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Monday, May 7, 2012

Yahoo CEO faces calls for ouster after inaccuracy

In this Nov. 24, 2010 photo, then PayPal president Scott Thompson, who in January 2012 was named CEO of Yahoo Inc., poses for photos at PayPal's offices in San Jose, Calif. Yahoo shareholder and New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb questioned Thompson's qualifications and integrity after exposing a misrepresentation about the executive?s education. The fabrication confirmed by Yahoo Inc. on Thursday, May 3, 2012 gives Loeb more artillery as he tries to topple a board of directors favored by Thompson. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

FILE - In this Nov. 15, 2010 file photo, then PayPal president Scott Thompson, who in January 2012 was named CEO of Yahoo Inc., speaks at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Yahoo shareholder and New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb questioned Thompson's qualifications and integrity after exposing a misrepresentation about the executive?s education. The fabrication confirmed by Yahoo Inc. on Thursday, May 3, 2012 gives Loeb more artillery as he tries to topple a board of directors favored by Thompson. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Scott Thompson's reign as Yahoo's CEO is in jeopardy after just four months on the job because he allowed an inaccuracy about his academic credentials to recur for years.

A major Yahoo shareholder who exposed the fabrication is now leading the charge to oust Thompson for unethical conduct. In a letter Friday, activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb demanded that the board of the struggling Internet company fire Thompson by noon EDT Monday or face possible legal action.

"CEO's have been terminated for less at other companies," wrote Loeb, who controls a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo through his hedge fund, Third Point LLC.

Yahoo reiterated Friday that "the board is reviewing this matter and, upon completion of its review, will make an appropriate disclosure to shareholders."

Thompson's troubles revolve around an exaggeration about his education at Stonehill College, a small Catholic school near Boston where he was graduated in 1979.

Since announcing Thompson's hiring in January, Yahoo had included two bachelor's degrees ? one for accounting and the other for computer science ? on the executive's biography. The dual degrees appeared on Yahoo's own website and in an April 27 legal document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

After being confronted Thursday by Loeb, Yahoo confirmed that Thompson received only an accounting degree from Stonehill. Yahoo has since removed all references to Thompson's education from his bio on its website. The company hadn't amended its SEC filing with the inaccuracy as of late Friday.

It's unclear whether the inaccuracy about the computer science originated with Thompson or someone else at Yahoo.

But Thompson's bio with dual degrees periodically cropped up before he joined Yahoo. He was listed with a computer degree on a website touting his appearance at the Web 2.0 technology conference in 2010 while he was running eBay Inc.'s PayPal payment service. The computer science degree also has appeared in Thompson's bio in connection with his 2008 appointment to a Silicon Valley startup, Zuora.

EBay listed only Thompson's accounting degree in its SEC filings while he was working at PayPal.

Even if Thompson didn't personally write his biography, he almost certainly reviewed the information at some point and should be held accountable for the distortion, said Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

Elson believes Yahoo's board needs to dump Thompson or "it will face questions about its own effectiveness."

Yahoo blamed an "inadvertent error." After that excuse was ridiculed on the Internet, Yahoo issued another statement late Thursday about the board's intent to look into what happened. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., didn't give a deadline.

The uproar over Thompson's qualifications and integrity is the latest tempest at beleaguered Yahoo, which has been reeling since it turned down an opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $33 per share four years ago.

The company has been losing ground to rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. ever since, causing its revenue to steadily fall and leaving its stock price below $20 since September 2008, a few months after Microsoft's final offer. Yahoo's shares fell 25 cents to close at $15.15 Friday.

Thompson, Yahoo's fourth full-time CEO in the past five years, had just started to revamp the company, but he probably won't be around much longer, predicted Kirk Hanson, executive director for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley.

"The board really is boxed into a corner," Hanson said. "If this individual is prone to exaggeration or excessive claims, they have to be worried it might happen again down the road.

"They also have to ask themselves, 'Can this leader serve as a moral example or moral leader for our company?' Behavior rolls downhill. If the CEO exaggerates a little, then others in the organization will exaggerate a lot."

Although he was well-respected at PayPal, Thompson isn't getting much support in Silicon Valley.

Thompson alienated much of the technology industry in March when he decided to sue Facebook for alleged infringement on some of Yahoo's Internet patents. The lawsuit has been skewered in Silicon Valley as a cheap shot at Facebook Inc. as it prepared to complete an initial public offering of stock that is aiming to raise as much as $13.6 billion for the company and its current shareholders. Yahoo critics also viewed the lawsuit as the desperate act of a company that has run out of good ideas.

In his Friday letter, Loeb argued that Thompson has to be dumped to avoid "irreparable damage to Yahoo's culture." He argued that Yahoo's own code of ethics justifies firing Thompson "for cause," a move that probably would prevent him for qualifying for a severance package. Yahoo's code states that information filed with the SEC "must be full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable."

If Yahoo fires Thompson, it will be the company's second ouster of a CEO in less than a year. The company fired Thompson's predecessor, Carol Bartz in September after concluding her turnaround strategy wasn't working.

Thompson so far has been focused on cutting costs. Just last month, Thompson laid off 2,000 Yahoo employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the company's biggest payroll purge in history. He has also promised to close or sell about 50 Yahoo services that haven't been attracting enough online traffic or generating enough revenue.

Loeb is trying to oust Thompson as he seeks four seats on Yahoo's board of directors ? one for himself and three for his allies. Yahoo instead added three other directors in late March. Thompson told Loeb he wasn't qualified to be on the company's board.

The search for new directors was overseen by Patti Hart, whom Loeb is also attacking as an ethics liability. Loeb is upset that Hart's bio claimed she held a bachelor's degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University. On Thursday, Yahoo clarified that Hart graduated from the college with a bachelor's degree in business administration with specialties in marketing and economics.

Loeb ended his letter by pressing Yahoo to appoint him and his three preferred candidates to avoid a showdown at the company's annual meeting later this year. Yahoo hasn't scheduled the meeting yet.

"The company can ill afford to continue this misguided fight with its largest outside shareholder while it has so many other fires to put out," Loeb wrote. "There has been enough damage already."

Associated Press

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New metal mix could lead to cheap, plentiful sodium-ion batteries in gadgets

Lithium batteries very frequently power our gadgets, but the material itself isn't common and, by extension, isn't cheap. Researchers at the Tokyo University of Science aim to solve that through sodium-ion batteries using a new electrode material. By mixing together oxides of iron, manganese and sodium, Shinichi Komaba and team have managed to get a sodium battery's electrode holding a charge closer to that of a lithium-ion battery while using a much more abundant material. Having just 30 total charges means this simplest form of sodium-ion battery technology could be years away from finding a home in your next smartphone or EV, although it's not the only option. Argonne National Laboratory's Chris Johnson has co-developed a more exotic vanadium pentoxide electrode that could produce 200 charges while keeping the battery itself made out of an ingredient you more often find in your table salt than your mobile gear.

[Image credit: Hi-Res Images of Chemical Elements]

New metal mix could lead to cheap, plentiful sodium-ion batteries in gadgets originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 May 2012 06:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Disney Research?s Touch? shows off the future of iPhone-like multitouch gestures? everywhere

The iPhone made capacitive multitouch, gesture-based technology mainstream. These days, we never think twice about tapping, swiping, pinching, twisting, or otherwise manipulating the digital content on our devices. But only on our digital devices. Imagine a future where capacitive multitouch wasn't limited to screens but could be implemented on all sorts of everyday objects, from doorknobs to tables to liquids, to the human body itself. Well, Disney Research isn't just imagining it, they're engineering it today with something they call Touch?.

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Study ties fertility treatment, birth defect risk

Test-tube babies have higher rates of birth defects, and doctors have long wondered: Is it because of certain fertility treatments or infertility itself? A large new study from Australia suggests both may play a role.

Compared to those conceived naturally, babies that resulted from simple IVF, or in vitro fertilization ? mixing eggs and sperm in a lab dish ? had no greater risk of birth defects once factors such as the mom's age and smoking were taken into account.

However, birth defects were more common if treatment included injecting a single sperm into an egg, which is done in many cases these days, especially if male infertility is involved. About 10 percent of babies born this way had birth defects versus 6 percent of those conceived naturally, the study found.

It could be that the extra jostling of egg and sperm does damage. Or that other problems lurk in the genes of sperm so defective they must be forced to fertilize an egg.

"I don't want to scare people," because the vast majority of babies are born healthy, said the study's leader, Michael Davies of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Couples could use simple IVF without sperm injection, freeze the embryos and implant only one or two at a time, he said. All of those can cut the chance of a birth defect.

The study was published online Saturday by the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a fertility conference in Barcelona, Spain. Health agencies in Australia paid for the research.

More than 3.7 million babies are born each year through assisted reproduction. Methods include everything from drugs to coax the ovaries to make eggs to artificial insemination and IVF. Fertility treatments account for about 4 percent of births in Australia and as many as 8 percent of them in Denmark, where costs are widely covered, Davies said.

In the United States, more than 60,000 babies were born in 2009 from 146,000 IVF attempts. About three-quarters of them used ICSI, or intracytoplasmic sperm injection.

ICSI was developed because of male infertility. But half the time, it was not done for that reason but to improve the odds that at least some embryos will be created from an IVF attempt. Many clinics do it in all cases.

IVF costs around $10,000 to $12,000 per attempt and another $2,000 for sperm injection.

The study used records on nearly 303,000 babies conceived naturally and 6,163 conceived with help in Australia from 1986 through 2002, plus records on birth defects detected by age 5. Researchers counted heart, spinal or urinary tract defects, limb abnormalities and problems such as cleft palate or lip, but not minor defects unless they needed treatment or were disfiguring.

They looked at birth defect rates according to type of fertility treatment. They also had three comparison groups of women who conceived naturally, including some with some history of infertility or who previously needed help to get pregnant.

Among fertility treatments, only ICSI, the sperm injection, resulted in higher rates of birth defects once other factors that affect these odds were taken into account.

"They take a sperm that is probably not normal and force it to conceive," said Dr. Darine El-Chaar, an OB-GYN at Canada's University of Ottawa. She led a smaller previous study of this and called the new work impressive and "the study that needed to be done" to sort out the source of these risks.

In the study, frozen embryos were less likely to result in birth defects than fresh ones used soon after they were created. Defective ones may be less likely to survive freezing and thawing, so the fittest embryos result in pregnancies, Davies said.

Babies born to women with a history of infertility who ended up conceiving on their own, or who had natural pregnancies after assisted ones, also had higher rates of birth defects. That suggests that infertility itself is playing a role.

Dr. Glenn Schattman, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies and a Cornell University fertility specialist, said it was reassuring that ordinary IVF is safe. If ICSI is chosen because male infertility is involved, "parents have to be aware that by having a child with their own genetic material, they might be increasing their risk" of a birth defect, he said.

Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a geneticist and research chief at the March of Dimes, said doctors should take this work seriously and discuss it with patients. He said techniques have improved over the last decade and ICSI may be safer now than when this study began.

Even with genetic testing for various diseases, "we always tell our patients that this doesn't guarantee a perfect baby," he said.

___

Online:

New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

Infertility information: http://www.sart.org and http://www.asrm.org

Sperm injection explanation: http://bit.ly/Inb688

CDC on fertility treatments: http://www.cdc.gov/art/ARTReports.htm

___

Follow Marilynn Marchione at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Associated Press

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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

iPod Connectivity and Satellite Radio, Ford's Growing Pride | Mobile ...

Without effort, the operator can now enjoy audio presentations of their iPod into their vehicles or by just listening to Sirius Satellite Radio. These innovations are made by Ford for the automotive industry in its latest vehicle lineup. Said the major changes are expected to gain from the sale of Ford cars in years to double.

Mark Fields, Ford?s President of North and South America found. ?We at Ford are committed to listening to our customers more, and that there never seems to know how their personal audio devices while driving, we see the upward trend in the audio market and we are quick to respond to our cars. ?

In addition, Doug Vanda Gens, director of product from Ford and business development for electronics said, ?The iPod was a huge hit, and we at Ford wanted a way for people to operate the equipment in their Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicle without having to develops with the unit while driving excitement. What we have achieved is the integration with the iPod in our cars is only part of a much larger effort to Ford Motor Company to respond to customer trends more quickly. ?

In 2007 Ford lineup, which is embedded extra audio inputs provided. The relationships can come to your iPod or MP3 player integration with impeccable audio output in the vehicle. Said lineup includes Ford Edge, Mustang, Fusion, Explorer, Expedition, Sport Trac, Ranger, F-150 and more.

Early next year, Ford will also Tunes for Advanced Audio System. This is an iPod integration, which provides quality sound even while charging. Trip Tunes Advanced allows the driver to keep the iPod in the glove compartment, or control and select music via the radio controls or steering wheel.

Another upcoming offer by Ford is the integration of Sirius radio. Field also noted, ?In 2005, less than half of our cars come with a navigation system, satellite radio or extra audio inputs. For 2007 we have doubled the models with a navigation system and quadrupling the number with Sirius Satellite Radio.?

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OSHA cites Upstate Niagara Milk Coop for safety violations (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)

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GOP Pricks Obama; He Needles Back (WSJ)

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