Labor Relations Board Rulings Could Be Undone



By ruling that Mr. Obama’s three recess appointments last January were illegal, the federal appeals court ruling, if upheld, would leave the board with just one member, short of the quorum needed to issue any rulings. The Obama administration could appeal the court ruling, but no announcement was made on Friday.


If the Supreme Court were to uphold Friday’s ruling, issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it would mean that the labor board did not have a quorum since last January and that all its rulings since then should be nullified.


Many Republicans and business groups applauded Friday’s ruling. They often assert that the appointments Mr. Obama made to the board have transformed it into a tool of organized labor. But many Democrats and labor unions say Mr. Obama’s appointments restored ideological balance to the board after it was tipped in favor of business interests under President George W. Bush


Mark G. Pearce, the board’s chairman, issued a statement saying the board disagreed with the ruling and suggested that other appeals courts hearing cases about the constitutionality of Mr. Obama’s appointments could reach a different conclusion.


“In the meantime, the board has important work to do,” said Mr. Pearce, whose agency oversees enforcement of the laws governing strikes and unionization drives. “We will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions.”


Unless the Senate confirms future nominees to the board — Senate Republicans have blocked several of Mr. Obama’s board nominees — Mr. Pearce will be the only member left if Friday’s ruling is upheld. The board has five seats.


Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a statement that urged the recess appointees to “do the right thing and step down.” He added, “To avoid further damage to the economy, the N.L.R.B. must take the responsible course and cease issuing any further opinions until a constitutionally sound quorum can be established.”


The three disputed recess appointees included two Democrats, Sharon Block, deputy labor secretary, and Richard Griffin, general counsel to the operating engineers’ union; and one Republican, Terence Flynn, a counsel to a board member. Mr. Flynn resigned last May after being accused of leaking materials about the group’s deliberations. Another Republican member, Brian Hayes, stepped down when his term expired last month.


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IHT Rendezvous: Which Companies' Sustainability Promises Do You Believe?

H&M, the Swedish clothing retail giant, has vowed to become greener and more sustainable when it comes to the water it uses to make its clothes.

“Water is a key resource for H&M, and we are committed to ensuring water is used responsibly throughout our value chain. We do this to minimize risks in our operations, protect the environment and secure availability of water for present and future generations,” said Karl-Johan Persson, the head of H&M, in a press statement released yesterday.

The World Wildlife Fund, the venerable environmental group, will monitor the effort and collaborate with H&M in a campaign called “Pioneering Water Stewardship for Fashion” over the next three years.

With 94,000 employees selling clothes in 48 countries and 750 direct suppliers, H&M is a significant global force in the garment industry.

WWF sees H&M’s commitment to changing all aspects of its water use — from cotton to the customer — as a chance to change the way an entire industry deals with water use and pollution.

“This partnership marks an evolution in the corporate approach to water,” said James P. Leape, Director General of WWF International, according to the statement.

Just two years ago Greenpeace U.K. condemned H&M for wasting water, shaming it with commitments Puma, Adidas and Nike had made to do better. At the time Greenpeace charged: “H&M had links to factories discharging a range of hazardous chemicals into China’s rivers.”

The German sportswear-maker Puma (owned by the French PPR) has been scoring points with environmentalists on several sustainability campaigns. Two years ago, the company introduced an accounting tool that measures the sustainability of products in terms of the greenhouse gases emitted and water consumed to make them. More visible to consumers, the company has received much praise for its environmentally friendly packaging.

Even the corporate behemoth Nike, which in the ’90s was forced to fight against the image of profiting from child labor, has long vowed to be a good and sustainable corporate citizen. In 2011, it announced it wanted to stop discharging hazardous chemicals by 2020.

Join our sustainability discussion. Do you trust these multinational companies when they announce sustainability plans? Or are such announcements more public relations and marketing than honest goals?

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DealBook: Moving From Wall Street to the Tech Sector Proves Tricky

When Vinicius Vacanti set out to make a pitch for a local deals start-up to investors, he figured he understood the process given his four years on Wall Street.

But minutes into his first meeting with a venture capitalist, Mr. Vacanti realized he would be rejected. The investor quickly pointed out the flaws, including the site’s lack of users. As Mr. Vacanti rode the bus back to New York from Boston, he considered scrapping the project and starting over.

“The skills you build on Wall Street don’t correlate to a start-up,” said Mr. Vacanti, 31, a founder of the daily deal aggregator Yipit, who previously worked at the private equity firms Blackstone Group and the Quadrangle Group. While some of those skills are useful, he said, “a couple of those are actually bad.”

As more financiers jump to the technology sector, some are finding that their background, typically considered an asset in the corporate world, can be a liability. Some do not know how to write computer code. Others are ill-prepared for the penny-pinching and frustration of start-up life. In short, they have trouble persuading the Silicon Valley establishment that they have what it takes to nurture a young company.

“We start a little skeptical of someone from a finance background,” said Eric Paley of Founder Collective, the investor who declined to back Mr. Vacanti’s original idea. “It’s the lack of having to create something for a customer, find the market opportunity and persevere through it with very, very low economics.”

The challenge has become particularly acute as big investors become more discerning with their money. While the technology scene has boomed in recent years, venture capitalists are showing signs of pulling back, especially after the struggles of Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and other former Internet darlings.

Last year, venture capitalists invested $1.78 billion in 302 deals in New York City. That compares with $2.27 billion in 317 deals in 2011, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, which use Thomson Reuters data.

“There’s definitely fewer dollars available” for young companies that need an additional round of financing, said David Pakman, a New York-based partner at the venture capital firm Venrock. “Capital is tight and getting tighter.”

For young Wall Street professionals contemplating a bleak job market, the lure of working at a start-up — with its cachet and prospects for riches — can be powerful. But many financiers are finding it difficult to make the switch.

When Evan Rose left his job at the hedge fund Dynamic Capital Management to start an online night life service, he did not know how to write code. At first, he tried to outsource the programming for the site to Web developers in India. But he had to throw out the final product. “It was pretty much gobbledygook,” said Mr. Rose, 25.

After that, he started from scratch, learning to write code using Google and online forums. It took him a year to create the finished product.

When he eventually took the project to investors, he was excited about the idea, which he called an “OpenTable for night life.” But the site, NiteFly, had a chilly reception. “Although to him it was a novel concept, we’d heard it before,” said Kyle Widrick, a venture capitalist at Burch Creative Capital who heard the pitch.

To be taken seriously, Mr. Rose realized that he would need a deeper knowledge of the intended industry. So he abandoned NiteFly to work on a different start-up, eCruit, which aims to connect corporate recruiters to college students through online video conferences.

He worked with a human resources employee at a big bank, who used his contacts to attract recruiters to the service. With a seed investment from Ted Dintersmith, a partner emeritus at Charles River Ventures, eCruit is now planning its inaugural recruiting sessions for this year.

Some first-time entrepreneurs turn to mentorship programs like Y Combinator and TechStars to gain experience and tap into sources of financing.

Olga Vidisheva, the founder of the online fashion company Shoptiques, had a classic Wall Street background when she entered Y Combinator, having spent two years at Goldman Sachs before going to Harvard Business School. Two of her earliest investors were friends from Goldman, and her first employee came from the buyout firm Providence Equity Partners.

With no technical background, Ms. Vidisheva, 27, used the opportunity at Y Combinator to find a programmer. After the three-month-long program, she also ended up raising $2 million from prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Only a handful of “Wall Street refugees” have gone through Y Combinator, said Paul Graham, a founder of the incubator, adding that the number of applicants from finance has been growing in the last couple of years. “What we like about them is they tend to be pretty fierce,” Mr. Graham said. “You can point them at any problem, and if they don’t know how to solve it, they’ll figure out how to solve it and then solve it.”

Others are trying to bring their Wall Street experience to the Web, rather than entering a completely new field.

Nick Sedlet, a former quantitative strategist at Goldman Sachs, and Elli Sharef, a former management consultant at McKinsey & Company, started HireArt, a site that connects qualified job seekers with employers. They modeled the program on the in-depth interview process at Goldman and McKinsey, which require applicants to tackle math and logic problems. Prospective employees might be asked to design a marketing campaign for a fitness start-up, or calculate the amount of capital that a chief executive should invest in new property.

“McKinsey and Goldman are two institutions that have really thought about how to assess people,” said Mr. Sedlet, 27. “We saw a very easy way to make that methodology available online.”

Keenly aware of the challenges of start-up life, Mr. Vacanti, of Yipit, now writes a blog chronicling his experiences and sometimes speaks at gatherings for young professionals considering a similar path. After the disappointing meeting in 2010, Mr. Vacanti took the investor’s advice to heart and decided to “pivot,” in tech parlance, moving from offering local discounts to aggregating daily deals from sites like Groupon. In 2010, Yipit raised $1.3 million from investors; in 2011, it raised $6 million.

Last March, in response to one of Mr. Vacanti’s blog posts, Mr. Paley commented on their meeting. “Glad I could help,” Mr. Paley wrote on Twitter. “Should have invested in the pivot!”

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/25/2013, on page B6 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Moving From Wall Street to the Tech Sector Proves Tricky.
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Doctor and Patient: The Drawn Out Process of the Medical Lawsuit

She was one of the most highly sought radiologists in her hospital, a doctor with the uncanny ability to divine the source of maladies from the shadows of black and white X-ray films.

But one afternoon my colleague revealed that she had been named in a lawsuit, accused of overlooking an irregularity on a scan several years earlier. The plaintiff suing believed my colleague had missed the first sign of a now rampant cancer.

While other radiologists tried to assure her that the “irregularity” was well within what might be considered normal, my colleague became consumed by the what-if’s. What if she had lingered longer on the fateful film? What if she had doubled-checked her reading before signing off on the report?

She began staying late at the hospital to review, and review again, her work. And she worried about her professional reputation, asking herself if colleagues were avoiding her and wondering if she would have trouble renewing her license or hospital privileges. At home she felt distracted, and her husband complained that she had become easy to anger.

After almost a year of worry, my colleague went to court and was cleared. But it was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. “I lost year of my life,” she told me. “That lawsuit completely consumed me.”

She was not the first colleague to recount such an experience. And far from overstating the issue, doctors may in fact be underestimating the extent to which malpractice not only consumes their time but also undermines their ability to care for patients, according to a new study in Health Affairs.

For more than 150 years, the medical malpractice system has loomed over health care, and doctors, the vast majority of whom will face a lawsuit sometime in their professional lives, remain ever vocal in their criticism of the system. But with few malpractice claims resulting in payments and liability premiums holding steady or even declining, doctors have started to shift their focus from the financial aspects of malpractice to the untold hours spent focused on lawsuits instead of patient care.

Now researchers are putting numbers to those doctors’ assertions. For the current study, they combed through the malpractice claims records of more than 40,000 doctors covered by a national liability insurer. They took note of the length of each claim, any payments made, severity of the injury and the specialty practiced by the physician being sued.

Most claims required almost two years to resolve from initiation of the lawsuit — and almost four years from the event in question. Cases that resulted in payment or that involved more severe patient injuries almost always took longer.

The researchers then looked at the proportion of a doctor’s career spent on an open claim. They discovered that on average, doctors spent more than four years of their careers — more time than they spent in medical school — working through one or more lawsuits. Certain specialists were more vulnerable than others. Neurosurgeons, for example, averaged well over 10 years, or more than a quarter of their professional lives, embroiled in lawsuits.

“These findings help to show why doctors care so intensely about malpractice and what they might face over the course of a lifetime,” said Seth A. Seabury, lead author and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.

The results also underscored what plaintiffs must endure. Previous studies have shown that when medical errors occur, patients prefer to have physicians acknowledge the mistake quickly and apologize as soon as possible. Though less than 5 percent of all errors lead to a malpractice claim, lengthy claims drag out the process and, in certain cases, hold up what may be appropriate compensation.

Patients not directly involved can be affected as well. A legitimate malpractice lawsuit sometimes results in doctors or even entire institutions changing how they practice in order to prevent similar events. Lengthy legal wrangling can slow down these potentially important improvements.

While the findings are only an indirect measure of the extent to which malpractice claims can affect doctors’ and patients’ lives, the study makes clear the importance of considering time, as well as cost, when looking at malpractice reform.

“If we could get these cases resolved faster, we might be able to improve the efficiency of the system, lower costs and even improve quality of care for patients,” Dr. Seabury said.

“Having these things drag on is a problem for doctors and patients.”

Read More..

Doctor and Patient: The Drawn Out Process of the Medical Lawsuit

She was one of the most highly sought radiologists in her hospital, a doctor with the uncanny ability to divine the source of maladies from the shadows of black and white X-ray films.

But one afternoon my colleague revealed that she had been named in a lawsuit, accused of overlooking an irregularity on a scan several years earlier. The plaintiff suing believed my colleague had missed the first sign of a now rampant cancer.

While other radiologists tried to assure her that the “irregularity” was well within what might be considered normal, my colleague became consumed by the what-if’s. What if she had lingered longer on the fateful film? What if she had doubled-checked her reading before signing off on the report?

She began staying late at the hospital to review, and review again, her work. And she worried about her professional reputation, asking herself if colleagues were avoiding her and wondering if she would have trouble renewing her license or hospital privileges. At home she felt distracted, and her husband complained that she had become easy to anger.

After almost a year of worry, my colleague went to court and was cleared. But it was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. “I lost year of my life,” she told me. “That lawsuit completely consumed me.”

She was not the first colleague to recount such an experience. And far from overstating the issue, doctors may in fact be underestimating the extent to which malpractice not only consumes their time but also undermines their ability to care for patients, according to a new study in Health Affairs.

For more than 150 years, the medical malpractice system has loomed over health care, and doctors, the vast majority of whom will face a lawsuit sometime in their professional lives, remain ever vocal in their criticism of the system. But with few malpractice claims resulting in payments and liability premiums holding steady or even declining, doctors have started to shift their focus from the financial aspects of malpractice to the untold hours spent focused on lawsuits instead of patient care.

Now researchers are putting numbers to those doctors’ assertions. For the current study, they combed through the malpractice claims records of more than 40,000 doctors covered by a national liability insurer. They took note of the length of each claim, any payments made, severity of the injury and the specialty practiced by the physician being sued.

Most claims required almost two years to resolve from initiation of the lawsuit — and almost four years from the event in question. Cases that resulted in payment or that involved more severe patient injuries almost always took longer.

The researchers then looked at the proportion of a doctor’s career spent on an open claim. They discovered that on average, doctors spent more than four years of their careers — more time than they spent in medical school — working through one or more lawsuits. Certain specialists were more vulnerable than others. Neurosurgeons, for example, averaged well over 10 years, or more than a quarter of their professional lives, embroiled in lawsuits.

“These findings help to show why doctors care so intensely about malpractice and what they might face over the course of a lifetime,” said Seth A. Seabury, lead author and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.

The results also underscored what plaintiffs must endure. Previous studies have shown that when medical errors occur, patients prefer to have physicians acknowledge the mistake quickly and apologize as soon as possible. Though less than 5 percent of all errors lead to a malpractice claim, lengthy claims drag out the process and, in certain cases, hold up what may be appropriate compensation.

Patients not directly involved can be affected as well. A legitimate malpractice lawsuit sometimes results in doctors or even entire institutions changing how they practice in order to prevent similar events. Lengthy legal wrangling can slow down these potentially important improvements.

While the findings are only an indirect measure of the extent to which malpractice claims can affect doctors’ and patients’ lives, the study makes clear the importance of considering time, as well as cost, when looking at malpractice reform.

“If we could get these cases resolved faster, we might be able to improve the efficiency of the system, lower costs and even improve quality of care for patients,” Dr. Seabury said.

“Having these things drag on is a problem for doctors and patients.”

Read More..

Davos 2013: On Russia's To-Do List at Davos: Buff Image







DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — This year at Davos, the Russians are working hard to make a splash.




There is a House of Russia near a main hotel and a media center for Russia at the opposite end of this ski village. And then there is the bevy of Russian politicians, business folk and cultural figures on hand trying to encourage more foreign investment and correct what many of them privately concede is a poor image abroad.


Even Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former president and now prime minister, whose political standing in Russia was tarnished by a swap of offices with Vladimir V. Putin announced in September 2011, subjected himself to a highly unusual spectacle here.


Scores of Russian experts had worked with the World Economic Forum, as the conference here is known, on a presentation they called Scenarios for Russia.


The session on Wednesday, with Mr. Medvedev gamely sitting through the judgment before speaking himself, sketched out three ways that Russia, whose economy is heavily dependent on oil and gas extraction, could develop in the near future.


Based on assumptions like falling energy prices, regional inequalities and even an open split among Russian elites, none of the three possibilities was particularly optimistic. In addition, when the audience was asked to vote on the most needed development for Russia’s near future, it overwhelmingly chose the need to improve governance and overhaul government.


Given recent developments in Moscow, that may come as no surprise. Many political analysts see moves like the recent clampdown on demonstrations and the banning of American adoptions of Russian children as signals that the government is digging in, rather than opening up to change.


Mr. Medvedev’s response, though, was more tepid than many in the audience presumably hoped to hear. He simply repeated past promises, so far unrealized, that Russia will respond positively to demographic, political and economic shifts that could change the status quo.


Sergey Guriyev, a Russian economist, presented perhaps the gloomiest situation: A schism in the Russian elite that could force eventual, possibly sudden, change, in a country still haunted by memories of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and all that followed.


The status quo “is not sustainable simply because the Russian middle class will grow and demand reforms,” Mr. Guriyev said.


Over the past 10 years, oil and gas riches trickled down to a new middle class, he argued. “Now, more income doesn’t make people happy,” he said, adding that this Russian class “is unprecedentedly educated and rich for a country with such outdated political institutions.”


Unlike Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, whose experience on the hustings of British politics lend him an ability to think on his feet and deliver punchy lines, Mr. Medvedev barely opened up to questioning from an audience that was about half the size of the one that packed the hall to hear Mr. Cameron on Thursday, a day after his gamble on European Union membership.


In private conversation, Russian businessmen deplored what they saw as a missed opportunity for Mr. Medvedev to give a forceful speech to the Davos crowd. But foreign investors invited to private sessions with the prime minister later Wednesday and earlier Thursday were much less inclined to criticize him.


Like the Russian business community, these investors are reluctant to speak on the record, citing the uncertainty of doing business in the country. What they also do not speak much about is the healthy return on their money.


While Russian business and the state accounted for most of the estimated $400 billion said by officials to have been invested in 2012, foreign investors get a good return on their money — some in high double digits, one banker said.


Russians often particularly cite China as a rival for foreign attention and money. Ruben Vardanian, a financier now at Russia’s giant Sberbank, said that while many businesspeople, domestic and foreign, saw that their activities “are much more profitable in Russia than in China,” the Chinese gave a greater sense of certainty.


While the circle of foreigners now interested in Russia is widening, Mr. Vardanian told a meeting of mostly Russian reporters, foreigners still often lament that “we can’t understand the rules of the game.”


“They don’t want to deal with, say, Mr. Vardanian, who is then replaced by Mr. Ivanov, and then by Mr. X,” he said. “They want to deal with rules.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of Ruben Vardanian, a financier at Sberbank, as Reuben.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2013

An earlier version of the correction for this article misspelled the first name of Ruben Vardanian. It is Ruben, not Reuben.



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Britain Warns of ‘Imminent’ Threat to Westerners in Benghazi





LONDON — Days after the deadly hostage crisis in Algeria, Britain on Thursday announced a “specific, imminent threat to Westerners” in neighboring Libya and urged any British citizens in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi to leave immediately.




Travel advice updated by the British Foreign Office also warned against “all but essential travel” to several other Libyan cities, citing a “high threat from terrorism” and a possibility of retaliatory attacks targeting Western interest in the region after the French military intervention in Mali, which preceded last week’s Islamist attack on a remote Algerian gas field near the Libyan border.


The Foreign Office did not describe the nature of the reported threat in Benghazi, where an attack on the United States diplomatic compound in September killed four Americans including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.


Since September, the British authorities have warned against all travel to Benghazi.


Earlier this week, a senior Algerian official said that several Egyptian members of the squad that attacked the Algerian gas complex were also among those who had attacked the American mission in Benghazi.


The Egyptians were among 29 kidnappers killed by Algerian forces during the four-day siege of the gas plant in which at least 37 foreign hostages and one Algerian died. Three militants were captured alive and one of them, under interrogation by Algerian security forces, recounted the Egyptians’ involvement in both attacks, the Algerian official said.


“We are aware of a specific, imminent threat to Westerners in Benghazi,” the Foreign Office advisory said. “We advise against all travel to Benghazi and urge any British nationals who are there against our advice to leave immediately.”


In other Libyan places, it said, “there is a high threat from terrorism. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travelers.” The advisory did not specifically link its warnings to the kidnappings in Algeria.


Foreign Office officials declined to elaborate on the warnings.


As the crisis in Algeria unfolded, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain repeatedly warned that Al Qaeda-linked extremists and other Islamist militants in North Africa presented a growing threat to Western interests.


“Just as we have reduced the scale of the Al Qaeda threat in other parts of the world, including in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so it has grown in other parts of the world,” he said. “We need to be equally concerned about that, and equally focused on it.”


During the Algerian hostage crisis, the kidnappers depicted their attack as linked to the French intervention in Mali, in turn provoked by a lightning advance south by Islamists who have turned Mali’s desert north into a separatist redoubt.


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Nokia Shows a Profit, but Shares Drop


BERLIN — The Finnish phone maker Nokia on Thursday reported its first quarterly profit in almost two years since entering its smartphone alliance with Microsoft, but the company’s shares fell as doubts persisted about the company’s ability to accomplish a turnaround.


The company, based in Espoo, Finland, said it had a profit of €202 million, or $269 million, in the three months through December, up from a loss of €1.1 billion loss a year earlier. Sales fell 20 percent to €8 billion from €10 billion as it phased out an older line of smartphones that used the Symbian operating system.


The company’s shares fell as much as 8.4 percent in afternoon trading in Helsinki, to 3.194, as Nokia announced that it would not pay a dividend for 2012, which would save the company about €750 million. It was the first time Nokia had not paid a dividend in recent memory, according to the company.


Mats Nystrom, an analyst at SEB Enskilda Bank in Stockholm, said that Nokia had raised investor hopes earlier this month when it said it would report a quarterly profit, but that the company had not met those expectations with results that showed less-than-expected growth in the average selling prices of its flagship Lumia smartphone line and falling cellphone prices. “I still think it is far from a certainty that this turnaround will be a success,” Mr. Nystrom said.


In a conference call with journalists, the Nokia chief executive, Stephen Elop, said the company had successfully eliminated investor concerns about its future and ability to pull off a turnaround. Nokia’s net cash on hand at the end of December, bolstered by the decision to forgo a dividend payment, rose to €4.4 billion from €3.6 billion in September.


“For investors, it was a solid quarter in which we removed concerns about our cash situation,” Mr. Elop said. The former Microsoft senior executive has closed factories across Europe and eliminated 16,500 workers from Nokia’s phone business over the past year.


The quarterly net profit was the first since Nokia announced its alliance with Microsoft in February 2011, which set off a turbulent transition that led to about €5 billion in combined losses, the laying off of a third of the company’s work force and a steep decline in its market share in smartphones, the industry’s defining segment.


While sales of Nokia’s new Lumia line, which uses Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, are accelerating, to 4.4 million units in the fourth quarter from 2.9 million in the third, the company is now a distant challenger to the industry leaders Apple and Google. The Android operating system from Google is now running nearly two-thirds of all new smartphones sold around the world.


Apple sold more than 10 times the number of iPhones during the fourth quarter, 47.8 million, and sales of Android smartphones, according to International Data Corp., reached 136 million in the third quarter. But as the largest maker of smartphones running Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8, Nokia can build on its gains.


“This is really the time now for Nokia to put up results,” said Francisco Jeronimo, an I.D.C. analyst in London. “They are almost exclusively out there with Windows 8, and Microsoft is strongly promoting the operating system. There can be no more excuses now.”


In North America, Nokia increased its sale of phone handset sales by 40 percent in the fourth quarter to 700,000 units, up from 500,000 in the third quarter. Mr. Jeronimo said those results were weak considering the sizable marketing investment in the United States and Canada by Nokia and Microsoft on Windows 8.


Nokia’s share price has fallen by more than half during its software alliance with Microsoft. The shares have risen about 13 percent this year.


In the fourth quarter, Nokia’s profit was fueled by continued cost-cutting and the introduction of the Lumia 820 and 920 smartphones running Windows Phone 8.


The new handsets helped Nokia raise the average selling price of Lumia phones in the quarter to €186, up 33 percent from €140 in the same quarter a year earlier. But the average price of Nokia’s basic cellphones, which still make up almost two-thirds of its total phone sales, fell by 3 percent to €31 from €32.


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Well: Can You Read the Face of Victory?

Picture a tennis player in the moment he scores a critical point and wins a tournament. Now picture his opponent in the instant he loses the point that narrowly cost him the title. Can you tell one facial expression from the other, the look of defeat from the face of victory?

Try your hand at the images below, of professional tennis players at competitive tournaments. All were included in a new study that suggests that the more intense an emotion, the harder it is to distinguish it in a facial expression.

(Photos: Reuters/ASAP)


The researchers found that when overwhelming feelings set in, the subtle cues that convey emotion are lost, and facial expressions tend to blur. The face of joy and celebration often appears no different from the look of grief and devastation. Winning looks like losing. Pain resembles pleasure.

But that is not the case when it comes to body language. In fact, the new study found, people are better able to identify extreme emotions by reading body language than by looking solely at facial expressions. But even though we pick up on cues from the neck down to interpret emotion, we instinctively assume that it is the face that tells us everything, said Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist who carried out the new research with colleagues at Princeton University.

“When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if there’s positivity or negativity going on there,” he said. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

Dr. Aviezer and his colleagues, who published their work in the journal Science, carried out four experiments in which subjects were asked to identify emotions by looking at photographs of people in various situations. In some cases, the subjects were shown facial expressions alone. In others, they looked at body language, either alone or in combination with faces. The researchers chose photographs taken in moments when emotions were running high – as professional tennis players celebrated or agonized, as loved ones grieved at funerals, as needles punctured skin during painful body piercings.

According to classic behavioral theories, facial expressions are universal indicators of mood and emotion. So the more intense a particular emotion, the easier it should be to identify in the face. But the study showed the exact opposite. As emotions peaked in intensity, expressions became distorted, similar to the way cranking up the volume on a stereo makes the music unrecognizable.

“When emotions are extremely high, it’s as if the speakers are blaring and the signal is degraded,” said Dr. Aviezer, who is now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “When the volume is that high, it’s hard to tell what song is playing.”

In one experiment, three groups of 15 people were shown photographs of professional tennis players winning and losing points in critical matches. When the subjects were shown the players’ expressions alone — separated from their bodies — they correctly identified their emotion only half of the time, which was no better than chance. When they looked at images of just the body with the face removed — or the body with the face intact — they were far more accurate at identifying emotions. Yet when asked, 80 percent said they were relying on the facial expressions alone. Twenty percent said they were going by body and facial cues together, and not a single one said they were looking only for gestures from the neck down.

Then, the researchers scrambled the photos, mixing faces and bodies together. The upset faces of players were randomly spliced onto the bodies of celebrating players, and vice versa.

When asked to judge the emotions, the subjects answered according to the body language. The facial expression did not seem to matter. If a losing face was spliced onto a celebrating body, the subjects tended to guess victory and jubilation. If they were looking at the face of an exuberant player placed on the body of an anguished player, the subjects guessed defeat and disappointment.

Although they were not aware of it, the subjects were clearly looking at body language, Dr. Aviezer said. Clenched fists, for example, suggested victory and celebration, while open or outstretched hands indicated a player’s disappointment.

In another experiment, the researchers looked at four other emotional “peaks.” For pain, they used the faces of men and women undergoing piercings. Grief was captured in images of mourners at a funeral. For joy, they used images of people on the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” capturing their impassioned faces at the very moment they were shown their beautiful, brand new homes. And for pleasure, they went with a rather risqué option: images from an erotic Web site that showed faces at the height of orgasm.

Once again, the subjects could not correctly guess the emotions by looking at facial expressions alone. In fact, they were more likely to interpret “positive” faces as being “negative” more than the actual negative ones. When faces showing pleasure were spliced onto the body of someone in pain, for example, the subjects relied on body language and were often unaware that the facial expression was conveying the opposite emotion.

“There’s this point on ‘Extreme Makeover’ where people see their new house for the first time and the camera is on their face, so we have these wonderful photos of their expressions,” Dr. Aviezer said. “At that moment, they look like the most miserable people in the world. For a few seconds, it’s as if they are seeing their house burn down. They don’t look like you would expect.”

The researchers noted that they were not suggesting that facial expressions never indicate specific feelings – only that when the emotion is intense and at its peak, for those first few seconds, the expression is ambiguous. Dr. Aviezer said the facial musculature simply might not be suited for accurately conveying extremely intense feelings – in part because in the real world, so much of that is conveyed through situational context.

And this may not be limited to facial cues.

“Consider intense vocal expressions of grief versus joy or pleasure versus pain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and hearing someone behind you shriek. Is it immediately obvious whether the emotion is a positive or negative one?

“When people are experiencing a very high level of excitation,” Dr. Aviezer said, “then we see this overlap in expressions.”

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Well: Can You Read the Face of Victory?

Picture a tennis player in the moment he scores a critical point and wins a tournament. Now picture his opponent in the instant he loses the point that narrowly cost him the title. Can you tell one facial expression from the other, the look of defeat from the face of victory?

Try your hand at the images below, of professional tennis players at competitive tournaments. All were included in a new study that suggests that the more intense an emotion, the harder it is to distinguish it in a facial expression.

(Photos: Reuters/ASAP)


The researchers found that when overwhelming feelings set in, the subtle cues that convey emotion are lost, and facial expressions tend to blur. The face of joy and celebration often appears no different from the look of grief and devastation. Winning looks like losing. Pain resembles pleasure.

But that is not the case when it comes to body language. In fact, the new study found, people are better able to identify extreme emotions by reading body language than by looking solely at facial expressions. But even though we pick up on cues from the neck down to interpret emotion, we instinctively assume that it is the face that tells us everything, said Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist who carried out the new research with colleagues at Princeton University.

“When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if there’s positivity or negativity going on there,” he said. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

Dr. Aviezer and his colleagues, who published their work in the journal Science, carried out four experiments in which subjects were asked to identify emotions by looking at photographs of people in various situations. In some cases, the subjects were shown facial expressions alone. In others, they looked at body language, either alone or in combination with faces. The researchers chose photographs taken in moments when emotions were running high – as professional tennis players celebrated or agonized, as loved ones grieved at funerals, as needles punctured skin during painful body piercings.

According to classic behavioral theories, facial expressions are universal indicators of mood and emotion. So the more intense a particular emotion, the easier it should be to identify in the face. But the study showed the exact opposite. As emotions peaked in intensity, expressions became distorted, similar to the way cranking up the volume on a stereo makes the music unrecognizable.

“When emotions are extremely high, it’s as if the speakers are blaring and the signal is degraded,” said Dr. Aviezer, who is now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “When the volume is that high, it’s hard to tell what song is playing.”

In one experiment, three groups of 15 people were shown photographs of professional tennis players winning and losing points in critical matches. When the subjects were shown the players’ expressions alone — separated from their bodies — they correctly identified their emotion only half of the time, which was no better than chance. When they looked at images of just the body with the face removed — or the body with the face intact — they were far more accurate at identifying emotions. Yet when asked, 80 percent said they were relying on the facial expressions alone. Twenty percent said they were going by body and facial cues together, and not a single one said they were looking only for gestures from the neck down.

Then, the researchers scrambled the photos, mixing faces and bodies together. The upset faces of players were randomly spliced onto the bodies of celebrating players, and vice versa.

When asked to judge the emotions, the subjects answered according to the body language. The facial expression did not seem to matter. If a losing face was spliced onto a celebrating body, the subjects tended to guess victory and jubilation. If they were looking at the face of an exuberant player placed on the body of an anguished player, the subjects guessed defeat and disappointment.

Although they were not aware of it, the subjects were clearly looking at body language, Dr. Aviezer said. Clenched fists, for example, suggested victory and celebration, while open or outstretched hands indicated a player’s disappointment.

In another experiment, the researchers looked at four other emotional “peaks.” For pain, they used the faces of men and women undergoing piercings. Grief was captured in images of mourners at a funeral. For joy, they used images of people on the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” capturing their impassioned faces at the very moment they were shown their beautiful, brand new homes. And for pleasure, they went with a rather risqué option: images from an erotic Web site that showed faces at the height of orgasm.

Once again, the subjects could not correctly guess the emotions by looking at facial expressions alone. In fact, they were more likely to interpret “positive” faces as being “negative” more than the actual negative ones. When faces showing pleasure were spliced onto the body of someone in pain, for example, the subjects relied on body language and were often unaware that the facial expression was conveying the opposite emotion.

“There’s this point on ‘Extreme Makeover’ where people see their new house for the first time and the camera is on their face, so we have these wonderful photos of their expressions,” Dr. Aviezer said. “At that moment, they look like the most miserable people in the world. For a few seconds, it’s as if they are seeing their house burn down. They don’t look like you would expect.”

The researchers noted that they were not suggesting that facial expressions never indicate specific feelings – only that when the emotion is intense and at its peak, for those first few seconds, the expression is ambiguous. Dr. Aviezer said the facial musculature simply might not be suited for accurately conveying extremely intense feelings – in part because in the real world, so much of that is conveyed through situational context.

And this may not be limited to facial cues.

“Consider intense vocal expressions of grief versus joy or pleasure versus pain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and hearing someone behind you shriek. Is it immediately obvious whether the emotion is a positive or negative one?

“When people are experiencing a very high level of excitation,” Dr. Aviezer said, “then we see this overlap in expressions.”

Read More..