
The interest payments on a year's outstanding initial debt are calculated using the loan interest rate
(9) ht = j·Bt-1.
The amortization is made in equal installments until the loans' maturity
The capital investment schedule of the simulated firm is defined by (1). The necessary funding for the capital investments, interest payments, and amortization comes from cash inflows, and, when not sufficient, from the new loans
If the firm generates enough funds internally, no new loans are taken. Instead, the potential extra funds are paid out as dividends
The retained earnings are defined by
(13) Rt = Rt-1 + pt - ot.
The level of common stock is kept constant in the simulation, i.e. no new stock issues are included in the model
(14) St = St-1.
The book value of the firm at the end of each year is calculated from the liabilities plus the equity side of the balance sheet as
(15) Vt = Bt + St + Rt.
In general terms EVA is defined in this paper in a manner similar to the RI (residual income) as (see e.g. Biddle et al., 1997:305-306)
(16) EVA = NOPAT - WACC · Capital
where NOPAT is the net operating profit after taxes and WACC is the weighted average cost of capital. The trade-marked Stern Stewart & Co's EVAO includes accounting adjustments both in NOPAT and the capital. The adjustments are too proprietary to be carried out in this paper. Fortunately, it is not to be expected that this has a bearing on the nature of the results (see e.g. Biddle et al. 1997 and Chen & Dodd 1997). Furthermore, we do not include taxation in our model. Our NOPAT will be the accounting profit before the interest on loans. This will not affect the general pattern of the results.
In terms of our simulation model the EVA is the profit before interest payments net of a charge for the cost of all debt and equity capital employed
(17) EVAt = (pt + ht) - ct Vt-1
where the weighted average cost of capital for the year under observation is calculated from the cost j of debt and cost e of equity
(18) ct = j·Bt-1/ Vt-1 + e·(St-1 + Rt-1)/ Vt-1.
An alternative format of (18) that emphasizes the effect of leverage on the average cost of capital can be written as
(18a) ct = e - (Bt-1/ Vt-1)·(e-j).
In the above we have chosen to use the initial balances instead of e.g. annual averages of the balance sheets.
In the finance literature one of the most involved issues is the assessment of the cost of capital. In particular, assessing the cost of equity is a difficult question both in practice and theory. In our simulation two alternative ways of defining the cost of equity will be used. In the above formulas it is given as an external parameter. However, the cost of equity can also be defined as the firm's internal rate of return (see Fama and French, 1999). Here we can utilize an important advantage of our simulation approach. The IRR is accurately known in the simulation.
It is possible to define a theoretical version of the EVA using the economic profit on the assets net of a charge for the cost of all debt and equity capital employed.
where the average weighted cost of capital is defined by the rate of interest and the firm's profitability
The question naturally arises whether the practical EVA (17) vs. the theoretical EVA (19) will lead to substantially differing results.
The model calculates also traditional financial ratios for profitability. Return on (the capital) investments is defined by
(21) ROIt = (pt + ht) / Vt-1.
Return on equity is
(22) ROEt = pt / (St-1 + Rt-1).
The firm's financial standing is reflected in its leverage defined by
(23) LEVt = Bt / Vt.
EVA is a measure that is expressed in absolute, monetary terms. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to compare the behavior of a relative EVA to the firm's ROE and ROI. The latter is left for the simulation, but the former relation is easily assessed analytically. Define the relative EVA as
(24) EVARt = EVAt / (St-1 + Rt-1).
Using EVA definition (17), the definition of the weighted average cost of capital (18), and the formula for the interest payments (9), it is readily seen that the relative EVA is just the return on equity less the cost of equity
(25) EVARt = ROEt - e.
The selected combinations of the different input sets will become evident below in discussing the results for the research questions posed.
The cost of loans can be considered an external variable determined by the interest rate on the markets. In the simulation runs the loan interest rate is varied all the way up from 0% (to see one end of an extreme case) to the long-run profitability of the firm's capital investments (the internal rate of return). Interest rates beyond the IRR are not considered, because a firm would not be viable under such circumstances.
The measurement of the cost of equity is an involved issue both in practice and theory. One relevant way of looking at the concept, especially in connection with EVA, is regarding the cost of equity as the owners' required return on the capital they invest in the firm. In the simulation runs the cost of equity is varied from the extreme case of 0% up to a maximum of 12%. In particular, in line with Fama & French (1999), the case where the cost of equity is made equal to the IRR is interesting as a benchmark. The special strength of the simulation approach, as compared to empirical data from actual business observations, is that the true IRR will be available without any bias.
The first question before it is conductive to observe EVA's behavior is to see under what loan costs the firm can stay generally viable. In a rudimentary framework one can observe what happens to the firm's leverage as a function of the load interest rate and the firm's profitability. Figure 2 delineates the mean leverage for the observation period (years 22-34 in the simulation, c.f. Appendix 2). As is to be expected, if the firm's growth rate constantly exceeds its profitability, the firm's situation is not tenable in the long run. In Figure 2, when the profitability of the firm is 4% and it tries to grow at a rate of 8%, not even practically costless loans can keep the firm afloat. On the other hand, when the profitability (12%) clearly exceeds the firm's growth rate (8%), the leverage curve is very flat until a sudden, steep upwards slope at the growth level. At normal profitability figures (6%, 8%) the leverage increases smoothly along the cost of loans.
Next consider the behavior of EVA for the different levels of cost of loans under different levels of cost of equity, i.e. the shareholders' requirement of return. Figure 3 delineates the results for the case of balanced growth and profitability.
When the required rate of return, i.e. the cost of equity equals the firm's true profitability (e = r = 8% in the figure) in line with Fama and French, it is evident from all our simulation results that the cost of loans has very little effect on the EVA of a viable firm.
The theoretically correct cost of equity is not necessarily available to the stakeholders. In actual practice the cost of equity / required rate of return is determined on an ad hoc basis or estimated from market based data. This situation is exemplified in Figure 3 by the case of e = 5%. It is readily seen that on the other hand EVA stays insensitive to the cost of loans, but on the other hand the absolute level of EVA is significantly affected.
It is also evident from the figure, that if the required rate of return is set unrealistically by the shareholders (e = 12% or e = 0% in Figure 3), EVA's behavior becomes more drastic.
By definition, a comparison of the practical EVA (17) and theoretical TEVA (19) is relevant only when the required rate of return is set at the (true, but in practice unknown) profitability of the firm. Under these circumstances the EVA and TEVA figures are very close. This result is similar to the results concerning the economist's vs. accountant's valuation of the firm's profits. For a further discussion and references see e.g. Salmi & Virtanen (1997:21).
The results in this section indicate, somewhat contrary to the intuitive expectations, that (as long loans can be secured at viable rates), EVA is almost unaffected by the cost of loans. To summarize, we draw the following conclusion
Figure 4 shows that the more aggressive the growth policy the more sensitive the EVA. This goes both for the level and the variability of the annual EVA figures.
The mechanism that causes this behavior is rather obvious. At higher growth rates (with respect to the firm's profitability) more and more financial leverage is needed to keep the firm and the growth going. The increase in EVA and its variability comes through two effects. As a physical phenomenon, the growth increases the level of the earnings component as such. As a financial phenomenon, the increasing financial leverage gears upwards the returns earned on the shareholder's equity and thus adds economic value to the shareholders.
It should be noted that the results in Figure 4 are obtained in a Modigliani-Miller type of setting. In other words, the calculations are performed under unchanging risk, fixed return requirements and non-increasing loan costs for the different growth levels.
To conclude
In business practice EVA is a measure that is applied in absolute, monetary terms. Nevertheless, it is interesting to compare the behavior of a relative EVA to ROE and ROI. It was already shown in (25) that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the relative EVA and the firm's ROE, which are only separated by the firm's cost of equity. This fact may be a good explanation for the empirical results such as Biddle, Bowen & Wallace (1997) and Chen & Dodd (1997) not finding evidence of an EVA supremacy over net income in explaining the firms' stock returns.
Figure 5 delineates the behavior of the relative EVA at the different growth strategies in comparison with ROI.
The behavior of the relative EVA shows both similar and different features as the absolute EVA. Again, the variability is significant. The more aggressive the growth policy the more sensitive the EVA. Despite the variability, the mean levels of the relative EVAs stay fairly constant. The mean levels are determined by the growth strategies.
ROI behaves differently. It is a very good approximation of the profitability of the firm's capital investments, i.e. the firm's IRR. There is very little fluctuation in the ROI figure. ROI is a highly robust measure. This result is in line with the results in Salmi & Virtanen (1997).
Furthermore, the results show that on an annual level the EVA figures are affected by cyclical business fluctuations (and irregular events). On the other hand, the further, unreported simulation experiments done in the project, show that average nature of the EVA results are not affected by the cycles.
Figure 3 indicates that, as is expected, if the firm is unable to earn profits in excess of the required return, EVA will go negative. However, the behavior under increasing loan interest rates is counter-intuitive. The answer would thus seem to be at most a qualified yes for EVA acting as a financial distress warning, as far as the economic value distress definition is used. The key issue is whether the owners have set a reasonable required return. If not, a perfectly sound firm will falsely appear to be in distress.
Consider legal bankruptcy in the light of Figure 4. In practice, firms that develop an extremely high leverage will in many cases either go bankrupt, or at could be taken over for a restructuring. At least if risk premiums are not included, strongly leveraged (growth) firms will have higher and higher EVAs. Hence, the absolute EVA measure could be dangerously susceptible as a distress warning device.
The central idea of EVA is subtracting the cost of capital from the firm's profits to measure, as the term indicates, the economic additional value produced by the firm to its owners over the weighted cost of the capital employed. This raised the question of the effect of the debt and equity cost components on the behavior of EVA. It was observed that under realistic (with respect to the firm's profitability) required returns (cost of equity) the loan interest rate has little effect on the EVA's behavior until the cost of loans approaches the firm's profitability. This insensitivity can be considered a somewhat unforeseen result with respect to the intuitive expectations of EVA's behavior. On the other hand, as is expected, EVA behaves in a linear fashion with respect to the cost of equity.
Business firms may and do adopt different growth strategies in relation to their profitability levels, ranging from conservative to aggressive. A interesting current example of the aggressive growth strategy choices have been the new information technology companies. It was confirmed in this paper that EVA and its variability are strongly affected by the firm's growth policy choices. This result is in line with expectations because the consequent increasing financial leverage gears up the return earned on the shareholders equity.
The results have also a bearing on the debate of the relative merits of the value-based measures against the properties of traditional accounting measures. It was observed that even under regular economic circumstances (the relative) EVA is much more unstable than the traditional return on investment (ROI) measure. Furthermore, as was shown in the mathematical derivations, there is one-to-one correspondence between (the relative) EVA and the traditional return on equity (ROE). These findings subject to doubt the potential claims on EVA's supremacy over the more traditional accounting measures.
Traditional financial ratios are commonly used also for distress prediction. It was observed that EVA does not have incremental value in the predicting.
Besides the results arrived at concerning EVA and its relation to the traditional accounting profitability measures, this paper goes to demonstrate the good applicability of the controlled simulation approach in financial research. The major advantages of the simulation approach are the ability to emulate different business situations at will and to facilitate a plausible ceteris paribus scrutiny of the relevant cases.
Output variables
|economic value added in year t
|economic value added in year t based on the internal rate of return
|relative economic value added in year t
|return on investments
|return on equity
Bao, B-H. & D-H. Bao (1998). Usefulness of value added and abnormal economic earnings: an empirical examination. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting 25:1&2, 251-264.
Biddle, G.C., R.M. Bowen & J.S. Wallace (1997). Does EVA beat earnings? Evidence on associations with stock returns and firm values. Journal of Accounting and Economics 24:3, 301-336.
Bowen, R.M. & J.S. Wallace (1999). Interior Systems, Inc. The decision to adopt EVA registered trademark. Accounting Education 14:3, 517-541.
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Chen, S. & J.L. Dodd (1997). Economic Value Added (EVATM): An empirical examination of a new corporate performance measure. Journal of Managerial Issues 9:3, 318-333.
Damodaran, A. (1998). Value creation and enhancement: back to the future. Contemporary Finance Digest 2:4, 5-52.
Dodd, J.L. & J. Johns (1999). EVA reconsidered. Business and Economic Review 45:3, 13-18.
Fama, E.F. & K.R. French (1999). The corporate cost of capital and the return on corporate investment. The Journal of Finance 54:6, 1939-1967.
Henderson, S., G. Peirson & R. Brown (1992). Financial Accounting Theory. Its Nature and Development. 2nd ed. Longman Chesire, Malaysia.
Ittner, C.D. & D.F. Larker (1998). Innovations in performance measurement: trends and research implications. Journal of Management Accounting Research 10, 205-238.
Milunovich, S. & A. Tsuei (1996). EVAO in the computer industry. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 9:1, 104-115.
Mouritsen, J. (1998). Driving growth: Economic Value Added versus Intellectual Capital. Management Accounting Research 9:4, 461-482.
Mäkeläinen, E. (1998). Economic Value Added as a Management Tool. (Downloadable [cited 20 Jan 2000] from http://www.evanomics.com/evastudy/ evastudy.shtml).
O'Byrne, S. F. (1996). EVA and market value. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 9:1, 116-125.
O'Hanlon, J. & K. Peasnell (1998). Wall Street's contribution to management accounting: the Stern Stewart EVA® financial management system. Management Accounting Research 9:4, 421-444.
Pfeiffer, T. (2000). Good and bad news for the implementation of shareholder-value concepts in decentralized organizations: A critical study comparing the DCF method and the EVA method. Schmalenbach Business Review 52:1, 68-91.
Salamon, G.L. (1982). Cash recovery rates and measures of firm profitability. Accounting Review 57:2, 292-302.
Salmi, T., R. Ruuhela, A. Laakkonen, R. Dahlstedt & , M. Luoma (1984). Extracting and analyzing the time series for profitability measurement from published financial statements: with results on publicly traded Finnish metal industry firms, Part III. The Finnish Journal of Business Economics 33:1, 23-48.
Salmi, T. & I. Virtanen (1997). Measuring the long-run profitability of the firm; a simulation evaluation of the financial statement based IRR estimation methods. Acta Wasaensia, No. 54. (Downloadable from http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/smuc/smuc.html).
Stark, A.W. & Thomas H.M. (1998). On the empirical relationship between market value and residual income in the U.K. Management Accounting Research 9:4, 445-460.
Stern Stewart & Co. (1997). The Stern Stewart Performance 1000: Introduction and Documentation. Stern Stewart Management Services Inc.
Stern Stewart & Co. (2000) WWW home page. (Downloadable [cited 20 Jan 2000] from http://www.sternstewart.com/index2.shtml).
Stern J., G. B. Stewart III & D. Chew (1995). The EVA®: Financial Management System. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 8:2, 32-46. Journal publisher Stern Stewart Management Services Inc.
Stewart III, G. B. (1991). The Quest for Value, Harper Business, New York.
Stewart III, G. B. (1994). EVA®: fact or fantasy. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 7 (Summer), 71-84. Journal publisher Stern Stewart Management Services Inc.
Taylor, J., A. Blackall & E. Haas (1999). Using simulation and economic value added to enhance business decisions, Bank Accounting & Finance 12:2, 20-25.
Uyemura, D.G., C.C. Kantor & , J.M Pettit (1996). EVA® for banks: Value creation, risk management, and profitability measurement. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 9:2, 94-113.
Weissenrieder, F. (1999). Economic Value Added or Cash Value Added. (Downloadable [cited 20 Jan 2000] from website http://www.anelda.com/articles/e3.html).
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The Daily Post's live breaking news blog brings you regular updates, pictures, video, tweets and comments covering the latest North Wales traffic, travel, weather, crime and council news.
You can contribute to the live blog by posting your comment below, and you can also tweet us @dailypostwales to share breaking news stories, pictures and opinions - or email us at firstname.lastname@example.com
Our North Wales breaking news live blog begins at 06:30am every weekday and 10am at the weekend and is updated throughout the day and into the evening.
CAIA PARK ASSAULT: Officers called at 4.19pm yesterday found that he had sustained injuries after being assaulted near the sports centre in Caia Park.
The man has since been released from hospital and inquiries are ongoing to establish the circumstances surrounding the incident.
CAIS PARK ASSAULT: More on yesterday's Caia Park incident now. Police are appealing for witnesses after a man was assaulted in the Queensway area of Wrexham.
GRASS CUTTING: Outcry over Wrexham Council's decision to prune grass cutting budget.
GOODNIGHT: On that very sad note, I will head home from the late shift now. Tom Davidson will be here tomorrow. Thank you for checking out our live blog today. Goodnight.
PEDESTRIAN INJURED: Police have arrested a local man and he remains in custody at Caernarfon police station. Inspector Chris Griffiths is appealing for witnesses or anyone with information about the accident to ring 101 quoting reference number R056842.
PEDESTRIAN INJURED: A 21-year-old man was struck by a car as he walked home from the Oystercatcher pub in Rhosneigr in the early hours of today. He was seriously hurt and has been taken to the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke.
PEDESTRIAN INJURED: I've just made a last round of calls and found that the police are appealing for information about a serious road accident.
Daily Post West front for April 19 http://t.co/E4lpAciibw— Daily Post Wales (@dailypostwales) April 18, 2014
AND here is the front page of tomorrow's West edition...
Daily Post East front for April 19 http://t.co/iKMsyMTo13— Daily Post Wales (@dailypostwales) April 18, 2014
OK So here is the front page of tomorrow's east edition...
TRAFFIC: Those roadworks, incidentally, are down in Carno.
TRAFFIC: For drivers using the A470, it's going to be closed in both directions due to roadworks during the night near Dol-Llin Ffordd (Derlwyn Junction) between 7pm and 6am until April 30. Diversions are in place.
TRAFFIC: The roads are still looking pretty clear.
Afternoon Tea. No scones required pic.twitter.com/jS3ckYA13B— Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (@TuHwntirBont) April 18, 2014
ON a lighter note...
BOAT ACCIDENT: In North Devon, there was a tragic boating accident today. One man has died and another has been taken to hospital after a pleasure boat capsized in a river estuary, at Bideford Bar at 11.33am.
BOY ON FIRE: Police said they received "reports of a boy on fire" and they are following a positive line of inquiry.
Petrol was said to have been involved in the incident and the boy was taken to Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital where his injuries have been described as serious.
BOY ON FIRE: Another tragic incident now. A young boy is being treated for serious burns after reports that he was "on fire" in a city street.
The seven-year-old was hurt in the incident in Bedford Avenue, Aberdeen, at around 2pm today.
Fatal Road Traffic Collision A487 Felindre Farch to Cardigan road 18.04.14: "At approximately 1.40pm today, 18... http://t.co/GGSK682XEx— Dyfed Powys Police (@DyfedPowys) April 18, 2014


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SPRINGFIELD - The Springfield Falcons announced on Wednesday that center Nick Drazenovic has been assigned to the club by its NHL affiliate, the Columbus Blue Jackets. Additionally, Springfield has recalled goaltender Paul Dainton from its ECHL developmental club, the Evansville IceMen.
Drazenovic participated in two games with the Blue Jackets after earning his latest recall to the club on Feb. 23. In four contests with Columbus this season, Drazenovic is scoreless with a -1 mark. He is second on Springfield with 46 points (16 goals, 30 assists) and leads the AHL with 26 power-play points (9 goals, 17 assists) in 47 games. Drazenovic returns to the Falcons on a six-game AHL point streak (3 goals, 6 assists), dating back to Jan. 26.
A native of Prince George, British Columbia, Drazenovic skated with the Peoria Rivermen, St. Louis' primary developmental affiliate, during the first four seasons of his career from 2007 to 2011. In 366 AHL games between Springfield and Peoria, Drazenovic has 99 goals and 148 assists for 247 points. He has not posted a point in seven career NHL contests with Columbus and St. Louis. Drazenovic, 26, was selected by the Blues in the sixth round (171st overall) of the 2005 NHL Entry Draft.
Dainton is 3-3-1 with the Falcons this season, posting a .942 save percentage and a 1.82 goals-against average. He put together a pair of memorable outings in his two most recent appearances with Springfield, stopping 35 of 36 shots in a 2-1 shootout victory over Albany on Jan. 19, and then nearly securing a shutout in a 28-save effort in a 4-1 win over the Bridgeport on Jan. 20. Dainton is 8-11-2 with a .881 save percentage and a 3.92 goals-against average with Evansville in 2012-2013.
As a rookie in 2011-2012, Dainton played in 28 games with the Falcons, registering a 13-12-1 record, an .893 save percentage, and a 3.11 goals-against average. Dainton was named the CCM/AHL Player of the Week for the period ending Feb. 26, winning all three starts while collecting a shutout. The 26-year-old from Bradford, Ontario, played in 21 games with the ECHL's Chicago Express and Reading Royals last year as well, combining for a 7-5-3 record with a .905 save percentage and a 3.21-goals-against average. He made his professional debut with Springfield at the end of the 2010-2011 campaign, going 2-2-0 in five outings with a .912 save percentage and a 2.63 goals-against average.
Dainton's recall results from a lower-body injury suffered by Allen York in practice on Wednesday.
The Falcons took eight points over three days this past weekend at the MassMutual Center to move into a tie for first place in the AHL standings. Springfield embarks on a four-game road swing this Friday in Adirondack before returning home to host Providence on March 16 at 7 p.m.
Nick Drazenovic, Paul Dainton rejoin Springfield Falcons
SPRINGFIELD - The Springfield Falcons announced on Wednesday that center Nick Drazenovic has been assigned to the club by its NHL affiliate, the Columbus Blue Jackets. Additionally, Springfield has recalled goaltender Paul Dainton from its ECHL developmental club, the Evansville IceMen.


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Home sales send mixed message
Home sales bumped up in December, in King County. Analysts disagree over whether it's sign of an important trend or not. The Seattle Times calls it the biggest month for home sales since a federal tax credit expired last summer.
But the Seattle P-I quotes Glenn Crellin of Washington State University as saying the real estate market is likely to stay sluggish for several months or longer:
"I think the first half of 2011 is going to continue to be really rough as you have those foreclosure properties moving through the pipeline (driving down prices)," Crellin said. "I haven't seen any significant job creation on the private-sector side and I think we're going to see continued job losses in the public sector."
Prices in December were lower than a year ago in King, Snohomish, and Kitsap counties, while Pierce saw prices slightly up from last year.


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Cruising Lahaina on a Segway
May 27, 2013 - Leah Sherman
Ah, the Segway. It's the battery-operated personal transporter that was supposed to change the world when it was introduced in 2001.
I have a co-worker who purchased one of the earliest models. He'd ride it from his home in Wailuku to our office (also in Wailuku). And then the rest of us would joy ride around the parking lot during our dinner break. But, he said, riding home in the dark made him (understandably) nervous and then the battery died and replacing it would have been expensive, and that appeared to be the end of my Segway-ing experience.
But no.
Segway Maui offers guided, small-group tours through Lahaina and Iao Valley on Segways — obviously. And last week I opted for the Tuesday-morning "Lahaina Early Bird Segway Tour." Let me just start by saying that an "early bird" tour that starts at 9 a.m. is my kind of "early bird" as I have no idea what 6 a.m (or even earlier, yikes!) looks like.
The Lahaina tours start at Segway Maui's store at 991 Limahana Place (turn at Pizza Hut and then turn right). Parking is available on the street or in the Sugar Cane Train lot.
After signing a waiver, you watch a safety video. The video, by the way, is terrifying. It shows a helmeted figure falling every which way off his (or her) Segway. I was touring with a family of four from New Jersey, and I had to agree with the wife when, after watching the video, she said, "I'm not sure I want to do this."
Let's take a step back for a second and focus on what, exactly, a Segway is. According to Segway Maui's website (see link at right), "A Segway is a two-wheeled, self-balancing, battery-operated human transportation vehicle. It is operated in a standing position. . . . It is a non-motorized, eco-friendly machine." I'd say Segways are most likely to be spotted in use by security personnel at airports or shopping centers. They are really handy in those situations because they allow a person to move rapidly (maximum speed of 12 mph) and are much more versatile that a golf cart-type vehicle.
OK, back to my Lahaina tour.
We shook off our post-video fears, donned helmets and fluorescent yellow safety vests and went outside for Segway-riding lessons. Each person was given a Segway (which each feature adjustable handlebars to accommodate people of varying heights and an attached bag to store wallets, phones, cameras, etc.) set in "turtle" mode — meaning you cannot go full speed — giving riders a chance to become comfortable. After getting on your Segway, you go through a few drills — going forward, going back, stopping, turning, weaving through cones. Once we'd mastered turtle mode, our Segways were set to regular mode and we went through the drills again. When we all felt good with regular mode, we tried going over some bumps and going up and down a hill. Then we were ready to go.
Just to be clear, the Segway was very stable and really easy to maneuver. I felt completely at ease. There is no reason to be scared.
Our tour guide was Teresa. And she was able to communicate with me and the other riders using hand signals and a one-way listening device, through which she told us where we were going and pointed out interesting things along the way.
The tour crossed Honoapiilani Highway and headed toward Front Street. We stopped at the Lahaina Jodo Mission and Mala Wharf before turning toward the "touristy" part of Front Street. We traveled on the sidewalk until we reached the Lahaina Center, at which point we moved to the street. We took Front Street to Lahaina Harbor, then circled the banyan tree before continuing down Front Street to Prison Street and the Lahaina prison (or Hale Pa'ahao, according to the Lahaina Restoration Foundation website).
Granted, I don't live on the west side, but I've been on Maui for 12-plus years and I'd never been to the Lahaina Jodo Mission (which is beautiful) or the prison. I didn't even know there was an old prison on the street presumably named for it. So, see, you learn something new all the time.
After some time on the prison grounds, we reboarded our Segways and headed back toward the Segway Maui store, with a stop to check out the Sugar Cane Train locomotive.
Total amount of time spent on the Segway — right around 2 hours.
Afterward, I meet my husband on Front Street for lunch. As we strolled a few blocks from the parking lot to the restaurant, I came to the realization that walking is totally overrated. I need a Segway of my own.
Segway Maui has offers tours daily. Teresa told me that there is no set route for the Lahaina tours, so if there is something you want to see, let them know. Tours are limited to six people, but they do have enough transporters to accommodate more than one tour at a time. According to their website, various tour lengths are available and begin at $94. Kamaaina prices are 10 percent off. Riders must weigh between 100 and 260 pounds. Closed-toed shoes are required; sunscreen, sunglasses and bottled water are recommended. You are welcome to bring your camera but photos cannot be taken while you are on the Segway. Tour guides carry cameras and take pictures that are included in the tour price and can be emailed to you.
For more information, see Segway Maui's website or call (808) 661-8284.
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The first stop on my tour was at the Lahaina Jodo Mission.
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Hello, and welcome to my site. I'm Dakota, an author of erotic romance and paranormal erotica. And what exactly does that mean? Well, it means that I love to create worlds where the heroines are strong and their heroes are even stronger. Whether it's two friends who realize there is more than friendship between them or the sexy alien who captures his unwilling slave's heart, sparks fly between them. My imagination has no bounds or at least none I've found yet!
On my site, you'll find links to my work, excerpts of them, along with opinion polls (because I'm a curious little kitty) and contests. So please feel free to look around. And by all means let me know what you think. You can contact me through my contact page. I'd love to hear from you!


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Winter 2005/2006 Volume 6, Issue 7
IMF's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grant renewed for second year
With our CDC grant renewal for 2006, the IMF will reach out to additional communities, as well as strengthen the community relationships we formed in 2005.
Advocacy Update: Support for Cancer Priorities Short-Changed in President's Budget
President Bush's recent state-of-the-union speech set the stage for an annual federal spending proposal that threatens to further erode our nation's long-standing commitment to advance the pace of medical research and drug access.
The Yin and Yang of Long-Term Survivorship
Philosophers in the Han dynasty (207 BCE to 9 AD) developed the concept of Yin and Yang, the idea that everything in the universe has its opposite. If this is so, where does cancer fit into this ancient method of understanding life?
American Society of Hematology - 47th Annual Meeting
Recap from the American Society of Hematology's 47th annual meeting held in Atlanta, Georgia on December 10–14, 2005. We have selected the major myeloma presentations for you to keep informed on the latest myeloma research that was presented.
Dear Reader
2006! Another new year, one filled with new opportunities, new partnerships, and renewed hope. As is customary it's also a time to look back on what we've achieved and this year I'm especially proud of what the IMF has accomplished.
The Stafford Family Funds Myeloma Research Grant
To date, the four WAMP swim-a-thon events have raised more than $40,000—enough to fund a grant in my dad's honor through the IMF research program. Our family plans to continue our efforts to help fund myeloma research in hopes for a cure for my
Flavia Hiatt Shares Her Story
On August 13, 2005, Flavia and her friends transformed the boardroom and mezzanine of Luxe Hotel Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills into a fabulous fashion trunk show to benefit the IMF's myeloma research program. Shop For A Cure featured Flavia's own clot
2006 IMF Brian D. Novis Research Grant Awards
Grant Recipients Honored at IMF Scientific Advisors Meeting.
Combination Therapy with VELCADE plus Melphalan & Prednisone
At the 2005 annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, Dr. Jesús F. San Miguel presented interim data on the ongoing GEM/PETHEMA study of VELCADE® (bortezomib) plus melphalan and prednisone (V-MP) in elderly, previous
Pain Management in Multiple Myeloma
Myeloma Today speaks with Daniel R. Kloster, MD
Transplant Nutrition
Myeloma Today speaks with Heather-Ann Younker, RD, CNSD
My Life With Myeloma
It's important to know that you can lead a good life—and a long one—even with myeloma.
Challenging Cancer with the Power of Painting
Board of Directors Profile: Matthew Robinson
This is a very exciting growth period for the Foundation. And it's enormously rewarding for me to apply my business experience of the last 20 years to helping the IMF accomplish its goals and objectives.
IMFers MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<br>2005 Member Fundraisers in Review
When the IMF started its member fundraising program several years ago, we had no idea how our members would respond. Would they be intimidated? After all, "fundraising" is a daunting word to some of us. Or would the opportunity of being pro
2005 Support Group Recap
As the IMF embarks on a new year, it serves well to look back at the accomplishments of 2005. It was an exciting year. Robin Tuohy, Kelly Cox, and I made visits to about a third of the myeloma support groups around the country. This was a very reward
Central Nebraska Myeloma Support Group
The IMF Returns to St. Petersburg, Russia
International Clinical Conference Promotes Myeloma Education
IMF Hotline Coordinators Answer Your Questions
My brother was just told he has a very rare form of myeloma called IgM. I can't find anything on it and keep coming across discussions of something called "Waldenström's macroglobulinemia." Can you help?


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So this week I was in Washington D.C. and as you can imagine, those people give no shits about the Astros V Cards game. So I turned to my old friend the ESPN GameCenter app and kind of watched in disbelief when a 6-0 lead turned into a 6-5 nailbiter.
Ryan Franklin.
The name in and of itself is enough to send a cold shiver up your spine. The dude has been odoriferous as a pile of horse shit. More dank that a 3 day old wet sock. So poor it's surprising he doesn't have a guitar case open on the mound while hurling.
And, really, I'm probably being nice.
Franklin thrust himself into the spotlight this off-season. And in a good way. He took to Twitter hard and was one of the few athletes I've seen on the social networking site that would pretty much respond to anyone that Tweeted at him. Didn't matter how stupid or benign the inquiry was, Franklin was sending out responses and breaking down the walls of athlete v fandom at an alarming rate. No, he wasn't Kobe Bryant or Albert Pujols… but he was a bonafide MLB pitcher and the closer for a team that chances are you root for.
Then he Tweeted a picture where Pujols was in his underwear in the background.
The rest is a downhill journey that's pretty remarkable. From opening day he can't get an out. And this week in Houston he was brought in with a 6-0 lead before getting tagged with 2 earned runs and a quick hook. Soon the Cardinals were in a battle for a win. You can't put all 5 runs on Franklin, but even before April is out, doesn't it feel like Franklin's SO bad that when he comes it, this rut he's in rubs off on everybody.
Fans, players- I mean it's like he's got Ebola or something. We don't want to even think about it. LaRussa doesn't want to be asked about it. Everybody just wants the guy to go away.
Maybe not forever. Like I said, his Twitter relationships he made this winter went a long way with most rational people. They root for the dude because he's just like us… only a bit richer and a bit cooler… but other than that, totally like us! But the Cardinals have to be smart here and make sure a proud guy doesn't taint whatever legacy he has and whatever season they have by continuing to let Franklin pitch.
It's not fair to anyone.
Time for the phantom rib cage pull. Or the classic arm fatigue and get Franklin away from the game for a couple of weeks. In fact, send the guy to some tropical island and don't let him even know what the team is up to. Have him come back at the end of May and maybe give him a go. If he's still toast, pay the man, and shut him down.
It's gone beyond pissing up wins and on to infestation of everyone in the clubhouse. And when, as a team, you start worrying about the well being of a struggling player at the detriment of the other 24 guys? Well, you're in for trouble.
And probably another year without the playoffs.
Now, the Friday Links…
- Hipsters? Need not apply. LINK HERE
- People, in pizza cosutmes, becoming pizza. LINK HERE
- The most awesome slingshots ever made. LINK HERE
- 10 videos of people running into screen doors. LINK HERE
- Type creepy. Just like in the movies. LINK HERE
- Tom Haver Foods. LINK HERE
Lastly, the STL Kidney walk is this Saturday. If you don't have anything going on, come out and have a big time with your friends from the National Kidney Foundation — LINK HERE
Have a big weekend.


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On Saturday, authorities said Frank Littrell was charged with first-degree murder, two counts of armed criminal action and first-degree assault in connection with the double shooting at a Claycomo, Mo., business.
Littrell turned himself in to the Clay County Sheriff's Office Friday night.
Authorities identified the victims in the shooting. They said he injured his sister, 40-year-old Elizabeth A. Williams, and killed his father, 73-year-old Raymond L. Littrell.
According to court documents, family members told detectives there was a falling out in the family last year over tools. Since then, Frank had not allowed the family to see his 10-year-old son.
The mother of the 10-year-old son had taken the boy to the business to visit his grandfather just before the shooting. Authorities said the boy and the mother witnessed the incident.
Frank Littrell is being held on $1 million bond.


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A trade group says Facebook needs 'measurement transparency'
The call for an audit of Facebook's metrics comes a week after the social network acknowledged inflating its video metrics.
A trade group says Facebook needs 'measurement transparency'
The call for an audit of Facebook's metrics comes a week after the social network acknowledged inflating its video metrics.
Google bolsters its ad targeting and analytics tools
The tools build on the vast amount of information Google knows about consumers.
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Sponsored by 2013 Social Media 300
The iPhone 4S shows the future of the mobile user interface.
Apple Inc.'s latest and greatest trick is Siri. And what a great trick it is.
Siri is the female-voiced speech recognition software that enables users of the new iPhone 4S to speak instead of type. Siri is comprehensive—she works in the smartphone's Calendar, Contacts, Music, Notes, Phone and Text apps. When used on her own, she can do any number of things, such as check the weather or current stock quotes.
She even has a sense of humor. When you say to her, "Siri, beam me up." She addresses you by name and says, "Stand still."
But what startled me while trying out the new technology was when I asked her a retail question, having no idea what she'd do. I said, "Siri, I need a men's shirt." She paused for just a moment, then told me, "I found a number of men's clothing stores fairly close to you." And onscreen she displayed listings of stores from closest to furthest. Touching a store links to Google Maps where you are supplied with directions.
There have been other applications of speech recognition technology, but I've never seen one so comprehensive and accurate. And helpful. That's the whole point, to be helpful.
Much is made of typing on the small screen of a smartphone being difficult. Well, if that's a problem for you, here's the solution. And it's a solution that's only going to grow in availability and use. Why type when you can speak? Some mobile technology experts like to call typing "friction" and say, rightfully so, that mobile commerce should be as frictionless as possible. Speech recognition is definitely the way to go.
I could not write this post without mentioning the pioneering work of Buy.com Inc. The e-retailer offers speech recognition technology as part of its site search in its mobile app. In addition, you can take a picture of an item and search by image or scan a bar code of an item and search by code. Site search through Buy.com's app is about as frictionless as you can get.
It won't be too very long before people start expecting speech recognition, so you might want to jot it down somewhere on your mobile commerce strategic roadmap. The future of speech recognition is a bright one.
An app should be the easiest way to make a purchase, and offer other benefits, ...
Posted 09/30/16
Effective apps not only boost sales, they provide an easy way to obtain customer feedback.
Posted 09/30/16
Changes to Google's ranking scheme puts more emphasis on serving mobile shoppers well. Links and ...
Posted 09/29/16
They want mobile shopping to be easy, are open to trying buying on social networks ...
Posted 09/27/16
Online retail is hard, grocery retail is really hard, so online grocery is, of course, really, really hard."


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A Split Vote on Alternative Electoral Systems
My print column this week examines the debate over voting systems that theorists and reformers have backed to replace the system prevalent in the U.S. and many other places, in which each voter gets one vote and the candidate with the most votes wins. Among possible alternative systems include some where voters rank candidates and others where they assign candidates scores.
Instant runoff, the focus of my column, has gotten the most traction so far. But some mathematicians point out that the system could give rise to various troubling results. Two significant ones: Voters who decide to shift their support from one candidate to a second can hurt that second candidate; and voters can get a worse outcome if they choose to show up to the polls, inadvertently helping their least-favorite candidate (the no-show paradox). Robert Z. Norman, Dartmouth College professor emeritus of mathematics, has simulated three-candidate elections in which each candidate has at least 25% of support and finds that each of these apparent paradoxes occur about one in five times.
Rob Richie, Instant runoff's leading advocate as executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group FairVote, counters that in practice, such paradoxes are rare — and can also arise in elections that have non-instant runoffs if no candidate gets a majority of the vote.
Researchers sometimes turn to simulations because it can be difficult to determine just how rare these occasions are because instant-runoff localities often don't release full election results. Unlike in a simple, one-voter, one-vote race — the so-called plurality system, where election results are simply the number of votes each candidate received and the winner has the most votes — full instant-runoff results are much more complicated. In a three-party race, there are 15 different ways to rank the candidates (counting ballots with just one or two candidates ranked). But election boards often just release the final candidate totals in each round of the runoff, rather than the full voter preferences.
"There's not very much real data around," said Nicolaus Tideman, an economist at Virginia Tech.
Richie said he prefers that the full details not be released, in part so that candidates who lose don't parse all the results in search of an argument that they should have won. "I've come to believe we shouldn't put all the rankings out there for people to mull over and second-guess the outcomes," he said. An important part of elections, he added, "is for those who have lost to accept they lost and move on." He also would rather not arm instant runoff's opponents with material for what he calls "post-election 'math masturbation' that IRV opponents can do when they have full tallies to work with."
One example that Richie considers just such an exercise: Terry Reilly, a retired engineer and former chair of the campaign finance review and ethics board for San Jose, Calif., who opposes instant runoff, has found what he considers a near-instance of no-show paradox in last November's Oakland mayoral race, which used instant runoff. To analyze the results,
Kaplan Reilly had to decode ballot codes such as 000000290000012307000000200300001520010000039900, containing information on the precinct, whether it is an absentee ballot and the actual vote. He found that there were nearly 1,600 different ranking combinations on the nearly 120,000 mayoral ballots. Reilly also discovered that Don Perata — who lost despite having far more first-place votes than winner Jean Quan because Quan was the overwhelming second choice among supporters of Rebecca Kaplan, who finished third — would have won if 2,400 anti-Perata voters showed up to cast their ballot for Kaplan.
Instant runoff "is being pitched everywhere, and I ain't buying," Reilly said.
Richie responds, "The outcome as it really happened in Oakland was quite coherent and totally defensible, but opponents can find such 'flaws' by playing with numbers."
Kaplan is untroubled by Reilly's numbers. "We very deeply respect the democratic process by which the voters selected" Mayor Quan, said Kaplan's spokesman, Jason Overman. Kaplan "supports ranked choice voting as a way to improve and enhance democracy, increase participation, and eliminate the need for costly manual runoff elections. And we've now seen that it works."
Other electoral systems have their own potential problems. Approval voting allows voters to throw their support behind as many candidates as they want. Whoever is approved by the most voters wins. A variant, range voting, allows voters to assign candidates a score to show the degree of their preference, and the candidate with the highest average score wins. But Richie and others object that these systems could be gamed by strategic voters, who would approve only of their favorite candidate and dominate the voters who more earnestly supported multiple candidates, thereby inadvertently harming their top choices.
The possibility of gaming the system "does strike me as important under realistic political conditions, especially after a particular system has run through a few electoral cycles and the politicians and voters have had time to learn its vulnerabilities for purposes of strategic gaming and tactical voting," said Richard E. DeLeon, professor emeritus of political science at San Francisco State University.
Richie argues that the potential to harm your favorite candidate by also indicating support for an opponent makes such systems nonstarters. "Some awfully smart theorists seem rather blind to what it means to have a system where you can't indicate support for a second candidate without it counting directly against the chances of your first choice," Richie said, calling these competing systems "vaporware."
It's hard to know just how these systems would work because they rarely have been put into effect. "There have been bills on approval voting but none have been successful," said Steven Brams, professor of politics at New York University and a leading advocate of approval voting.
Warren Smith, a former Temple University mathematician and co-founder of rangevoting.org — a hub for support of range voting — laments "a vicious cycle where an argument against using it is that it hasn't been used." Without much empirical data on range voting to work with, Smith has conducted extensive simulations that indicate range voting would beat its leading opponents in many categories, including minimizing the extent to which the electoral outcome would differ from the one that would optimize voter satisfaction. Smith said he had predicted that instant runoff would "derail the cause of genuine voting reform because it would get widely realized that instant runoff voting was a poor system." He sees evidence of this outcome in U.K. voters' rejection last week of instant runoff.
Political scientists are divided among the systems. Before the recent U.K. referendum, the London School of Economics and Political Science organized a workshop on voting systems where 22 specialists cast a ballot, using approval voting to register their opinion on it, instant runoff and other systems. None chose the plurality system; ten chose instant runoff and 15 chose approval voting.
Donald L. Horowitz, professor of law and political science at Duke University, argues that there is no one best system. The ideal one will depend on local conditions, said Horowitz, who has studied electoral systems in Indonesia, South Africa, Lebanon and other countries with high levels of internal strife. "I don't like pronouncing on these things in the abstract," Horowitz said. "It is very, very context-sensitive. In severely divided societies, the kind where people hate each other and sometimes kill each other, what you care most about is not representing what people care about, it is about pushing compromise and conciliation."
Tideman added, "This is an area where there is only a limited extent to which one would want to rely on experts. If people try different systems and like one more than another, it's wrong of experts to say they should like another."
Further reading: I wrote about voting systems in 2009, including Oscar voting.


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El Presidente
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Huge win for Florida Gulf Coast. But let's be honest. The only bigger fraud than Georgetown being a #2 seed is everybody calling the wife of the FGC coach a supermodel. She's cute for sure, but supermodel? No chance. Photoshop city.
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|Science Skills
|Science Tools Review: The tools module reviews with students the tools scientists use for both qualitative and quantitative observations. Students review how to use tools such as their 5 senses, rulers, and balance scales through hands-on activities.
|Physical Science
|Changes in Matter: Students further explore concepts from previous activities, and look at how matter may be modified or changed. Through an instructional video, games, and activities, students explore three types of change matter makes: physical change, in which only the shape of the matter changes; physical phase change in which matter changes to a different form solid, liquid, or gas; and chemical change, in which matter is changed in a way that cannot be undone, for example, fruits ripening or foods cooking.
|Electrical Energy: Students today have a lot of experience with electrical energy. They will explore the types of things electrical energy does.
|Heat Energy: Students explore heat energy and how its felt. Students use their hands to build friction and make heat energy. In the Larry in his Laboratory activity, students learn about conduction and radiation with an animated host and live-video examples.
|Force & Motion
|Motion: Sometimes it feels as if our young students are in constant motion, and motion certainly fascinates children. Students will study, describe, and learn to measure motion. Students will learn that motion can be measured in terms of distance and in terms of time. Interactive activities and games allow students to compare and make these measurements of motion. The Take a Note activity allows students to connect to mathematics content as they compare and order several measurements of distance.
|Life Science
|Balance in Nature
|Food Webs: Food Webs explores the links between living things and their energy sources. Food Webs shows how food chains are built linking the sun, plants, and animals as energy sources and/or users.
|Habitats: Students learn about the needs of living things. As they consider different habitats, from farm to tundra and grasslands, students begin to understand the importance of both living and nonliving things in a habitat. Students learn about many different habitats and how animals and plants have adapted in order to thrive where they live.
|Earth/Space Science
|Earth in Space: Students will begin to understand Earths place in space by thinking about cycles and patterns. As students learn about and reproduce the cycles of the moon and the seasons, they broaden their understanding of the Earths rotation and the moons orbit around the Earth. Reinforcing these concepts as well as students math skills, students perform a number of pattern-building activities. In offline learning activities, students do some kinesthetic learning by performing a spinning and orbiting dance.


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Poor wheat crop in Argentina, which is expected to limit exports
Argentina is expected to trim the quantity of 2012/2013 wheat destined for overseas shipment to 4.5 million tons from a previous 6 million due to a smaller than forecast harvest, a local newspaper reported on Saturday.
Argentina's government curbs wheat and corn exports to ensure ample and affordable domestic supplies of food.
The wheat harvest in grains powerhouse Argentina will be smaller than expected and of poorer quality this season as farmers slog through waterlogged fields, trying to save their crops from toxic fungi bred by too much rain.
Argentina's government has already advanced exporters that grain giants like Cargill and Bunge will see a reduction in the quantity of export permits to ensure local supply, according to La Nacion newspaper.
The announcement comes at a time when world grain markets are contemplating the risk of prolonged supply tensions. Consumer nations have seen their wheat bills soar this year and Argentine supply has been eyed to help cap prices.
Argentina's government forecasts the 2012/13 wheat crop at 11.1 million tons, recently marked down from 11.5 million.
But with more than 26% of the harvest already collected, yields have been poor, prompting some analysts to reduce their projections for the full crop.


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Womens Golf Completes First Two Rounds at Louisville
SIMPSONVILLE, Ky. -- Jenna Hague posted back-to-back rounds of 73 to lead the Ball State women's golf team Monday on the opening day of Louisville's Cardinal Cup.
Hague is tied for eighth place on the individual leaderboard at 2-over par 146, while the Cardinals sit in 11th place as a team with 18 holes to play at The Cardinal Club.
The final round of the tournament is scheduled for Tuesday with an 8:40 a.m. shotgun start. Live scoring is available at golfstat.com.
Ball State finished Monday with a 54-hole total of 627 (315-312) as a team. Louisville is the only team under par through two rounds, leading the 13-team field at 9-under par 567. Kansas is second at 5-over.
Laura Restrepo of Louisville tops the individual leaderboard at 7-under and is one of only four players under par for the tournament.
Following Hague for Ball State, Meghan Perry carded a two-round total of 159 (82-77), while Mary Welch came in at 161 (82-79). Sarah Westaway posted a 36-hole score of 164 (81-83), while Karley Dobis rounded out the lineup at 165 (79-86).
Brenna Obergfell, competing as an individual this week, is tied with Dobis at 166 (86-80).


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April 12, 2010 | Filed under: Book news
Search Results by tag: iPhone
An assortment of links to kick off your work week: No Canadians on IMPAC prize shortlist The Bookseller offers its London Book Fair rights preview iPad Mini in the works? (Uh, I've got an iPad ... Read More »
Some links to wind up the week: Oprah may bring books back iBooks come to iPhone Is the Library of America running out of writers? iPad now one step closer to heaven Newly discovered: Kipling's ... Read More »
April 9, 2010 | Filed under: Book news
To add to last-minute Apple Tablet fever, ebooknewser caught this clip on CNBC last night, when Terry McGraw, CEO of McGraw-Hill, revealed on-air that the Tablet will, in fact, be announced today, that McGraw-Hill has ... Read More »
January 27, 2010 | Filed under: Book news
Sundry links from across the Web: Amazon: 1, Print publishers: 0. Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has given Amazon exclusive e-book rights to two of his best-selling books The clandestine ... Read More »
December 15, 2009 | Filed under: Book news
Edna O'Brien, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux are among the writers who will be making their short fiction available exclusively to Kindle users thanks to a new deal between online retailer Amazon.com and the general ... Read More »
December 7, 2009 | Filed under: Book news
A few sundry links from across the Web: "Living in a Gourmet's Paradise?" Rapper Coolio now has his own cookbook, Cookin' with Coolio A new audio-book version of the Bible is available, featuring Richard Dreyfuss ... Read More »
November 23, 2009 | Filed under: Book news
Simpson's writer takes revenge on uppity Pynchon scholar Nick Cave has a new novel, with its own iPhone app, Dave Byrne has a new memoir, and now ¦ wait for it ¦ Duran Duran has ... Read More »
September 11, 2009 | Filed under: Authors, Industry news
U.S. mega-chain Barnes & Noble announced in a press release yesterday the creation of the world's biggest e-book store comprising "more than 700,000 titles, including hundreds of new releases and bestsellers at only $9.99." Unlike ... Read More »
July 21, 2009 | Filed under: Book news
Time magazine book critic and tech columnist Lev Grossman follows up his report earlier this year about the future of literature with a new article, written with reporter Andrea Sachs, examining the impact Amazon is ... Read More »
Sundry links from around the Web: It looks like Shortcovers, Indigo's downloadable e-book application for mobile devices, has some new competition: Lexycycle, the start-up behind the popular iPhone e-book reader Stanza, has been acquired by ... Read More »
April 28, 2009 | Filed under: Book news