macerate absoluteness

Monday, October 8, 2012

Factbox: Chavez battles Capriles for Venezuelan presidency

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The following are key facts about Chavez and Capriles, and their policy plans: FACTS ABOUT CHAVEZ * Born to a poor family in the Venezuelan plains in 1954, Chavez aspired to be a painter and then a professional baseball player. 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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/factbox-chavez-battles-capriles-venezuelan-presidency-113044103.html

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Earnings may not matter to new breed of investor

By BERNARD CONDON, Associated Press

NEW YORK --?One type of investor buys stocks when everyone is convinced that corporate earnings will fall. He buys because he thinks they're wrong and earnings will rise instead. Call him the contrarian.?

Another type of investor buys when everyone thinks that earnings will rise. He buys because he thinks they'll rise even more than expected. Call him the eternal optimist.

Now, the 3?-year-old bull market may have produced a third type of investor, an undiscovered breed with a curious strategy for success: He expects earnings to fall but buys anyway because he hopes it won't matter.

Call him the blind-faith investor. Or maybe just blind.

"How do you explain where the stock market is?" Barclays Capital stock strategist Barry Knapp said last week as the Standard & Poor's 500 inched higher yet again. "Stock prices are not warranted by the fundamentals."

The financial reporting season begins Tuesday, when Alcoa announces third-quarter results. Brace yourself: For three months, stock prices have risen while, in seeming contradiction, Wall Street analysts have slashed estimates for earnings.

Earnings for July through September are expected to drop 1.3 percent compared with a year earlier for S&P 500 companies, according to S&P Capital IQ, a research firm.

That would break an 11-quarter streak of rising earnings that began just after the Great Recession ended three and a half years ago. Earlier this year, analysts had expected earnings for the quarter to rise 7 percent.

To be fair to the bulls, it's generally future quarters that investors should be most concerned about, not the one that just passed. That's a time-honored rule of investing.

But analysts have been cutting estimates for those quarters, too. They've lowered forecasts for earnings growth for each of the next two quarters by a third since the summer, and as much as half since the beginning of the year.

The bad news started in July, when UPS, the world's largest package delivery company, said the global economy was slowing and lowered its 2012 profit forecast as a result.

Then FedEx said that shipping volume had fallen to recession levels, and that investors should expect lower earnings. Norfolk Southern, the giant railroad company, cut its forecast, too.

The flurry of so-called negative pre-announcements ranged across industries ? from steel maker Nucor Corp. and Applied Materials Inc., which sells semiconductor-chip-making machines, to Starbucks and Tiffany & Co.

On Tuesday, Fifth & Pacific, the company behind Juicy Couture products, said sales were weakening and it was likely to report lower earnings than expected, too. Investors pushed its stock down 11 percent in just a day.

Tally it up and 78 percent of companies issuing pre-announcements have suggested they will disappoint, according to FactSet, a financial data provider. That is the worst reading since FactSet began keeping records six years ago.

The problem is companies are running out of ways to increase earnings. You can see that in the results for the previous quarter, from April through June. Earnings for companies in the S&P 500 barely rose from a year earlier, just 0.8 percent.

U.S. economic growth has slowed to an annual rate of 1.3 percent, practically stall speed. Meanwhile, the old formula that companies have used to compensate ? pulling more profit out of each sale by trying to run leaner ? suddenly isn't working.

You can only cut expenses and squeeze workers so much, and many companies seem to have reached the limit. Profit margins are falling for the first time in the recovery, after hitting a record of nearly 9 percent, according to Goldman Sachs.

The other way U.S. companies have posted higher profits is by selling more abroad. But many of the 17 countries that use the euro have fallen into recession. And developing countries are facing headwinds now, too. China, India and Brazil are slowing. On Wednesday, the Asian Development Bank slashed its growth forecast for emerging economies this year and next.

So what's kept stocks rising? One theory is loose monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve announced last month a third round of bond-buying to try to stimulate the economy. That followed a bold plan by the European Central Bank to buy government bonds of struggling countries in its region.

"Central banks have single-handedly kept asset prices elevated," said Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at trading firm Miller Tabak Advisors. "It's certainly not the economy. It's certainly not the trajectory of earnings."

To be sure, analysts have been too pessimistic before, and investors who ignored them made money. Analysts expected earnings to fall in the first quarter of 2012, but they didn't. Those who bought the S&P 500 at the start of the year are up 16 percent.

And even if analysts are right and earnings fall, you can still make money buying stocks, though history suggests it's risky.

In the 46 quarters since the start of 2001, earnings for the S&P 500 have fallen 15 times. Seven of those times, stock prices rose the following three months, sometimes spectacularly.

In the first quarter of 2009, S&P 500 earnings plunged 35 percent. Yet investors who were brave enough to buy stocks enjoyed an S&P 500 gain of 15 percent over the next three months. If they held on after that, they doubled their money.

Similarly, investors won big who bought after the third quarter of 2001, when earnings fell 23 percent. Stocks rose 10 percent the following three months. But unlike in 2009, the next few quarters produced losses as earnings kept plunging. Stocks dropped for the next three quarters, in one of them by 18 percent.

Investors shrugging off disappointing earnings now are hoping the current period resembles 2009. But it's not a sure bet, and they may end up getting something closer to 2001 instead.?

More business news:

Where is the stock market headed in the next 6 months?

Source: http://marketday.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/07/14248051-earnings-may-not-matter-to-a-new-breed-of-investor

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Thursday, October 4, 2012

Compassion meditation may boost neural basis of empathy, study finds

ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2012) ? A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person's ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity.

"It's an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy," says lead author Jennifer Mascaro, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at Emory University. "Previous research has shown that both children and adults who are better at reading the emotional expressions of others have better relationships."

The meditation protocol, known as Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership. Although derived from ancient Tibetan Buddhist practices, the CBCT program is secular in content and presentation.

The research team also included senior author Charles Raison, formerly a psychiatrist at Emory's School of Medicine and currently at the University of Arizona, and Emory anthropologist James Rilling.

When most people think of meditation, they think of a style known as "mindfulness," in which practitioners seek to improve their ability to concentrate and to be non-judgmentally aware of their thoughts and feelings. While CBCT includes these mindfulness elements, the practice focuses more specifically on training people to analyze and reinterpret their relationships with others.

"The idea is that the feelings we have about people can be trained in optimal ways," Negi explains. "CBCT aims to condition one's mind to recognize how we are all inter-dependent, and that everybody desires to be happy and free from suffering at a deep level."

Study participants were healthy adults without prior meditation experience. Thirteen participants randomized to CBCT meditation completed regular weekly training sessions and at-home practice for eight weeks. Eight randomized control subjects did not meditate, but instead completed health discussion classes that covered mind-body subjects like the effects of exercise and stress on well-being.

To test empathic accuracy before and following CBCT, all participants received fMRI brain scans while completing a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). The RMET consists of black-and-white photographs that show just the eye region of people making various expressions. Those being tested must judge what the person in the photograph is thinking or feeling.

Eight out of the 13 participants in the CBCT meditation group improved their RMET scores by an average of 4.6 percent, while the control participants showed no increase, and in the majority of cases, a decrease in correct answers for the RMET.

The meditators, in comparison to those in the control group, also had significant increases in neural activity in areas of the brain important for empathy, including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These changes in brain activity accounted for changes in the empathic accuracy scores of the participants.

"These findings raise the intriguing possibility that CBCT may have enhanced empathic abilities by increasing activity in parts of the brain that are of central importance for our ability to recognize the emotional states of others," Raison says. "An important next step will be to evaluate the effects of CBCT on diverse populations that may particularly benefit from enhanced empathic accuracy, such as those suffering from high-functioning autism or severe depression."

Findings from the current study add to a growing database indicating that the CBCT style of meditation may have physical and emotional effects relevant to health and well-being. For example, previous research at Emory found that practicing CBCT reduced emotional distress and enhanced physical resilience in response to stress in both healthy young adults and in high-risk adolescents in foster care.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Emory University. The original article was written by Carol Clark.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

J. S. Mascaro, J. K. Rilling, L. Tenzin Negi, C. L. Raison. Compassion meditation enhances empathic accuracy and related neural activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2012; DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss095

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/KnF1GSwtq24/121004093504.htm

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ASUS VivoTab RT 10.1-inch Windows 8 RT tablet comes to AT&T later this year, we go hands-on (update: now with video!)

Asus VivoTab RT 101inch Windows 8 RT tablet comes to AT&T later this year, we go handson

The ASUS VivoTab RT is heading to AT&T exclusively this winter with 4G LTE -- that much we already knew. But how does it feel? Well, it feels like a super thin (0.33-inches) and light (1.1 lb.) Windows 8 RT tablet. The Tegra 3 quad-core processor packs more than enough power into the 10.1-inch, multitouch Super IPS screen to make swapping between apps and other such affairs a smooth snap, and 2GB of internal RAM certainly doesn't hurt in the speed department either. That 10.1-inch screen comes with ASUS' "TruVid" technology, which intends to make your viewing experiences all the more magical -- the screen looked plenty nice to us, as did media displayed on it, but perhaps not the "brilliant viewing experience" that ASUS is touting. There's still no price for the device or its non-RT cousin (not to mention those AT&T data plans), but we expect to hear more in the near future -- winter's only so long, right?

Gallery: Asus VivoTab RT (hands-on)

Continue reading ASUS VivoTab RT 10.1-inch Windows 8 RT tablet comes to AT&T later this year, we go hands-on (update: now with video!)

Filed under: Tablets, Mobile, ASUS

ASUS VivoTab RT 10.1-inch Windows 8 RT tablet comes to AT&T later this year, we go hands-on (update: now with video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/H1Gn_175FtA/

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High and Low: Robert Altman's 'A Wedding', Joe Dante's 'The Hole ...

This week?s DVD releases include ?lesser? but no less entertaining movies by two American mavericks working in their favorite genres: Robert Altman satirizing an American institution with an ensemble cast so large it practically needs the old Cinerama process to get everyone on the screen, and Joe Dante mixing laughs, jolts and teens in peril.

HIGH: A Wedding (Anchor Bay; $9.98 DVD)

WHO?S RESPONSIBLE: Written by John Considine, Patricia Resnick, Allan Nichols and Robert Altman; directed by Altman; starring Carol Burnett, Lillian Gish, Vittorio Gassman, Mia Farrow, Paul Dooley, Dina Merrill and Lauren Hutton.

WHAT IT?S ALL ABOUT: It?s the wedding day for Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) and Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker), but the happy couple don?t steal focus in Altman?s hilarious 1978 follow-up to Nashville. The class divide between the two families ? Dino?s related on his mother?s side to the wealthy, snobbish Sloan clan while the nouveau-riche Brenners own a truck stop ? provides the crux of the comedy, though all sorts of intriguing subplots, tropical storms, sexual secrets and all-around inappropriate behavior pop up throughout the happy day. With this many farcical goings-on in one huge mansion, it?s no surprise that Altman later turned this script into an opera.

WHY IT?S SCHMANCY: While critics often dismiss A Wedding, given that it comes on the heels of the director?s masterpiece, it?s a biting, bracing comedy that ranks among the great screen satires of the 1970s. If you?ve ever been to a big wedding, you know the phenomenon of not knowing who everyone is, and this film requires at least a few viewings before you can nail down all the relationships among the 48 ? twice as many as Nashville?s 24 ? characters. You?ll find those viewings to be rewarding, since there are so many hilarious performances and oddball supporting characters that you might miss the first time you watch.

WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT (AGAIN): This title was mostly lost in the shuffle for years. It was originally available on DVD only in a 2006 Altman box set with three other titles before becoming a solo release with little fanfare the following year. Now that Anchor Bay is giving A Wedding another go, movie fans who missed this gem in the Altman oeuvre have a chance to check it out. (Extras-wise, there?s but one featurette, and someone needs to release that opera on DVD, too.)

LOW: The Hole (Big Air Studios; $14.99 DVD, $20.99 Blu-Ray)

WHO?S RESPONSIBLE: Written by Mark L. Smith, directed by Joe Dante; starring Chris Massoglia, Haley Bennett, Nathan Gamble, Teri Polo, Bruce Dern, Dick Miller.

WHAT IT?S ALL ABOUT: After moving into a new house, brothers Dane (Massoglia) and Lucas (Gamble) discover a trapdoor held shut with a half-dozen padlocks. Consumed by curiosity, they open it, only to find a seemingly bottomless cavern on the other side. They soon realize that the hole knows what you fear most, and with the help of next-door neighbor Julie (Bennett), they fight to overcome their deepest terrors.

WHY IT?S FUN: The Hole has that overly-bright look you?ll recognize from cable movies and low-budget direct-to-DVD flicks, but nobody juggles comedy and horror like Dante, the man behind both Gremlins films, The Howling, Piranha and Matinee. Even if he?s working on the cheap, he?s still inventive and funny, and the film offers some effective frights and charming performances (particularly from Bennett and Gamble), all wrapped up in a moral not unlike the one currently being offered up by ParaNorman.

WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT (AGAIN): Minimally released in U.S. theaters, it?s more than likely that you missed this one during its all-too-brief run on the big screen. So, this DVD is your only chance to see the movie at all, even if the handful of extras offered here are pretty thin gruel.

Alonso Duralde has written about film for The Wrap, Salon and?MSNBC.com. He also co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast and regularly appears on ?What The?Flick?! (The Young Turks Network). ?He is a senior programmer for the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles and a pre-screener for the Sundance Film Festival. He also the author of two books: Have Yourself A Movie Little Christmas (Limelight Editions) and 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men?(Advocate Books).

Follow Alonso Duralde on Twitter.

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Source: http://movieline.com/2012/10/02/dvd-releases-a-wedding-robert-altman-the-hole-joe-dante-high-and-low/

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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Texans maintain top spot in AP's power rankings

NEW YORK (AP) ? The Houston Texans are on top of the AP Pro32 NFL power rankings again, and getting ready for the Monday night spotlight when they visit the New York Jets.

The Texans became the first team to retain the No. 1 spot after a resounding 38-14 rout of the Tennessee Titans to remain unbeaten in four games.

The other two unbeatens, Atlanta and Arizona, needed game-deciding field goals to stay perfect.

A week after becoming the fourth team in as many weeks to ascend to No. 1, Houston received 11 first-place votes and 382 points Tuesday from the 12-person panel of media members who regularly cover the NFL.

Atlanta remained second with 369 points, and Arizona was fifth with one first-place vote and 342 points.

All eyes will be on the Texans come Monday night, when quarterback Matt Schaub and defensive end J.J. Watt lead them against the Jets in New Jersey. The Jets dropped five places to 23rd after a 34-0 loss at home to San Francisco, which moved up a spot to fourth, just behind Baltimore.

"The Texans are making it look easy right now and have shown themselves to be the most well-rounded team in the NFL," said John Lynch of Fox Sports, and "J.J. Watt is having an MVP type season."

ESPN's Chris Berman chimed in that the Texans have "answered every test with authority."

The Falcons beat Carolina 30-28 on Matt Bryant's 40-yard field goal with 5 seconds left.

"Something special happening with the Falcons," said Rich Gannon of CBS Sports/Sirius XM, "and the players believe it as well."

The Cardinals rallied against Miami to force overtime on Kevin Kolb's 15-yard touchdown pass to Andre Roberts with 22 seconds left, then won 24-21 on Jay Feely's 46-yard field goal 6:31 into OT.

"They have won eight in a row at home," said the Chicago Tribune's Dan Pompei, who voted Arizona No. 1 for the second week in a row. "Even if a lot of the wins have been ugly, they still count."

"If the NFL conducted its coach of the year balloting at the end of September, Ken Whisenhunt would be the slam-dunk choice," said the Dallas Morning News' Rick Gosselin of the Cardinals coach.

New England was sixth, followed by Green Bay with Philadelphia up four places to eighth after its 19-17 win over the New York Giants, who tumbled seven spots to 11th.

"The Eagles are the NFL's shakiest 3-1 team with all three victories coming by a combined total of four points. No matter. They're still 3-1," said Alex Marvez of Foxsports.com.

Winless New Orleans was 26th, up a spot after its 28-27 loss to the Packers.

"Not even an impassioned speech from Drew Brees at a midweek team meeting was enough to get the Saints in the win column," said Bob Glauber of Newsday. "Stunningly, the season's just about over after a month."

Winless Cleveland was 32nd and last for the second straight week.

"That's 13 losses in their last 14 games, and, no, that's never a good sign for a head coach about to gain a new boss," said Clark Judge of CBSSports.com.

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Follow Richard Rosenblatt on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/rosenblattap

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Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/texans-maintain-top-spot-aps-power-rankings-200623908--nfl.html

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NEC Medias Tab UL runs Android 4.0, weighs just over half a pound (hands-on)

Folded in between DoCoMo R&D prototypes and One Piece-themed smartphones unlikely to make it across the Pacific, NEC's new Android tablet caught our eye. The 7-inch NEC Medias Tab UL is one very svelte slab. Measuring in at just 7.9mm (0.3 inches) thick and weighing a mere 250g (0.55 lbs), the tablet still manages to house a 3,100mAh battery, and a Snapdragon MSM8960 1.5GHz dual-core processor. If you'd compare it to the Nexus 7, Google's own effort look a little weighty and thick against this white-finish tablet. Performance from the dual-core chip is also suitably impressive, despite the curious DoCoMo-decked Android skin coating the Ice Cream Sandwich OS.

In true Japanese style, there's a TV aerial embedded within the side and while it won't broadcast the crisp high-definition delights of NOTTV, there's plenty of terrestrial viewing available -- if you stay in the Land of the Rising Sun. We were pleasantly surprised with its crisp WXGA screen, which looks to be TFT. The 1,280 x 800 resolution display meant videos and websites looked sharp, while there was barely any color degradation at wider angles. On DoCoMO's network, users can expect to see download speeds up to 75Mbs, and upload speeds hitting up to 25Mbps. The tablet is now on sale across Japan, but there's still no word yet on it launching elsewhere.

Gallery: NEC Medias Tab UL hands-on at CEATEC 2012