text:
[Date Index]
[Thread Index]
[Author Index]
Dear MathGroupers!
I found following not satisafying behavior of Mma:
(1) Find the zeroes of a third order polynomial:
In[1]:= Solve[ 11x^3 - 20 x^2 - 10x + 22 == 0, x] //N
-16 -16
Out[1]= {{x -> 1.61319 - 1.11022 10 I}, {x -> -1.01567 - 2.32933 10 I},
> {x -> 1.22065 + 3.43956 10 I}}
This solution is wrong.
It does not exist a complex solution.
Plot the function between 1.21 and 1.62!
I found this type of solution several times and now in
the book of Werner Burkhardt where this example is from.
Ok, you can get rid of the imaginary numbers by using Chop. But
anyway, you are interested in an analytic expression. (Without //N).
Can you trust it? Appearently no!
Everybody can construct polynomials with small imaginary parts
and therefore you are not sure if there are really complex solutions.
What to do?
Forget about the analytic solution and use "brutal force":
In[2]:= NSolve[ 11x^3 - 20 x^2 - 10x + 22 == 0, x]
Out[2]= {{x -> -1.0156658802924896}, {x -> 1.220654426396538},
> {x -> 1.61319327207777}}
But the worse thing is
In[5]:= Solve[ 11x^3 - 20 x^2 - 10x + 22 == 0, x,VerifySolutions->True] //N
-16 -16
Out[5]= {{x -> 1.61319 - 1.11022 10 I}, {x -> -1.01567 - 2.32933 10 I},
> {x -> 1.22065 + 3.43956 10 I}}
that the Option VerifySolutions does not realize the wrong solution.
Anyway, the WRI experts will say, this comes why..... and they are
right. But I think the user is at first interested in believable results.
I am sure there is a solution to this problem.
Probably a first way out is a warning message or a
finetuned VerifySolutions Options that works.
(2) Integration with Sqrt.
In[9]:= Integrate[ 1/Sqrt[(4-x)^2],x]
Out[9]= Integrate[--------------, x]
Sqrt[(4 - x) ]
I suggest the WRI should do at least one branch cutting
using PowerExpand automatically and
accompanying the result with a message that others branches
are available by an Option Branches -> All.
In[12]:= Integrate[PowerExpand[ 1/Sqrt[(x-4)^2]],x]
Out[12]= Log[-4 + x]
Integrate::branch: Integrand ambivalent!
1/(x-4) was integrated.
Branches -> All provides other branches.
Every comment is welcome.
Kind regards,
Reinhard Simonovits
University Graz, Theor. Physics


text:
Remembering Vincent Ostrom: unhorsing a dominant paradigm
- First Online:
- Received:
- Accepted:
DOI: 10.1007/s11127-012-0053-7
- Cite this article as:
- Lowery, D. Public Choice (2013) 154: 163. doi:10.1007/s11127-012-0053-7
- 783 Downloads
This essay is a memorial piece about Vincent Ostrom (September 25, 1919–June 29, 2012). I start by reviewing his academic history and then turn to Professor Ostrom's major intellectual legacy—his effort to overturn the dominant paradigm in public administration and political science on metropolitan government reform. The three most important contributions of his work are discussed, including the introduction of public goods theory into the study of public administration and his work on quasimarkets and the Tiebout model. Three controversies or conundrums raised by his work are then discussed. Finally, the essay considers whether Professor Ostrom was ultimately successful in his effort to overthrow the traditional approach to the production and delivery of public goods at the city government level.
KeywordsCommissioned scholarly obituary on Vincent Ostrom
Vincent Ostrom (September 25, 1919–June 29, 2012) will be remembered as one of the early mainstays of the Public Choice Society, having served as its President from 1967 to 1969. This publicly acknowledged role as a leader in the development of the public choice approach was merited. Indeed, he was throughout his career a major advocate of and contributor to public choice theory in the disciplines of political science and public administration. Along the way, he made critical contributions to the study of urban government, the provision of public services, and federalism. For those studying these and related topics within these disciplines, Vincent Ostrom was the very public face of public choice theory. It is through his extensive body of work, rather than directly through economics, that political science and public administration students were and still very much are introduced to public goods theory and alternatives to the traditional approach to reforming the delivery and production of public services at the city government level.
Born in Washington, Professor Ostrom's scholarly career began deeply rooted on the west coast with a BA (1942), MA (1945), and PhD (1950) from UCLA. This was followed by faculty positions at the University of Wyoming (1945–1948) and the University of Oregon (1949–1958) before returning to UCLA from 1958 to 1964. His early academic interests were focused heavily on the quintessential western issue of water—how a scarce commodity with considerable public goods characteristics is politically distributed among many potential consumers. This work is best reflected in his 1953 monograph, Water Supply, later reprinted in book form as Water and Politics: A Study of Water Policies and Administration in the Development of Los Angeles (Ostrom 1972a). That western experience provided the experiential foundation for Professor Ostrom's more important body of theoretical work on the design of public service institutions. This is reflected in perhaps his most important journal article published while at UCLA, "The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry," written with Charles M. Tiebout and Robert Warren, which appeared in the American Political Science Review in 1961. The central importance of this paper will be discussed more below.
Still, Professor Ostrom will be forever associated with Indiana University, and his work there will be the main focus of this essay. Arriving there in 1964, he was a Professor of Political Science until 1990, and then the Arthur F. Bentley Emeritus Professor of Political Science until his death. In 1973, he co-founded the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis with his life and intellectual partner Elinor Ostrom, with the workshop being renamed in their honor in 2003. It was at Indiana that Professor Ostrom's major impact on the field was fulfilled through both important empirical and theoretical work and the training of two generations of young scholars who have made their mark in public choice theory and in any number of other subfields in public administration, political science, and several other disciplines whose students benefited from the open door the Workshop provided for interdisciplinary scholarship.
1 An advocate of paradigm change
The author of 15 books and monographs, 61 journal articles, and many more chapters in edited books and proceedings, Vincent Ostrom's scholarly interests were incredibly varied but centrally focused on the design of public institutions of service provision and production. No short review of his work can do justice to the breadth of his contributions. But his most durable and significant contributions with respect to public choice concern his persistent, tireless, and powerful efforts to redirect how the disciplines of political science and public administration understand the nature of public service provision and production. These efforts were expressed through his work on urban government in particular, and public service delivery institutions more generally.
The dominance of the traditional reform approach was such that it constituted a well-defended paradigm that guided both scholarly work on service delivery and, perhaps even more consequentially, the training of several generations of public employees through its influence on students receiving masters' degrees in public administration.
What kind of structure would facilitate prompt delivery of the mail, or neutral enforcement of the law, or efficient cleaning of the street? The reformers pictured a government agency that would be nearly the opposite of the Jacksonian standard; where Jacksonian bureaucracy had been comprised of amateurs, they would hire professional experts; where the Jacksonian bureaucracy had been informal and political, they would impose administration by formal, written rules; where the Jacksonian bureaucracy had been decentralized to geographic wards, they would require centralized hierarchy.
The power of this paradigm is evident in the how the field first reacted to Professor Ostrom's work. For more than a decade, public administration and political science reacted with complete indifference. This is most clearly evident in how scholars responded to his 1961American Political Science Review (APSR) paper with Tiebout and Warren, "The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: Theoretical Inquiry." This is a dense paper that foreshadows in early form nearly all of Vincent Ostrom's important scholarly contributions, running from public goods theory to a discussion of a wide variety of quasimarkets, including the Tiebout model of fragmented governments and government contracting. Yet, while widely cited after 1970, the paper was referred to only three times in the decade after it was published—twice in 1965 and once in 1970—despite having been published in the premier scholarly journal of the discipline of political science. In retrospect, I do not think that this inattention was at its core due to any real hostility to Professor Ostrom's ideas. Rather, they were simply so strange from the perspective of the prevailing paradigm that few had any idea what to make of them. Even when political science and public administration were compelled to address Professor Ostrom's ideas after 1970, the reaction often verged on the apocalyptic, as was evident in his confrontational exchange (Ostrom 1977), again in the pages of the APSR, with Robert Golembiewski (1977; also see Baker 1976; Wade 1979) later in the decade. As we will see, the disciplines of public administration and political science have now incorporated as part of their approach to service delivery many of the ideas of Professor Ostrom, his colleagues, and students. But that influence was slow in coming and not especially promising in the beginning.
More to the point, this reaction could not have been unexpected given that Professor Ostrom self-consciously sought to confront, challenge, and ultimately replace the corpus of ideas and concrete institutional design implications of traditional reform theory. This is especially evident in his most influential book, The Intellectual Crisis in Public Administration, published in 1973. In the first chapter and explicitly using the language of Thomas Kuhn (1962), Professor Ostrom boldly called for a paradigm shift in public administration, to one diametrically opposed to nearly all of the central tenants of the traditional reform approach. By casting issues of public service delivery as a Manichean struggle between two incompatible approaches—the traditional reform approach and the public choice approach—in this and latter works (Ostrom 1975; Ostrom and Ostrom 1971; Ostrom 1972), Professor Ostrom both demanded scholarly attention to his ideas and at the same time subverted faith in a long-standing and powerful existing paradigm.
2 Three important contributions of Vincent Ostrom
What were those ideas and why where they so threatening to traditional scholarship and training in public administration and political science? Again, while Professor Ostrom's scholarship was wide-ranging, the essential elements of his fundamental challenge to traditional reform theory inhered in three nested ideas.
The first, the introduction of public goods theory to public administration and political science, is one that will not be easily recognized or appreciated by readers of Public Choice because they already swim in a sea of economic analysis, but is perhaps the most fundamental to his contributions. Pigou's (1922) essential idea of market failure and the nature of goods and services that might make exchanged-based provision problematic were reviewed in "Public Goods and Public Choices," a book chapter he wrote with Elinor Ostrom in 1977. While much of this pedagogical work was not new, this was the first time that many political science and public administration students were exposed to public goods theory. And public goods theory runs throughout his work more generally. This is perhaps most evident in his (Ostrom 1999: 71) explicit statement that, "Ostrom, Tiebout and Warren proposed that the theory of public goods be applied to be used to conceptualize the task of governance." But Professor Ostrom (1972b) also added to public goods theory by subsuming it under the concept of polycentricity or decentralized systems of decisions by rational, nondependent actors, thereby providing a broader theoretical conception of choice encompassing public goods theory, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison's approach to constitutional decision making, judicial decision making and much more.
And tellingly, his use of public goods theory had two major impacts on how these fields understood public service delivery. First, the dominant traditional reform approach focused exclusively on how public goods and service should be produced. It simply had no theory about the prior decision to provide goods or services through public institutions (Ostrom 1999). Public goods theory and economics more generally provided that theory and have since been fully incorporated into training in public administration. And many of us continue routinely to use the Ostroms' clear and concise chapter as a first introduction to these ideas when discussing the basic decision of governments to provide goods and services. Second and instrumentally more importantly to Professor Ostrom's efforts to induce a paradigm shift in our understanding of public service delivery, he employed public goods theory and his conception of polycentricity as powerful theoretical levers to unpack and undermine the assumptions underlying the traditional reform theory. While often overlooked, lacking this lever, his latter contributions would not have been possible.
The second and more readily observed challenge to the traditional reform theory was Professor Ostrom's analysis of quasimarkets as an alternative—more often than not a preferred alternative—to the direct production of government goods and services. As noted earlier, his 1961 APSA paper with Tiebout and Warren discussed a full menu of quasimarkets that might be employed instead of traditional bureaucratic production. And the range of quasimarket alternatives constitutes the substantive core of The Institutional Crisis in Public Administration. This, of course, is the most recognizable public choice element of his work. Prior to public choice theory, public goods theory followed Pigou's (1922) conclusion that, once market failure had been acknowledged, direct government production or regulation should follow. But building on Stigler's (1965) and many others' observation that just because markets can fail does not imply that governments will succeed, the public choice enterprise has in large part devoted itself to theoretical and empirical analysis of sources of nonmarket failure. Indeed, running throughout Professor Ostrom's work from The Intellectual Crisis in Public Administration to one of his last books, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (1997) is a full-throated endorsement of the public choice nonmarket failure thesis (also see Ostrom 1984).
Yet, even when nonmarkets fail, and especially so in the time before real reductions in the scale and scope of government were viewed as a viable political alternative, some other solution was required beyond simply not responding to market failure. Quasimarkets—the Tiebout model of government fragmentation, government contracting with the private sector and other governments, vouchers, and other innovative mechanisms of public service delivery—provided the needed alternative. And all rest on Professor Ostrom's observation that while Pigouvian market failure might call for government provision of goods and services, it does not imply that the government production of goods and services is needed. This persistent call to separate the decisions to provide and produce public goods and services in the face of market failure and the public choice menu of reasons why nonmarkets might fail is what ultimately so deeply challenged the traditional reform approach in political science and public administration. It is quasimarkets in all their forms that are designed as replacements for the centralized, professionalized, and consolidated bureaucracies of the traditional reform approach. And Professor Ostrom's tireless championing of quasimarkets has had a profound impact on governments. Today, half of all local government goods and services are produced through quasimarkets in one form or another. While many public choice scholars have played a role in laying the theoretical and empirical foundations for this rapid and widespread transformation of the public sector in what has been a relatively short time period, Professor Ostrom can certainly claim to be among the most consequential proponents of quasimarkets.
The third nested intellectual contribution of Professor Ostrom's career concerns one particular type of quasimarket: the Tiebout model. While the essential idea of employing fragmented governments as a quasimarket to better match consumer preferences with local government goods and services will always be associated first with Charles Tiebout (1956), Vincent Ostrom surely filled the role of St. Paul in developing, testing, and proselytizing the Tiebout model. But his work on the Tiebout model and its implications for institutional design also deeply informed his more original work on the design of intergovernmental institutions and federalism, especially so his 1971 book, The Political Theory of the Compound Republic. Thus, Professor Ostrom contributed significantly to extending and generalizing the theoretical implications of Tiebout's original observations.
Still, if there is one notion that will be associated with Professor Ostrom, it will be fragmenting local government. In the many empirical studies conducted under the auspices of the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis and in at least two textbooks—Understanding Urban Government: Metropolitan Reform Reconsidered (Bish and Ostrom 1974) and Local Government in the United States (Ostrom et al. 1988)—the virtues and economies of small, fragmented, and amateur-based co-production of local goods and services were touted by Professor Ostrom as a preferred alternative to what he labeled Gargantua, the centralized bureaucracies of consolidated metropolitan governments. Largely based on the attention to this alternative by Professor Ostrom and his colleagues, the politics of the fragmented model have been elaborated on in important ways over the last three decades, especially so by Mark Schneider's (1989) analysis in The Competitive City: The Political Economy of Suburbia of the role of city officials as entrepreneurs seeking a stronger tax base. And while debates over the merits of fragmentation have become a staple in research on urban politics and government, the results in the real world have been telling. While there was a steady move over several decades toward consolidating metropolitan governments prior to Professor Ostrom's work in the 1970s, such efforts ground to a near halt thereafter. In no small measure, Professor Ostrom provided the opponents of consolidated governments the intellectual firepower to achieve this.
3 Problems and conundrums
As noted earlier, Professor Ostrom's ideas largely were ignored in the 1960s. And even after they could no longer be ignored in the 1970s, reactions to them initially generated near hysterical comments by many of those rooted in the prevailing traditional reform paradigm (Golembiewski 1977; Baker 1976; Furniss 1978; Wade 1979). Many of these entailed a rejection of economic modes of analysis in their entirety, especially in terms of substituting the concept of consumer for that of citizen, and have little telling impact on how Professor Ostrom's theoretical contributions have been incorporated into political science and public administration scholarship. Still, Professor Ostrom's work generated a number of theoretical and empirical controversies that remain with us and which he did not fully address. These remain a continuing task for those wishing to pursue his enthusiasm for quasimarkets in general and the Tiebout model in particular.
Perhaps the most important of these concern the distributive consequences of governmental fragmentation. Simply put, the Tiebout model is both based on a number of strong assumptions and is largely inattentive to distributive outcomes. For 30 years, a number of scholars have indicted local governmental fragmentation as fostering inequality owing to mismatching tax bases and the need for goods and services (Hill 1974; Downs 1994; Weiher 1991). Elinor and Vincent Ostrom's answer to these problems was always a simple assertion that higher levels of government or intergovernmental agreements could always address such distributive issues. But two essential elements of the larger public choice enterprise have been the ideas that public officials are not statesman but self-interested politicians and that institutions matter by providing veto points the might well shape political agendas. Thus, in addressing what seems a well-founded empirical criticism about the secondary consequences of reliance on quasimarkets going beyond the efficient delivery of public goods and services, the Ostrom's often seemed to assume in response a non-public choice world in which such issues could be whisked away. In his rejoinder to critics pointing out some of the undesirable consequences of fragmentation, Professor Ostrom's lack of a plausible public choice characterization of how real politicians working in real institutions that give agenda control to some rather than others—while fully evident in his nonmarket failure critique of Gargantua—has provided substantial grounds with which to reject fragmentation beyond simply rejecting an economics-flavored analysis.
Second, Professor Ostrom's analysis of the virtues of quasimarkets more generally has, in what is perhaps the greatest compliment that can be given to any scholar's work, generated hundreds if not thousands of empirical analyses of the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of vouchers, contracting-out, and the Tiebout model. I will not cite these here because such empirical tests are a staple of this journal and many others in economics, political science, and public administration. The cumulative results, however, are best summarized as confused, mixed, and complex, and the comparative consequences of quasimarkets thus remain controversial. In parallel to the public choice claim that just because markets fail does not imply that nonmarket production will be successful, these very heterogeneous empirical results suggest that just because nonmarkets can fail does not imply that quasimarkets can succeed. This means that our enthusiasm for quasimarkets must be tempered by a recognition that quasimarkets also can fail (Lowery 1998). In some cases, the sources of quasimarket failure—such as poorly informed consumers or monopoly production because only a single firm bids for a contract—are the same as those that might lead to market or nonmarket failure. In others, failure might arise from differences in the preferences of production and provision consumers that are uniquely associated with the separation of these two sets of actors when relying on quasimarkets. In short, in his enthusiasm for quasimarkets as an alternative to the institutions of traditional reform theory, Professor Ostrom rarely acknowledged that they too can fail in ways that should influence our choice of public service delivery institutions. I will have more to say about this in the conclusion when I consider the success Professor Ostrom enjoyed in inducing a paradigm shift in scholarship on service delivery.
Third and perhaps as a consequence of his success in promoting public choice approaches to government production of goods and services relying on quasimarkets, a secondary literature has developed that might be labeled "public choice lite." A good example of this is Osborne and Gaebler's widely influential 1992 book, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. With all of the depth of an airport management book, these works tout in glowing language the institutions of quasimarkets as surefire solutions for all that ails us with little or no connection to the serious theory that underlies them. And these books are not unimportant given that many of the government officials making real decisions on how government goods and services are produced are exposed to only this sort of work. As a result, quasimarkets are often applied in a cookie-cutter manner where the necessary conditions to make quasimarkets effective simply are unspecified. I do not know what Professor Ostrom thought about such works, and he is certainty not responsible for them. But I would like to think that they would have appalled him given that his intellectual work on quasimarkets was always deeply grounded on a solid understanding and appreciation of both political and public goods theory.
4 Remembering Vincent Ostrom
I have only two final thoughts, and the first is personal. I completed my work on an MPA degree in the spring of 1974. This was a very traditional program in which I had little exposure to public goods theory, the virtues of consolidated and centralized bureaucracies were never questioned, and Vincent Ostrom was never mentioned. That fall, I entered a PhD program where in the first class—an Introduction to Public Administration—the instructor held up Professor Ostrom's The Intellectual Crisis in Public Administration and said that this book would overturn everything we know about the field. Thereafter, I enrolled in plenty of economics courses and directed my research attention to quasimarkets. It remains a big part of my research agenda. But it would be fair to say that more often then not my empirical work has led me to very different conclusions than those suggested by Professor Ostrom. I frequently am a critic of his work, finding, for example, that local governmental fragmentation does not always better match the preferences of citizens to services as he would have expected (Lyons et al. 1992). Still, his work has profoundly and enduringly shaped my research agenda and those of many others, irrespective of how our empirical and theoretical work supports or rejects hypotheses that he initially framed. While I only met Professor Ostrom a few times, he has had perhaps more influence on my work than any other scholar. And I am certainly not alone in bearing this intellectual debt.
And the reason is quite simple. He profoundly reshaped how political science and public administration think about public service delivery. But was he successful in engendering the paradigm shift that he aspired to? In part, yes. Traditional reform theory as a dominant paradigm was thoroughly unhorsed by Professor Ostrom. The simple certainties in centralized, consolidated, professional bureaucracies of my MPA education are gone, in large part due to Professor Ostrom. And public goods theory now constitutes a core subject in public administration programs. Further, his ideas have had significant real-world impacts by providing the intellectual underpinnings for the proliferation of quasimarkets and the slowing of efforts to consolidate metropolitan governments. But public choice theory and its quasimarket institutions remain controversial in public administration and political science due to the distributional consequences of quasimarkets, the very mixed empirical findings on their efficiency, effectiveness, and equity, and the possibility of quasimarket failure. Thus, the public choice approach embodied in Vincent Ostrom's work has not replaced traditional reform theory as the next dominant paradigm. At best, we now have a bi- or even multi-polar intellectual world in which the two approaches (and perhaps others)—what Elinor Ostrom termed the two reform traditions—are pitted constantly against each other in both scholarly debates and classroom discussions. What remains for the next generation to do is to develop a more encompassing level of theory that allows us to specify the conditions under which different types of public service institutions will be most effective, efficient, and equitable. Pubic goods theory, so long as it incorporates elements of quasimarket failure, along with its more traditional attention to market and nonmarket failure, would seem well placed to provide this higher level of theorizing that would subsume traditional reform theory and Professor Ostrom's approach in a new synthesis.1
For those wishing to assess Professor Ostrom's work more directly, many of his most important papers, along with those of colleagues and students working in the Workshop for Political Theory and Policy Analysis have been collected in an excellent three-volume set edited by Michael D. McGinnis (1999a, 1999b, 1999c).

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Your Dog, Your Life
The Scoop
Dog News, Politics
Bark-Out-Loud Humor
Doggie Style
Gear and Glam
Wildebeest creates the perfect present for new dog parents.
Dog Breeds
Foods & Treats
Health & Care
Behavior & Training
Dogs & Cleaning
Dog of the Day
Photo Comments (3)
Photo Comments (1)
"Me an' Summer babysittin Somora Gem"
Photo Comments
"cheif little big man"
"Watchin' my t.v shows Bol"
"Me an'my sisfur SophiaHope"
"Zack"s urn"
Lost Pet
I stood by your bed last night
I came to have a peep.
I could see that you were crying,
You found it hard to sleep.
I whined to you softly
as you brushed away a tear,
"It's me, I haven't left you,
I'm well, I'm fine, I'm here."
I was close to you at breakfast,
I watched you pour the tea,
You were thinking of the many times,
your hands reached down to me.
I was with you at the shops today,
Your arms were getting sore.
I longed to take your parcels,
I wish I could do more.
I was with you at my grave today,
You tend it with such care.
I want to reassure you,
that I'm not lying there.
I walked with you towards the house,
as you fumbled for your key.
I gently put my paw on you,
I smiled and said "it's me."
You looked so very tired,
and sank into a chair.
I tried so hard to let you know,
that I was standing there.
It's possible for me,
to be so near you everyday.
To say to you with certainty,
"I never went away."
You sat there very quietly,
then smiled, I think you knew
... in the stillness of that evening,
I was very close to you.
The day is over...
smile and watch you yawning
and say "goodnight, God bless,
I'll see you in the morning."
And when the time is right for you
to cross the brief divide,
I'll rush across to greet you
and we'll stand, side by side.
I have so many things to show you,
there is so much for you to see.
Be patient, live your journey out
...then come home to be with me.
Author unknown
Zack I miss you every day, Every moment
You are my heart and will be always
My little Cowboy with a big Heart
There are phrases to remind cowboys to mind their behavior when they ride into town,Otherwise known as "going from stable manners to table manners"
If a cowboy forgot himself,He might have been reminded by someone saying, "He doesn't have manners enough to carry guts to a bear."
Yup Cowboys have a phrase for every occasion........
There's two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither one works. – Will Rogers
Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer ( see above).
a few more....
"He couldn't hit the ground with his hat in three throws"
"he couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel."
When you have the right place to go, any road you take will get you there
When you believe in what you stand for it's hard for them to knock you down.
Yup, I'm purty proud to be a cowboy.....
Always Cowboy Up!
Woah, Talk about having a purty good day when I opened
up my Dogster mail!
I had gotten a message sayin...
You are the Royal Member of the Day at PDPC!
Well you can imagine I was purty surprised, Mom
on the other paw nearly fainted! Bol
I am very honored,The picture is amazin! Thank you
Bailey, Buttercup and PDPC
Copyright © I-5 Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.
Visit Catster


text:
|Medeiros, Rosane
|Barbosa, Rossemberg
|Tabosa, Ivon
|Riet-correa, Franklin
|De Barros, Severo
|Gardner, Dale
|Molyneux, Russell
Submitted to: Toxicon
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/13/2003
Publication Date: 6/7/2003
Citation: MEDEIROS, R.M., BARBOSA, R.C., TABOSA, I.M., RIET-CORREA, F., DE BARROS, S.S., GARDNER, D.R., MOLYNEUX, R.J. TREMORGENIC SYNDROME CAUSED BY IPOMOEA ASARIFOLIA IN NORTHEASTERN BRAZIL. TOXICON. v. 41. p. 933-935. 2003. Interpretive Summary: A disease in goats is dissolved involving depression, tremors, extreme sensitivity to noise incoordination and falling is described. The problem is caused by the animals eating a plant belonging to the sweet potato family. Analysis for compounds, known to be present in other plants of this family, that alter the way in which sugars are utilized in the basic functioning of living cells did not show them to be present. The disease is therefore caused by a different group of compounds, or by toxins produced by infection of the plant by fungi.
Technical Abstract: Ipomoea asarifolia is a toxic plant in Northeastern Brazil, affecting goats, sheep and cattle. To determine the clinical signs and pathology of the intoxication by I. asarifolia, and to investigate the possibility that the plant induces a lysosomal storage disease, the green plant was dosed to 10 goats. Four goats ingesting 23?37 g/kg bw daily had clinical signs in 4?10 days. Four goats ingesting 10 g/kg bw daily had clinical sips in7?38 days. One goat had clinical sips after 19 days of daily ingestion of 5 g/kg. Another goat had no clinical signs after ingesting 2.5g/kg bw of plant during 125 days, but clinical signs appeared after 11 days ingesting 10g/kg bw. Clinical signs were depression, somnolence, tremors, hypersensitivity to noise or movements, head nodding, incoordinated gait, hypermetria, swaying when standing and wide based stance. When the goats were driven or startled they had severe incoordination of movements, sideway progression and falling, sometimes into unusual positions. After a period of rest they usually rose unassisted. Appetite was maintained, but most goats lost weight. Five goats recovered in 4?9 days after the withdrawal of the plant. Two goats died spontaneously and three were euthanatized for histologic and ultrastructural studies. No significant lesions were observed at necropsies or on the histologic and ultrastructural studies. Samples of the plant analyzed for enzymatic inhibitors were negative for calystegines and contained an almost undetectable amount of swainsonine (less than 0.001%). It is concluded that L asarifolia causes a tremorgenic syndrome due to unknown tremorgenic phytotoxins or mycotoxins.


text:
Welcome to Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona!
The first public single-gender charter high school in our state, Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona (GLAAZ) empowers young women to succeed as leaders in their classrooms, in their communities, and in their own lives. We achieve this vision by sustaining rigor, relevance and relationships: the hallmarks of a 21st century school.
Envisioned as the premier educational option for young women, GLAAZ combines the most successful models of school reform with highly effective teachers and curricula that connects the work of the school to the life of our community. GLAAZ shares the attributes of high schools that work: a common focus on research-based goals and an intellectual mission; a small, personalized learning community; technology as a tool for designing and delivering engaging, imaginative curricula; and, rigorous academic standards for both high school and college level studies. GLAAZ is committed to providing opportunities for students to earn college credits beginning in the freshman year of high school. The young women of GLAAZ are empowered to:
- Contribute to our community through service learning and civic engagement
- Participate in school-wide initiatives and decision-making
- Create meaningful community involvement for students, teachers and parents through service learning, job internships and participation in community-based organizations
- Develop leadership skills in our weekly advisory program, supplemented with Girl Meets World, a curriculum also selected by Oprah for her leadership school.
Discover YOUR potential at Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona!
Any young woman who wishes to excel in high school, college, and beyond is eligible to attend Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona.
"I have big plans ahead of me...Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona is the
only school that can help me fulfill my highest potential." Katie, student
only school that can help me fulfill my highest potential." Katie, student
Call or email Veronica Saenz, our Parent Coordinator, at 602.288.4518
to learn more or download an application here.
Para asistencia en Español, por favor llame a Veronica Saenz
al 602-288-4518
to learn more or download an application here.
Para asistencia en Español, por favor llame a Veronica Saenz
al 602-288-4518


text:
Starke Execution Scheduled Wednesday
(AP Wire Report) - A circuit judge struck down a
request to grant a new hearing and delay Wednesday's scheduled
execution for John Richard Marek.
Attorney Martin McClain asked Judge Jeffrey Levinson on Monday
to hear testimony from a new witness, state prison inmate Lee
Johnson. The attorney said Johnson would testify Marek's
co-defendant Raymond Wigley said he killed Adela Marie Simmons in
Assistant State Attorney Carolynn McCann reminded the judge that
six other inmates also testified that Wigley had confessed to the
slaying. Levinson dismissed those claims and the state supreme
court upheld that ruling.
With the hearing request denied, Marek is still scheduled to die
at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Florida State Prison near Starke.
Related Stories
- Convicted Killer Set for Execution at Starke
- After Four Delays, Gore's Execution Scheduled For Tuesday
- Gore Back On Schedule For Execution
- Van Poyck Execution Remains Scheduled
- Convicted Triple Murderer to be Executed Wednesday
- Debby Forces Some School Closures for Wednesday
- Weather Radio Wednesdays
- Marion County Pet Adoptions, Wednesday August 7, 2013
- Wednesday's Adopt-a-Pet Segment
- Prez Candidate's Wife Comes to Gainesville Wednesday


text:
Related quotes
"I think the tribal council should make it the highest priority. That would mean the election results would be a true representation of what tribal members want. As it stands, the election process is tainted."
"What you saw tonight was the result of some seniors determined to go out competing at the highest level."
"Security is the highest priority in the data center and in a secure network, but it is only half the equation. To have a truly secure system, security must be addressed end to end, from the data center all the way to the end user. Secure Blue has the potential to be a security 'seal of approval' in industries such as consumer, medical, government and defense, and digital media."


text:
Edith Nesbit
Edith Nesbit (15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924 / Kennington / Surrey / England)
» Click to list general statistics » OR, select a date :
To Iris
IF I might build a palace, fair
With every joy of soul and sense,
And set my heart as sentry there
To guard your happy innocence--
read more >>
- Hits: Number of visitors who read the poem on the given date.
- Posts: Number of visitors who posted the poem to a friend (via e-mail) on the given date.
- Dates that have "0" hits may not be shown on the list.
- Dates, poems and poets that have "0" hits may not be shown on the list. Statistics are generated daily.


text:
In a recent post I argued that Spatial is Indeed Special but that GIS software skills will soon be obsolete. Recent graduates trying to establish "GIS careers" (perhaps we should start calling them Geospatial Careers?) have begun complaining because the opportunities they were promised haven't materialized. I recently tried to provide some guidance for those attempting to launch a GIS career. But, if you are a current undergraduate studying GIS within a geography department what should you do to prepare for one of these spatial careers? Should you continue taking ArcGIS classes or should you spend more time on other skills?
As I was thinking about this blog post I thought perhaps I should call on the AAG and Geography Departments to create a more unified and consistent curriculum across the discipline. This would serve to improve the standing of geography in the private sector (because employers would have a better idea what to expect from geography grads) and grads would have better opportunities. But then I realized that the divisions within geography are too wide and the wheels of academia too slow moving for any sort of useful compromise and near-term change. I also realized that no one in academics is likely to listen to what I have to say, perhaps for good reason. Instead, I'm better off focusing on communicating directly with current undergrads who can take control of their own education and career. This may require creating your own curriculum and going outside your home department so you'll have to be a bit entrepreneurial but you'll need that in your career either way.
So, in a series of blog posts to follow I will make suggestions to undergrads who are interested in one of the spatial career paths that I mentioned in the Spatial is Indeed Special post and a few others.
Here are the 4 different paths that I mentioned and I'm adding two more: spatial statistician and geospatial database administrator.
- GIS software developer
- geospatial analyst
- cartography/visualization specialist
- geographic information scientist
- geospatial database administrator
- spatial statistician
I will cover each of these 6 career paths and how to prepare while you're still in college in a series of posts to follow over the next week or so. I understand some of these career trajectories better than others so I welcome input on any or all of these. Also, please let me know if another career path should be added to this list (or if you feel like 2 or more should be consolidated).
Stay tuned for more!
27 Comments
Pingback: Spatial is Indeed Special…but GIS Software Skills will Soon be Obsolete | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide – 5 Key Skills for Future GIS Software Developers | Geographical Perspectives
/ March 29, 2012 at 9:29 pm /
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide – How to Become a Geospatial Analyst | Geographical Perspectives
/ April 1, 2012 at 10:35 am /
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide – Cartography and Visualization Specialist | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide – Geographic Information Scientist | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide – Spatial Statistician | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Geospatial Database Administrator | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Summer Ideas for the Young and Broke | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Geospatial Career Q&A with Undergraduate Part 4 – Long Term Career Planning | Geographical Perspectives
/ September 9, 2012 at 6:58 pm /
Pingback: 2013, No Idle Hands | odoenet
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide | USC Spatial Sciences Institute
Pingback: 2014 Rankings – Top 10 Graduate GIS Programs | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Spatial Career Guide
Pingback: How to get into Graduate School: 3 Secrets to Success | Geographical Perspectives
Pingback: Review: Soft Skills - odoenet
Pingback: Is Programming an Absolute Must for GIS Undergrads? | Geographical Perspectives


text: I went to launch my car the other day. And the motor was revving and I wasn't going like it should have and all of a sudden it started to pull hard at the end of first through the rest of the gears. Then I smelled something like it was burning. Ever since if o take off a little rough I get that smell. The clutch is the stock oem clutch and has 64k on it. I'm not too sure if the clutch is completely gone any ideas on wat I can do I'm kinda tight with money right now. Also wat kind of clutch should I buy.


text:
Wojciech Szczesny was forced to apologise to Arsenal and manager Arsene Wenger today in light of his father's recent comments.
While Maciej Szczesny's intervention may have done his son no favours, it won't be the first time a sportsperson has been shown up by a family member, as these unlucky athletes can testify.
You can choose your friends...
Click HERE or click 'VIEW GALLERY' to launch our guide
- More about:
- Family And Parenting
- Friendship
- Galleries


text:
Separate names with a comma.
Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Shadow62, Jan 12, 2005.
Why does the micromedia flash player
keep popping up.
i don't want it nor do i need it.
Check that popup closely; is it micromedia, or macromedia7?
I'm getting the same kind of thing, with the latter.
Let me know what you find, and I'll do the same.
It is Macromedia most likely. A lot of advertisers on various sites use Macromedia flash to display their ads. E greeting cards also use Macromedia. I primarily use FireFox as my web browser and I have it set to not use or download Macromedia. FireFox just displays a bar under the tool bar asking if you want download the plugin. It goes ahead and loads the rest of the web page. IE will not load a web page until you accept or reject Macromedia. I do have Macromedia installed on IE so that if I need flash I use IE to visit those sites.


text:
Choose from dozens of Cardstock sizes, colors and textures. Our color selection ranges from ultra thick 236lb. Brilliant White Cotton to saturated LuxColors, metallics and even our exclusive LuxSparkle line. Sizes include the standard 8 1/2 x 11 and increase in size up to 13x19. If you're looking for scrapbook paper, there are over 60 colors of 12 x 12 Cardstock. Instead of cutting on your own cards, consider our smaller sizes, flat or folded cards, already cut to fit perfectly into your invitation envelopes. If you're looking to print business cards, put together homemade invitations, create a scrapbook, custom print a restaurant menu or any DIY project all the card paper you need is right here.
I love the cardstock which is hard to find in the size I want. Envelopes.com were super fast and efficient. I rate them with A#1!
Feb 21, 2017
there were no specific details as to how this paper would hold up to print. it did wonderful. lack of details typically means don't try this at home. I love the color and the weight. recommend this paper for invitations or other printing.
Dec 16, 2016
Great cardstock, just wanted I wanted and the color I needed, using these for a fall wedding invite buy cutting square fold envelope. Fast shipping too
Nov 4, 2016
Very nice and durable sheets. I recommend these for projects as well.
Sep 6, 2016
I used the cardstock to make pocket cards to hold invitation and enclosures. The vintage plum matched perfectly for my wedding since it is a rustic fall wedding (colors: eggplant and tan). The paper is very heavy and ended up paying extra for postage with addition of burlap belly band; but quality is great and if scored for folding the invites looked just like we had bought them that way!!!
Aug 12, 2016
This was one of 9 or 10 colors I bought recently, as well as having bought many other colors over the years. I use them as notecards for my photos which are the actual photos, not pictures printed on the paper. My daughter has said that I am one of the few people who still sends the actual photo and who doesn't just download them to friends. I love the colors and the quality of the paper. Service and the cost were reasonable.
Aug 3, 2016
The embossed grain is gorgeous - perfect for rustic wedding invitations
Jul 5, 2016
We purchased the mini #17 envelopes for a DIY wedding guestbook. It turned out amazing! We're using the cards for people to sign and stick in the mini envelopes. They fit perfect and the gold shimmer paper is gorgeous!
Jun 9, 2016
I love unusual, yet timeless stationery. I have the silver fold over notes and matching envelopes for letters, the large copy size silver paper and envelopes for business communication, and now these wonderful little cards and envelopes for gifts. They are unexpected, unusual, and elegantly modern. Fabulous quality! Excellent prices, and fast shipping! Great store!
May 24, 2016
This paper is fantastic. I am creating my daughter's wedding invitations and the quality of this paper is just what I needed.
Apr 27, 2016


text:
EMA Partners South Africa is a member firm of EMA Partners International, a retained executive search organization, comprising an expanding global partnership of search professionals. Ranked among the leading executive search firms in the world, EMA Partners has more than 40 offices, on six continents, employing over 100 search consultants, each dedicated to satisfying their clients' executive talent requirements.
We follow the best of the generalist and specialist executive search models by operating across all industries.
Our firm combines an in-depth understanding of our clients' business needs with a confidential and sophisticated search methodology. As a result, we are able to identify and source outstanding candidates, well matched to specific requirements.


text:
To ease concerns, Google released a letter this week stating the specific manner in which they planned to use Motorola's patents for lawsuits (i.e. defensively) and placed a cap on the rate they'd ask for in FRAND-based patent licensing deals. It apparently assuaged any remaining doubts, as both the U.S. and E.U. are now expected to approve the deal without asking for any concessions. This should perhaps not be a surprise, since competitors Apple, RIM, and Nokia all make mobile operating systems and manufacture the hardware for them.
The deal won't be completely in the clear – Chinese regulators have until March 20th to render an opinion on the deal. Regulators in Israel and Taiwan also still have to sign off on the deal before it can officially close. But U.S. and E.U. approval are major milestones on the way to completing the acquisition.
And just in time, as apparently Google has big plans for their new hardware division. Who's looking forward to seeing what Googerola has up its sleeves in the coming years?
source: Reuters


text:
Texaco: From Takeover Bait To DynamoTodd Vogel
Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
--Samuel Johnson
When Texaco CEO James W. Kinnear gathered 2,000 executives inside a London Methodist church back in early 1987, he had plenty of reason to concentrate. After all, Texaco Inc. was on the hook for one of the largest damage awards in history--$11 billion--for elbowing its way into rival Pennzoil Co.'s deal to acquire Getty Oil Co. in 1984. Texas courts were dragging their feet on reviewing the decision. As Kinnear addressed the gathered worldwide staff, it looked as if Texaco might be heading up the gallows stairs.
Kinnear's message was quite simple: If employees would keep their minds riveted on Texaco, he promised to deliver them from the humiliating Getty affair. And he made another vow that sounded quixotic at the time: Texaco would ultimately emerge as one of the most admired companies in the world. That seemed unlikely, given Texaco's dim reputation and grimmer prospects. Even Kinnear later confided to fellow Texaco executives: "You must have been thinking: `What is he smoking?' "
CRASH MAKEOVER. Dramatic as Texaco's public agonies were, there were less visible systemic woes that were just as life-threatening. A legacy of underinvestment and outmoded technology had left Texaco with one of the industry's sorriest exploration records. It gleans more oil from the boardroom than in the ground--hence the Getty mess. And its ossified bureaucracy was in such disrepute that by 1987 Texaco's stock price reflected less than half of its $59.40 a share in net worth, prompting raider Carl C. Icahn to mount a takeover and proxy battle that year.
Four years, a bankruptcy, and a takeover fight later, Kinnear has pulled off one of the most startling comebacks in U. S. corporate history. The crisis atmosphere at Texaco gave him the opportunity to refashion the company in ways he might never have managed in more normal times. Kinnear has shed $7 billion in assets and 10,965 employees. And he has reshaped virtually all of the company's operations, from the way it manages its exploration in Sumatra to the way it sells high-test in Hartford.
In the process, Kinnear has transformed a rigid, oil-poor company into a focused, innovative, and growing force in the industry. Says onetime nemesis Icahn, who publicly skewered Kinnear and Texaco during his takeover challenge: "Since the proxy fight, they woke up. I wish to hell I'd kept the stock."
Icahn has reasons for regret. Texaco has cut its debt from 49% of equity in 1988 to 39% today. Its cost to find a barrel of oil has plunged from more than $9 in 1985 to $3.83 in 1990 (charts, page 52 42 ). And with the help of the oil price run-up prior to the Persian Gulf war, earnings have soared from $861 million, before asset sales, in 1989 to $1.4 billion on $41.9 billion in revenues in 1990. Even though oil prices have edged downward 37% from their wartime heights, the new Texaco is positioned for a nice earnings ride. Paul D. Mlotok, an analyst at Morgan Stanley & Co., figures Texaco's profit growth will cruise at an average of 14% a year through 1996, compared with 11% for other major integrated oil companies.
And the ultimate irony: The sweet victory enjoyed by Pennzoil and Chairman J. Hugh Liedtke hasn't been a panacea. Battered by fierce competition, sagging natural-gas prices, and a troubled diversification effort, Pennzoil's earnings have recently fallen off.
Texaco's stunning reversal of fortune has surprised even it's own directors. Says Thomas S. Murphy, Texaco director and chairman of Capital Cities/ABC Inc.: "If you had told me a few years ago that we would be in the shape we are now, I simply wouldn't have believed it." Texaco's brighter outlook still hasn't added much oomph to its stock, though. At about 60, it's up only some 4% since the start of the year.
OIL DRAIN. Investors have reason to be wary. While Texaco was struggling to survive, Exxon Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group were plowing money into technologies such as computer-generated seismic imaging that could lead to the next big oil find. And Texaco needs a gusher. Despite its successes, Texaco has one of the shortest reserve lives--the number of years its current reserves would last--among the majors. Until recently, Texaco actually used up more of its oil reserves than it replaced through acquisitions and exploration. In short, it was liquidating itself at an alarming rate, while rivals were slogging around the planet finding new oil fields.
Kinnear has now made exploration a bigger priority at Texaco. Late last year, he announced a $21 billion capital spending plan for Texaco's exploration and refining operations. The program nearly doubles annual spending to $3.1 billion in 1991, from $1.8 billion back in 1988. Already, his efforts have placed Texaco on a more equal footing with global rivals. Texaco ranked No. 2, behind Atlantic Richfield Co., in a Wertheim Schroder & Co. analysis reviewing the production and exploration track records of the majors since 1986, based on such factors as production costs and reinvestment rates.
Texaco is still heavily reliant on foreign oil, though. Back in 1988, Saudi Arabia and Texaco set up Star Enterprise, a joint venture in which the Saudis acquired a half-interest in Texaco's refineries and gas stations in 23 states--a direct pipeline into the world's largest energy market. In return, Texaco got access to an ocean of oil. There's a big downside, however. About 60% of Texaco's refined product sales could be vulnerable if Saudi production is disrupted.
The man who has transformed Texaco's culture spent his entire working life steeped in it. He joined Texaco's marketing department in 1954, after the U. S. Naval Academy and duty in Korea. In those days, Texaco relished its reputation as an industry maverick. "The company had a kind of militaristic culture, and you had a series of CEOs who ran it that way," says one former Texaco executive. It was also notoriously arrogant. One big reason: Texaco was one of the few oil companies that grew up independently from the mighty Standard Oil trust, whose 1911 breakup spawned such rivals as Exxon, Mobil, and Amoco.
FEW SURPRISES. Kinnear, however, has rarely let Texaco's rigid ways cramp his style. At 31, he was sent to Hawaii to build Texaco's retail operations on the islands from scratch. There, he slashed gasoline prices to match those of competitors. In three years, he had grabbed 8% of the market--quite a feat in such a fragmented business. "I've been on the competitive kick since," he says.
Kinnear's star really started to rise, though, when he took over as president of Houston-based Texaco USA in 1982. Kinnear turned things around at the marketing and refining arm, closing or selling inefficient refineries and spending $2 billion to revamp more promising ones. He also cut Texaco's money-losing U. S. retail network in half, to 2,500. The result: While the Texaco USA unit lost an average of $200 million annually from 1981 to 1984, by 1985 the unit had turned a $10 million profit. The next year, it posted a $145 million gain.
Few were surprised, then, when Texaco's chairman at the time, John K. McKinley, elevated Kinnear to vice-chairman in 1983. Kinnear stayed in Houston, and that turned out to be a blessing. McKinley and Texaco President Alfred C. DeCrane Jr., Kinnear's chief rival for the top job, orchestrated the Getty deal from the company's White Plains (N. Y.) headquarters. They also took a real shellacking for the debacle. When Texaco's board gathered in late 1986 to name a new chief, Kinnear was the obvious choice. His vast operational experience gave him an edge. So did his popularity among employees--a sharp contrast to the old regime, for whom "the only difference between a person and a pump was that the pump is depreciable," says a union official. The board gave Kinnear the CEO job and day-to-day management responsibility, while DeCrane assumed the role of chairman.
SLUMPING STOCK. Then all hell broke loose. In April, 1987, the U. S. Supreme Court refused to shield Texaco froma lower-court ruling that required an $11 billion bond. Crude-oil suppliers soon suspended deliveries, and bankers began to demand more security. On Apr. 12, Texaco Inc. and its two subsidiaries--Texaco Capital N. V. and Texaco Capital Inc.--filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
With Texaco's stock trading at depressed levels, Icahn soon acquired a 14% stake and eventually offered to buy the rest of the company for $12.4 billion. Kinnear refused, and Icahn launched a proxy fight to oust the CEO and seat himself, together with four others, on Texaco's board.
Kinnear struck back with the public-relations savvy that his predecessors had always lacked. He and DeCrane made a whirlwind cross-country tour, pressing the flesh with pension-fund and insurance executives. Kinnear also attacked Icahn as a quick-buck artist in newspaper ads. In the end, Kinnear prevailed, but not before Icahn garnered 41% of the vote. "I thought the assets would have been better off in someone else's hands," says one institutional holder who voted with Icahn. "I would have made a big mistake."
The scare forced Kinnear to rethink the whole company. He needed to restructure Texaco. And he had to raise $3 billion, the sum finally agreed upon by Texaco and Pennzoil to settle the Getty affair. What followed was one of the largest sell-offs in corporate history--and the emergence of a leaner and more profitable Texaco. In June, 1988, Kinnear sold Deutsche Texaco, a German subsidiary, for $1.2 billion. It still wasn't enough. So Kinnear also sold off one of the company's most cherished assets: Texaco Canada Inc. That turned out to be a shrewd move. The $2.04 billion unit was generating only $120 million in cash flow, thanks to tax complications involving the repatriation of earnings. Texaco sold the unit to Imperial Oil Ltd. of Canada for $4.15 billion, netting $3.24 billion for its 78% stake.
Kinnear also shook up Texaco's bureaucracy, putting his popularity to the test. He instituted a tough program that pegged salaries to performance at the divisions. He also broke with Texaco's insular tradition of promoting only from within. "We wanted some new blood," Kinnear says. So, he lured away Allen J. Krowe, a former executive vice-president at IBM, to serve as Texaco's CFO. In all, six top Texaco officials would come from outside the company.
Through all Texaco's travails, Kinnear refused to scrimp on research and development. Texaco pumped $15 million into one product, called System. The aim: to create an engine-cleaning, high-performance gasoline. System is now the brand name for virtually all of Texaco's gasoline offerings. Since its launch in 1989, Texaco's sales have picked up momentum: In 1990, the company's total market share--including sales by Star Enterprise--hit 6.5%, up roughly a quarter of a percentage point from 1989, while total volume rose 3.1%, according to Lundberg Survey Inc. Another edge: Texaco is a leading producer of methyl tertiary-butyl ether, a key ingredient used in the reformulated gasolines required by the Clean Air Act.
Kinnear's biggest coup though, has been to recast Texaco's exploration process. Before, each division came up with its own exploration plan. With each team hoping to strike a gusher, that often caused an imbalance of high- and low-risk wells. Texaco's replacement rate lurched up and down. Now, managers are schooled in a portfolio strategy balancing sure-fire projects and long-shot efforts.
A BIG PAYOFF. Kinnear has also given more freedom to his exploration staff, which once had to wait months for executives to sign off on new wells. One payoff: In December, 1989, Texaco learned of a discovery in a Malaysian field. A manager rushed through a process that used to take up to two weeks and quickly had a bid in hand for the property. Within a day, he was on a plane headed for Kuala Lumpur. Texaco now owns a partial interest in the site and plans to start drilling on Aug. 1.
Texaco has come a long way--but there's more to be done. Its reserve life of about 8.8 years lags behind Exxon's 11.3 years and Amoco Corp.'s 11.7. Texaco also needs more in-house technological savvy. Royal Dutch/Shell and Exxon have spent billions on computer-aided exploration that can deliver color-coded topological models and pinpoint remote oil and gas wells. Rivals say that Texaco has to hire out some of the reading of this data. Sniffs one competitor: "We'd never hire out interpretation."
Kinnear acknowledges that he still has work to do. But remember that Texaco once had a rather tight noose around its neck. For Kinnear and Texaco, it's been quite a reprieve.


text:
The British oil giant is selling assets to Taqa, the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, as it continues to raise cash to pay for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
BP insisted it was still a major investor in the North Sea, with plans to invest 10 billion US dollars (£6.7 billion) over the next five years in the region.
The sale means BP has now sold 37 billion US dollars (£23 billion) of assets under plans to raise 38 billion US dollars (£24 billion) by the end of 2013 following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers and caused the worst oil spill in US history.
The deal is expected to complete in the second quarter of next year, subject to regulatory approvals.
- More about:
- Bp
- Energy
- Investment
- Oil Spill


text:
Matching: alliance X
- Sort by:
- Date ▼
- Title
- Likes/Votes
- Comments
- Views
New Solution Brief: IBM Rational Software for SAP
IBMandSAPAllianceBlog Tags: ibm alliance sap rational 2,410 Views
Improves collaboration across SAP and non-SAP projects ● Accelerates delivery times to move your business forward more quickly ● Reduces the cost of implementing and maintaining enterprise software ● Mitigates the risk of business impact amid constant change...
from Blog: IBM and SAP Alliance Blog
Open Virtualization Alliance w/ IBM, HP, Intel, Red Hat, SUSE, BMC, Eucalyptus
Jean Staten Healy Tags: kvm linux alliance virtualization open 6,906 Views
Yesterday, 7 industry leaders announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance . (Click here to see the press release). IBM, BMC Software, Eucalyptus, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE have created this consortium to foster the adoption of open...
from Blog: Virtualization@IBM
ODF Alliance: 350+ members, 50 countries and ODF adopters
AntonySatyadas Tags: france kong germany malaysia croatia odf minnesota massachusetts india poland belgium extemadura brazil italy alliance denmark norway hong 3,466 Views
The ODF alliance ( http://www.odfalliance.org ) recently applauded Brazil's decision to recommend ODF as the government's preferred format (e-Ping Interoperability Framework version 2.0); India's decision to use ODF at a major state government agency; Italy's...
from Blog: Social Business transformation
Microsoft Interoperability and FUD
AntonySatyadas Tags: interoperability hat microsoft novell fud red office alliance 3,768 Views
What is this all about: Microsoft made 2 key announcements recently around interoperability and an inclination to "embrace" Linux: 1. With Novell: Virtualization, Web services management and document format, and patent protection - IBM already addresses...
from Blog: Social Business transformation