The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
The latest from the Wall Street Journal, 12-30-11:
Sears Holdings Corp. identified 79 of the stores the retailer is planning to close, with nearly half being Kmart locations and Florida having the most closures by state.
Earlier this week, the retailer said it planned to close between 100 and 120 stores and record up to $2.4 billion in quarterly charges after another weak holiday season.
Closures affect 25 states. Florida led the list with 11, followed by six each for Ohio, Michigan and Georgia. With the exception of Ohio, those states had jobless rates above the national average in November, according to the Department of Labor.
Most of the closures were distributed evenly across the U.S., though the Northeast won’t see many. Pennsylvania and New Hampshire each are expected to have two store closures so far. No others were mentioned by Sears on Thursday for that region.
Sears will close about 120 Kmart and Sears stores in a bid to revitalize its business. Shares fell 27% in reaction. Karen Talley has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images
Sears is planning to close 38 Kmart stores, 25 Sears full-line locations and two Sears hardline-only locations. The company will also close 14 Grand/Essentials stores, a format Sears had opened over the past decade in an effort to better compete against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp.
According to the company’s website, Sears said employment totals varied and thus the company couldn’t provide an estimate of how many layoffs would occur. Sears said a typical store being closed employs between 40 and 80 associates.
Original Post 12-28-11:
Full disclosure: I wore clothing from Sears as a kid. We also used to take our children when they were young to have their portraits done by the photographic studios at Sears. We even purchased our first washer and dryer from Sears right before our first child, Maggie, was born and we knew our laundry needs would increase dramatically (the number of loads per week has yet to decline 17 years later). However, we haven’t purchased much if anything from either Kmart or Sears in the past decade. Our clothing purchases have migrated to higher-end department stores or clothing chains. Our bigger ticket items are now bought at Best Buy or online. Any tools I buy, I typically get at Home Depot or Lowes. Is it any wonder that Sears/Kmart is in so much trouble and closing 120 stores according to today’s Wall Street Journal:
Sears Holdings Corp. said Tuesday that it will close as many as 120 stores and record up to $2.4 billion in quarterly charges after another bad holiday showing, raising fresh doubts among analysts about the future of the middle-market retailer.
Sales at stores open at least 12 months have slid every year since the company was created by the well-known hedge-fund investor in 2005. But its deteriorating condition has accelerated this year—it posted a $421 million loss last quarter—and it said Tuesday that same-store sales for the eight weeks ending Christmas Day dropped 5.2% compared to the year before.
The 49-year-old Mr. Lampert has struggled to retain qualified executives: Under his watch, the company c-suite has become a revolving door. Stores have been criticized for showing their age.
Its once highflying shares—which peaked at $191.93 in April 2007 amid speculation that Sears would be an investment vehicle for Mr. Lampert akin to Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.—plunged 27% to $33.38 Tuesday. They have lost more than half their value this year and are down 73% since the merger closed in March 2005. The market capitalization of Sears by the end of Tuesday had dropped to $3.6 billion.
That is far from what Mr. Lampert envisioned when he launched an $11 billion purchase of venerable Sears, using money from Kmart, a company he had steered out of bankruptcy earlier in the decade. He predicted the merger would create a “powerful leader in the retail industry.”
Frankly, if you’re going to get me and my family into a physical retail setting, you had better make it worth my time, in terms of giving great customer service, making it easy to find what we want, providing a pleasant environment, and of course offering decent (but not necessarily the lowest) prices. Otherwise, forget it. Nonetheless, Mr. Lampert chose a different approach:
But from the outset, Mr. Lampert’s strategies for reviving the fading Sears and Kmart brands confounded retail experts, who especially question his decision to scrimp on renovating aging stores.
While store chains typically spend $6 to $8 per square foot on annual maintenance according to retail experts, Sears is spending a fraction of that amount—about $1.90, according to investor research firm International Strategy & Investment Group.
Mr. Lampert’s bare-bones décor frustrated some of his business partners, notably Martha Stewart Omniliving Media Inc., whose relationship with Kmart ended acrimoniously in 2009.
“Have you been to a Kmart lately?” Ms. Stewart said in a CNBC interview around that time. “It’s not the nicest place to shop.”
I think Raymond “Rain Man” Babbitt put it best:
Aneil
Delta College, a two-year institution located in Michigan, has moved to make all of its full-time faculty positions either tenured or tenure-track. That means about 55 instructors at Delta have the option of replacing their one-year renewable contracts with tenure-track status.
The decision bucks a trend toward the hiring of adjunct professors and keeping them off the tenure track, at community colleges and across most of higher education. And the conversion of existing positions to tenured, as opposed to just hiring new professors, is considered the Holy Grail for adjunct advocates.
Officials at the college said their goals are better teaching and showing respect for professors. They also said the move won’t cost much, and will help in recruiting new faculty members.
“We truly believe that having tenure or tenure-track faculty is a commitment to our students,” said Thomas Lane, vice president of instruction and learning services at the college. Part of the reason, he said, is that tenured faculty can focus on students and teaching instead of worrying about “are they still going to be here” after their contract expires.
Delta is a mid-sized community college, with 11,495 students who are taught by 225 full-time faculty members (including the 55 who have been off the tenure track) and 324 part-time adjuncts. The full-timers will have the option of converting to tenure-track, a choice Lane suspects most, if not all, will make.
Relatively few faculty members at community colleges have tenure, and that percentage is shrinking.
Research from the American Federation of Teachers found that in 2007, only 17.5 percent of faculty members at public two-year institutions held either tenure or tenure-track status. About 43 percent of new hires among full-time faculty members at community colleges are tenure-track, said Craig Smith, AFT’s deputy director of higher education, and those numbers are “going down.”
A tenured professor is far more likely than an adjunct to serve on a curriculum committee. That’s good for the curriculum, because classroom insights are obviously valuable. And Smith said that professor is likely to feel more engaged with the curriculum than would a faculty member who was merely on the receiving end of curriculum shifts.
To the extent that these faculty do indeed respond to Delta College’s offer of improved status by contributing more to the curriculum and life of the college, students will end up winners as well.
Aneil
How many friends do you really have, and where are these friends? This recent article by Ned Potter of ABC News indicated some trends and research findings that I find disturbing:
We may “friend” more people on Facebook, but we have fewer real friends– the kind who would help us out in tough times, listen sympathetically no matter what, lend us money or give us a place to stay if we needed it, keep a secret if we shared one.
That’s the conclusion made by Matthew Brashears, a Cornell University sociologist who surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database and found that from 1985 to 2010, the number of truly close friends people cited has dropped — even though we’re socializing as much as ever.
On average, participants listed 2.03 close friends in Brashears’ survey. That number was down from about three in a 1985 study.
Even more disturbing to me was this:
Compared to other things that matter for support — like being married or living with a partner — it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married.”
My take on this is that to the extent that that particular finding is valid, then a lot of people don’t have very health marriages.
Aneil
#Delta
I don’t enjoy flying, and not because I’m afraid to fly. It’s just that with the hassles of going through security lines, checking bags, fees for everything it seems except using the restrooms on planes (please don’t get any ideas, airlines), rushing to make connections, yadda yadda yadda, I keep telling everyone we need to spend more our tax dollars on truly high-speed rail for any trip under a 1,000 miles.
That’s why I was delighted to get this email below from Delta this morning. After barely missing my Silver Medallion status last year, and because of flight cancellations, no less, with my current trip to Michigan, I just made it for next year, AND it is effective immediately. Thanks, Delta!
Aneil
|
|
|
|
|
Add this to pile of Olympian-scale corporate scandals. To quote Casey Kasem, ”the hits just keep on coming”:
TOKYO—The secret held for a quarter-century, quietly passed among senior executives. Within Olympus Corp. the goal was clear. Hide some $1.5 billion in investment losses from public view.
The toll on Olympus mounted as time went by. “The core part of the management was rotten, and that contaminated other parts around it.”
So concluded a 200-page reported issued Tuesday, the most complete account yet of a scandal that routed money through more than a dozen banks, funds and investment firms around the globe, ultimately leading to the departure of several top executives and putting the respected optical-equipment maker on the bubble for a stock delisting.
Starting in the mid-1980s, Olympus, along with other Japanese exporters, turned to speculative financial investments as a way to ease the sting of a surging yen with what they believed would be easy profits.
At Olympus, that strategy set in motion a chain of events that were the heart of the company’s accounting scandal, according to the report, written by a six-member outside panel appointed by the company last month.
“The situation was an epitome of the salaryman mentality in a bad sense,” said the panel, referring to Japan’s culture of corporate loyalty.
The four men devised a plan to transfer the bad assets off Olympus’s books to firms that weren’t officially connected with the company and so wouldn’t appear in Olympus’s accounts, the report said. The intention was to unwind those transactions gradually, allowing Olympus to take the losses secretly, over time. This type of operation had been employed by so many Japanese companies in the 1990s that it was widely known in Japan as tobashi, meaning, to send something flying away.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2011) — There’s definitely something to be said for first impressions. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests it can take just 20 seconds to detect whether a stranger is genetically inclined to being trustworthy, kind or compassionate.
The findings reinforce that healthy humans are wired to recognize strangers who may help them out in a tough situation. They also pave the way for genetic therapies for people who are not innately sympathetic, researchers said.“It’s remarkable that complete strangers could pick up on who’s trustworthy, kind or compassionate in 20 seconds when all they saw was a person sitting in a chair listening to someone talk,” said Aleksandr Kogan, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
Two dozen couples participated in the UC Berkeley study, and each provided DNA samples. Researchers then documented the couples as they talked about times when they had suffered. Video was recorded only of the partners as they took turns listening.
A separate group of observers who did not know the couples were shown 20-second video clips of the listeners and asked to rate which seemed most trustworthy, kind and compassionate, based on their facial expressions and body language.
The listeners who got the highest ratings for empathy, it turned out, possess a particular variation of the oxytocin receptor gene known as the GG genotype.
Friends:
Workers fired or disciplined for bad-mouthing employers on social-networking sites are fighting back using a decades-old labor law—a new front in the murky battle over what workers can do and say online.
Since the rise of Facebook and Twitter, companies believed they had the right to fire employees who posted complaints or hostile or rude comments online about their employers.
But in recent months, workers have sought to solve their very modern employment predicament by using the law that kick-started the U.S. labor movement: the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The law gives private-sector employees certain rights to complain about pay, safety and other working conditions. It doesn’t protect simple griping.More than 100 employers, including a saloon, a BMW dealership and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., have been accused by workers over the last 12 months of improper activity related to social-media practices or policies, according to the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that enforces the law and decides whether employees’ complaints have merit.
NLRB lawyers in Washington have decided that about half of the complaints they have reviewed thus far have sufficient merit for the agency to intervene, generally in the form of a civil complaint filed against employers on behalf of employees. Complaints are heard by an NLRB judge, who can order a remedy.
The NLRB actions, most of which involve nonunion employees, represent a new arena in which the agency is asserting itself in the workplace. It already is on the hot seat with Republicans and business groups, who say it has favored unions over employers under President Barack Obama’s watch, notably when it challenged Boeing Co.’s decision to install a nonunion production line in South Carolina.
Rafael Gomez of law firm Lo Tempio & Brown in Buffalo, N.Y., who is representing a nonprofit group in an NLRB case involving Facebook postings, said his case and others suggest the agency is “seeking to assert itself in a nonunion workplace.”
In a separate case, Dawnmarie Souza, a paramedic for American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc., was fired after calling her supervisor a “scumbag” on Facebook, from her home computer. She was unhappy the supervisor had questioned her about a customer complaint, according to the NLRB’s investigation.
The NLRB’s complaint on Ms. Souza’s behalf—the agency’s first ever involving a firing related to social media—came after NLRB lawyers in Washington concluded the firing was illegal because the postings were made during an online discussion among employees about supervisory action, which is considered “protected concerted activity” under the law.
The comments were provoked by what the NLRB deemed the supervisor’s unlawful denial of union representation during a workplace meeting about the customer complaint. The case was settled in February before it could advance to an NLRB administrative judge.
Whatever you write on Facebook or elsewhere, just make sure it’s the truth, and that you are prepared to defend it, perhaps in court, with or without the NLRB’s assistance.
Aneil
I had to replace my iPhone 4 32GB a few weeks ago when I left it in a New York City taxicab. I didn’t want to shell out $299 for a iPhone 4S 32GB, and so I just purchased an iPhone 4 8GB, figuring I would be buy the 64GB model of the iPhone 5 whenever it came out. I missed not having most of my songs on my 8GB model, but I listen to mostly the same songs or brand-new ones, so I was willing to put up with it. Now I don’t have to, thanks to Apple’s iTunes Match, which allows me to listen to any of my 5,000+ songs via its Cloud for only $25 a year. What a bargain! I just downloaded it today, and so far, it’s working flawlessly.
Here’s Walter Mossberg’s review of iTunes Match in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Now, Apple has introduced a locker service that mostly eliminates that problem by doing away with the need to upload the vast majority of your music, while still allowing you to populate your locker with your songs quickly and easily. It’s called iTunes Match, and it’s the last piece in the company’s rollout of its massive iCloud initiative, which includes things like wireless synchronization of contacts and calendars.
Here’s how it works. Instead of making you upload your song files to Apple’s servers, iTunes Match scans the iTunes library on your Macs or Windows PCs, then matches the titles you have with the 20 million songs Apple has the right to distribute via its iTunes store. If your songs are included in that 20 million, Apple simply places them in your online locker. In almost all cases, users will be left with only a small remnant of songs to upload—such as recordings by garage bands. (ITunes Match works only for digital music, not movies, TV shows or audiobooks, even if they’re available in iTunes.)
Once the songs are in the cloud, they also appear in your library in iTunes on computers, or in the Music apps on iPads, iPhones and iPod touch devices. You can stream the music, or press an icon with a downward arrow inside a cloud to download it. You can include up to 10 devices in iTunes Match. Plus, iTunes Match—which costs $25 a year for up to 25,000 songs—covers any song you own, regardless of how you obtained it. That includes songs purchased from non-Apple music services or imported from CDs, or even those that were downloaded illegally.
I’ve been testing iTunes Match on several Macs, a Windows PC, and on an iPad and an iPhone. In general, I found Match delivers on its promises, despite some limitations and glitches, several of which Apple told me it will remedy via software updates.Because of Match, my music collection is now complete and essentially identical on all my computers and on my iPad and iPhone, allowing me to access any of my songs from any of these devices, without manual synchronization via a cable, or paying more than once for the same song. My Match locker is even accessible from my Apple TV device.
![[BADMOUTH]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-BQ777A_BADMO_NS_20111201184527.jpg)
