Author (#1)September 2007 Archives

Researchers studying handedness found data in a group of early 20th-century films of everyday English life.

The researchers concluded left-handedness declined in Victorian England because of social and school pressures and the rise of industrial tools, among other factors, reaching bottom around the turn of the 20th century.


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If it were a movie, it would have been a blockbuster. It it were a book, it would have passed "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Los Angeles Business from bizjournals: First-day sales for 'Halo 3' top summer blockbusters, last 'Potter' book

Steady growth in earnings is a touchstone of value investing, but Mark Hulbert, editor of The Hulbert Financial Digest, writes in NY Times piece: Strategies: How Many Quarters in a Row Can Earnings Really Grow? says it's likely managers are doing lots of legal manipulation to make those earnings consistent.

Hulbert reports on research by three accounting professors who find that no more than 46 companies during that 42-year period should have had earnings-per-share growth for 20 consecutive quarters. But 587 companies actually reported such strings of growth, so the professors conclude that their findings constitute “prima facie evidence of earnings management.”

Those companies with the consistent earnings do trade for higher PE ratios compared to other companies, even those with slightly more fluctuations in earnings, and the companies can be penalized strongly if the streaks are broken.

The clear investment implication is that we shouldn’t bet too heavily on companies that have reported long strings of increases in quarterly earnings per share.

Such companies’ stocks will most likely have already been bid up to too-lofty a level, and will therefore be especially vulnerable to a big decline once the string of earnings gains comes to an end.

Ken Burns documentary "The War" has aired this week. When possible we're watching, and recording the programs.

The "voices" that are becoming the most important to me are Tom Hanks' voice of Al McIntosh, owner and editor of The Rock County Star Herald and Ernie Pyle's columns. McIntosh regularly wrote of the life in the Luverne, Minn. during the time of the war. The excerpts are very strong written in an underplayed style that passes on the dignity and routine of the folks back home.

Ernie Pyle is much better known for his columns written of the life of the soldier in Europe and for living the life of the soldiers. In the series, Pyle's columns are read by Kevin Conway.

WSJ: For Facebook, GeoCities Offers a Cautionary Tale: Can Rise and Fall of Once-Hot Site Sway Decisions on Funding, IPO?

Geocities was one of the hottest properties of the internet in the mid-1990s. Lots of folks built their first sites and posted their first photos on Geocities. It also led to several clones, Angelcities, Tripod and others. Geocities was purchased by Yahoo, Tripod was purchased by Lycos. It was the early days when search engines were expanding to portals.

And now there's Facebook, Del.icio.us, digg and mySpace. From WSJ: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old when David Bohnett, then a 37-year-old mainframe programmer, hatched an idea: Set up a Web-based "community" where young people could divulge their most intimate feelings.

Good story on how fleeting hot on the internet can be, how companies often spend billions to buy stuff and then not know what do with it and how hard it is to build a sustainable long-term business

"It's not that easy to monetize social media," says Eric Hippeau, a managing partner of Softbank Capital that made more than 20 times its investment in GeoCities. He also sits on Yahoo's board. "Once Microsoft's deal with Facebook expires, as does Google's deal with MySpace, they're going to have to sell advertising for themselves and it's going to be a challenge." So far, he says, "it's not that easy to match the right advertising with the right audience."

Facebook is still a hot property. The day before WSJ's article, Microfsoft was eyeing an investing up to $500 million for a 5 percent stake in Facebook. WSJ has some of the history of Geocities, as does Wikepedia's history of Geocities.

The NY Times drops Times Select. Lost Remote's Cory Bergman: Times Select has been the great experiment in premium newspaper content (the WSJ is a different animal). So does this put a nail in the coffin of the premium online news model?.

NY Times' action leads to speculation that Rubert Murdoch will open even more of the Wall Street Journal. Will Murdoch be putting money in my pocket?

Also: Lost Remote: Learning the right lesson from the Times Select experiment, which includes the end of CNN's Pipeline:

Times Select believed that people would pay for its writers because it is “The Times.” CNN believed people would subscribe to its video service because it’s “CNN.” This is no different from stations and newspapers believing that people will visit their sites because they are “the news channel” or they have “the brand” for trust. The fact is that the information rules.

On the Web, you can’t assume your offline brand means anything. That’s especially true when there is so much information that is so similar to your own. (Admit it.) Learn the lesson from Times Select — the right lesson. No — not that people won’t pay you anything. The lesson is that you have to rethink your brand and what it means to meet the online audience on their terms.

NY Times: At 25, ‘McPaper’ Is All Grown Up. Most journalists criticized its glibness, its charts and its style of coverage. Now more papers have adopted the look and USA Today has also turned more serious growing in respect. It's now the largest-circulated daily newspaper in the U.S. with 2.3 million surbscribers (a large chunk still from hotel subscriptions) and it's been making money for about 15 years, though not at the profit margin of other papers. One industry-wide impact from USA Today -- most daily papers now have large weather maps.

One month does not make a year, but I was surprised to read in PaidContent.org that while most newspapers and other news media saw in increase in online advertising in August, McClatchy reported a 3 percent drop in online advertising. Peer papers such as Lee and Journal Communications reported gains as did most other online new organizations. Given that, it's not surprising McClatchy also reported a drop in print advertising -- mostly from a drop in residential advertising.

Vintage Superermarket Photos has two dozen photos of grocery stores from the past. The photos looks like they're from the 50s and 60s. It looks familiar to me.

The Wall Street Journal had a story in the Friday print edition Detroit Auto Makers Try Some New Tricks on how difficult it is for domestic automakers are having trouble convincing new car buyers despite improvements in quality and design. The chart below is a portion of a chart in the paper:

This shows that 69 percent of owners of a domestic vehicle bought another domestic vehicle. What caught my eye was how low the percentage of owners of European vehicles who bought another European vehicle -- 41 percent.

Haha.nu explains how to take maple leaves from the fall and turn them into roses. I don't know...maple leaves seem pretty enough as is.

Read: "The Human Factor" by Graham Greene -- Rather than a last-minute mad dashes to save the world, "The Human Factor" looks at the lives of a settled agent, his wife and her child and the moral issues the agent faces. In his mind he's not betraying his country, but in the end we see that he saw only part of the picture. His bosses and others were playing different games. I liked the book, but it helps to have an appreciation of life during the Cold War. "Human Factor" entry in Wikipedia.

A day after the story about Eons.com cutting staff, (Maybe baby boomers don't want social networking), is a piece in today's NY Times: New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age. Besides eons, there are others, including Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown.

Social networking has so far focused mainly on businesspeople and young people because they are tech-savvy and are treasured by Madison Avenue.

But there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.

Eons.com, which marketed itself as the social networking site for baby boomers, is cutting is laying off about a third of its staff and plans a restructuring, according to Boston Business Journal. From January: MySpace for boomers