TOKYO | Thu Aug 2, 2012 2:14am EDT
TOKYO Aug 2 (Reuters) - Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics Corp said on Thursday it expects an operating profit of 21 billion yen ($268 million) for the year to March 2013, after its major shareholders pledged $633 million in loans to support a turnaround plan.
Renesas' full-year outlook beat a 28.3 billion yen operating loss forecast by nine analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
For the April-June quarter, Renesas logged an operating loss of 17.6 billion yen, down from a 19.1 billion yen loss in the same period last year after it was forced to shut plants in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.
Renesas' major shareholders Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp and NEC Corp - which together own 90 percent of the chipmaker - said on Tuesday they would provide 49.5 billion yen in financial support. Renesas is also expected to secure 50 billion yen in bank loans.
It plans to use the funds to cut 12 percent of its workforce and sell or consolidate half of its domestic plants, although analysts question whether it will find buyers for its loss-making plants. ($1 = 78.2400 Japanese yen) (Reporting by Mari Saito; Editing by Richard Pullin)

View the original article here

In cricket, and in life, a perfect end is a rarity.
Even Don Bradman was bereft of it. Yet a not-so-perfect ending cannot deny a few sportsmen their legitimate place in the sun. South Africa’s wicket-keeper Mark Boucher is one such cricketer.
His remarkably long international career, of almost 15 years, was tragically snuffed out when he was hit in the eye by a bail in a warm-up match against Somerset on July 9 during the ongoing England tour. He was only one short of 1,000 victims — an unheard of feat in the 145 years of international cricket history.
Agonisingly short of a milestone, just like Bradman who could not score the four runs in his final innings to sign off with a perfect test average of 100.
The England series was meant to be Boucher’s last, where he was expected to walk into the sunset having crossed the monumental mark of 1,000 victims and 150 Tests. The plan was perfect, not destiny.
In cricket, keeping is, by far, considered the most thankless job. A difficult catch may get a slipfielder all the plaudits but for a keeper, standing only a couple of feet away, it’s considered a routine job. For him the bar is much higher — nothing short of spectacular gets talked about. And he is expected to pick up every wayward throw of his colleagues and yet script impossible run-outs. That’s not all — conceding a bye is viewed, even by his team mates, as almost criminal.
Life for a keeper is not only unfair but often cruel. Boucher, with his feline agility and characteristic combativeness, transformed this difficult job into a fashionable profession. His celebratory leap into the air after pulling off a stunning catch will remain frozen in the minds of cricket aficionados.
Boucher made sure his stocky stature never came in the way of snapping those gravity-defying catches. He took 532 catches in tests, 403 in ODIs and 18 in T20Is to go with 46 stumpings.
On paper a world record holder. On ground, bowlers’ dream ally.
He was as spectacular behind the wicket as fearless in front — a firefighter in flannel. The incredible self-belief to collar any bowling attack often came shining through, especially when the team needed him the most.
Quite famously in the Johannesburg ODI in March 2006, Boucher produced a sparkling unbeaten 50 to chase down a seemingly impossible target of 434 against an Aussie bowling line-up that included Brett Lee, Nathan Bracken and Stuart Clark. It was an innings that would have made even the greatest of batsmen proud for its sheer determination and daring.
As a batsman, he was an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Under pressure, he had the knack of producing a shot that would pierce any field. And often with metronomic regularity till the team crossed the finish line. What he lacked in grace, he more than made up for it with his effectiveness, innovation and daredevilry. For a keeper to have clocked 5,515 runs in 147 tests with five centuries, it goes to show his extraordinary all-round cricketing skills.
In a team sport, rarely is an individual’s effort indicative of a team’s performance. Boucher’s left its mark, often. Three of his five test centuries came in the winning cause and the other two in drawn matches. He averaged 1.97 victims per innings in the longer version of the game but in the 74 Tests that the Proteas won during his career, he averaged 2.1.
The keeping equivalent of a century is five or more victims in an innings and Boucher pulled it off on 14 occasions in test cricket and seven times in the shorter version. In June 1998, in his very first year of international career, Boucher dazzled with his glove work at the game’s most majestic theatre — Lord’s. He snapped five catches and affected one run- out in the first innings and followed it with two more catches in the second. South Africa won by 10 wickets.
And yet figures do not reveal Boucher the player in entirety. What perhaps best defines him was the selflessness with which he performed — always a captain’s delight, invariably an opposition’s nightmare.
If Sachin Tendulkar and Muttiah Muralitharan dominated peers with bat and ball, Mark Boucher did it with his pair of gloves. A freak accident may have ended his career but cannot take away his rightful place among the greats of contemporary cricket.

View the original article here

Sometimes people suspect that the grass is greener in the next field … but they’re not always right.
Consider this. India’s gross domestic product has grown about 7 percent on an average per year for the past nine years. Its industrial growth has been steadily rising since then. Buoyed by economic growth, the country’s capital markets also offered itself as an attractive and inflation beating investment option.
That means that someone who invested at the end of 2002 in the BSE’s benchmark index, Sensex, would have made a 418 percent return on his portfolio by July 11 (just a random date). It sounds like the Madoff plan, but it’s not. The Sensex’s value on Dec 31, 2002 was 3377.28 which rose manifold to 17489.14 on July 11, 2012. Our market had its fair share of ups and downs, but it remained focused and depicted the country’s growth story.
However, that “someone” who made the 418 percent return most likely was not one of us. The average Indian investor has been satisfied with, and probably still wants, investments with a fixed return that comes from safer havens. According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, Indians were called “wise savers but poor investors”. The statement found its base in the statistics that its Indian household Investor Survey revealed.
According to the survey, only 10.74 percent of households were investors (up from 7.4 percent in 2001-2002) while 89 percent were either saving in fixed income or are still clinging to their savings accounts. About 46 percent of urban households preferred to save, compared to 21 percent who chose investing.
In 2002, this was not a bad idea. India’s GDP grew at 3.7 percent that year compared with 2001. But in 2003, it jumped to 8.37 percent because of services (mostly financial, real estate and business services) and manufacturing sector which together drove this transition to a higher growth trajectory.
In the same year, the amount of foreign money entering India’s capital markets rose sevenfold. Most of this came from foreign institutional investors, who poured in 304.6 billion rupees ($5.5 billion), compared to 36 billion rupees ($665 million) a year earlier. They bought the Indian growth story; why didn’t we?
The Bombay Stock Exchange’s benchmark 30-share Sensex index started an unprecedented rise on May 6, 2003, climbing almost 67 percent to 5003 points seven months later. That was a better performance than nearly any other investment option out there. What did the Indian individual investor do?
You wouldn’t know because the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s handbook of statistics has no information. And as per the NCAER survey, about 43 percent of investors prefer to invest through mutual funds rather than jumping into the open field all by themselves.
Over the years, mutual funds’ assets under management in equity funds have grown immensely. It stands at $33 billion (assets in equity funds) as compared to measly $5.32 billion in March 2004.
The growth appears impressive. However, only 11 percent of the population is part of this smaller investor community. “Average” Indian investors might want to rethink their historical avoidance of stocks. Inflation (CPI) is 10.16 percent (May 2012) and rising, above the nine-year average of 6.98 percent.
In such a situation, saving will keep them safe … but will it keep them going?

View the original article here

Since I met her over a week ago, I have been unable to forget.
Every morning as I put on my lipstick and black eyeliner in front of the mirror, I am reminded of her face. Or lack of it.
Sonali Mukherjee, 27, is one of hundreds of women across the world who have lost their faces, and their will to survive, as a result of one of the most heinous crimes against women I have come across: Acid violence.
Nine years ago, three men broke into Sonali’s home in the east Indian city of Dhanbad as she slept, and threw concentrated acid over her face.
The highly corrosive chemical caused 70 percent burns to her face, neck and arms and melted away the skin and flesh on her nose, cheeks and ears – leaving her almost blind and partially deaf.
Sonali, who was a 17-year-old college student at the time of the attack, had rejected their sexual advances for months and when she threatened to call the police, they took their revenge.
Despite multiple painful skin reconstructive surgeries, she still looks nothing like the photographs taken before the attack – a smiling pretty, confident, young woman who took pride in her appearance and who wanted to be a teacher in India’s poor and marginalised tribal areas.
Sonali says she is living “half a life with half a face” and has endured so much mental and physical pain over the years, that she is now pleading with the government to allow her to end her life. Euthanasia is illegal in India.
According to London-based charity, Acid Survivors Trust International, around 1,500 acid attacks are reported globally each year, with 80 percent of them on women. Figures are likely to be much higher, though, as many victims are too scared to speak out.
Acid attacks are not specific to any one country, but are more common in India and other South Asian nations such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal as well as in Cambodia and Uganda.
Many of the attacks on women, like that on Sonali, are simply because men in these deeply patriarchal societies cannot handle rejection of love or a marriage proposal by a woman and decide to take revenge.
In a conservative culture where women are largely still judged by their looks, rather than by their attitudes, education, career or achievements, throwing a bottle of cheap and easily available hydrochloric acid over them is guaranteed to ruin their lives.
No one will marry them, employ them or even want to be seen with them. Their families, which are often poor, are burdened with the expense of years of medical treatment and soon run out of money – forcing victims with “half faces” to hide indoors, isolated and unable to return to the life they once had.
Despite the long-term financial, medical and psychological support vital for victims, little compensation, if any, is given by authorities.
As a result, these faceless women are left forgotten – but if you meet them, you simply cannot forget.
See Sonali’s story here.
Photo caption: Nita Bhalla and Sonali Mukherjee pictured at a Sikh temple in New Delhi which has given Mukherjee shelter. Photo taken on July 22, 2012 by Ahmad Masood of Reuters

View the original article here

A DJ plays music at a club in Warsaw January 4, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Kacper Pempel
LONDON | Thu Jul 26, 2012 3:24pm EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.
Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.
A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.
"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse," Serra told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."
They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.
Intrinsic loudness is the volume baked into a song when it is recorded, which can make it sound louder than others even at the same volume setting on an amplifier.
The music industry has long been accused of ramping up the volume at which songs are recorded in a 'loudness war' but Serra says this is the first time it has been properly measured using a large database.
The study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, offers a handy recipe for musicians in a creative drought.
Old tunes re-recorded with increased loudness, simpler chord progressions and different instruments could sound new and fashionable. The Rolling Stones in their 50th anniversary year should take note.
(Reporting by Chris Wickham)

View the original article here

CHICAGO | Wed Aug 1, 2012 8:20pm EDT
CHICAGO Aug 1 (Reuters) - Nokia is promoting Groupon Inc offers on the maps on its Lumia smartphones as it tries to stand out in a crowded field vying for the attention of U.S. cellphone owners.
The partnership with Groupon, announced on Wednesday, shows Groupon Now! offers on Nokia maps with a green "G" icon. U.S. users can buy offers from their phones and get directions to the locations to redeem the offers using Nokia's navigation system.
Nokia is not sharing financial details of the partnership with Groupon. No other such deals have been announced yet, but in the future Nokia could look for different ways of monetizing its maps, such as giving phone owners easier ways to make reservations or bookings, Michael Halbherr, Nokia's executive vice president of location and commerce, told Reuters.
Nokia, the Finnish cellphone maker, has been trying to reverse its decline in the smartphone market by adopting Microsoft software, but has had little success against rivals Apple and Samsung.
Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 in June and said phones running the new software would hit the market this autumn.
"The primary intent right now is to make Windows Phone a competitive ecosystem versus either Android or iOS," said Halbherr, referring to Google's Android operating system and the Apple system used to run its popular iPhones.
Nokia vaulted into the navigation business in 2008 with its $8.1 billion purchase of Navteq. It claims that nine out of 10 car navigation systems use its maps. Such systems also compete with free products such as Google Maps on phones and computers.
Until now, Nokia navigation products have been applications running on Windows phones. With Windows Phone 8, Nokia's location platform will be part of the operating system itself.
Location-based services, such as directions on smartphones, are critical to Nokia's overall strategy even if it means that competitors get to include the services on their phones, CEO Stephen Elop told reporters in Chicago.
"It is to our benefit to ensure that many different companies use this, and there will be companies taking advantage of the platform who may compete with other elements of Nokia," said Elop. "But that has to be okay. It has to be, you have to think that way. The competition ... is not with other device manufacturers, it's with Google."
View the original article here

Your welcome to this blog !!!