Little girl found. When Patti Waldmeir discovered a baby in a Shanghai street one winter night, she was told to mind her own business. She didn’t... One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming. I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness – so that it could have a chance to live. For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago – a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers.
“There’s a baby outside!” A mobile phone photograph of Donuts, taken soon after she was found. Book Review: Unnatural Selection. Technology - Heaven knows when gamers need to rest. A few days ago, Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, issued a dramatic public apology after a cyberattack forced his company to shut down its PlayStation Network, a service that enables video game players to compete against each other online.
Sir Howard said he regretted the “inconvenience and concern” caused by the attack, which possibly gave criminals access to the personal details of millions of people, and has kept owners of Sony’s PlayStation3 game console offline for weeks as the company tightens up its defences against computer hackers. I’m sure that Sir Howard meant what he said. But I cannot accept his apology. In taking this stance, I would note that I bear neither the man nor his company any grudge. In fact, along with several Financial Times colleagues, I have been Sir Howard’s guest for lunch, and I found him a gracious host and an edifying conversationalist. By way of explanation, I would point out that I am the father of a 13-year-old PlayStation3 aficionado.
Comment - Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on? Comment / Op-Ed Columnists - Egypt’s liberals are losing the battle. Comment / Opinion - Chernobyl’s guide to tyranny. Who's Responsible for Those $4 Umbrellas? Management - Inside Nokia: trying to revive a giant. Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction. Travel / City Breaks - Postcard from ... London.
The FT columnist plays princess for a day at the Goring Hotel, where Kate Middleton has reportedly chosen to spend her last night as a commoner Is the Goring Hotel fit for a (future) queen? Kate Middleton has reportedly chosen to spend her last night as a commoner in this small, family-run hotel located, in its own words, “adjacent to Buckingham Palace”, but which is actually rather closer to Victoria railway station. To find out whether it’s good enough for her (and her family and friends, who have booked the entire hotel for the royal wedding weekend), I’ve put it through an even tougher test. It’s relatively simple to be nice to a future queen when you’ve had ages to prepare the best suite and whip your staff into shape. Yet the daffodils outside in the windowboxes smiled on me, as did the two sentries, clad in bowler hats and long Edwardian coats, on either side of the door. She shouted with pleasure at the wallpaper and gave the white towelling robes an appreciative stroke.
Management - The fickle value of friendship. Comment / Analysis - Manufacturing: Electric avenues. Ivy League Alumni Quit Admissions Interviews as Success Slips. With admissions notifications from Ivy League colleges going out as early as today, it’s more than just applicants awaiting the results. Alumni interviewers like University of Pennsylvania graduate Andrew Ross say they’re getting annoyed that fewer of the students they endorse win acceptance. Some are ignoring calls to do more and others are quitting the volunteer job altogether. Ross has interviewed more than 50 applicants in a decade and only seen two or three get in. “Is it worth it to interview if I’m not going to have any influence on the students getting in?” Said Ross, 33, who lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and runs a children’s entertainment business. “If it doesn’t mean much, then they should find a better way to use our time. It just kind of feels ridiculous.” As competition for admission soars, Ivy League colleges that enlist their graduates as interviewers to build loyalty are angering them instead.
Long-Term Consequence Brightest Minds Yale Response Recruitment Blitz. Comment & analysis / FT Columnists - The difficult balance of intellectual property. Harvard Isn't Worth It Beyond Mom's Party Talk: Amity Shlaes. Anxious families awaiting April college admission news are living their own March Madness. Their insanity is captured in Andrew Ferguson’s new book, “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College” (Simon & Schuster). He describes the vanity of a desperate mother at a cocktail party who is dying to announce her daughter’s perfect SAT scores: “‘We were really surprised at how well she did,’ the mother would say, running a finger around the rim of her glass of pink Zinfandel. Her eyes plead: Ask me what they were, just please please ask.” And you know Mom won’t relent there. The first of these presumed truths is that the SATs are just this month’s hurdle, followed by getting a college transcript with a perfect 4.0 to get the perfect job.
Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. Cost Analysis The second fallacy is that debt accumulated for college is always a good investment. Comment & analysis / FT Columnists - Europe, learn to live with the dithering.
Comment / Opinion - Advice from Curie on Japan’s nuclear nightmare. For Defense in Galleon Trial, Offense Is Tactical Art. Columnists / Notebook - Dude, where’s my consultant? Management - Case study: Axa’s rebranding. Comment / Analysis - Middle East: Gas leak in the house. Comment & analysis / FT Columnists - Hong Kong’s land system that time forgot. Comment & analysis / FT Columnists - McKinsey model springs a leak. China Takes the Aviation Stage. Rajaratnam's Plan to Take the Stand May Be His Biggest Bet Yet. Theater Tickets? Weather Insurance? Airlines Seek a Bigger Cut of Flyers' Spending.
Companies / Financial Services - Rising to the top at McKinsey. Management - Female quotas would target the wrong women. The Monday Interview - The man who turns Post-it notes into bank notes. High Priest of Stats Is the Go-To Guy. Tokyo Stock Exchange Welcomes New Mascot 'Arrows-kun' - Japan Real Time. Columnists / Andrew Hill - Society and the right kind of capitalism. Columnists / Luke Johnson - Multiple careers are better than one. The Social Network and the Dunbar Number | Mind & Matter. FT Magazine - The sabotaging of Iran. Majid Shahriyari became an Iranian martyr while he was driving to work on an autumn day in Tehran. As he made his way along Artesh Boulevard, an explosive device ripped through his car. The 45-year-old was a devout man: Iranians would describe him as a Hizbollahi, a person fiercely loyal to the country’s Islamic system and easily identified by his unshaven face and simple clothes.
But Shahriyari also stood out for another reason. He was one of Iran’s leading atomic scientists, an expert on nuclear chain reactions. Iran has long maintained that its atomic programme is aimed at developing peaceful nuclear energy. But much of the outside world believes its true intention is to build a nuclear weapon.
Either way, Shahriyari was indispensable. On November 29 2010, as the scientist and his wife were on their way to Shahid Beheshti University, where they worked as professors, a motorcycle pulled up alongside their car. Who is killing Iranian scientists? Not all went well under Dagan. Comment - Where have all the thinkers gone? Comment & analysis / FT Columnists - Sins of the Tiger Mothers. FT Magazine - The forger’s story. One morning last September, a visitor arrived at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana.
He had been expected at 9am but he called from outside at 7.45am, and when Lee Gray, the museum’s curator, went down to greet him, she found his red Cadillac parked across two spaces in the handicapped spot. His name was Father Arthur Scott, he was dressed in the outfit of a Jesuit priest with a Society of Jesus lapel pin, and he bore a gift. A few weeks before, Father Scott had sent a letter postmarked Michigan to the museum, an elegant institution attached to the University of Louisiana. His mother, an art collector from Philadelphia, had died, and his sister Emily was still in Paris sorting out the estate, he wrote. His mother had left a number of paintings, including a pastel drawing by Charles Courtney Curran, which he wanted to donate. He planned to return with others and the family was also likely to make a financial donation. “See those orange spots? Wall Street Dares to Indulge Itself Again. 7:35 a.m. | Updated Exuberance made a comeback this year at Josh Koplewicz’s annual Halloween party.
More than 1,000 people packed into a 6,000-square-foot space at the Good Units night club in Manhattan, a substantially larger crowd than in the last several years. The open bar was sponsored by Russian Standard vodka, and Mr. Koplewicz, an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs, was able to snag a big headliner: the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim, who performed dressed in a black cat costume. The scene was more extravagant in September, at a 50th birthday party in Hong Kong for Brian Brille, the head of Bank of America Asia Pacific.
Mr. Two years after the onset of the financial crisis, the stock market is recovering and Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again. It’s true that firms scaled back the corporate excesses, like fancy retreats and private jets, for which they were vilified as a brutal recession gripped the country. Expensive restaurants report a pickup in bookings. J.T. America’s culture of no | Analysis & Opinion | Saying ‘yes’ is one of the dominant tropes of American life. America’s favorite politicians are the sunny optimists: think Ronald Reagan and “Morning in America.” In fact, the culture is so insistent on looking on the bright side that, as Barbara Ehrenreich complained in a recent book, injunction can be heard on the cancer ward.
You might even say — and some historians have — that Americans themselves have been pre-selected for their optimism: you or your ancestors had to have a powerful faith in the New World and the opportunities here to make the trek over in the first place. That’s why when I interviewed Nikesh Arora, Google’s head of sales, operations and business development at a media conference last week, one of his comments had particular resonance with the live midtown Manhattan audience and in the blogosphere shortly afterwards.
According to Arora, creating a culture of yes is central to creating a culture of innovation. Business education / Soapbox - The flawed maths of financial models. What many suspected has been found true: quantifying in finance may be an oxymoron Imagine a car school that specialised in teaching how to build Toyotas. Following the manufacturer’s recall of thousands of malfunctioning vehicles, should the school rethink its curriculum or should it trot along unperturbed, delivering the same lectures as before, as if nothing had happened? A similar conundrum is faced today by those universities that offer graduate programmes in what we could generally label quantitative finance.
The credit crisis that started in mid-2007 has brought to the surface serious malfunctions in some glorified financial mathematical models as well as the tendency of finance theory’s most sacred tenets to calamitously break down. In all those cases, the system’s very viability was threatened. So, what should the many schools worldwide, including several leading business schools, hosting quant finance programmes do? Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014. Comment - A smart business is dressed in principles not rules. Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.