The US adds two more medals and Russia gets its first in the fourth day of the Sochi Olympics
Sochi Winter Olympics 2014 results: Team USA captures two medals on Day 4
Showing posts with label Results. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Results. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Sochi Winter Olympics 2014 results: Team USA captures two medals on Day 4
Sochi Winter Olympics 2014 results: Team USA captures two medals on Day 4
Sunday, November 10, 2013
RPT-Struggling U.S. cities hope small projects yield big results
RPT-Struggling U.S. cities hope small projects yield big results
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By Mary Wisniewski
GARY, Ind. Nov 9 (Reuters) – Struggling U.S. Rust Belt cities for years have tried to counter the loss of manufacturing jobs with big, expensive projects like casinos and stadiums.
For cities such as Gary, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio, these projects brought hope and headlines. Some delivered new revenue, but others brought new costs and mixed results.
Gary’s underused Genesis Convention Center, for example, cost the city $ 3.6 million in repairs and operations in the past year alone.
Now, Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson and civic leaders of some other blighted cities are going small with strategic, narrowly focused ideas such as selling vacant homes for $ 1, demolishing derelict buildings and neighborhood clean-up projects that produce immediate results.
“It’s a movement away from this singular, mega-project,” said Toni Griffin, an architect and urban planner at City University of New York. “Where cities are moving to is a larger more strategic framework.”
Gary, a struggling city 30 miles south of Chicago along the shores of Lake Michigan, is a prime example of the trend.
Known as the “Magic City” in the roaring 1920s for its spectacular growth, Gary is still home to U.S. Steel’s largest plant, but the number of mill jobs has shrunk to 5,000 from 30,000 in the 1970s. Gary’s population in 1960 was more than 178,000, but it disintegrated to just 79,000 by 2012.
Some one-third of its residents live in poverty and the home and business vacancy rate is about 35 percent. Gary recorded 43 murders in 2012 – three times as many per capita as nearby Chicago.
S. Paul O’Hara, a Xavier University professor who wrote a history of Gary, said Gary’s problems may seem overwhelming, but a few small steps could build a foundation for better days.
Attempts have been made to revive Gary, including casinos and a minor-league baseball stadium.
Similar projects were tried in other cities – a trend known as the “Bilbao” effect after the Guggenheim Museum that revived Bilbao, Spain, said Terry Schwarz, director at Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative in Ohio.
SMALL STEPS TO REVIVAL
Flint provides an infamous example of how a big project can backfire. AutoWorld, an $ 80 million theme park opened in 1984, closed six months later due to low attendance. It was later demolished and the land acquired by the University of Michigan-Flint.
These days, Flint is having more success with the Genesee County Land Bank, which allows neighbors to buy adjoining lots cheaply, so they can expand their gardens. The Bank recently received $ 20.1 million in federal money for 1,661 building demolitions, according to the city.
The Bank also has helped revive the downtown, turning boarded-up buildings into apartments and restaurants, said Chris Waters, associate provost at the University of Michigan-Flint.
“There’s actually night life in Flint,” Waters said. “It still amazes me.”
In Youngstown, the Mahoning County Land Bank – an entity that manages and develops tax-foreclosed properties – helps move vacant buildings back onto tax rolls.
The city also has increased penalties for neglectful owners. One tactic is a $ 10,000 bond paid by any entity foreclosing on a building. The city can use the money for repairs if the property is neglected.
“We’re starting to see the visual impact,” Maureen O’Neil, Youngstown’s chief code official, said. “Some of our corridors look a lot better.”
BUILDING A FUTURE
Like Gary, Youngstown and Flint were heavily dependent on single industries and were devastated economically when tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared between the 1960s and 1980s. Youngstown lost jobs in steel, Flint in the auto industry.
Freeman-Wilson, elected last year as Gary’s first female mayor, sees its potential as a transportation hub. It lies in the center of the country, alongside Lake Michigan and 30 minutes from Chicago, with rail and highway connections. To build on its transportation potential, she said a bigger plan is to expand the airport’s runway by September 2014.
The mayor sees a tourism potential because the city was the hometown of pop star Michael Jackson. Gary’s real estate is also a bargain – the Miller Beach neighborhood attracts Chicagoans who want lake views at lower costs.
One wall of the mayor’s office is covered with ugly pictures including a hollowed-out train station and a crumbling frame house – all eyesores Freeman-Wilson wants revived or demolished.
“Some are gone, some are on their way out – that historic rail station we should really develop,” she said, tapping each picture in turn. She also has a plan for cleaning up the city block by block and is counting on volunteers to start scrubbing.
Freeman-Wilson, a Harvard-educated Gary native, says she sees why past mayors turned to big projects. “When you see a convention center, you regain hope.
“I understand that, but I don’t want to do that to the exclusion of smaller things.”
Read more about RPT-Struggling U.S. cities hope small projects yield big results and other interesting subjects concerning Bonds at TheDailyNewsReport.com
Saturday, November 2, 2013
The Council Has Spoken !! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 11/02/13
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The Council Has Spoken !! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 11/02/13
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Energy stocks fuel European shares after results beats
Energy stocks fuel European shares after results beats
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* FTSEurofirst 300 up 0.1 pct
* BP, Saipem fuel energy rally after results
* Deutsche Bank, UBS hit, raise buffers for legal costs
By Toni Vorobyova
LONDON, Oct 29 (Reuters) – European shares edged higher on Tuesday as estimate-beating results at BP and Saipem fuelled a surge in the oil sector, a laggard in this year’s equity rally.
Adding to the upbeat crop of results, Finnish handset maker Nokia forecast a more profitable future for its NSN network equipment and software unit, sending its shares up 6.6 percent.
With the third quarter results season about a third of the way through, European companies have so far beaten earnings expectations by an average of 1.7 percent, behind their U.S. peers but on track to end two consecutive quarters of misses, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine data.
“Overall, it’s a fairly mixed bag but with a bit of positive upside on earnings so far,” said Neil Marsh, managing director of cash equities at Newedge.
“I still think we will have positive momentum going into the end of the year. Fundamentals look reasonably good, the economic data is not appalling like it has been, it’s showing signs of at least bottoming out so it’s fairly bullish at the minute.”
The FTSEurofirst 300 was up 0.1 percent at 1,284.27 points at 1506 GMT, less than 10 points away from last week’s five year peaks.
The energy sector was responsible for most of those gains, with heavyweight BP up 4.7 percent after it unveiled forecast-beating results and promised to sell more assets and return the proceeds to shareholders.
“The underlying numbers look close to expectations but the good news is an increase in the dividend, an extension of the buy-back programme and a commitment to keep capex flat in 2014,” analysts at Liberum Capital said in a note.
The rebound in BP follows a tough year, when the shares gained roughly half as much as the broad European market while the oil and gas sector as a whole has been the second worst performer after basic resources, on concerns about falling crude prices and rising costs.
Negative market positioning and sentiment have set the bar relatively low for positive surprises.
Among the least-loved stocks has been Italian oil services group Saipem, which confounded market bets for a third profit warning on Tuesday by confirming its earnings outlook for the year.
Shares in Saipem jumped 5.2 percent on the news, which wrong footed an active short-selling market in the stock. Short sellers borrow shares they do not own and sell them on, in the hope of buying back the stock more cheaply later on.
As of Oct. 28, some 15.6 percent of Saipem’s shares available to be borrowed were out on loan to short sellers, Markit data showed, a multi-year high if periods around dividend payments, when arbitragers borrow the stock for tax purposes, are excluded.
Volumes in Saipem topped five times of their 90-day daily average, making it the most actively traded stock on FTSEurofirst 300, followed by UBS at four times the average.
Shares in the Swiss bank dropped 7.8 percent on news it has been ordered to hold extra capital in case it has to pay out more in legal settlements.
“They (regulators) are looking for a pound of flesh … and I think that’s the way it’s going to be from now on,” said Nick Xanders, head of strategy at BTIG. “The sector has started to roll over and I think it will continue.”
Read more about Energy stocks fuel European shares after results beats and other interesting subjects concerning Real Estate at TheDailyNewsReport.com
Sunday, October 27, 2013
FinancialBuzz Exclusive CEO Interview with Jammin Java Corp. (Q2 Financial Results) Coffee Stocks
Friday, October 25, 2013
The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 10/25/13
South Carolina Tea Party Coalition: The Tea Party movement may only be a few years old, but the beginning of the movement is often misunderstood and misreported. While the tea party is often portrayed as being purely an anti-Obama movement, the truth is that the Republican Party has always been as much a target as President Obama and his administration.
Once again, the Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.
This week we had a tie in our Council category between Joshuapundit’s The Dirty Secret Behind ObamaCare No One’s Talking About and The Right Planet’s ObamaSoft — The World’s Worst Rollout in History, who applied his knowledge of software engineering to give us a wonderful and well written in-depth look at exactly how big the colossal failure of the ObamaCare rollout was.
In accordance to our by-laws, that means I get to put on my Watcher’s hat and break the tie, and there’s no question – The Right Planet takes the honors this week!
Here’s a slice:
Watching the disastrous rollout of the online healthcare exchanges has really left me shaking my head, and not just for the obvious reasons. The rollout of Obamacare has been described as nothing short of abysmal, leaving some to question why the administration would go ahead with the launch of a busted site. Numerous problems have plagued the debut of the Obamacare healthcare exchanges; and a number of experts are questioning the soundness of the site’s architecture.
But Obamacare supporters are attempting to slough off all the errors associated with the online exchanges as simple “glitches”–to be “expected” with such a revolutionary, comprehensive web-based system.
Well, if there’s something I do know a bit about, it’s software engineering. My background is in client-server development with an emphasis on web applications. Developing distributed applications that must communicate with multiple servers and clients was my field of expertise. I designed relational datebase schemas and ER diagrams; I modeled and mapped the application layers to the data layers using UML and OOD, I wrote the complex SQL queries and stored procedures to access the data layer from application layer; and I dealt with the interface issues and graphical design on the front-end as well. It’s been about five years since I worked for a consulting firm as a software engineer. So forgive me if I may use some “old school” terms in this article. But I’d like to take a deeper look at this whole healthcare software disaster known as healthcare.gov from purely the software engineering perspective.
First, on a bit of a sidenote, I’m surprised by the reliance on a web interface to implement the state healthcare exchanges. Is the assumption that the 30-40 million that are allegedly uninsured and desperately need Obamacare have access to an iPad, laptop or computer? Ironically, in spite of Obamacare (a.k.a Affordable Care Act) and all promises contrary, estimates are there will still be 30 million left uninsured. But I digress.
The debut of healthcare.gov is one of the worst software rollouts I’ve ever witnessed. The president was forced to hold an emergency press conference in the Rose Garden, playing the part of Salesman-in-Chief. The administration and the liberal media are portraying all the software errors as “glitches.” Well, FYI to the liberal media and the CEO of Obamasoft, we don’t refer to fatal program errors as “glitches,” not in software world.
The preferred description for a so-called software “glitch” is a bug. Almost all software contains bugs of some kind. That’s why updates, patches and new versions of software will always be the norm. People aren’t perfect, nor is technology. Software is “alive.” You can’t just code it once and leave it at that; it must constantly be refactored and improved, since technology constantly changes. The big difference between a bug and an error is, typically, a bug will not cause the application (program) to freeze or crash.
For those who have no clue about the software development process, it might help to start off with a bit off a primer on some technical terms and concepts that will hopefully give a better understanding on the challenges of developing and implementing the healthcare.gov online exchanges.
The term application has an important meaning in software engineering. In a general sense, a software application can be thought of as a computer program. But, in a strictly technical sense, a software application is commonly comprised of numerous computer programs.
There are significant differences between what is called a stand-alone application and a web application. A stand-alone application is a computer program like Microsoft Word that installs directly to your computer’s local hard-drive (HD). A web application resides on a remote computer (server), not the client computer’s local hard-drive, and must be accessed via an internet connection. Typically a web application is accessed via a web browser like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, etc. This is referred to as a client-server architecture–meaning: two separate computer programs communicating with each other.
Much more at the link.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Mark Steyn with Whose Islam? submitted by Joshuapundit… in which Steyn wonders out loud at the West’s strange insistence that terrorism fomented in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam. Do read it.
Okay, here are this week’s full results. Only Rhymes With Right was unable to vote this time, but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty:
Council Winners
- *First place with 4 1/3 votes! – The Right Planet – ObamaSoft — The World’s Worst Rollout in History
- Second place with 3 1/3 votes – Joshuapundit – The Dirty Secret Behind ObamaCare No One’s Talking About
- Third place with 1 2/3 votes – Liberty’s Spirit – Cultural Relativism and the Decline in Societal Decency
- Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room – Yale Prof. offers a revealing glimpse into the Ivy League’s epistemic closure
- Fifth place with 1 vote – VA Right! – Obamacare Now Officially a Laughing Stock – Time to Pile On!
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Mellow Jihadi – Sefton, a cavalry horse who refused to die
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Noisy Room – The Tea Party And The Mad Hatter
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Nice Deb – ACORN Offshoot Tapped To Help With Multi-State ObamaCare ‘Navigator’ Drive
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Political Commentator – Bill de Blasio for Mayor? Will the official color of NYC be changed to red?
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – The Future of Counter Terrorism
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Razor – League of Denial Seals The Deal For This NFL Fan
Non-Council Winners
- *First place with 4 votes! – Mark Steyn – Whose Islam? submitted by Joshuapundit
- Second place *t* with 2 2/3 votes – Caroline Glick – Israel and the new Munich submitted by Noisy Room
- Second place *t* with 2 2/3 votes – Yuval Levin/NRO – Assessing The Exchanges submitted by The Glittering Eye
- Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – The Tower – Iranian President, Supreme Leader Rail Against “Zionist Regime” submitted by Simply Jews
- Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Sarah Palin – D.C’s ‘Corrupt Bastards Club’ submitted by The Watcher
- Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Yale Global Online – The Dragon’s Spear: China’s Asymmetric Strategy submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
- Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Strata-Sphere – Anatomy Of A Government FUBAR ObamaCare Style submitted by The Right Planet
- Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Narratively – Nick Brown Smelled Bull submitted by The Razor
- Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Newsbusters – Dem Rep. Steve Cohen: Tea Party Republicans Are ‘Domestic Enemies’ We Took Oath To Defend Against submitted by Rhymes With Right
See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in… don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that!
Commentary from Experts around the web…Post id = does not exist.
The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 10/25/13
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Cambodia goes to polls but results all-but-certain
- Hun Sen has been in office for 28 years
- The three main parties teamed up, and hoped for strength in numbers
- More than 9 million people were eligible to vote
- Opposition parties alleged widespread irregularities
Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) — Cambodians went to the polls Sunday for an election whose outcome is all but certain: five more years in power for long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Hun Sen has been in office for 28 years. And so confident was he of victory, he didn’t bother campaigning ahead of the elections.
Still, opposition groups were energized.
The three main parties teamed up, and hoped for strength in numbers: Enough votes to take over control from the ruling party.
More than 9 million people were eligible to vote.
The excitement bubbled over Friday when opposition leader Sam Rainsy returned home from exile in France.
He left in 2009 to avoid prison on charges of spreading disinformation — charges many considered politically motivated. International pressure led to him receiving a royal pardon last week. But he arrived too late to run for office.
On election day, opposition parties alleged that widespread irregularities had marred the balloting.
At a local high school in Phnom Penh, the names of voters registered with the opposition parties were either missing or misspelled — meaning they couldn’t vote.
The national election committee said it worked hard to ensure the election was far.
“In preparing for the election this year, we started in the middle of 2012,” said Tep Nytha, the secretary general of the committee, ahead of the balloting.
Opposition supporters told CNN that if they end up losing the election due to voter fraud, they will appeal the results — but do so in a peaceful way.
They will take their grievance to the United Nations, they said, rather than to the streets.
Final results are expected to be announced later Sunday.
CNN.com Recently Published/Updated
Cambodia goes to polls but results all-but-certain
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
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