text:
Are Gold Stocks Undervalued?

 |  Includes: DGL, GDX, GLD, IAU
by: Moses Kim

Gold investors will remember the shellacking of gold shares starting in the fall of 2008. Gold bugs threw in the towel and everyone proclaimed the end of the gold bull market. Instead of collapsing, gold shares went on to have one of the most dramatic rallies in recent memory.

While the current correction in gold shares hasn’t been as drastic, the level of undervaluation is similar. In 2008 when gold shares collapsed, at least gold was falling precipitously too. However, in 2011, gold and gold shares have disconnected: gold is up 10% on the year while the HUI is down 16%. This is creating levels of undervaluation in gold shares we last saw in March 2009.

Due to the bifurcation in the gold market, the GOLD: HUI ratio, which measures the relative value of gold to gold shares, is at multi-year highs. This is a buy signal for gold shares.

click to enlarge images

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The last time the ratio was this high, the HUI embarked on an intermediate term rally that ended only after the HUI doubled in 8 months. This is the type of potential rally that is developing in gold shares.

Click to enlarge

Not many gold bulls are comparing this period to the one in 2008-2009, but the undervaluation in gold shares is similar. Meanwhile, the global economy has deteriorated and our debt load has risen by about 50%. Civil unrest has spread throughout the world and the Euro experiment is unraveling. The extent to which big-time global investors are now buying gold directly from gold producers is unprecedented.

The fundamentals continue to improve for gold, yet people are getting bearish. This should get gold bulls excited because the most explosive rallies occur when everyone is bearish. Gold shares may correct and consolidate from here, but it appears a strong rally in gold shares is developing for 2012.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Type: response

text:
Oracle Corporation, Taleo Corp. - M&A Call (Transcript)

Apr.26.12 | About: Oracle Corporation (ORCL)

Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL)

M&A Call

April 26, 2012 12:00 pm ET

Mark V. Hurd - President and Director

Steve Miranda - Senior Vice President of Applications Development

Jason Blessing - Executive Vice President of Products and Technology

Neil Hudspith - Chief Customer officer and Executive Vice President

Mark V. Hurd

Well, welcome, and thank you for joining our webcast. We announced the close of the Taleo acquisition earlier this month, so a special welcome to all of our Taleo customers.

This acquisition is particularly important to us because we're adding the leader in cloud recruiting and talent management to our Fusion HCM cloud. Taleo's cloud manages 15% of all the hires in the U.S. and is one of the world's largest cloud deployments, with nearly 16 billion transactions per year. Oracle is now the only vendor that can offer a complete suite of core HR systems, combined with recruiting, talent management and analytics, on-premise and in the cloud. Together, we'll help companies drive exceptional organizational performance.

Strategic talent management is no longer a nice-to-have investment. It's a key driver of business success and financial performance. In fact, it's the #1 issue for CEOs today. Many companies know more about their laptops than they do their people.

Talent management is one of the last major business functions that has to be automated. HR typically doesn't have the tools to provide the management information or the data to be able to benchmark results. Only 25% of organizations today have HR-related KPIs, or key performance indicators. Companies that can make data-driven decisions deliver as much as 40% higher profitability per employee. So this is a big deal. Oracle Fusion HCM with Taleo will now provide the applications and the analytics to help companies improve performance, drive growth and to become more competitive.

Let me give you a couple of scenarios, in fact, I'll give you 3. Hiring and recruiting. First scenario, we're hiring aggressively to grow our sales force. It's important to hire the right people the first time around, because every bad hire can cost you $500,000. Simple math, do 10 poor hiring decisions, costs you $5 million. And I've got to get them on board and productive as quickly as I possibly can. Positions not filled have a direct impact on my ability to deliver on my sales targets.

Scenario 2, identifying and retaining top talent. 80% of companies can't even identify the top performers who are a flight risk, and they don't know if career plans are in place for those employees. As a leader, I've got to decide if I invest more in retention or recruiting for each function, big decision. Do I retain what I have? Do I recruit more? I need data. What's the tenure of employees in certain positions? Is their compensation right? Is there opportunity for them to advance?

Scenario 3, how much of a focal or increase should I plan and pay for this year? I look at my goals, attrition rates and benchmark our compensation against the industry. I need to understand the impact of choosing a 3% or a 4% increase. Should it be the same for every geography? Should it be the same for every job category, every function in the organization?

With Taleo, Oracle expects to help human resources teams elevate their strategic contribution to the business to allow HR organizations to effectively consult, advise and lead companies on how to address the issues that I've described, full suite of solutions, simplify HCM and talent management through cloud delivery and mobile access to those capabilities, powerful analytics and data that drives leadership strategy and talent productivity.

Now here to give you some more details are Steve Miranda. Steve is Senior Vice President of Oracle Development; Jason Blessing, who's Taleo's EVP of Product Development; and Neil Hudspith, Taleo's Chief Customer Officer. And I'm pleased to announce that both Jason and Neil have accepted leadership positions at Oracle. It ensures continuity of relationships with Taleo customers, maintains vision and expertise for the Taleo products, and I'm thrilled they could join us today as well.

So with that, let me hand it off to Steve.

Steve Miranda

Great. Thank you, Mark, and thank you for joining us, everyone. As Mark mentioned, the way we work has changed. Not only is the competition for top talent really increased, increased globally, our access to information, the number of devices we consume information has dramatically increased and changed, and really, the added importance of finding, recruiting, retaining and then effectively making the top talent effective has become very, very critical to the companies, not only as the Chief HR Officer, the head of recruiting in a company but really every manager throughout the enterprise.

So as these changes take place in organizations, what are we doing or what are the trends that we see within HCM or, really, the future of HCM? And they come into a couple of different areas. The first is really simplifying the HCM product, not only from delivery quickly to be able to deliver in a very agile methodology in cloud and then to have that delivery across multiple different channels, including, and especially, mobile as it becomes much more pervasive throughout the enterprise.

And in addition to simplify, you need a much more connected process to -- full life cycle from finding the top talent, retaining the top talent, training the top talent and then having that life cycle of data feedback so that you will have a virtuous cycle, if you will, of data to help you improve that process throughout, to simplify HCM and make HCM and every manager enterprise more effective.

In addition to that, there are other data elements, if you will, that come into play that -- which should help customers and organizations accelerate their business success, really, data points that we've never had before: social HCM, not only internal to the enterprise but external to the enterprise; taking advantage of real time analytics to make decisions faster and with data-driven decisions rather than intuition-driven decisions; and then taking that one step further to further use the patterns that you see and technology capabilities to give HR professionals and managers predictive analytics.

With these trends is what -- we're so excited to be able to deliver the -- what we believe is the most complete cloud HCM and talent management suite on the market today. Added to the already available in-the-cloud Fusion HCM products, including global HR, global payroll, workforce management, we now have a complete suite of talent management products: recruiting and onboarding; learning; performance; engagement and retention; comp, including incentive comp and rewards; as well as talent review. And underlying and across all those products, all available via mobile, integrated solutions with embedded analytics, not only analytics for like key performance and benchmarks but also predictive analytics, and all available at Oracle's reliable and secure cloud of Enterprise scale going forward.

And really, the combination then of Taleo with Oracle brings you the world's leading and best-in-class Taleo recruiting and onboarding, learning and development. We've added to the Oracle performance management product a Taleo performance management product, really giving both perspectives, not only performance management that ties back into recruiting but has tight integration with HR so you get that closed loop functionality. And then on the back end, really, the Oracle products that we've had: engagement and retention, compensation, talent review and core HR.

And the key here is now the combined entities of Oracle and Taleo. We can start to accelerate the investment across all of these products by bringing what Taleo has done very, very well in their cloud applications, in their cloud service offerings with what Oracle's done well, not only with the Oracle cloud applications but to be able to really expose the broad set of Oracle applications and the Oracle set of technology and delivery capabilities to the Taleo customer base going forward.

To explain little bit more of that, let me introduce Jason Blessing. Jason is the EVP of Taleo Products and Technology. Jason?

Jason Blessing

Thanks, Steve, and good morning, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our webcast today. As Mark said in his opening comments, I've decided to join Oracle, and I'm extremely excited about the opportunity. My team is also being brought over into Oracle intact, and we'll continue to focus on Taleo products and Taleo and Oracle customer success. I also think that as part of Oracle, we can deliver more value to our customers through a much broader offering and also by bringing faster, more rapid innovation into our product suites.

This morning, I'd like to accomplish 2 things. First, I'd like to ensure the participants on the webcast understand the breadth of our combined offering, and I also want to make sure that our customers understand where we are investing. It's also important for the Taleo customers to know that we intend to continue to support and invest in the Taleo products. In fact, we plan to proceed with our current planned release schedules for both the Taleo and Oracle product suites.

Let me start by talking about our industry-leading talent acquisition solution. As Mark stated earlier, talent management is the #1 issue for CEOs, and finding and hiring the right people is one of the most important steps in addressing that issue. Our recruiting product provides the most comprehensive set of tools to both source talent and then match this talent up with key roles in an organization. We plan to continue to invest heavily in our Recruiting offering, and we'll be directing that investment in the following areas.

First, we plan to improve our integrations with Oracle's core HR systems to really streamline the hiring process, make it easier for our customers. We also plan to enhance the candidate experience, making it easier for candidates to apply on devices, such as mobile and tablets, and also giving our customers more control over the career website experience. This is something our customers have asked for. We've heard you, and we're going to deliver on that this year.

And we also plan to further invest in predictive analytics so companies can better optimize their sourcing spend, which is often one of the largest line items in an HR budget. For example, people spend a lot of money on talent acquisition around things such as media, campus recruitment, et cetera. In fact, the annual spend around sourcing is over $15 billion a year. And we want to help our customers predict the timing of hiring, as well as the best sources for recruitment, so again they can optimize that spend.

Mark also talked about the importance of investing in and growing internal talent. Now many of you know this, but building talent is usually cheaper than buying it on the open market. And Taleo's learning and development product allows companies to grow world-class talent internally. Our product supports formal, informal and social learning.

For example, just last week, I read a great book on leadership. Our product allows me to propagate that out to my team. I'd like my team to read it. Our learning system allows me to put the reading of that book in their development plan and allows the team members in my group to collaborate on that book as they read it. We're also one of the few vendors that can support your for-profit training business in addition to internal training, all on the same cloud-based platform.

This year, we will continue to focus our learning and development effort or investment in a few key areas. First, the value proposition of a learning system is really enhanced when it's integrated tightly with performance management. This allows your customers to ensure that your employees with the highest potential get access to the right learning content, as well as the right development tools. And finally, we're planning some exciting new ways to push learning out into both social and mobile environments.

On to performance management. We have and we'll continue to differentiate our performance management capabilities based on ease of use. We believe ease of use aids in adoption, which helps turn performance management into an ongoing conversation between a manager and an employee versus a conversation that only happens on an annual basis.

Organizations can also configure their performance processes in our application to match their business practice. Workers and managers can easily navigate through the process and complete evaluations that are aligned to their HR practices and their recruitment practices. For example, the combination of PM and recruiting allows you to better recruit the people that are similar to the star performers in your organization.

We also believe that the value proposition of performance management is greatly improved when it's both integrated with the talent management suite as well as core HR. This will enable our customers to leverage the information such as goals, competencies, career aspirations to have a much more complete view of an employee when reviewing their performance. To support this vision, we will continue to invest in the usability of our products and integrating performance management with core HR and also continuing to broaden out the talent profile.

Social and goal management is another key area of investment for us, which we think will make it easier for teams to collaborate around shared goals and drive better business results in an area.

Another key aspect of our offering are tools that are designed to improve employee engagement and retention. One of the keys to successful employee engagement is ensuring that they have visibility into their own HR information and control over their own HR activities, whether they're related to changing personal information or something having to deal with a talent management process, such as updating competencies or goal progress.

Our plan is to expand the Oracle Fusion talent base, which is already the foundation to help workers and managers own their own HR transactions. This includes things such as updating skills assessments and the ability to compare people in jobs to ensure best fit for performance. Employees will also be able to use this tool to do things like find mentors and collaborate with other employees that have similar likes.

We will also be moving quickly to bring together the best aspects of Taleo and Fusion's employee profile to deliver a single comprehensive view of your entire employee population. And the best part, all of this functionality is represented in a very easy-to-navigate org chart.

Compensation and rewards is another very important investment area for us. Effectively compensating employees is a challenge for most managers. Our compensation products empower organizations to pay for performance with a comprehensive approach to both focal compensation and incentive comp, all in one product.

Modeling and budgeting capabilities are also included so that organizations can define compensation plans and build complex calculations to ensure they are making the best use of their compensation budget and allocating it to the right people. The product also is underpinned with best-in-class analytics to support strategic planning and the allocation of compensation rewards based on a comprehensive view of an employee or a group of employees, again to make sure you're rewarding and incenting the right people.

As we look forward, we will be adding market data to the applications on pay to allow customers to better benchmark their compensation plans to what's going on in the industry. We will also be adding more capabilities around grade-step progression and matrix management for -- to compensation to better support hourly workers and complex reporting assignments.

Talent review. We are hearing more and more from our customers about the need to attract and keep top talent. How do we identify key players, and how do we ensure that they are placed into the positions where they can be most successful? The talent view process -- talent review process is an opportunity for managers to identify and also align their top performers and high potential employees with the right roles and responsibilities in the organization.

Talent review is a visualization tool that helps managers get a much better understanding of their organization's strengths, their organization's potential while also providing additional information, such as formal and also the ever-increasing important informal performance feedback on their employees, so they have a complete picture of all of the employees in their organization.

Now going forward, we will add the ability to do individual comparisons within the visualization tool. And we will also plan to leverage talent pools, a concept that Taleo brought to the table, and recruiting profiles, to see what the pipeline looks like for key positions to make -- and also making sure that employees have an opportunity to participate in talent reviews to make sure they are appropriately slated for new positions.

Moving on to Taleo Business Edition. I'm proud to say that Taleo Business Edition is the most widely deployed talent management platform in the industry for small- and medium-sized customers. We have over 4,700 customers that use Taleo Business Edition. With Taleo Business Edition, we offer a flexible try-before-you-buy approach that allows our customers to experience the full suite of talent management products before entering into a contract.

Taleo Business Edition will continue to be supported as a part of Oracle and will continue to receive new investment. This new investment will be directed towards making the product easier to deploy and use. We also plan to add new capabilities to all modules, with a specific focus on improving the recruiter experience and also adding new features to both performance management and learn.

As I said earlier, joining forces with Oracle will give us access to a much broader technology portfolio, which will allow us to more quickly deliver innovation to our customers. Mobile is a fantastic example of this. Oracle has already made significant strides in their mobile development framework, and we at Taleo are very excited to see Fusion for tablets coming to market this year. And by leveraging Oracle's mobile development framework, we will be able to push more and more key talent management functionality out to tablets and mobile phones as we bring the products together.

We also envision providing candidates with better tools to apply for jobs from mobile devices, as well as applications that allow employees to access everything from their talent profile to learning content while on the go. This is going to allow us to better serve the needs of today's mobile candidates and mobile workforce.

The combination with Oracle also allows us to accelerate our vision of embedding social collaboration constructs, things such as feeds, following threaded discussions directly into the talent management processes. We will do this by leveraging the innovative Oracle Social Network product offering.

We feel that embedding social aspects into our products can do a few things. It can improve key business processes, such as sourcing new talent or teams collaborating around goals and performance reviews. This social collaboration will improve both the user experience, the business value of the systems and, overall, the richness of the data being collected in the applications.

The next area of focus for us is analytics, accelerating business insight. Until now, most business intelligence solutions had been focused on what happened. They've been rearview-mirror focused. How many requisitions did we fill? How much did they cost? How long did it take to fill these requisitions? We think that there is a huge opportunity to look differently at business intelligence, by focusing on what's happening right now and into the future, to give managers more information to make better decisions to guide their business.

We are also planning to expand our investment in workforce predictions. Today, we can provide insight to our customers, somewhat of an early warning system, to highlight employees who could be at risk or those who are likely to be top performers in the future that perhaps we just haven't identified yet. We also plan to go further and tie in recruiting and learning data, again, to help predict employee success, and we also anticipate allowing customers to use the tools to help reengage or redeploy employees on higher value-add assignments who might be at risk at the company.

And finally, one of the areas that I'm most excited about is accelerating our Big Data solutions. Again, this is another area where the combination of Taleo and Oracle benefits our customers through accelerated innovation. As Mark talked about in his opening comments, Taleo has a massive data store that contains key insights. For example, our data shows from which source a company is most likely to find a critical hire, like a software engineer here in Silicon Valley, how much they'll cost to get on board and how long it will take for the company to on-board them. This is a very simple example but it shows how our data can be packaged and leveraged by our customers at a much more strategic level to drive business planning and also optimize sourcing costs.

Oracle has done a tremendous job building engineered systems that combine hardware and software, solutions like Exadata and Exalytics machines. We will take advantage of this investment, these solutions, to help unlock the insights in our data store and share those learnings back with you, our customers, embedding these insights directly in the applications. Again, this is another great example of where our combined efforts can deliver differentiated value to our customers.

And with that, I'm now going to hand it back to Steve, and Steve's going to wrap up the application section of our presentation. Thank you.

Steve Miranda

Thank you, Jason. Welcome to Oracle.

Jason Blessing

Thank you.

Steve Miranda

So and really for the class of customers we have out there, for those of you who are Taleo customers who aren't Oracle customers, welcome to you as well, and welcome to Oracle. And hopefully, you've seen, from Jason's detailed roadmap, that we're doing a couple of key takeaways for you as a Taleo customer.

First, we're continuing with Taleo's roadmap across all the products to deliver value based on our customer feedback and customer success the Taleo product line has had for a number of years. Second, we're accelerating that investment by leveraging Oracle application investment with tight integrations to Fusion HCM and components that come in the Fusion Talent Management suite as well. And then finally, really accelerating that investment in terms of what Oracle can bring to the table technology-wise to help Taleo accelerate and speed to market mobile, business intelligence, as well as social solutions, again, all available in the cloud, all available as you expect it through the normal upgrades that Taleo provides today.

Now if you're a current Taleo customer and also an Oracle customer or use Oracle PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite or Fusion, again, you will continue to see the same investment that Jason went through, as well as investment in the Fusion Applications, in PeopleSoft, in e-Business Suite but now we have identified opportunities to really make this integration easier and better for you. So instead of dealing with 2 different companies, Oracle has taken on the task of doing that integration to deliver a much more comprehensive solution for you, the joint customer.

And finally, if you're neither a customer of either Oracle nor Taleo for talent management or for HR, we really want to offer you the best of both worlds and really give you the decisions to be able to be flexible and make the business decision that makes most sense for you across a number of dimensions, which product, whether you want to have a full suite of applications, full suite of combined HR and talent management or even one particular product deployed quickly, available in the cloud to best serve your business needs. And really, this is what we think is the strength of Oracle applications: Customer choice, comprehensive solutions.

So really, to wrap from the product side, we feel very excited to have Taleo on board and as part of the Oracle product family and really part of the Oracle cloud. We believe we're the only vendor that combines a comprehensive HCM and talent management solution in the cloud, again, full circle and completely integrated from recruiting, talent acquisitions, learning, performance, talent review, on the core HR, payroll, benefits, incentive compensation, all of which has social, mobile and business intelligence underlying it for rapid customer success and rapid customer adoption in this changing world that we have in managing top talent.

So with that, let me introduce Neil Hudspith. Neil is Taleo's Chief Customer Officer. Neil?

Neil Hudspith

Thank you very much, Jason and Steve. It is great to be here with you today.

One of the things that has made Taleo great are the extraordinary clients who use our technology every day to create competitive advantage through talent. Since the acquisition by Oracle was announced, I've had the pleasure of meeting with many of our clients and partners, the community we serve, who have overwhelmingly expressed their support of this great combination.

There are a few key areas that they find particularly compelling. The combination of Oracle and Taleo will deliver the only, the only, complete HCM and talent management offering in the cloud, a complete solution that delivers talent insights to business leaders, enabling growth, organizational optimization and, ultimately, driving, in my opinion, the holy grail, employee engagement. Secondly, Oracle's leadership and investment in HCM and talent management, combined with Taleo's data store, is expected, in fact, will provide a wave of innovation like we have never seen before. And lastly, Oracle and Taleo's combined technology and expertise in the field of HR and talent analytics, helping HR managers deliver metrics and performance data to the boardroom to help drive profitability and growth.

One of the many ways that we engage with our clients is through the Customer Executive Council, a group of Taleo's top 25 customers who meet regularly to provide guidance, best practices and insight to our leadership teams and to one another. In a meeting we held a few weeks ago in San Francisco, we spent time discussing an integrated solution with Oracle embracing the cloud, mobile and social, and it was energizing to hear the passion and excitement they had around the future of Oracle's HCM vision and products.

Reinforcing the themes I've just shared, I just want to share with you a few insights from specific customers that were provided about our acquisition. A leading grocery store chain who is focused on talent management analytics said they believe a strong integration between Taleo and Oracle BI and HCM solutions will help them have a more strategic voice inside their company. A top consulting firm said they believe the Oracle-Taleo partnership will lead to a more powerful and rewarding customer and, importantly, end-user experience. And lastly, one of the largest healthcare management companies said they are enthusiastic about the Oracle-Taleo acquisition due to the combination of top Taleo talent along with the strong reputation and financial backing of Oracle. And I love this last piece, they believe it makes us unstoppable.

As you would have sensed, I am passionate about our customer's success. And I want you to know that Oracle shares exactly the same passion and commitment: To continue and accelerate our journey to becoming the most used, the most used talent software on the planet.

I am delighted to be joining Oracle with the vast majority of the Taleo engineering, sales and services teams who will be joining Oracle. For our Taleo customers, your support teams remain unchanged. You will continue to work with the same teams that have provided you with the excellent support that you have come to expect from Taleo.

And finally, I'm delighted to announce that Oracle has planned to continue our Taleo World conference on September 11 through the 14 in Chicago. Taleo World, it's all about ideas and innovation, featuring dozens of informative breakout sessions, offering Taleo customers the opportunity to learn more about the combined product strategy. We are also thrilled to welcome all of Oracle's HCM customers, too.

Thank you so much for joining the webcast today, and I look forward to seeing all of you in Chicago in September.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of Seeking Alpha. However, we view them as an important resource for bloggers and journalists, and are excited to contribute to the democratization of financial information on the Internet. (Until now investors have had to pay thousands of dollars in subscription fees for transcripts.) So our reproduction policy is as follows: You may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to Seeking Alpha and either link to the original transcript or to All other use is prohibited.

If you have any additional questions about our online transcripts, please contact us at: Thank you!

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-153-172-175.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-36
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


text:
Value Mole's  Instablog

Value Mole
Send Message
I am an individual investor that has spent 8 years on Wall Street and now resides in Shanghai, China. I manage my own portfolio only and my goal is to help all individual investors also become comfortable managing their own money. I focus on value stocks.
  • "Deeper Dig on DuPont" by Value Mole 0 comments
    Jul 29, 2010 3:51 AM | about stocks: DD, MMM

    DuPont (NYSE:DD) recently reported 2Q10 earnings that easily exceeds Wall Street expectations by nearly 25%, reporting 2Q10 EPS of $1.17 per share versus Wall Street average of $0.94 her share.  The Company also raised its 2010 full year projections nearly 15% from $2.50 - $2.70 per share to $2.90 - $3.05 per share.  That type of performance is worthy of a deeper dive.

    DuPont is one of two specialty materials companies in the Dow, the other being 3M Corp (NYSE:MMM).

    Segments and Geography:
    The Company operates in several industries: Agriculture (32% of sales), Specialty Chemicals & Materials (21%), Safety & Protection (11%), and Electronics & Comm (6%).  Geographically, the Company operates in U.S./Canada (40% of sales), EMEA (28%), Asia (20%), and Latin America (12%).

    The Company currently trades 12.6x 2010E EPS.  This is a 23% discount to 3M Corp (NYSE:MM), which trades at 15.5x 2010E EPS.  The company's 5 year projected EPS growth is 9%, which implies a 1.4x P/E/G.  Dividend yield is 4.20%, or $1.64 per share.  Dividend payout ratio is only 53.8%.  The company has maintained or increased dividend payments in the past 10 years.

    We typically look for less than 1.0x P/E/G for a screaming bargain (DD trades at 1.4x), however given that DD is trading at 23% discount to MMM and DD is also paying a 4.3% dividend yield (that will either remain as is or increase given the past 10 year dividend payout history), DD is a steady, low-risk long term investment.

    Timing wise, we're waiting for the stock to pull back to around $35 per share.  DD is definitely now on our RADAR though.

    Disclosure: No position

    Stocks: DD, MMM
Back To Value Mole's Instablog HomePage »

Instablogs are blogs which are instantly set up and networked within the Seeking Alpha community. Instablog posts are not selected, edited or screened by Seeking Alpha editors, in contrast to contributors' articles.

Comments (0)
Track new comments
Be the first to comment
Full index of posts »
Latest Followers

  • MCD trades at 14.7x P/E, 3.3% dividend, real estate value $30bn (30% of market cap), recession resilient. Bought recently at $88.00.
    Jul 4, 2012
  • BBRY trades at 8.6x 2010E P/E (adjusted for net cash fo $6 per share). With 41% market share of smart phone, is RIMM a deep value play?
    Aug 9, 2010
  • Is HPQ a Buy now? Go with positions in DELL (for hardware) and IBM (for services) instead.
    Aug 8, 2010
More »
Instablogs are Seeking Alpha's free blogging platform customized for finance, with instant set up and exposure to millions of readers interested in the financial markets. Publish your own instablog in minutes.


text:
DigitalGlobe sells off following Google-Skybox report

DigitalGlobe (DGI -4.9%) is within striking distance of its 52-week low ($26.48) following a report stating Google is in early talks to buy satellite imagery startup Skybox Imaging. Google Maps and Earth currently depend heavily on DigitalGlobe's high-res imagery.

Skybox asserts its imagery solution is superior to alternatives thanks to its use of proprietary telescopes, advanced cameras/image sensors, and superior pixel-processing. The company also boasts its satellites are 20x smaller than conventional alternatives.

From other sites
Comments (4)
  • Blue22
    , contributor
    Comments (449) | Send Message
    What a joke! Skybox or whatever has resolutions they say are "BELOW 1 METER!"
    That's 100cm for you investors who can't add. Digital Globes existing satellites have delivered 50cm by far the best in the business. There is no comparison between the two entities! It would be like comparing the Hubble to your backyard telescope! THEY ARE FOR DIFFERENT PURPOSES AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

    DGI has a complete satellite ready to launch in a few weeks. It is worth about 2 billion to start. This will bring their commercial resolution, military is classified, down to 30cm. They have a second satellite of the same incredible quality of 30cm which will be launched when tailored to specific military and commercial needs and international demand. It is the project of several years work and again is worth billions.

    By shorting the only corporation in its class money-grubbers have slowed down critical progress for this sterling corporation and the Defense Department. You all know what delays mean to your taxes right????????????We all saw how critical the technology is in the search for the 777. Look at the various satellites and you'll see the difference.

    As I am an investor in DGI I don't appreciate losing almost a third of my stock value on a bunch of short crap! Their CFO was fired the next day after the faulty report neglected to illustrate the value of two best in the world satellites complete and ready to go! Billions invested for several times the short term return. That is they type of company I invest in and so does your military. Who the hell do you think provides the intel to keep you and your family safe?
    8 Apr 2014, 03:26 PM Reply Like
  • Donkey Kong
    , contributor
    Comments (184) | Send Message
    An interesting rant, but your comment about the CFO being fired is incorrect. It was the former Controller and Chief Accounting Officer (CAO), Susan M. Fox, who was replaced (see Form 8-K filed, 3/3/14).

    Remember, facts do matter.
    8 Apr 2014, 09:54 PM Reply Like
  • Gorgar56
    , contributor
    Comments (2) | Send Message
    Skybox's microsats are a far different animal than DGI's imaging birds, and can be used for quite a number of useful missions without having the higher resolution of DG's 'WorldView' constellation. It should be no surprise to anybody familiar with the geospatial information industry that DG would be interested in an acquisition of Skybox -- the two different platforms are highly complementary.
    13 Apr 2014, 09:44 PM Reply Like
  • Gorgar56
    , contributor
    Comments (2) | Send Message
    It should come as no surprise to anybody familiar with the geospatial intelligence field that DGI might be interested in Skybox -- the two company's technologies are highly complementary and satisfy a number of different mission requirements.
    13 Apr 2014, 10:13 PM Reply Like
DJIA (DIA) S&P 500 (SPY)
ETF Screener: Search and filter by asset class, strategy, theme, performance, yield, and much more
ETF Performance: View ETF performance across key asset classes and investing themes
ETF Investing Guide: Learn how to build and manage a well-diversified, low cost ETF portfolio
ETF Selector: An explanation of how to select and use ETFs


WARC-Truncated: length

text:
Pokemon X and Y Fossil Pokemon Guide – How To Obtain

By   /   3 years ago

Pokemon have existed since the beginning of times. The entire lineage of Pokemon goes millions of years back and some of these Pokemon have been victims of defunctness. However, these Pokemon can be discovered via Fossils.

These Fossils can then be taken to a research lab in Kalos region where they will be revived. For more help on Pokemon X and Y, read our Breeding, Berry Farming and Make Money Guide.

Pokemon X and Y Fossil Pokemon

The two Fossil Pokemon that can be found in Kalos region are Amaura (Sail Fossil) and Tyrunt (Jaw Fossil). Along with this, each one of them also has a Evolving Form.

This Rock/Dragon Type Pokemon has Strong Jaw ability at its disposal and being an ancient Pokemon, it can be found in Fossil. It evolutionary form is Tyrantrum.

This ancient Pokemon is evolved from Tyrunt and retain the Dragon/Rock Type. However, it has 4x height growth rate and 10x weight growth rate than the Tyrunt.

Another ancient Pokemon which is Ice/Rock Type Pokemon. This Pokemon has Refrigerate ability which can turn Normal-Type into Ice-Type moves.

It is the evolutionary form of Amaura which retains the Ice/Rock Type form and grows 2x the normal height growth rate and 10x the normal weight rate.

This Rock/Flying Type ancient Pokemon is found inside the cracked boulders in Old Amber which can be smashed by a Rock Smash.

Mega Aerodactyl
Retaining the form of Rock/Flying Type Pokemon, this ancient Pokemon is evolved from Aerodactyl.

Along with this, you can use Rock Smash to break other rocks in Glittering Cave to get some other Fossils:

  • Helix Fossil (Omanyte)
  • Dome Fossil (Kabuto)
  • Claw Fossil (Anorith)
  • Root Fossil (Lileep)
  • Skull Fossil (Cranidos)
  • Armor Fossil (Shieldon)
  • Cover Fossil (Tirtouga)
  • Plume Fossil (Archen)
  • Sinnoh and Unova (Skull, Armor, Cover, and Plume) – X/Y Versions
  • Kanto (Helix and Dome) – Y-version
  • Hoenn fossils (Claw and Root) – X-version

Found anything missing? Do let us know in the Comment Section below!

Featured Videos

Join the Conversation

Hot Right Now

Video Game Villains

Top 10 Invincible Video Game Villains Who Just Won’t Die, No Matter …

We all are accustomed with video game villains and the story usually concludes with the fall of...

by   /   1 week ago
Panasonic 3DO

Top-10 Retro Consoles You Never Knew Existed

Video gaming has come a long way! While we are well-acquainted with the likes of Xbox Scorpio and...

by   /   1 week ago
Insanely Priced Retro-Games

Top-10 Insanely Priced Retro Games

It goes without saying that video gaming is a luxury and an expensive hobby. While most of the...

by   /   1 week ago
Video Games Past

Why Some Video Games Should Let Go of Their Past

We all have favorite video games franchises that we so dearly love the way they are and yet we also...

by   /   3 weeks ago
Suicide Squad Reviews

The Best Worst Suicide Squad Reviews to Make You Forget Batman vs Supe…

Suicide Squad reviews are beginning to pour in and things are… looking not so good! Similar to...

by   /   3 weeks ago
Load More


text:
« Another federal sentence for failing to register | Main | Mario Claiborne killed in strange robbery... now what?!?!? »

May 31, 2007

Libby sentencing letters to be released after sentencing

As detailed in this AP article, a "federal judge said today he will release more than 150 letters he received regarding next week's sentencing of former White House aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby."  Here are more details:

Libby, who was convicted in March of perjury and obstruction in the CIA leak case, had asked that the letters not be released.  Attorneys for several news organizations argued that the law required the letters be made public.  U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton agreed, citing a need for transparency.

"The court has received more than 150 sentencing letters in this case, some urging leniency for the defendant and some expressing opprobrium at the defendant's actions and calling for the imposition of a substantial prison sentence," Walton wrote.  The letters will be released after Libby is sentenced June 5, Walton said.  Addresses and other personal information will not be released.

May 31, 2007 at 12:17 PM | Permalink

TrackBack URL for this entry:

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Libby sentencing letters to be released after sentencing:

If the vice president did it, does that mean it's not illegal?

Posted by: tekel | Jun 2, 2007 11:38:38 AM

Post a comment

In the body of your email, please indicate if you are a professor, student, prosecutor, defense attorney, etc. so I can gain a sense of who is reading my blog. Thank you, DAB


text:
Theme: Recent Advances in Separation Techniques for the Future Benefits

Separation Techniques-2015

Renowned Speakers

Separation Techniques-2015

Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to San Francisco and Separation Techniques Symposium and Exhibition 2015 Recent Advances in Separation Techniques for the Future Benefits.
It is with great pleasure to welcome you to the Separation Techniques conference 2015. Separation Techniques conference 2015will be held during August 10-12, 2015, San Francisco, USA. “International Expo on Separation Techniques" (Separation Techniques-2015) in San Francisco - a city noted for its unique energy, culture, cuisine, music, and easy living.
Separation Techniques conference 2015 in San Franciscois the place to learn about the latest issues important to discovery, development, and economic production processes inherent to a wide range of related technologies and techniques. The symposium will bring together the world's preeminent academic, government, and industrial scientists who will contribute cutting-edge presentations on emerging applications and processes. The meeting is structured with courses, tutorials, workshops, general and parallel sessions packed with plenary, keynote, invited and contributed talks, as well as prominently featured poster sessions and best poster awards. A key part of the program is the Exposition which is the largest, most comprehensive exhibition where companies launch new products and showcase the latest instrumentation, software and tools for performing state-of-the-art chemical measurements related to all types of separations in multiple disciplines. The program will not only benefit separation science experts, but will encourage novices entering the field to attend tutorial presentations where introductory materials will be provided.
See you at the international Expo on Separation technique August 2015 in San Francisco.

yours sincerely,
Gerhard Kratz
Speaker sign
Global Sales Director
abcr GmbH
Karlsruhe Area

Welcome to the Separation Technique 2015 Conference.
This high profile conference to be held in beautiful San Francisco in August 2105, will cover the multiple aspects of Separation Techniques; from distillation to chromatography but also from analytical tools to production perspectives. Experts from all fields involving Separation Techniques are expected to attend and provide the latest trends and developments in their fields. Separation Technique – 2015 will bring high level scientists from academia and industry together to discuss technologies applications as well as analytical tools that are essential to the development of new products. Having the possibility to learn the state of the art in your technology is one of the benefits but being able to also explore alternate techniques and to discover other fields of application is what makes this conference so valuable. Either through lectures, seminars or workshops sessions throughout the three day conference, young scientist as well as seasoned experts can learn from Separation Technology 2015. Finally this world class conference will be a unique opportunity to network with chemists, engineers as well as executives and VPs.
We hope sincerely that your participation to the International Expo on Separation Techniques will be an unforgettable and productive scientific event.

yours sincerely,
Olivier Dapremont, Ph.D.
Speaker sign
Executive Director, Process Technologies
AMPAC Fine Chemicals LLC

Separation technique will bring together developers, users, academicians and researchers for sharing and exploring new areas of research and development and to discuss emerging issues.There will be many seminars, workshops and technical sessions take place in this conference series which will catch the attention of the professionals to attend the conference and it would enormously enrich our knowledge in understanding the current requirements of the global pharmaceutical industry. The expert will get an excellent opportunity to give many presentations and lectures on different topic and will also present their case studies.

The separation techniques industry is growing rapidly, with value expected to hit $228 billion by 2015, up from $164 billion in the year 2010, marking annual growth of nearly 7%, according to a recent industry research report.

Global revenues from chromatography reagents totaled nearly $4.3 billion in 2011 and $5.2 billion in 2012. Total revenues should reach $11.9 billion in 2017 after increasing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18%.Liquid chromatography, the largest segment, should account for $2.4 billion in 2012 and $7.1 billion in 2017, a CAGR of 24%.Gas chromatography will total $1.1 billion in 2012 and $1.7 billion in 2017, a CAGR of 9.5%.

The global market for commercial biotechnology separation systems reached $12.1 billion in 2010, $14.6 billion in 2011, and it will further grow to $26.7 billion at an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8% by 2016.The liquid chromatography separation systems segment was worth $2.3 billion in 2010 and $2.5 billion in 2011; the segment will further reach nearly $4 billion by 2016 increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6% from 2010 to 2016 and the membrane filtration segment reached $2.5 billion in 2010 and is expected to reach $3 billion in 2011; it will further grow to and reach $3.8 billion by 2016 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.9% from 2010 to 2016.

Target Audience:

Chemistry Eminents, Professors and Scientists
Pharma Professors and Students from Academia
Drug Design experts
Drug Discovery & Formulation Experts
Drug Designing Tool Makers
Analytical and Validation Experts
Chemical Engineers
Microbiology Department
Forensic Experts
Directors/Managers & Business Intelligence Experts of Pharma Industires.
Pharmacology Department
Clinical Research & Clinical Data Management
Vice Presidents/Directors & Brand Manufacturers & Retailers
Quality Check Chemists

Track 1:
Track 1:

Track 1: Advances in Sample Preparation Techniques

Liquid/liquid extraction is one of the most widely employed and useful techniques in pharmaceutical sample preparation. This is due to a number of characteristics, including simplicity, rapid method development, and reasonable selectivity. Another one is Solid phase extraction (SPE) is a technique designed for rapid, selective sample preparation and purification prior to chromatographic analysis. Crystallization is also a chemical solid–liquid separation technique, in which mass transfer of a solute from the liquid solution to a pure solid crystalline phase occurs. In chemical engineering crystallization occurs in a crystallizer. Crystallization is therefore an aspect of precipitation, obtained through a variation of the solubility conditions of the solute in the solvent, as compared to precipitation due to chemical reaction.

Track 2: Membrane separation

Membrane separation processes operate without heating and therefore use less energy than conventional thermal separation processes such as distillation, sublimation or crystallization. The membrane acts as a semipermeable barrier and separation occurs by the membrane controlling the rate of movement of various molecules between two liquid phases, two gas phases, or a liquid and a gas phase. The two fluid phases are usually miscible and the membrane barrier prevents actual, ordinary hydrodynamic flow. There are so many types of membrane process such as Microfiltration techniques, Gas diffusion, Reverse Osmosis, Ultrafiltration etc.

Track 3: High-Impact Application Fields

Recent progress in column technology and the demands and developments in instrumentation and accessories for miniaturized LC. chiral columns, chiral reprivatizing reagents, and chiral selectors for approaches that span the range of analytical separation platforms. High-Impact application fields also involve the separation of racemic compounds into their enantiomers

Track 4: High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Recent developments in commercially available micro-particulate packing’s and columns for all modes of HPLC are reviewed. Over 200 packing’s and columns are classified according to separation mode, functionality, particle size, and other chromatographically useful properties. Recent advances in both ionization methods and mass spectrometers have resulted in powerful new techniques for the study of drug metabolism and disposition. The interest in high-performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (HPLC/MS) is the result of the lack of a sensitive universal detector for HPLC.

Track 5: Novel Techniques

A novel separation technique for aqueous nanoparticles (NPs) is developed via a phase transfer based separation. By using anti-charged surfactant in oil phase, small sized NPs can be extracted into the oil phase, leaving large sized NPs in the aqueous phase. Thus, the separation is achieved. Chromatography uses for forensic Testing as gas chromatography is often used to investigate criminal cases. Ebola Immunization the deadly Ebola virus in the countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia has been largely confined. Chromatography has revealed itself as incredibly useful in determining which antibodies are more effective in neutralizing Ebola. Although no drugs have been conclusively validated as yet, it was instrumental in the development of the experimental immunization and will continue to be used in ongoing research.

Track 6: Advances in Chromatography

Chromatography, technique for separating the components, or solutes, of a mixture on the basis of the relative amounts of each solute distributed between a moving fluid stream, called the mobile phase, and a contiguous stationary phase. Recent Advances in Chromatography involves developments in liquid chromatography, advances in affinity chromatography, developments in Gas Chromatography and ion chromatography.

Track 7: Advances in Mass Spectrometry

New mass spectrometry methods have recently emerged like data independent analysis and hyper reaction monitoring. There are methods for isolating and purifying the compound class prior to mass spectrometric analysis. Covered in-depth are the mass spectrometry of carbohydrates, peptide sequencing by mass spectrometry, mass spectrometry of nucleic acid components, and mass spectrometry in pharmacology. Recently, the coupling of microfluidic devices to mass spectrometry, especially electrospray ionization (ESI) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI), has attracted an increasing interest and produced tremendous achievements.

Track 8: Product Related Processes

It involves the Product-related impurities, which are basically types of protein modification with a help of combination of 2D gel electrophoresis, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and peptide mapping we analyze these. Process-related impurities, such as host cell proteins, which we can detect using ELISA, 2D gel electrophoresis, western blotting or mass spectrometry.

Track 9: Clinical chemistry, Biomarkers and Diagnostics assays

It is a techniques which involve Molecular diagnostics is a technique used to analyse biological markers in the genome and proteome—the individual's genetic code and how their cells express their genes as proteins—by applying molecular biology to medical testing. The technique is used to diagnose and monitor disease, detect risk, and decide which therapies will work best for individual patients. A medical test is a kind of medical procedure performed to detect, diagnose, or monitor diseases, disease processes, susceptibility, and determine a course of treatment

Track 10: Complementary Separation Techniques

Complementary separation techniques are proven very efficient like Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has during the last two decades become more robust and been able to separate neutral analytes without compromising the downstream detection. An interesting aspect in CE compared to more commonly used high-performance liquid chromatography is the orthogonal separation mechanism provided by CE. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) brings unique combined information on molecular identity and molecular distribution of a sample surface.

Track 11: Green Technologies, Future Challenges and Trends

Separation process is a method to achieve any mass transfer phenomenon that converts a mixture of substances into two or more distinct product mixtures. New separation methods are emerging and It involves HTLC, such as increased analysis speed, enhanced separation productivity, “green” LC with pure water mobile phases coupled to universal FID detection, and fast analysis of complex samples by combination with fast 2-D techniques, have become an option for routine practice.

Track 12: Large Scale Preparative Chromatography for the manufacturing of APIs

It is one of the most powerful techniques for analysis and preparative separations of pharmaceutical intermediates and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). This technique was developed more than a hundred years ago and is now present in the laboratories of chemists and engineers for drug discovery, process development and manufacturing.

OMICS International Organises 300+ Conferences Every Year across USA, Europe & Asia with support from 1000 more scientific societies and Publishes 400+ Open access journals which contains over 30000 eminent personalities, reputed scientists as editorial board members.For more details on Mass Spectrometry market please visit Separation Techniques 2015

Track1: PharmaceuticalValidation

GMP-definition is the validation of "establishing documented evidence that establishes a high degree of certainty that a particular process will consistently a product that provides the previously established specifications and quality attributes are available."Appropriate and complete documentation is recognized as crucial for the validation. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), production formulas, detaileddocumentation batch changeControl, experimental reporting systems, analytical documents, reports development, validation protocols and reports are an integral part of validation philosophy. The validation of the documentation provides a source of information for the ongoing operation of the plant and is a resource that is used in the subsequent process of development or modification activities.All test activities will take a level of impact assessment to ensure that systems, services andProducts were determined directly affected by the test.

Track 2:Quality Assurance and Quality Control

The process of making sure that the stakeholders are adhered to the defined standards and procedures is called quality control. In quality control, a verification process takes place.

Certain activities and products are verified against a defined set of rules or standards.

Every organization that practices QC needs to have a Quality Manual. The quality manual outlines the quality focus and the objectives in the organization.

The quality manual gives the quality guidance to different departments and functions. Therefore, everyone in the organization needs to be aware of his or her responsibilities mentioned in the quality manual.

Quality Assurance is a broad practice used for assuring the quality of products or services. There are many differences between quality control and quality assurance.

In quality assurance, a constant effort is made to enhance the quality practices in the organization.

Therefore, continuous improvements are expected in quality functions in the company. For this, there is a dedicated quality assurance team commission.

Track 3: Clinical Trials in Validation of Drugs

many Pharma companies have built experienced biomarker teams internally that are responsible for delivering appropriate biomarkers for new agents in their pipeline. The strategy employed by many of these companies is that the biomarker validation and early clinical trials of the drug/biomarker combination is outsourced to companies such as Almac Diagnostics. The advantage of this approach is that the drug can be killed quickly if efficacy is not seen in the biomarker selected population. When a biomarker is discovered in a pre-clinical setting, there are a number of important considerations that must be accommodated prior to its implementation clinically. Most commonly, the first consideration is the migration of the assay to an appropriate tissue and / or platform. Commonly, preclinical biomarker studies are carried out on cell line or animal models using fresh tissue, so a migration study is usually required as the tissue to be tested will often be formalin fixed and paraffin embedded (FFPE). Another form of migration we often have to consider is a platform migration. When discovery has been carried out on a platform such as microarray or next generation sequencing, the delivery of a clinical diagnostic may be better suited to a qPCR based platform, depending on the number of genes in the signature. Typically we carry out both a platform and tissue migration, often moving from a signature discovered from fresh tissue using a microarray to a qPCR panel optimized for performance in FFFPE.

Track 4.Hybrid Techniques in validation

Track 5: Advances in Validation Techniques

Bioanalytical method validation is a mandatory step to evaluate the ability of developed methods to provide accurate results for their routine application in order to trust the critical decisions that will be made with them. Even if several guidelines exist to help perform bioanalytical method validations, there is still the need to clarify the meaning and interpretation of bioanalytical method validation criteria and methodology. Yet, different interpretations can be made of the validation guidelines as well as for the definitions of the validation criteria. This will lead to diverse experimental designs implemented to try fulfilling these criteria. Finally, different decision methodologies can also be interpreted from these guidelines. Therefore, the risk that a validated bioanalytical method may be unfit for its future purpose will depend on analysts personal interpretation of these guidelines. The objective of this review is thus to discuss and highlight several essential aspects of methods validation, not only restricted to chromatographic ones but also to ligand binding assays owing to their increasing role in biopharmaceutical industries. The points that will be reviewed are the common validation criteria, which are selectivity, standard curve, trueness, precision, accuracy, limits of quantification and range, dilutional integrity and analyte stability. Definitions, methodology, experimental design and decision criteria are reviewed. Two other points closely connected to method validation are also examined: incurred sample reproducibility testing and measurement uncertainty as they are highly linked to bioanalytical results reliability. Their additional implementation is foreseen to strongly reduce the risk of having validated a bioanalytical method unfit for its purpose.

Track 6: Novel Approaches in Validation Techniques

Track 7: Pharmacovigilance and Regulatory Aspects

Pharmacovigilance is governed by mandatory regulations issued by medicines regulatory authorities world wide, and it is imperative that pharmaceutical companies are compliant with these. The CIOMS and ICH organizations have contributed significantly to the harmonization of the various national regulations, with the aim of defining a single set of globally accepted standards and requirements. However, there are still regional and national variations. In chapter we review the evolution of pharmacovigilance regulations to date, followed by a more detailed appraisal of the regulations themselves, focusing mainly on the regulatory framework in the three ICH Regions—Europe, the USA, and Japan—and indicating key aspects of global harmonization and variation. Pharmaceutical regulations continue to develop and evolve, and it is therefore impossible to provide a comprehensive account of all current regulatory aspects of pharmacovigilance in a book chapter. Readers are therefore strongly advised to consult local and regional regulatory documents, in order to obtain the detailed and up-to-date understanding necessary to ensure compliance with regulatory aspects of pharmacovigilance.

Track 8: Applications in Validation of Drugs

The application of a good Process Validation is critical for pharmaceutical and biotech organizations.  To assist industry, several guidances have been developed by regulatory agencies in the last few years that define the requirements and best practices for the effective implementation of Process Validation.

Organizations that fail to develop an effective process validation system will face significant regulatory consequences including For Cause audits by regulators, recalls or plant closure.  However, the application of process validation is not limited to the manufacturer; it also extends to include suppliers.  Regulations have also been established which direct organizations to assess the adequacy of process validation activities at their suppliers.  For example, regulators expect organizations to begin process validation activities before new equipment is installed.

Track 9: Future Prospects of Validation

Interest in drug use among America's major ethnic minority groups is rapidly increasing. Despite the welcomed interest, researchers tend to use broad ethnic labels to identify their samples. Such labels as "ethnic glosses" provide little information concerning the heterogeneity of each ethnic group and, in most instances, violate the guidelines concerning appropriate descriptions of sample characteristics. Use of broad ethnic descriptors particularly in drug use research creates external validity problems and prevents replications. Researchers are encouraged to obtain detailed information on the sociocultural characteristics of their samples by obtaining measures on ethnic identification, situated identity, and acculturative status. Use of ethnic identity and acculturation measures, however, can create problems in defining appropriate sample frames.

Track 10: Pharma Market Audit

Marketing audit, which business schools now teach to students from all sectors, is very useful to high-performing brands and companies to help identify which aspects of the spend works hardest. The factors driving success can be more accurately identified, enabling more precise targeting of resources to maintain competitive edge. Marketing audit also helps underachieving brands as it will identify how and where performance can be improved and how budgets can be more effectively deployed.

Conference Highlights

  • Advances in Sample Preparation Techniques
  • Membrane Processes
  • High-Impact Application Fields
  • High Performance Liquid Chromatography
  • Novel Techniques
  • Advances in Chromatography
  • Advances in Mass Spectrometry
  • Product Related Processes
  • Clinical chemistry, Biomarkers and Diagnostics assays
  • Complementary separation techniques
  • Green Technologies, Future Challenges and Trends
  • Large Scale Preparative Chromatography for the manufacturing of APIs

To share your views and research, please click here to register for the Conference.

To Collaborate Scientific Professionals around the World

Conference Date August 10-12, 2015
Sponsors & Exhibitors Click here for Sponsorship Opportunities
Speaker Opportunity Closed Day 1 Day 2 Day 3
Poster Opportunity Closed Click Here to View

Media Partners


text:
On Water Bears

Frank A. Romano III, Florida Entomologist

This journal article discusses Tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates that require water in their environment and are found in freshwater, marine and terrestrial habitats. The article describes the morphology and phylogeny of this "little known phylum" as well as illustrates ways one might collect water bears. In addition, the article sites species distributions in the southeastern US.

This resource is referenced here:
Subject: Biology, Evolution, Microbiology
Resource Type: Scientific Resources:Overview/Reference Work
Grade Level: Graduate/Professional, College Upper (15-16), College Lower (13-14), High School (9-12)
Topics: Biosphere:Evolution, Microbiology, EcologyKeywords: tardigrade, taxonomy, phylogeny, ecology, collecting, water bear


text:
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Yard Decoration

Here is a photo that I took today.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! If you ask a question, be sure to subscribe to comments so you'll get my reply.

Related Posts with Thumbnails


text:
Photography archived articles

Subscribe to the RSS feed for this category only

Photography and Picture of the day10 Oct 2006 at 23:26 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Direct sunlight creates unflattering hard shadows. Not having an assistant holding a reflector for me while I stroll along La Defense with the kids I had to improvise with the material at hand. Luckily, La Defense has a plentiful provision of variously reflective walls even larger than the largest reflector my non-existing assistant can handle.

So here is a picture of Calixthe dancing Coupé Décalé in the afternoon light. Barely a meter on our left was a large glass façade that provided the wonderful fill light on Calixthe’s face. That goes to show that even with no fancy hardware there are always plenty of opportunities for nice lighting that await the innovative souls.

Photography20 Aug 2006 at 23:01 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Football photography packing list and hardware setup” was the brief… Here is the debrief !

First, thanks to Julien for loaning his Canon Eos 350 XT and Vosonic X’S-Drive II Plus VP2160. The VP2160 was nice to have but I simply could not have obtained the same results with my Canon Eos 300D in place of the 350XT. As Giampi said in the understatement of the week : “The 300D is not a sports camera”… I would go even further to say it is near useless for that task.

The most important thing I discovered it that focusing is quite a challenge – anticipation helps greatly but it is not always possible. I have found that prefocusing on a higher contrast subject at the same distance helps, but again that is not always possible. Corner shots, free kicks and high arcing balls were golden opportunities for anticipating the trajectory and focusing on the receiving end players. I was able to do it better than I expected, but that is not saying much and it was even worse when merely reacting to the action. As expected, keeping the people on the ball in focus was horrendously hard and I have to work on that – a lot.

I was moderately content with the AF performance in good light of the Canon EF 70-200/2.8 L behind the Kenko Teleplus Pro 300 AF 2x teleconverter mounted on the borrowed Canon Eos 350XT. As the sun began to set AF got worse and out of focus images became even more frequent. I shot the whole set at ISO1600 with aperture priority at various settings trying to keep the speed around 1/1000-1/2000s while maximising depth of field. The Canon Speedlite 580EX with the Better Beamer FX-3 helped a little with the lighting but considering the distances the AF assist was of course ineffective. Someone even mentioned that the camera was slowed down by trying to find the AF assist pattern – I’m not sure about that but it may be worth checking.

I surely made the focusing on action even worse by shooting with AI focus instead of AI servo. I’m quite ashamed of that mistake. Maybe I forgot to set it up properly because I’m not used to do it on my 300D which does not offer that choice… As usual, discovering new hardware on the event is a truly bad idea… I guess that’ll serve me as a reminder to force AI servo next time and to get intimately familiar with new hardware before covering an event.

In order to preserve my self-esteem I shall now blame my hardware a bit : the Canon EF 70-200/2.8 L is quite slow with a teleconverter. But since it is not too expensive I’m going to stick to that solution… I wonder if the Canon 2x teleconverter is any faster than my Kenko.

Quite unexpectedly the 350XT lasted the whole game on a single battery with the batery indicator still showing full at the end – that was only about 700 frames but I would guesstimate that this is four times more efficient than the 300D with its more powerful battery. I’m impressed ! Less impressive is the use of different batteries for those two cameras. Lack of commonality is especially irritating considering that the Canon Eos 20D does use the same BP511A batteries as the 300D…

On the contrary, the 580EX seems to have exceeded the capacity of the four 2400mAh batteries : shooting every frame with flash was a pretty heavy workload… I’ll add a Canon CP-E3 to my letter to Santa Claus !

I was also surprised to never be hindered by filling the 350XT’s buffer. Maybe that is a hint that I am not shooting enough – perhaps as a result of my inability to keep interesting things in focus. I lost a few shots when shooting too conservatively – with many GB of storage at hand I had no reason to do that but bad habits die hard.

The 140-400mm focal length range provided by the doubled 70-200mm was a good range when shooting from the sidelines. The second body with the 24-70mm was not very useful – as expected a 70-200 would have been much more useful. A trans-standard zoom was nice to have for the team shots and for catching the penalty kicks from near the goal but the team shots could have been handled with a 70mm and the goal shots are traditionnaly a job for remotes. So two bodies with three lenses would be fine – let’s add a new 70-200mm on the Christmas shopping list. The Canon EF 70-200/4 L would be ideal for the second body, not least because it is not unreacheably expensive. The flash could easily provide the lighting difference between f/2.8 and f/4 – but then a second 580EX is probably useful because it adapts to the crop factor to reduce the wasted light.

After some post-processing the results are not as bad as I feared but correcting my erratic exposures and random focus did degrade the quality a bit. But the noise and softness before going through Neatimage were much harder on the eye…

All things considered this was a great learning experience and I look forward doing it again !

Photography16 Aug 2006 at 10:08 by Jean-Marc Liotier

I’m shooting football tonight for the first time. For the second time ever I’ll attend a football game and last time was thirteen years ago – that tells much about my expertise… I am lucky enough to attend Guinea vs. Cameroon thanks to an invitation from the Guinean national team. An international match – what an awesome way to introduce myself to football photography !

For such a great occasion my hardware setup reminds me of that Tank Girl quote… “Feeling a little inadequate ?”

My friends Guillaume and François being on vacation there was no way to take advantage of some of their stash of heavy gear. So all I could do to to scrounge up a semi-decent kit was to borrow a body from Julien. I also took his Vosonic X’S-Drive II Plus VP2160 portable hard disk to replace my Vosonic X’S-Drive VP2060 whose ergonomics I partly blame for a recent data loss. So here is my packing list :

On top of all that, some learning material digested beforehand can’t hurt… I found’s sport photography introduction to be a good starting point.

The problem with football is the fast action moving impredictably around the whole pitch. The most useful focal lengths are said to be 70-500 and short reaction times give no time for swapping lenses. So I intend to mount the 70-200 with the TC on the Eos 350XT on the monopod with the 550EX and the Better Beamer. The 24-70 will go on the Eos 300D with the 380EX. So the bad news is that I have a gaping hole in coverage between 70mm and 140mm. Another 70-200, even a f/4 would have been nice. Decent long glass in place of the converted 70-200/2.8 would had been even better but that is definitely not within my means so I should stop dreaming. But a replacement for the 300D shall surely be on my Christmas letter to Santa Claus so that I can at least stop borrowing bodies.

Too bad I only have one battery with the borrowed 350XT – I have four for my 300D so I’ll probably end up shooting part of the game swapping lenses on it… Which is exactly what I wanted to avoid. Why aren’t the two bodies using the same batteries ?

All in all I have the vital minimum but not much more. Compared to the pro shooters I expect to be on my left and right I’m feeling whoefully short on hardware… But let’s be a hero and prove that I can produce decent pictures with this ghetto rig !

Photography12 Jul 2006 at 12:41 by Jean-Marc Liotier

I have noticed that when using my 300D with my 580EX in high-speed sync mode I sometimes get a grossly over-exposed band on the left in portrait orientation or on the top in landscape orientation. Worn shutter, flash malfunction, body malfunction, communication error between flash and body, confusion between normal flash synchronization and high-speed flash synchronization, excessive shutter speed in normal flash sync ? I posted my problem on but the answers were inconclusive. I am left scratching my head about it and I can’t even find out how to reproduce the result reliably… For now my bets are on user error…

Here are a few frames featuring the overexposed band in case they remind someone of a known problem. One of the most likely root causes is the somewhat loose flash hostshoe.

Consumption and Photography04 Jul 2006 at 16:46 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Under the blazing sun during the start of the Le Mans 24 hours skating race I shot only two hundred frames before running my three freshly recharged batteries flat. I first thought that they were nearing the end of their useful lives, but during the night I managed to shoot four hundred frames on a single battery I just recharged. The intense heat from direct sunlight may have something to do with how fast power is depleted.

This comes as a surprise to me : I am used to rotating batteries in an inner pocket near my body to keep them warm in extreme cold weather but this is the first time I encounter performance degradation in extreme heat. And I have no idea how to attack this problem.

Robin Tichy mentions that “Li-ion batteries outperform their counterparts in high-temperature conditions ranging up to 40°–45°C. SLA and NiMH batteries do not perform well in higher-heat situations”. The BP511A batteries I use in my Canon Eos 300D use Li-ion – maybe I should consider myself lucky I did not use NiMH batteries

Photography24 Jun 2006 at 0:25 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Shooting people on a dance floor last week-end I faced the limits of my flash’s recycling speed. Bouncing against high ceilings with nearly no ambient light, even when shooting 1/60s f/2.8 at ISO 1600 the power of the Canon Speedlight 580EX was more than welcome. A couple of high-power discharges or even a single one were enough to keep the flash from firing for the next frame. As a result I produced many black frames.

I was mostly using recent 2400 mAH NiMH batteries which lasted reasonably long and were not the cause of this issue. The problem certainly lied in the recycle speed of the flash itself. Indeed Jamison Boyer had exactly the same experience just a week before me.

The solution is an external power pack feeding the flash’s high voltage input. This means either a Quantum Turbo or a Canon CP-E3. The Quantum Turbo is said to fully recycle a 580EX in less than 1.5 seconds whereas the CP-E3 does it in less than two seconds. But the CP-E3 weights 0.42 kg including batteries whereas the Quantum Turbo weights 1.1 kg. And considering the lower price of the Quantum Turbo the opinions tend to favor the compromise embodied by the CP-E3.

In his good introduction about high voltage batteries in general and Quantum hardware in particular, the heavily equipped Ralph Paonessa mentions the Quantum Turbo Compact that is in the same bulk and weight class as the CP-E3. But the Quantum Turbo Compact costs three times as much as the CP-E3 so there is no contest.

Some folks at Sportsshooter also mention the Lumedyne Tinycycler but it does not seem very common.

For the time being I don’t have the luxury of an external high voltage power pack. As Lord Rutherford once declared : “gentlemen, we have no money, therefore we must think”. My workaround is to shoot with both eyes open. In addition to improving situational awareness it allows to keep the outside eye on the flash readyness light and only shoot when it is lit up. Not quite as comfortable as an endless fast supply of power but that will have to do for now…

Photography and Picture of the day23 Jun 2006 at 0:40 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Capturing emotions photographically is not something I only achieve very randomly. But that day I was lucky enough to be at the right time, at the right place with working equipment and a steady hand.

Photography22 Jun 2006 at 0:05 by Jean-Marc Liotier

I have fallen in love with high dynamic range photography.

In his introduction to “Merge to HDR in Photoshop CS2Michael Reichmann does a great job of explaining dynamic range limitations in photography and the ways to overcome them. Photomatix provides a nice little FAQ about HDR imaging as well as a few dynamic range increase examples.

For Linux users, PFScalibration provides an implementation of a method for the recovery of high dynamic range images from a set of low dynamic range exposures such as the JPEG files produced by the generally available digital cameras.

For those who prefer a graphical user interface it is also possible to create HDR images from bracketed exposures using Cinepaint with Hartmut Sbosny’s “Bracket to HDR” Cinepaint plugin. Its output is an HDR image that like with PFScalibration can be saved in the OpenEXR HDR image format developed by Industrial Light & Magic.

With Cinepaint as well as with PFScalibration the resulting HDR image must then be tone mapped to normal dynamic range so that an image in a format such as JPEG can be produced. Tone mapping is the job of PFStmo, a package that contains the implementation of state of the art tone mapping operators.

Nicholas (alias Sunyata on Flickr) has been one of the very first Linux users to try his hand at HDR photography with Cinepaint and PFStmo and publish the results. Here are a few of his most beautiful latest results:

Stunning isn’t it ? These images show how HDR imaging liberates from the exposure constraints of traditional photography. PFScalibration and PFStmo are part of PFStools, a set of command line and graphical programs for reading, writing, manipulating and viewing high-dynamic range images. PFStools is the part of the excellent works of the Max-Planck-Institut Informatik. It is licensed under the GPL.

Because of its modular architecture owning to use of UNIX pipes, the PFStools package is quite flexible. A typical workflow would look like the following :

# Calibrate the system - this should only be done once for each camera
# Generate a listing of the calibration source files and their characteristics
jpeg2hdrgen img*.jpg > example.hdrgen
# Create the camera response curve
pfsinhdrgen example.hdrgen | pfshdrcalibrate -v -s camera.response
# Perform the actual process of converting bracketed JPEGs
# to a tone mapped HDR image
# Generate a listing of the source files and their characteristics
jpeg2hdrgen img*.jpg > example.hdrgen
# Create the HDR image in the OpenEXR format
pfsinhdrgen example.hdrgen | pfshdrcalibrate -v -f camera.response
| pfsoutexr example.exr
# Render a tone mapped image using the tone mapping operator of
# your choice (drago03 in this example).
pfsin example.exr | pfstmo_drago03 | pfsgamma 2.2 | pfsout example.jpeg

As you can see the process is quite simple. But you definitely need to read the PFScalibration documentation. Wolfsauge also paraphrased the PFScalibration documentation and sprinkled a few examples on top of it – you might want to read his article about producing HDR images to see the problem in another light.

Now let’s fetch a sturdy tripod, go out and make HDR images !

Photography and Picture of the day21 Jun 2006 at 0:10 by Jean-Marc Liotier

My keepers ratio for dance floor scenes is horrendously low, mostly because I can’t figure out how to focus on the right point with next to no ambient light apart from the occasional flickering red spotlight. Maybe I should try pre-focusing using the distance scale on my lens. For now my results are as much planning as generous gigage compensating for the dismal probabilities.

Talking about ambient light on the dance floor, you probably won’t see it because my Canon Speedlight 580EX also known as the portable sun almost drowns out everything else. Only when opening as much as made possible by my hardware and the moving nature of the subject (1/60s f/2.8 at ISO 1600) does a hint of ambient light register as you can see on the above picture. But I guess I’ll have to live with that : if I can’t get enough sharp shots with the flash, I would probably get none at all without it.

Photography20 Jun 2006 at 0:54 by Jean-Marc Liotier

I attended the wedding of my friends Marie-Caroline and Franklin this week-end and took the opportunity to exercise my somewhat rough wedding photography skills. Some more debriefing shall follow shortly and the finished product should be ready by the end of the week.

Much gigage was produced (a bit under 3000 frames) and a slight lossage experienced so today I’ll begin with a little story about storage…

I use a Vosonic X’S-Drive VP2060. It is quite old now but still works perfectly fine despite travelling quite a bit in my bag. Six months ago I wrote about the main risk inherent to my storage procedure :

“It is very unnerving to have no way to control wether or not copy from CF to hard disk was performed successfuly. I have not had a failed copy ever but the nagging risk remains in the back of my mind. That is why a review screen is no luxury and it is the primary reason why one of these day I will upgrade to something with a review screen”.

That was excellent foresight : this week-end I lost the entire content of 1 GB Compact Flash card full of reception candids because I failed to transfer it to my portable hard disk. The Vosonic X’S-Drive VP2060 gives no way to confirm wether or not a picture has been copied on the disk so I expected that the occurence of such loss was only a matter of time. The direct cause is of course user error, but the lacking ergonomics of the Vosonic are a large factor contributing toward it.

I now understand I should heed to the advice of other photographers on ditch the hard drive when operating under time pressure and instead bring as much CF storage as necessary. Chris Newkumet puts it best :

“I hope you’re not intending to download cards during a wedding and then format and reuse those cards at that same event. For one thing, there’s rarely time to do that given how quickly things move in a typical wedding schedule. And I’d never trust an assistant to do that, either. As Bas said, with the going rate for CF cards, there’s no good reason to do it. My advice–buy 7-8 gigs of CF capacity, fill each card, tuck them away safely and then take your time when you get back home or to the studio downloading the images. I shoot 1,500–2,000 images during a typical 10-hour wedding date, and I can tell you I need to sit down later and make sure I’ve accounted for all of them before I can rest easy. As for the portable storage devices themselves, the only one I have any experience with is the Epson and I can tell you it’s pretty slow. I think these gadgets are fine for traveling and what not when you have time at the end of each day to download cards”.

Experiencing a loss definitely got the lesson nailed in pretty well. And considering it was only a loss of about 350-400 frames (maybe 50 keepers at my going rate) it was a rather cheap lesson.

Portable (CF reader + hard disks) combos are still nice when working at a relaxed pace. The debate still rages about wether they should be used to free up CF space or only as a backup, or wether burning CDs is a a better option, but for me the choice is now clear : a portable storage device for travelling and a stack of CF cards for event photography.

Photography19 Jun 2006 at 0:22 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Scans from my Nikon LS-30 are quite noisy. Vuescan features “grain reduction” but I have found that for using Neatimage instead provides better results. I have had satisfying results with the Nikon Coolscan V profiles by Tom Lane using Neatimage‘s “remove more chrominance noise” preset.

At the moment there are no other Nikon slide scanner profiles. Since Neatimage profiles depend on the film and on the exposure, I guess I will have to produce a better matching profile myself.

Consumption and Photography18 Jun 2006 at 0:49 by Jean-Marc Liotier

After using Vuescan everyone realizes that scanner manufacturers should really be ashamed of what they ship with their hardware. Ed Hamrick single handedly produced the only program that really gets the best out of almost every scanners. Without him my precious Nikon LS-30 would just be about useless to me : since 1999 only Vuescan provides useable infrared scratch removal on Linux. Efforts by the SANE project to provide infrared dust removal have not gone beyond the proof of concept stage, so seven years later Vuescan is still the only one to save my negative scanning days. On top of that, support by Ed Hamrick is nothing short of exceptional – he is a highly responsive developper with great passion in his work. Add a perpetual license at a very low price and you probably understand that I’m in love with this product.

Photography07 Jun 2006 at 18:49 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Eos flash photography is a complex if not downright confusing art which makes Eos flash exposure errors a recurrent discussion topic. Lack of information from Canon would leave users in the dark if there was not’s definitive reference for Eos flash photography. On the path to flash enlightement the photographer will often come back to it to refresh his knowledge at the source.

My most grievous Eos flash photography sin is the use of the “focus – recompose – shoot” drill with flash :

“The fact that the camera biases flash exposure to the nearest focus point [..] is important to keep in mind. If you’re in the habit of using the old “focus, lock AE and recompose image” technique, be sure not do this when taking flash photos.

Flash metering occurs after ambient light metering, so in this case you’re locking AE but not flash metering, and therefore recomposing messes up your flash metering. Instead, select the focus point that’s closest to your subject in order to bias flash exposure to that area”.

Flash exposure lock also provides a way to focus-recompose while metering flash on the right target, but the awkward ergonomics make it unusable in practice for photojournalist style photography.

ETTL-II introduced several improvements, but I had missed the most important from my point of view : a new evaluative metering algorithm. The rumor claims that ETTL-II ignores the AF point bias. puts it much more mildly, but it looks like something that could potentially make the focus-recompose drill viable with flash.

The only drawback is that ETTL-II bodies are only ETTL-II. Only the 1D MkII has a custom function to switch between focus-point biased metering and evaluative metering.

Photography and Picture of the day07 Jun 2006 at 2:17 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Camera laid on a bench for five seconds at f/11, barely cropped and passed through Neatimage. I like how the orange office lighting contrasts with the bright green. Made with Canon Eos 300D with EF 24-70/2.8 L.

Lawn and lighted office in the evening

Photography and Systems07 Jun 2006 at 1:14 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Neatimage 5.4 Pro installs and runs fine with Wine 0.9.9-0ubuntu2 found in the Dapper Drake release of the Ubuntu distribution. Neatimage working with Wine was mentioned in Wine’s application database, but I was not successful with Ubuntu‘s Hoary Hedgehog. The upgrade to Dapper solved some of the problems but others probably remain because Neatimage crashes somewhere at the beginning of a filtration job. I’ll keep working on it…

Meta and Photography and Travels02 Jun 2006 at 18:17 by Jean-Marc Liotier

Since you asked… Yes I am the author of the ostrich picture featured on this page’s header. I shot it at Cape Point, South Africa in 2004. The whole picture of the two ostriches strolling on the beach is available here along with many others.

« Previous PageNext Page »


text:
Sunday, 3 June 2012

So little to do but even less time? How’d that one work out!

Well I seem to have so little time to blog, tweet and facebook at the moment yet I don’t seem to be getting a whole load of stuff done if that makes sense! Although I have been making the most of the weather whilst its been sunny but the good old UK as usual has given into rain this weekend.

I had some left over material from my Simplicity 2883 dress that was purchased at Lili Fabric's & thought well the sun is due and apart from my Colette Meringue I actually have no skirts but I also have no skirt patterns so I thought it cant be that hard to make a skirt with no pattern can it??….. Did I mention I’m really not keen on working with this material!

Anyway….I sat there with the lump of material I had and started to pleat it hand basting as well as pinning it as I went. I then remembered the material is lovely and stretchy but once sewn and be tricky to manoeuvre (but this is probably but my lack of experience talking). I decided rather than winding myself up and spending hours researching the net to just bang in a zip and button on the already pre planned elastic waistband (big smiles when I thought of this as I am yet to make any type of waistband lol).

Here is what I ended up with.
IMG_0633a    IMG_0634a    IMG_0627a
The pleats came out all the same size. I was happy with the elastic waist & I even put in an invisible zip and button.

I wore it for my mums birthday visit but it made me feel a bit old and frumpy (still trying to find “my” style):

So I decided despite being constantly told wear waist clinchers, hide your hips, cover your upper arms and so on and so forth…… to do this (please excuse the blurred photo I really need to get a wireless remote all this running backwards and forward on self timer is not doing it for me or my pictures lol)!

From the side empire line clothes tend to have the “is she pregnant or just a bit overweight” effect on me but straight on I find them quite flattering and I think this style of dress (if it was a dress lol)  is “in” at the moment. I can change up the top using different colours and styles and pair with belts worn under the bust (sounds silly I know but I’ve done it twice and it looked surprisingly good)!

I have already worn this out a few time and got a couple of compliments so I am more than pleased.

  1. Very cute and I don't think it is at all frumpy! I know how you feel though. I definitely have a love/hate relationship with elastic. :)

  2. OMG! you have read my mind about elastic. I'm just thinking, there is a fine line between a good and bad use of it. A line, I add, that I have not found as yet!

    You, on the other hand, are kicking some serious ass with this dressmaking malarky! I am really chuffed that I am here from the start to watch it all evolve.

    Keep sewing, keep writing... you're fantastic!

    Caffy x

  3. Such an Adorable dress! It looks great on you!


text:
*Free SGX Stock Picks* Special Offer!

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Live Singapore Business News

53.54% of SMB United shareholders accept Osaki's offer
The shareholders of SMB United Limited who have accepted the voluntary cash offer by Osaki Electric Co Ltd can expect to receive payment within 10 days. Osaki Electric said on Friday that it has received 53.54 per cent acceptance for its offer. Accordingly, the offer has become unconditional as to acceptance. The offer will remain open for acceptance until February 27, 2012 at 5.30pm.

Strait Times Index Slightly down
Singapore shares edged lower by mid-day after rising for four straight sessions, with commodities firm Olam International and rig builder Sembcorp Marine shedding more than 1 percent each. Among stand-out gainers, shares of Singapore-listed forestry firm United Fiber System Ltd surged as much as 71 percent after it struck a S$1.5 billion reverse takeover deal with Indonesian coal miner PT Golden Energy Mines Tbk. By 0530 GMT, the Straits Times Index was down 0.1 percent, or 3.21 points, at 2,891.22. The index has advanced around 9 percent so far this year, making it the best performer among major Southeast Asian markets.

Get all Singapore Business Updates, Free STI picks, Intraday Stock Picks Singapore. For all Intraday Stock Tips Click Here

Design by Free WordPress Themes | Bloggerized by Lasantha - Premium Blogger Themes | Grants For Single Moms