Amer Sports profits fall in Q4 due to warm winter (AP)

HELSINKI ? Global sports equipment maker Amer Sports Corp., whose brands include Atomic, Salomon and Wilson, saw fourth-quarter net profit fall 18 percent to euro31.1 million ($41 million), partly because of a slow start to the winter season.

Revenue in the period was euro556.9 million ($730 million), down 5 percent a year earlier, the Finnish company said Tuesday.

In the full-year, however, sales grew 8 percent to a new record of euro1.9 billion, with net profit surging more than 30 percent to euro91 million.

Chief executive Heikki Takala warned that although 2011 was a record year, the Finnish company was hit by low demand in November and December because of warm weather in key markets, which also was expected to have an adverse impact on 2012 pre-orders.

"2011 was a record year for Amer Sports. Almost all of our business units and geographic regions are improving and we can see that the strategy announced in 2010 is proving to work," Takala said. "We do see some new challenges ? the winter sports equipment market will be challenging due to the slow start of the season ... Further, the economical environment remains cloudy."

Amer's share price closed up more than 1 percent at euro9.70 ($12.78) on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

During October through December, Amer's net sales fell 10 percent in the winter and outdoor sector, but were up 22 percent in fitness equipment and 2 percent in ball sports.

Revenue fell in the company's largest market ? Europe, Middle East and Africa ? by 16 percent to euro274 million, but was up 12 percent in the Americas at euro205 million and 6 percent in Asia-Pacific at euro78 million.

The Helsinki-based company has 7,000 workers ? up from 6,500 last year ? with some 2,400 employed at sales and distribution points in 33 countries.

___

Online:

Company site: http://www.amersports.com

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120131/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_finland_earns_amer_sports

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Good housing legislation could save the economy

Housing is the one area of policy with the greatest potential to actually move the needle on the economy

I don?t know if the President will say much about housing, but there are some important and potential helpful policy choices percolating in the background.

Skip to next paragraph Jared Bernstein

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Before joining the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities as a senior fellow, Jared was chief economist to Vice President Joseph Biden and executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class. He is a contributor to MSNBC and CNBC and has written numerous books, including 'Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?'

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I?ve long held that of all the stuff on the White House?s ?we-can?t-wait? list?things they can do to help the economy and jobs without going through that legislative death trap formerly known as Congress?housing policy is the one with the greatest potential to actually move the needle.

And the most helpful policy in housing is the reduction of mortgage principal for underwater homeowners.?? Research has clearly revealed that owing more than the value on your home is the strongest predictor of foreclosure, and housing finance analysts widely agree that principal reduction is the best medicine to avoid this outcome.

But what does any of this have to do with stuff we could actually do right now?? Good question.? The answer is that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could quickly reduce the principal on millions of home loans they own or insure, without going through Congress.

So, why haven?t they done so?? Another fine question.?? First, you need to recall that Fan and Fred are 80% owned by the US gov?t right now, and FHFA, as conservator, wants to protect the taxpayer.? That?s fine?we thank you, FHFA.?

But?and news accounts have been getting this quite wrong?FHFA believes that loan forgiveness (principal reduction) would only save the taxpayers $20 billion while loan forbearance would save $24 billion (the latter modifies the loan, it does not reduce it).??

In other words, the FHFA agrees that both types of loan adjustments would reduce defaults and thus reduce losses to taxpayers, with a slight advantage to forbearance, which, as I?ll argue in a moment, is very likely incorrect.? I think if you did the analysis right, forgiveness would trump forbearance by a long shot.? But given the fact that reduction would clean this mess up a whole lot faster and more reliably than just changing the terms of the loans, and that taxpayers save either way, the path ahead?toward forgiveness, not forbearance?should be clear.

Unfortunately, the FHFA is placing landmines in that path.? Based on a letter reviewing all this by FHFA acting director Ed DeMarco, news accounts like this or this are reporting that if Fan and Fred were to reduce the principal on a subset of the mortgages they own or insure, it would cost?taxpayers $100 billion.

This $100 billion (it?s actually $102bn), however, is a gross number?it is the losses to the agencies, and the taxpayers, from all the mortgage defaults that FHFA expects to occur if they neither forbear nor reduce principal.? The relevant numbers, however, are the difference between the losses under a forbearance program ($78 billion), or a reduction program ($82 billion) and the cost of doing nothing.

The punch line, then, is that by their estimates, forgiveness saves the taxpayer $20 billion; forbearance, $24 billion.

But for a number of reasons, FHFA?s methods make forbearance look better than it really is.? This is some weedy stuff, but it matters:

?they use a state level price index rather than a localized price level.? This approach averages across cities with huge price drops and those with normal price declines, and thus reduces the number of the deeply underwater borrowers.*?? That in turn understates the impact of the policy most helpful to those borrowers: principal reduction.

?they use FICO credit scores and debt-to-income ratios at the time of loan origination rather than where those measures are today.? Obviously, they?re worse today, so this makes the agencies? book look better than it really is, and again, understates the benefits to principal reduction.? In other words, the way they do it artificially lowers their expected default rate, and so the policy that?s most effective against defaults for those with lower FICOs and higher DTIs gets less credit than it should.

?they assume that all of their debt forgiven in their forbearance programs is repaid?100% of it.?? That?s not realistic and it significantly reduces the cost of this option. ? Simply building in a realistic default rate for debt that?s been pushed back to the end of the loan would raise the cost of forbearance relative to principal reduction.

Any one of these changes will sop up the $4 billion difference in an NY minute, showing forgiveness to dominate forbearance.? But even if the FHFA wants to stick with their numbers, reductions will go to work much more quickly and effectively to prevent defaults.?

If they keep coming up with reasons not to do the right thing, the White House should do the right thing and replace DeMarco?a perfect good guy who believes he?s doing the right thing here but isn?t?with someone who gets the urgency of the situation.

*Imagine a) that anyone with a home price decline of 30% is underwater and needs a loan mod, and b) a state has two homeowners in two different cities.? Homeowner A?s price went up 30%, homeowner B?s price went down 30%. Average them together across the state and no one needs a mod; use the local price index, and B should get one.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on jaredbernsteinblog.com.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/REkhgMN9CWg/Good-housing-legislation-could-save-the-economy

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Life Out There | Starry Dreams and Financial Woes: SETI Research Is Revived - Life Out There

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, a band of astronomers recently restarted the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=53798e171a274bb93be016758fe96374

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House mice serenade mates with 'bird' song

Most people are familiar with the telltale squeak of a mouse scurrying out of their pantry, but scientists have long known that these aren?t the only noises house mice make. During courtship, the rodents also communicate in the ultrasonic frequency range, which sits beyond human hearing. Now, new research shows that these mating vocalizations are more than just your typical squeaks ? they?re songs, not unlike those you?d expect to hear from courting birds.

?It seems as though house mice might provide a new model organism for the study of song in animals," lead researcher Dustin Penn, an evolutionary biologist at the Veterinary University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. "Who would have thought that?"

Over the last few years, Penn and his colleagues conducted a series of studies on the courtship vocalizations of house mice. In their initial research, published in the journal Animal Behavior in 2010, they caught wild male and female house mice and looked at the vocal nature of their courtship routines.

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They found that most of the male mice would start their ultrasonic calls the moment they caught the urine scent of a sexually mature female. When the researchers played these calls back to the females, they learned that the females could somehow tell the difference between the calls of their siblings and the calls of unrelated males ? the females showed little interest in the squeaks of their brothers.

More recently, the researchers began analyzing several audio parameters, including duration, pitch and frequency, of the mating calls of wild-caught house mice. To their surprise, they found that the squeaks are quite complex and contain several features seen in bird songs, such as variations in duration and frequency of call syllables (units of sounds separated by silence).

When they compared the songs with one another, they saw that the vocalizations contained signatures of individuality and kinship. They also found that the songs of siblings were more similar to one anther than the songs of unrelated males.

The researchers now plan to look at how song quality affects mate choice ? in some bird species, males with the most complex songs win all the females. Future studies will also focus on figuring out how related mice have such similar songs.

"The familial effects we found might be explained by imprinting (social learning), as with bird song, genetic differences, or both," they write in their most recent study, published in the January issue of the journal Physiology & Behavior.

? 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46184222/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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Actress' claim to be gay by choice riles activists (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO ? Cynthia Nixon learned the hard way this week that when it comes to gay civil rights, the personal is always political. Very political.

The actress best known for portraying fiery lawyer Miranda Hobbes on "Sex and the City" is up to her perfectly arched eyebrows in controversy since The New York Times Magazine published a profile in which she was quoted as saying that for her, being gay was a conscious choice. Nixon is engaged to a woman with whom she has been in a relationship for eight years. Before that, she spent 15 years and had two children with a man.

"I understand that for many people it's not, but for me it's a choice, and you don't get to define my gayness for me," Nixon said while recounting some of the flak gay rights activists previously had given her for treading in similar territory. "A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it's a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn't matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not."

To say that a certain segment of the gay community "is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice" is an understatement. Gay rights activists have worked hard to combat the idea that people decide to be physically attracted to same-sex partners any more than they choose to be attracted to opposite-sex ones because the question, so far unanswered by science, is often used by religious conservatives, including GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum and former candidate Michelle Bachman, to argue that homosexuality is immoral behavior, not an inherent trait.

Among the activists most horrified by Nixon's comments was Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen, whose organization monitors and tries to debunk programs that claim to cure people of same-sex attractions with therapy. Besen said he found the actress' analysis irresponsible and flippant, despite her ample caveats.

"Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words, and it is going to be used when some kid comes out and their parents force them into some ex-gay camp while she's off drinking cocktails at fancy parties," Besen said. "When people say it's a choice, they are green-lighting an enormous amount of abuse because if it's a choice, people will try to influence and guide young people to what they perceive as the right choice."

Nixon's publicist did not respond to an e-mail asking if the actress wished to comment on the criticism.

While the broader gay rights movement recognizes that human sexuality exists on a spectrum, and has found common cause with transgender and bisexual people, Nixon may have unwittingly given aid and comfort to those who want to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, adopt children and secure equal spousal benefits, said Jennifer Pizer, legal director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and the Law, a pro-gay think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

One of the factors courts consider in determining if a law is unconstitutional is whether members of the minority group it targets share an unchangeable or "immutable" trait, Pizer noted. Although the definition of how fixed a characteristic has to be to qualify as immutable still is evolving ? religious affiliation, for example, is recognized as grounds for equal protection ? the U.S. Supreme Court still has not included sexual orientation among the traits "so integral to personhood it's not something the government should require people to change," she said.

"If gay people in this country had more confidence that their individual freedom was going to be respected, then the temperature would lower a bit on the immutability question because the idea of it being a choice wouldn't seem to stack the deck against their rights," Pizer said.

Nixon stirred the identity politics pot further when she explained in a follow-up interview with The Daily Beast this week that she purposefully rejected identifying herself as bisexual even though her history suggested it was an accurate term.

"I don't pull out the "bisexual" word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals," she said. "But I do completely feel that when I was in relationships with men, I was in love and in lust with those men. And then I met (her fiance) Christine and I fell in love and lust with her. I am completely the same person and I was not walking around in some kind of fog. I just responded to the people in front of me the way I truly felt."

Although science has not identified either a purely biological or sociological basis for sexual orientation, University of California, Davis psychologist Gregory Herek, an expert on anti-gay prejudice, said Nixon's experience is consistent with research showing that women have an easier time moving between opposite and same-sex partners.

A survey Herek conducted of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals of both genders bore this out. Sixteen percent of the lesbians surveyed reported they felt they had had a fair amount of choice in their sexual orientations, while only five percent of the gay men did. Among bisexuals, the figures were 40 percent for men and 45 percent for women.

What remains to be teased out, Herek said, is how a representative national sample of heterosexuals would answer the same question, and what people mean when their sexual orientation was a choice or not. Are they talking about their sexual desires? Acting on those desires? Or simply the identity they choose to show to the world?

"The nature vs. nurture debate really is passe," he said. "The debate is not really an either/or debate in the vast majority of cases, but how much of each. We don't know how big a role biology plays and how big a role culture plays. A possibility not often discussed is it's not the same for everybody."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120128/ap_on_en_tv/us_cynthia_nixon_gay_by_choice

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Mivizu Sense Leather iPad 2 Case

The Sense Apple iPad 2 Leather Case from Mivizu completely covers your iPad 2 in leather.? The iPad 2 slides into a geniune grain leather frame with a padded back for extra protection.? The interior is lined with microfiber fabric to help keep the screen cleaned.? The folding cover wakes/sleeps your device and protects your [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2012/01/27/mivizu-sense-leather-ipad-2-case/

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NY art dealer charged in $4M fraud (AP)

NEW YORK ? A New York art dealer has been charged in a $4 million fraud for selling works by Picasso, Matisse and others without informing the owner or giving him the proceeds.

The charges in a criminal complaint in Manhattan accuse Robert Scott Cook of selling 16 works of art without the owner/collector's knowledge. The artwork included watercolors, drawings, photographs, and other works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others.

Lawyers in court papers filed in a civil case against him say Cook is likely living abroad because he travels frequently around the world. A lawyer for the 62-year-old Cook did not immediately return a phone message for comment.

From 2005 to 2011, Cook owned Cook Fine Art, LLC.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/arts/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120127/ap_on_en_ot/us_art_dealer_charged

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