Leap Computer Interface
May 23rd, 2012Via: Leap:
More Facebook IPO Antics
May 23rd, 2012“There is often VERY strong voodoo at work…”
I don’t want to bore people with too many posts about this, but the stories are getting pretty interesting for being only a few days out from the IPO.
Here’s The Inside Story Of What Happened On The Facebook IPO:
The analysts cut their estimates because a Facebook executive who knew the business was weak told them to.
Put differently, the company basically pre-announced that its second quarter would fall short of analysts’ estimates. But it only told the underwriter analysts about this.
The information about the estimate cut was then verbally conveyed to sophisticated institutional investors who were considering buying Facebook stock, but not to smaller investors.
The estimate cut appears to have influenced the investment decisions of at least some institutional investors, dampening their appetite for Facebook stock, and crucially, affecting the price at which they were willing to buy Facebook stock.
As I described earlier, at best, this “selective disclosure” of the estimate cut is grossly unfair to investors who bought Facebook stock on the IPO (or at any time since) and didn’t know about it.
At worst, it’s a violation of securities laws.
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This one is a keeper. Don’t try to drink your coffee while reading this. You risk keyboard and monitor damage from uncontrollable laughter.
Hedge Funder Who Bet $100 Million On The Facebook IPO Just Called And Boy Was He Furious:
So Friday closes, everybody is saying what the fuck, I don’t know if I sold or not.
Iraqi Military to Buy U.S. Drones to Monitor Oil Fields
May 22nd, 2012Via: The Hill:
American military drones are returning to the skies above Iraq more than five months after U.S. troops withdrew from the country.
But this time, the drones will be operated by members of the Iraqi navy and will provide overwatch for the country’s oil platforms off its southern coast, U.S. officials in Baghdad said Wednesday.
The deal being will cover the sale of roughly 12 of the U.S. Navy’s Scan Eagle unmanned drones, a State Department official told The Hill on Monday.
The drones will be equipped with surveillance packages that will allow the aircraft to conduct day and night missions, the official said on the condition of anonymity.
Priest Claims Missing Teenage Girl Had Been Kidnapped ‘For Sex Parties by a Gang Involving Vatican Police and Foreign Diplomats’
May 22nd, 2012Via: Telegraph:
A teenage girl whose disappearance in Rome has remained a mystery for 30 years was kidnapped for sex parties by a gang involving Vatican police and foreign diplomats, the Roman Catholic Church’s leading exorcist has claimed.
Father Gabriele Amorth, who was appointed by the late John Paul II as the Vatican’s chief exorcist and claims to have performed thousands of exorcisms, said Emanuela Orlandi was later murdered and her body disposed of.
In the latest twist in one of the Holy See’s most enduring mysteries, he said the 15-year-old schoolgirl was snatched from the streets of central Rome in the summer of 1983 and forced to take part in sex parties.
“This was a crime with a sexual motive. Parties were organised, with a Vatican gendarme acting as the ‘recruiter’ of the girls.
“The network involved diplomatic personnel from a foreign embassy to the Holy See. I believe Emanuela ended up a victim of this circle,” Father Amorth, the honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists, told La Stampa newspaper.
The debate over who kidnapped Emanuela and what became of her has raged in Italy for three decades.
Secret, Emergency European Central Bank Aid Props Up Greek Banks
May 22nd, 2012Via: Financial Times:
There has been no official announcement. No terms or conditions have been disclosed. But Greece’s banking system is being propped up by an estimated €100 billion or so of emergency liquidity provided by the country’s central bank — approved secretly by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. If Greece were to leave the eurozone, the immediate cause might be an ECB decision to pull the plug.
Extensive use of “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA) to help banks in the weakest economies has been one of the less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis. Separate from normal supplies of liquidity and meant originally as a temporary facility for national authorities to use when banks hit problems, ELA proved a lifesaver for the financial system Ireland and is now even more so in Greece. As such, it has given the ECB — which has ultimate control over the facility — considerable power to determine countries’ fates.
FBI Investigates Bomb Threat at Site of New NSA Data Center in Utah
May 22nd, 2012Via: AP:
The FBI is investigating a bomb threat that halted construction of a National Security Agency data center at Utah’s Camp Williams.
FBI spokeswoman Debbie Dujanovic Bertram tells The Associated Press that agents are searching the site for anything suspicious.
Research Credit: KL
U.S. Lets China Bypass Wall Street Primary Dealers for Treasury Orders
May 22nd, 2012This is very interesting.
Via: Reuters:
China can now bypass Wall Street when buying U.S. government debt and go straight to the U.S. Treasury, in what is the Treasury’s first-ever direct relationship with a foreign government, according to documents viewed by Reuters.
The relationship means the People’s Bank of China buys U.S. debt using a different method than any other central bank in the world.
The other central banks, including the Bank of Japan, which has a large appetite for Treasuries, place orders for U.S. debt with major Wall Street banks designated by the government as primary dealers. Those dealers then bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions.
China, which holds $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, still buys some Treasuries through primary dealers, but since June 2011, that route hasn’t been necessary.
The documents viewed by Reuters show the U.S. Treasury Department has given the People’s Bank of China a direct computer link to its auction system, which the Chinese first used to buy two-year notes in late June 2011.
China can now participate in auctions without placing bids through primary dealers. If it wants to sell, however, it still has to go through the market.
The change was not announced publicly or in any message to primary dealers.
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
SpaceX Rocket Blasts Off for Space Station
May 22nd, 2012Via: AP:
A commercial rocket blasted off early Tuesday with a load of supplies for the International Space Station, opening a new era of dollar-driven spaceflight.
The SpaceX company made history as its Falcon 9 rocket rose from its seaside launch pad and pierced the pre-dawn sky, aiming for a rendezvous later this week with the space station. The rocket carried into orbit a capsule named Dragon that is packed with 1,000 pounds of space station provisions.
It is the first time a private company has launched a vessel to the space station. That’s something only major governments have done — until the present test flight. Launch controllers applauded when the Dragon reached orbit 9 minutes into the flight.
Harvard Medical School Facing Trial Over Massive Alzheimer’s Disease Research Fraud
May 21st, 2012Via: Alliance for Human Research Protection:
The US Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit overturned a summary judgement by a lower court ordering a whistleblower lawsuit filed by Dr. Kenneth Jones against Harvard Medical School, its teaching hospitals, Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Dr. Marilyn Albert (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Ronald Killiany to proceed to trial.
The case involves the largest Alzheimer’s disease [AD] research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (from 1980 through 2007) for a large project aimed at identifying early physical signs of Alzheimer’s by scanning certain regions of the brain with MRIs.
Dr. Jones was the chief statistician for the NIH grant. He blew the whistle after realizing that measurements used to demonstrate the reliability of the study had been secretly altered. Without these alterations, Dr. Jones explained, there was no statistical significance to the major findings of the study. When he insisted that the altered measurements be subjected to an independent reliability study, and that the manipulated results could not be presented as part of a $15 million federal grant extension application, he was terminated and his career came to an end.
The allegations in the suit concern multiple research fraud: data manipulation, significant deviations from the protocol, altered and re-traced MRI scans. To get positive results, Dr. Jones alleges, Dr. Killiany “fraudulently altered the MRI study data prior to 1998 to produce false results of a statistically significant correlation between conversion to AD and volume of the EC [entorhinal cortex].” US ex rel. Jones v. Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University.
He further alleged that Dr. Albert and Dr. Killiany violated federal regulations (43 CFR 50.103(c)(3) by making false statements in the NIH grant application. Statements that “were predicated on falsified data that the defendants, knowing of this falsity, failed to take corrective action or disavow the data.”
Research Credit: anchoviesmegma
Wisconsin Cops Tell Woman to Bring Cash to Bail Son Out of Jail, Then Steal Her Money
May 21st, 2012Via: Huffington Post:
When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.
She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer’s wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer’s bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. “The police specifically told us to bring cash,” Greer says. “Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash.”
So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.
Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.
“I told them the money had just come from the bank,” Beverly Greer says. “We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don’t understand how they could do that.”
The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It’s a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair.
It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family’s money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. “The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money,” Williams says. “Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money.”
