text:
Q: The variable 'control' is either undeclared or was never assigned - Except it is, and the application compiles My designer view started to throw up this error today. However, the application compiles without error and the controls are useable.
The custom control is defined in the designer correctly. If i click "ignore and continue" the designer loads up fine, but the control mentioned is missing.
So far I have tried:
Cleaning, rebuilding then restarting visual studio hasn't worked.
I haven't made any changes since using it yesterday, then walking into the office today.
My constructors are
public CalendarWindow(MainWindow owner)
{
    InitializeComponent();
    this._owner = owner;
}

public CalendarWindow(int job, int visit, DataTable customer, DataTable address)
{

    InitializeComponent();

    this.addressDetails = address;
    this.customerDetails = customer;
    this.visitID = visit;
    jobID = job;
}

and inside InitializeComponent() in designer.cs the controls are declared
//
// panel1
//
this.panel1.Anchor = ((System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles)((((System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Top | System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Bottom)
| System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Left)
| System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Right)));
this.panel1.AutoScroll = true;
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.label5);
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.label4);
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.calendar4); \\designer "error" points to here
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.label3);
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.calendar3); \\designer "error" points to here
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.calendar2); \\designer "error" points to here
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.calendar1); \\designer "error" points to here
this.panel1.Controls.Add(this.label2);
this.panel1.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(218, 12);
this.panel1.Name = "panel1";
this.panel1.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(873, 628);
this.panel1.TabIndex = 10;
this.panel1.MouseDown += new
System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventHandler(this.calendar1_MouseDown);

A: Looks like I've managed to solve this problem.
While the compiler didn't have any problems compiling the code and running the application, it didn't like some code within the control itself.
I only managed to catch this because i attempted to add the same control to the form after hitting "ignore and continue" at which point it refused to add it and provided me with direction to what was causing the problem, which happened to be in a class that wasn't part of the control but was used by it.
Correcting that error solved the problem.
I'm no wiser as to why it would compile and run without problems, yet the errors fed back made no reference to the offending artifact.

A: I have had the same problem and I fixed it. Actually Visual Studio only works with X86 controls and you can't create a user control in X64 mode and use it.
You should add a new class library in Any CPU mode and build the library. then you can add its DLL in your project and it works.
If it doesn't you must go to the Configuration manager and set the "Active solution platform" to X64 also do that for all subprojects.
remember that build option has to be checked.
and go to the properties of the class library and click on the build tab. then set the "platform target" to Any CPU.


text:
Slapy is a municipality and village in Prague-West District in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 900 inhabitants. It is located on the shore of Slapy Reservoir, which is the 6th largest dam in the country by area.

References

Villages in Prague-West District

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Unity Smooth Rotation and Scale Below is part of my collision script, everything is working fine with it.
I am trying to figure out how to make "player" do a smooth rotation and shrink the scale of the player object. How would I go about this? Should I create a check variable and check in update method to do a smooth rotation and I have no clue about smooth scale shrinking. Any help on how to go about this would be appreciated.
if(blackholeActive == true){
        player.transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, 0, Time.deltaTime * -150));
        player.transform.localScale = Vector3.Lerp(transform.localScale, new Vector3(0.025f, 0.025f, 0.025f), 0.01f * Time.deltaTime);
    }

// Black Hole Collision
    if (col.gameObject.tag == "BlackHole")
    {
        Debug.Log("Black Hole");
        int valC = coinCount;
        //coinCount = 0;
        int valS = starCount; // for stars lost text
        //starCount = 0;

        //Stop player from moving and falling and make them disappear into blackhole
        player.transform.GetComponentInChildren<Rigidbody2D>().bodyType = RigidbodyType2D.Static;
        player.GetComponentInChildren<Rigidbody2D>().velocity = Vector2.zero;
        player.GetComponentInChildren<Rigidbody2D>().gravityScale = 0;

        /// TODO: Stop Blackhole movement
        /// Make player spin and shrink
        blackholeActive = true;

        coinsLost.text = "Coins Lost: " + valC;
        starsLost.text = "Stars Lost: " + valS;
        gameOverCanvas.gameObject.SetActive(true);

    }

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: How to avoid losing items dropped by enemies in the Gutter? Twice in the first run through the Gutter I've seen the "Pick up item" prompt appear just for a fraction of a second after killing an enemy. It then disappears. There is no glowing mass, and no prompt. Reloading the game doesn't help. Any tips?

A: These "items" are affected by gravity. Basically, if there's a hole in the floor (in the Gutter there are many) then the item will fall through, given a big enough gap. Basically, the only way to grab these items are:

*

*Be quick. Mash the button if you have to, and expect a drop regardless, even if one is not forthcoming.

*Check the lower levels. Some platforms are multi-levelled. It is possible the item may have stopped below.

For the record: reloading the game does not "reset" the location of general item drops. This only happens for special equipment (like NPC drops, for example). If you quit the game with a few of these items around, they will disappear when you re-load the game.


text:
Spider and the Webs
Frozen Roses (IPU109)
Format 7 inch CD
7 inch - $7.00 USD CD - $6.00 USD
Spider and the Webs formed in Olympia, Washington during the summer of 2004 after Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill, Frumpies, The Go Team) and James Maeda (Serum Greys, November Witch) added Chris Sutton (Hornet Leg, C.O.C.O., Dub Narcotic Sound System) to the line up, allowing Tobi to switch instruments so she could play guitar AND drums.
This debut four song EP was recorded by Calvin Johnson at Dub Narcotic Studio. "Frozen Roses" is a romantic expression of the inexpressible. "It's Lovely Weather for Ducks" came about after 40 days and 40 nights of rain in Olympia. Is it a wistful spinster anthem or a sad cry for attention? "Mister Hypnotist" (co-written by Alan Larsen of Some Velvet Sidewalk) is a defiant cry, a seduction and a dance contest all in one...in order to subvert the masses we must engage on the subliminal level...you are getting very sleepy and it is time for action! Dance! "A Kid Named Jay" is sk8tr nostalgia. It sounds the way Stacey Peralta's hair looks when he's doing 360's.
James' guitar is wild and eccentric, with a 1981 northwest punk/1966 psychedlic flavor. Tobi and Chris keep the rhythms solid, driving and simple. Tobi's guitar playing is deliberately sparse yet meticulous; the sound governed by the use of a black and white Rickenbacker, generous amounts of reverb and a 1960's Fender amp with the treble on 11. The singing is classic Tobi Vail style, varying between screams and whispers. Her songwriting hearkens back to her most musically innovative group, the Go Team. She uses simplicity and starkness as punctuation.
This is Vol. CIX in 's International Pop Underground Series.
The digital version of this 7-inch is available from Bandcamp
Frozen Roses
It's Lovely Weather for Ducks
Mister Hypnotist
A Kid Named Jay

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


system protection. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards. Fixes problem. Many extra.
. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards. system protection. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards. system protection. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards. system protection. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards.
. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards. Many extra features. This program has received many top awards. Fixes problem.


Text in English. 4to (10-1/4 x 7-3/4) Decorated cloth.  pp.; 135+ photographs, illustrated epps. Design and some photos by Alexander Rodchenko.
SOVIET AVIATION (Photo-album). First Edition.
Text in English. Elephant folio (15-1/2 x 10) cloth decorated to front and spine. Illustrated throughout with photographs. Design by Alexander Rodchenko.
Text in English. 4to (10-1/4" x 7-3/4") Decorated cloth, illustrated epps. Illustrated throughout with photographs. Design by Rodchenko? From the group of Soviet books published for the 1939 World Fair (New York).
Text in German, English and French. 4to (10-1/2 x 6-3/4) cloth titled in gilt to spine). VIII, 184, 23 pp. Illustrated throughout with photographs by Aleksandr Rodchenko and others.
Text in German, English and French. 4to (10-1/2 x 6-3/4) cloth titled in gilt to spine. VIII, 184, 23 pp. Illustrated throughout with photographs by Aleksandr Rodchenko and others.


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Make no mistake, the fall election season began on the evening of June 3, just as soon as the primary election polls closed. But no one has spent much on the election since then, nor has the vast majority of voters focused on any issues to be decided in November.
This will change in a month or so, when the campaign gets underway semi-officially during the Labor Day holiday weekend.
-- Many more voters will turn out this fall than cast primary ballots.
-- Even though the fall campaign features just seven propositions, including four in the initiative and referendum category of popularly-placed proposals, two or three of them will be election centerpieces and spending records will be set.
-- Democrats will be favored in every statewide contest, even for controller, where the leading primary vote-getter was Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin. Things are likely to turn out just as expected, too.
These three items may not seem tightly linked, but they definitely are.
The presence of the initiatives and referendum on the ballot will attract far more voters than the record-low turnout of almost two months ago. That's precisely what Democrats in the Legislature planned back in 2011, voting overwhelmingly to place all propositions qualified via voter signatures onto the November ballot, keeping June initiative-free. They wanted more voters at the polls in November, when they mostly compete against Republicans, rather than have the big numbers come out for the intra-party fratricide of the top-two primary.
The likely result of those machinations and the higher turnout they will produce is that Democrats stand to take all statewide offices.
But Gov. Jerry Brown, somehow keeping a straight face, said it was really about getting more voters involved in key decisions. He noted that in 2010, the last general election not including a presidential race, 10.3 million Californians voted in November, compared with just 5.7 million in that year's primary.
With Democrats holding a large plurality among registered voters, the more people participate in the fall, the better Democrats figure to do. That's especially important for the only two Democrats who had close races last June. Yes, Democratic Board of Equalization member Betty Yee squeaked into November by just 400 votes over former Democratic Assembly Speaker John Perez and will have to make up ground on Swearengin, who finished a few percentage points ahead of both Democrats.
A bigger turnout is also important for Democratic state Sen. Alex Padilla of Los Angeles, who barely won a primary plurality over Republican academic Pete Peterson.
The one ballot measure figuring to draw the most voter attention – and special interest money – will be Proposition 45, an attempt to place health insurance rates under the same kind of regulation by the state insurance commissioner as auto and property insurance now get. This one is strongly backed by the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, whose founder, Harvey Rosenfield, wrote the 1988 Proposition 108 that created the current insurance regulations.
Expect that one to draw more than $40 million, the bulk from insurance companies fighting it.
Also of high interest will be Proposition 48, a referendum placed on the ballot by a combination of anti-gambling groups and existing Indian casinos. This one would overturn two gaming compacts setting up the state's first off-reservation casinos.
Expect heavy interest, too, in the Proposition 43 water bond, if Brown and legislators can agree on its precise content. Figuring to be little understood by many voters is Proposition 44, which would make permanent a rainy-day fund to cover potential state budget shortfalls.
Two other initiatives will also draw heavy investment, as trial lawyers seek to increase current maximum medical practice judgments and liberal groups try to reduce some crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
No one yet knows how all these issues will come out, but for sure they will interest far more voters than the boring June primary, exactly as the Democrats planned.


text:
Publishing and the Pandemic
How the pandemic has changed the idea of university literary communities dramatically
With the closure of physical space, there has been the opening up of wider spaces of another kind.
Saikat Majumdar
Oct 14, 2020 · 08:30 am
A pandemic, the world has learned at a great cost, is a sickness on a jet plane. A sickness for our times in more senses than we can bear to think about, a sickness gifted by the elite to the poor, from the airports all the way to the shanties and the villages.
When I was asked to write on university literary communities caught in the pandemic, my first thought was how the illness has transformed our bodies and minds – and our behaviour when we gather to talk and interact. And of course, the space where we do so.
Oddly enough, my mind immediately floated to an intriguing document shared with me by the organiser of an online lecture I did this August for a college in Delhi, "The Invention of Creative Writing." This was the transcript of chat messages shared by members of the audience present. It made me realise anew how a webinar flouted the unities of place and time.
Virtual liberation
First, it had audience from everywhere, from Rajasthan to Madhya Pradesh to Manipur, Mussoorie, Hong Kong, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and several other Indian states, far beyond the concentration of people from Delhi. Then there was the way the event was archived. The talk was recorded, yes, as offline lectures are also sometimes recorded and made available online. That was only expected here, but what was also additionally archived was the cluster of comments, hellos, even jokes – such as the private chat comment sent to the organiser recalling "crimes" committed as hostel buddies a couple of decades ago! Now we had these too, and stored forever!
The webinar culture has altered the meaning of two things: a gathering, and the archive. A gathering of people and the archiving of work are important for many communities – as anyone who participates in literary festivals and bookshop events online these days knows equally well. But it is especially important in colleges and universities, which are what I call permanent-transient communities. They are permanent institutions with a significant transient population. That's a professorial predicament – we age amidst an ageless people – new students keep replacing the older ones who leave.
To an extent, the literature class goes on uninterrupted. I'm teaching an introductory class to a large group of first-year students this semester – a mandatory general education course called "Literature and the World." These are unfortunate newcomers whose first experience of college is the now infamous zoomester. But I'm struck by the lively movement in the chat boxes. Comments pile up, sometimes just "!" marks in a queue based on which I call on them to talk, and talk they do, strangely a lot more than what we usually see in a real-life classroom with freshers.
The virtual nature of the space, or perhaps the comfort of their home study table seems to liberate them. There is the occasional struggle to get them to turn on their cameras – "When you switch your cameras off," one professor reportedly said, "You turn me off," before realising the gaffe – but that's a battle for another day!
The end of distance
On my part, I've become savvier with the whiteboard on zoom screenshare, which salvages my atrocious handwriting when I scribble on a physical whiteboard in a physical class. I hold office hours on Google Hangout; there are no days when I'm not on "campus," as there is no campus anymore. A few of the lectures are zoomed from Massachusetts by Anjali Prabhu, professor at Wellesley College, the institution which is collaborating with Ashoka on this course.
Writers whose work is discussed join our online classroom: Manjul Bajaj spoke to us from Gurgaon; I hope to hide her presence till our back-and-forth on her stories, but her zoom-square shows up on the screen and students are just a little more shy during their presentation – the author is dead, long live the author! Arundhathi Subramanium is scheduled to join us next month – from where? Madras, Bombay, New York? Does it really matter?
Literature – perhaps the humanities and imaginative social sciences in general – seem to work okay online; the lab sciences are a different ball game altogether. But while life in Sonepat may not seem like something to really miss, the students miss each other, late nights at the dhaba, gossip in the canteen, and, I'm sure, more sensory forms of mutual interaction.
The sensory calls for a time-space unity. I need to be where you are, and the presence has to be tangible, with voice and sight (if not more) intersecting without the aid of technology. When you are forced to give that up, you gain the right over something else – communicating with those who were never part of your time-space unity.
As I write this from my home in Delhi's Vasant Vihar, someone in Hauz Khas is suddenly no different from someone in South Africa's Cape Town, making some allowance for time-zones. Generally, we have an active calendar of events with visiting writers and speakers, book-talks, workshops, collaborations with publishers, but the roster tends to be limited to whoever is passing through/based in the Delhi-NCR area.
That equation's now delightfully messed up! The university's student literary society organises a conversation with Zoë Wicomb, the South-African writer based in Scotland, and nowhere during that vigorous conversation does she look sleep-deprived.
Falling barriers
This feels like the perfect time to launch the website for a transnational movement of literary activism, an initiative spearheaded by our colleague, Amit Chaudhuri.We just managed to sneak in the physical edition of the 5th symposium on this artistic-intellectual movement at the India International Centre in February, shortly before all life came to a standstill. Literaryactivism.com was fittingly launched this September in a panel zoomcussion, involving Charles Bernstein, Dayanita Singh, Simon During, Dubravka Ugrešić and Chaudhuri, who joined, respectively, from the Philadelphia, Delhi, Berlin, Amsterdam and Calcutta.
What news elsewhere? I asked my student research assistant Diya Isha, who's been "attending" college from her home in Kerala and doing a cartload of things for the college newspaper, The Edict. Diya reaches out to various college literary societies, and WhatsApp, the 21st century's force of nature, emerges as king once again!
Vaishnavi Balakrishnan from the Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences told her about the "not-so-active WhatsApp group" for their literary club, which suddenly had to open its doors to the student body of the entire college on popular demand as they started to conduct events online, including "story-writing, poetry writing-haiku, article writing, TV series and movies quiz...an inter-college debate in English and Tamil."
As lives started to be confined with the onset of the pandemic, they were "overwhelmed by the response" as they quickly became flooded with entries. Clearly, like students in my zoomester class, a lot of people feel more free in participating events online than in physical space.
Kaustuv Bakshi, who teaches gender and sexuality studies in the English department at Jadavpur University, described an active culture of community lectures by different professors organised by the Arts Faculty Students' Union (AFSU), which are streamed on different social media platforms that opens up the events far beyond JU students.
"For example," he said, "I delivered a talk on "Queer Lives in Quarantine", while my other colleagues spoke on subjects as diverse as Mental Health Issues during the Pandemic to Wittgenstein and his Language Games under the series, entitled, Beyond the Classroom." Kaustuv has been particularly attentive to the challenges faced by sexual minorities under the pandemic, a subject on which he has spoken online for a range of higher education institutions across the nation.
Altered perpetually
Indeed, many have realised the closure of physical space as the opening up of wider spaces of another kind. "This is also an opportunity," said Kritika Dixit, who works with Lady Shri Ram College's print and blog magazine. She sees the option of expanding beyond college-centric events to reflect on their location within a larger national and international community. However, at the same time, she said that "it's also in our isolation that we hope to bring people together and keep the spirit of the college alive."
Some institutions were already structured as virtual communities even before the world tilted us in that direction. Just as Sal Khan emerges as the real Bhaijaan of home-learning for children worldwide, Indira Gandhi National Open University, which has done similar things for adults in India, steps on its act. Nandini Sahu, Professor and Director, School of Foreign Languages at IGNOU pointed out that "there are lakhs of viewers and downloads every single day" from their Gyankosh and IGNOU Mobile Apps. "And our SWAYAM and SWAYAMPRABHA channels," she added, referring to IGNOU's TV and radio initiatives, "and our Gyandarshan and Gyanvani channels became much more popular during the pandemic."
Crises of both destructive and transformative kinds – they come together more often than we realise – have periodically created technologies and modes of social belonging that have initiated radically new forms and literary communities. The cumulative effects of the 18th century European Enlightenment, the acceleration of capitalism, print culture and the rise of the middle-class caused orality and performance to make space for printed and bound forms like the novel. During another period of simultaneous crisis and transformation in the 20th century - during the crucial years between the two World Wars, the philosopher Walter Benjamin had wondered if the new methods of mechanical reproduction, such as photography and cinema, would come to devalue the original aura of an artistic work.
I feel what we are experiencing now is no less consequential. Our sense of community has been scrambled and realigned irreversibly. As a widely shared article by Nicholas Christakis in The Economist predicts, "we have a long and sorrowful way to go." But as it slowly tapers off and life returns to normal in baby steps, the meaning of socio-cultural belonging and a literary education would have shifted.
In his philosophical treatise, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller had argued that art is central to the development of the individual and society. While Schiller had placed his argument in the historical context of the French Revolution, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has refashioned Schiller's formulations in a more contemporary context, in her provocatively titled book, An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization. Now we have a dystopian medical twist to this aesthetic education, one which has clipped our (airplane) and recharged (online) wings at the same time. It is bound to perpetually alter out sense of literary community, nation, and the world.
Saikat Majumdar, Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University, is the author of several books, including the novels The Firebird and The Scent of God. He can be found here on Twitter. @
This series of articles on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on publishing is curated by Kanishka Gupta.
How this children's publisher defied the downtrend to boost sales during the pandemic


text:
Anti CA high-speed rail initiative begins collecting signatures
Posted on May 17, 2012 by Art Pedroza Posted in 2012 Elections, Ballot Measures, California, High-Speed Rail
CONTACT: Shannan Velayas, (916) 653-6575
High-Speed Rail Initiative Enters Circulation Prevents Issuance of Future High-Speed Rail Bonds.
Terminates High-Speed Rail Project. Initiative Statute.
SACRAMENTO – Secretary of State Debra Bowen today announced that the proponents of a new initiative may begin collecting petition signatures for their measure.
The Attorney General prepares the legal title and summary that is required to appear on initiative petitions. When the official language is complete, the Attorney General forwards it to the proponents and to the Secretary of State, and the initiative may be circulated for signatures. The Secretary of State then provides calendar deadlines to the proponents and to county elections officials. The Attorney General's official title and summary for the measure is as follows:
PREVENTS ISSUANCE OF FUTURE HIGH-SPEED RAIL BONDS.
Prevents the issuance and sale of the remaining amount of high-speed rail bonds previously approved by the voters to initiate construction of a high-speed train system. Redirects any unspent high-speed rail bond proceeds from high-speed rail purposes to repay those outstanding bonds. Prevents the state from incurring additional debt or spending any federal, state or local funds for the high-speed rail project. Terminates all agreements entered into by the state for the high-speed rail project, except those agreements related to repaying outstanding bonds. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: State debt-service savings of up to $709 million annually from not using state bond funds to support high-speed rail, depending on the actual reduction in bonds funds spent as a result of this measure and whether those bonds would have been sold as taxable or tax exempt. Unknown reduction in state and local revenues due to a somewhat lower level of economic activity in the state over the next several years, resulting from a loss of matching funds from the federal government or private investors. (12-0010.)
The Secretary of State's tracking number for this measure is 1583 and the Attorney General's tracking number is 12-0010.
The proponents for this measure, Doug LaMalfa and George Radanovich, must collect signatures of 504,760 registered voters – the number equal to five percent of the total votes cast for governor in the 2010 gubernatorial election – in order to qualify it for the ballot. The proponents have 150 days to circulate petitions for this measure, meaning the signatures must be collected by October 15, 2012.
The initiative proponents can be reached at 5701 Lonetree Boulevard, Suite 301, Rocklin, California 95765. No phone number was provided.
To sign up for regular ballot measure updates via email, RSS feed, or Twitter, go to
www.sos.ca.gov/multimedia.
Ballot Measure California High-Speed Rail Initiative Signatures
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Saving Paul, from smoking, with Prop. 29 »


text:
Goyanes ist der Familienname folgender Personen:

 Concha Goyanes (1946–2016), spanische Schauspielerin
 Manuel J. Goyanes (1913–1983), spanischer Filmproduzent
 Mariano Baquero Goyanes (1923–1984), spanischer Romanist und Hispanist


Housing group is now meeting monthly with Erin Sullivan Sutton, DHS and Kristine Davis, DHS. We meet at 1:30-3:30 at MCIT on the Thursday of MACSSA. Last meeting Erin and Kristine discussed data analysis of persons experiencing long-term homelessness and housing support services. The evidence was quite dramatic showing increased housing stability with housing support services.
Support forVolunteer drivers continue to be a need, especially in geographically rural counties. Jackie Och, Todd County Director, submitted a legislative proposal for federal IRS language changes.
2. 2.8m 2019 and 4.1M ongoing and will be in base budget after that.
4. Additional RFP--Realtime software for hsg openings (does not include hmis list process) hope to include hb101 and disability maybe but less than corporate foster care, adults specifically as youthlink has this already. Phone app, potential?
5. Erin's group will shoot out as to when.
Topic 2. Regional Metro Counties. How to work together in metro. How directors have been engaged. 2006 formal cooperative agreement to manage longterm homelessness services. Dollars pass thru to Hearth connection. What else can we do together? Grh/hsg support services expanded to Include flexibility for service application on behalf of directors. Co-managing funds, Henn fiscal agent but now project by project and any county partnership. Helpful for dhs to have formal agreement. Data outcomes for group as compared to Continuum of Care reps.
review the visual on lth and hs support services diagram. Ben teach us or send query points. Erin and Kristine will follow up.
How looking thru lens of race equity to address issues? disproportionately African American and American indian. Access to disability waiver. Targeted strategies likehsg support services reaches disproportionate population that is homeless namely African American and American indian. Survey info.
County/statewide communication processes. Ideas, changes, questions vetted thru monthly conversations.


1. Mica : Formulated from special Mica, fine texture that helps to brighten skin even after breaking into a sweat.
2. Silicon Coating : Smooth touch and easy to blend formula.
3. SPF40 PA+++ : Protects and defends skin from UVA/UVB rays with sunscreen protection SPF40.
4. Sebum Control : Sebum Control Innovation controls oil effectively and lets your bright skin feel fresh all day long.


text:
Transformers — серия компьютерных игр в жанре Action, издателем которой выступает компания Activision.

Игры серии Transformers
 2007 — Transformers: The Game — первая игра в серии разработанная компанией Traveller's Tales для PS2, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3 и PC.
 2009 — Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — вторая игра в серии разработанная компанией Luxoflux для Windows, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii и Xbox 360.
 2010 — Transformers: War for Cybertron — третья игра в серии разработанная компанией High Moon Studios для платформ PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 и Wii.
 2012 — Transformers: Fall of Cybertron — четвертая игра в серии выпущенная 3 сентября 2012 года для Windows, PlayStation 3 и Xbox 360.
 2014 — Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark — пятая игра в серии разработанная компанией Edge of Reality, релиз состоялся 24 июня 2014 года на платформах PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 и Wii U.
 2015 —  — шестая игра в серии разработанная компанией PlatinumGames для Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 и Xbox One.

Мобильные
 Transformers: Robots In Disguise — игра для платформ Android и iOS по одноименному сериалу.

См. также
 полный список всех игр по франшизе «Трансформеры»

Примечания

Компьютерные игры о «Трансформерах»


text:
Q: Подбор алгоритма планирования потоков с одинаковой величиной кванта Выполняю проект, основной задачей которого является воспроизвести модель планирования потока с фиксированной (одинаковой) величиной кванта.
Теория: каждому потоку предоставляется квант времени (постоянный), в течение которого поток может выполняться на процессоре. По истечении кванта операционная система переключает процессор на следующий поток в очереди. Квант обычно равен целому числу интервалов системного таймера обычно 10 или 15 мс.

Концепция:

*

*В системе создается поток, ему выделяется квант времени на выполнение.

*Если поток успевает выполниться, то уходит из системы, иначе: по истечении этого кванта процесс прерывается таймером и помещается в конец очереди процессов, готовых к исполнению, а процессор выделяется для использования процессу, находящемуся в ее начале.

*Поступает из очереди новый поток

Вопрос:
Правильно ли я понимаю, что данный алгоритм планирования соответствует планированию RR (Round Robin) и реализовать данную программку можно методом FCFS (первым пришел, первым обслужен)? И процесс, получивший в свое распоряжение процессор, занимает его до истечения текущего CPU burst. После этого для выполнения выбирается новый процесс из начала очереди?


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Holdsworth Associates Getting the right angle for your communications
All in a day's PR work #4
PR & Strategic Communications
Content Creation & Production
Tag Archives | Event organisation
By Holdsworth on August 2, 2018 in Cambridge, News, Public Relations, Social Media
Our latest blog offering a PR peek into our working week – including press-event organising, film producing, lab test assisting, and birthday cake candle lighting!
By Holdsworth on May 14, 2018 in Cambridge, News, Public Relations, Social Media
From celebrating the birth of 500 babies to growing social networks, building event promotion packages and profiling unique business investments, here's a peek behind our PR week at Holdsworth Associates.
Design through to launch of a memorial garden
By Holdsworth on April 20, 2017 in
Brief and Objectives
Cheltenham Pet Crematorium (CPC) had converted a facility on an industrial estate into a crematorium. Although sympathetic inside, outside it was a warehouse with patch of grass alongside. CPC asked Holdsworth Associates to create a launch event to raise awareness of its services and communicate effectively to potential customers.
Research, planning and strategy
Pets are important family members and a cremation service provides a time for the owners to grieve and for other pets to understand the loss. CPC provides counselling and support to owners who are able to design their own service. However if the family want to take the ashes home or to scatter in a favourite place then they need to wait for short time.
HA proposed that a memorial garden was created for owners to use for reflection and also to exercise other pets. The garden would also provide something for a celebrity to 'open' and create the opportunity for a positive experience for invited guests.
Adam Henson, best-known for presenting Countryfile, and interested in dogs and gardening was invited to open the garden. It was decided to have a wildlife element as the site backed on to a nature reserve.
Being located on an industrial estate, the garden strategy would add value to the environment and create a more comforting environment for mourners.
Research revealed that the local Tewkesbury School had horticultural society. HA worked with the school to develop a project that would enable students to talk about bereavement and to use their skills to design and build the remembrance garden.
At the official opening, the pupils would be invited to bring their families and friends to see their work and meet Adam – creating a lovely photo-opportunity for regional media.
To warm up the media, HA created an initial story about commissioning the pupils to build the garden – this created an opportunity to talk to media and invite them to the opening.
For the launch there was a strong story, photo opportunity, people to interview about how they overcame their loss. The event attracted broadcast, online and print media.
Measurement & Evaluation
The launch of the Memorial and Wildlife Garden was a success, with coverage secured in local media and veterinary publications, including:
Cotswold TV
Cheltenham Standard
Vet Times
Vet Surgeon
Coverage was also achieved for CPC in the Daily Telegraph.
Launching a new food intolerance test product to the healthcare market.
Generating market pull for new health product
A charity campaign to engage and empower target audiences
Changing behaviour with cross-channel campaign
How do you communicate that you have specialist expertise in food innovation when all your work for international brands is confidential?
Changing attitudes towards insect protein
Promoting the Cambridge Phenomenon
In their latest book about the 'The Cambridge Phenomenon'. Charles Cotton and Kate Kirk wanted to stress the international impact of Cambridge ideas. Holdsworth Associates was asked to create a story to attract media coverage and add value to the event.
The concept of the Cambridge Phenomenon' has been discussed at length and frequently the city is criticised for creating ideas not businesses. This view is outdated, so HA proposed to use a photograph of the new Cambridge skyline of cranes, to create an alternative image for the city. We also invited spokespeople who have set up successful international businesses, or been the reason for multinational companies setting up R&D facilities in the cluster, to speak to the media at the launch.
Tech companies with different types of international impact were sourced and interviewed to gain case-studies. They were also invited to bring demonstrations to the launch event to create filming opportunities for broadcast media and interest for attendees and journalists.
Business, finance and technology publications were targeted, alongside local and national outlets.
We developed stories with William Tunstall-Pedoe; the man behind Amazon Echo's 'Alexa' software, Sebastian Manhart of Simprints, Professor Andrea Ferrari of the Cambridge Graphene Centre and Professor Chris Lowe of the University of Cambridge.
We commissioned a photograph of the new Cambridge Skyline to demonstrate visually the 'new Cambridge'.
Content was produced on each of these contributors, with diverse press releases. Holdsworth Associates kept in contact with these organisations as the process unfolded, providing details of the event and organisation for the demonstration desks, wireless access etc.
The launch of the 'Cambridge Phenomenon' gained strong coverage in the national, broadcast and online media.
Coverage included:
Cambridge TV
Science|Business
Engineering & Technology magazine
Participating companies also benefited from wider coverage and gained stories for their websites and content for Twitter and social media outreach.
How do you generate international coverage for a textbook? We dug beneath the surface to create human interest stories that brought the UNEP Atlas of Great Apes to life for the media and public.
Generating national media interest for World Atlas launch
We delivered three years of sustained public relations support to Augmentra, who developed ViewRanger, an 'off the road' sat nav for mobile phones.
Delivering consumer PR: from tech start-up to Apple app
We created a lively communications campaign for HSBC, integrating human interest with financial announcements, to gain coverage in mainstream news, financial and business publications.
Creating strong business stories
Profiling early-stage technology companies
By holdsworth_i6zq7j on March 24, 2017 in
St John's Innovation Centre (SJIC) is an incubator for early stage companies and provides a wealth of advice and support services aimed at entrepreneurs.
Holdsworth Associates has worked with SJIC over many years to provide public relations support in order to help companies gain a profile with the media, analysts and potential investors.
We worked with SJIC on a technology showcase, where 13 start-ups demonstrated to the media alongside a pitching session to investors.
To promote SJIC's services, and raise the profile of its tenants and other early-stage companies with the media and potential investors.
The event was called 'Meerkats and Avatars' – companies from across the East of England were invited to participate.
Each company was given a PR consultation meeting and a press release drafted with a strong news hook to support their business objectives. For many of the companies it was the first time they had their offering articulated in this way.
The technology showcase was aimed at invited journalists from local, national, trade and broadcast media.
Journalists had the opportunity to see demonstrations of early-stage products and meet the people involved in developing the technology.
The press releases were made available to the media who attended the event and also distributed online to journalists in our extensive database.
It proved to be a lively day with an impressive array of technologies demonstrated in creative ways.
It was attended by journalists from a range of media including the BBC, The Sunday Telegraph, New Scientist and The Guardian. Coverage appeared in print, online, on the radio and on television.
There was good attendance from investors and many of the companies subsequently gained investment.
For these early-stage companies it was a unique opportunity to raise their profile with the media and investors – in most cases it was the first time their ideas had received public attention.
Audio Analytic at Meerkats and Avatars
Gmax at Meerkats and Avatars
The companies supported by SJIC technology press days have included:
Audio Analytic: Sound-recognition software to aid crime detection by automatically recognising warning sounds such as car alarms, and highlighting the CCTV screen they are coming from.
Endomagnetics: A safe and cost-effective technique for detecting the spread of breast cancer.
Gmax: Real-time biometrics to improve racehorse training.
Intelligent Fingerprinting: Detection of illicit substances from fingerprints.
Ombar: Organic chocolate, made from raw cocoa beans, which is low in fat and high in antioxidants.
Omnisense: A flexible location system to allow tracking of people and assets in real time without the need for a fixed infrastructure.
Psonar: A music storage cloud which allows users to safely back up their collection, share playlists and discover new tracks legally.
Trillion Genomics: Their technology has applications in diagnostics, medical research, integrated disease management and drug discovery, and they specialise in screening for prostate cancer.
Visual Perception: A user interface to improve human-computer interactions by using patterns found in nature to create an intuitive browsing mechanism.
Zonerider: Free software which allows individuals to sell their Wi-Fi broadband, opening up possibilities for communities around the world to get online.
Bourn Hall Clinic is professional and approachable and it was important that social media activity had the same tone of voice.
Delivering content strategies for social media
The healthcare, medical device and wireless communities collaborated in this workshop which had four different strands.
Is the future of healthcare devices wireless?
By Holdsworth on January 18, 2017 in
How do you create high-profile media interest with the launch of text book? This is the challenge we achieved for the UNEP - World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
To achieve impact with a new report, it is vital to create a compelling package of engaging content.
The World Atlas of Great Apes was to be launched by UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre ahead of an important convention.
Although an interesting subject, the book was a collation of pre-existing information and contained nothing new. Holdsworth Associates was tasked with making the Atlas headline grabbing.
How we did it?
We analysed the book and interviewed its contributors. Although the Atlas contained no new data or statistics, it was the first time this information had been brought together in one place. We created an infographic to highlight this and used anecdotes, gathered from contributers, to provide journalists with the real-life stories behind the data.
London Zoo was approached to provide a launch venue and offer real-time broadcast images, while we invited conservationists and other specialists to speak to the media about the challenges they face.
The Atlas launch received international and national media coverage, including:
BBC One O'Clock News
BBC Wildlife and other consumer press
Sales of the Atlas exceeded expectations. The Atlas was referenced throughout the following week as the Kinshasa Conference progressed and it is now considered a key text by the media for great ape population and conservation data.
All in a PR agency day's work #9
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COMPOSER: Joseph Horovitz
PUBLISHER: World of Brass
Composer Joseph Horovitz will celebrate his 90th birthday in May, with 2016 already seeing a welcome retrospective of some his finest works at the RNCM Brass Band Festival in Manchester in January. It included Ballet for Band, written in 1983 at the set-work for the National Final at the Royal
Composer Joseph Horovitz
Publisher World of Brass
Genre Concert Piece
No. WOBRS20006SCORE
Composer Joseph Horovitz will celebrate his 90th birthday in May, with 2016 already seeing a welcome retrospective of some his finest works at the RNCM Brass Band Festival in Manchester in January.
It included Ballet for Band, written in 1983 at the set-work for the National Final at the Royal Albert Hall, and which has since become one his most popular major test-pieces - played on numerous occasions throughout the banding world.
It is a wonderfully elegant, mischievous composition - a brass band ballet, not of programmatic intent but of fertile imagination; beautifully crafted with a delicacy of touch as light on its feet as any arabesque.
The composer has admitted that he had a clear vision of the characters that inhabit his score, yet has never divulged any details - leaving the bands and listeners, as he says, "...to exercise their own imaginations rather than being influenced bymine!"


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text:
The strategies shaping private equity in 2019 and beyond
Publié le 3 mars 2019 3 mars 2019 par hanswillertbleuazurconsultingeu
For the past several years, fund managers have faced virtually the same challenge: how to put record amounts of raised capital to work productively amid heavy competition for assets and soaring purchase price multiples. Top performers recognize that the only effective response is to get better—and smarter.
We've identified four ways leading firms are doing so.
A growing number of (General Partners) GPs are facing down rising deal multiples by using buy-and-build strategies as a form of multiple arbitrage—essentially scaling up valuable new companies by acquiring smaller, cheaper ones.
The biggest firms, meanwhile, are beating corporate competitors at their own game by executing large-scale strategic mergers that create value out of synergies and combined operational strength.
GPs are also discovering the power of advanced analytics to shed light on both value and risks in ways never before possible.
And they are once again exploring adjacent investment strategies that take advantage of existing capabilities, while resisting the temptation to stray too far afield.
Each of these approaches will require an investment in new skills and capabilities for most firms. Increasingly, however, continuous improvement is what separates the top-tier firms from the rest.
Buy-and-build: Powerful strategy, hard to pull off
While buy-and-build strategies have been around as long as private equity has, they've never been as popular as they are right now. The reason is simple: Buy-and-build can offer a clear path to value at a time when deal multiples are at record levels and GPs are under heavy pressure to find strategies that don't rely on traditional tailwinds like falling interest rates and stable GDP growth. Buying a strong platform company and building value rapidly through well-executed add-ons can generate impressive returns.
As the strategy becomes more and more popular, however, GPs are discovering that doing it well is not as easy as it looks. When we talk about buy-and-build, we don't mean portfolio companies that pick up one or two acquisitions over the course of a holding period. We also aren't referring to onetime mergers meant to build scale or scope in a single stroke. We define buy-and-build as an explicit strategy for building value by using a well-positioned platform company to make at least four sequential add-on acquisitions of smaller companies. Measuring this activity with the data available isn't easy. But you can get a sense of its growth by looking at add-on transactions. In 2003, just 21% of all add-on deals represented at least the fourth acquisition by a single platform company. That number is closer to 30% in recent years, and in 10% of the cases, the add-on was at least the 10th sequential acquisition.
Buy-and-build strategies are showing up across a wide swath of industries (see Figure 2.2). They are also moving out of the small- to middle-market range as larger firms target larger platform companies (see Figure 2.3). They are popular because they offer a powerful antidote to soaring deal multiples. They give GPs a way to take advantage of the market's tendency to assign big companies higher valuations than smaller ones (see Figure 2.4). A buy-and-build strategy allows a GP to justify the initial acquisition of a relatively expensive platform company by offering the opportunity to tuck in smaller add-ons that can be acquired for lower multiples later on. This multiple arbitrage brings down the firm's average cost of acquisition, while putting capital to work and building additional asset value through scale and scope. At the same time, serial acquisitions allow GPs to build value through synergies that reduce costs or add to the top line. The objective is to assemble a powerful new business such that the whole is worth significantly more than the parts.
Having coinvested in or advised on hundreds of buy-and-build deals over the past 20 years, we've learned that sponsors tend to underestimate what it takes to win. We've seen buy-and-build strategies offer firms a number of compelling paths to value creation, but we've also seen these approaches badly underperform other strategies. Every deal is different, of course, but there are patterns to success.
The most effective buy-and-build strategies share several important characteristics.
Too many attempts at creating value through buy-and-build founder on the shoals of bad planning. What looks like a slam-dunk strategy rarely is. Winning involves assessing the dynamics at work in a given sector and using those insights to weave together the right set of assets. The firms that get it right understand three things going in:
Deep, holistic diligence is critical. In buy-and-build, due diligence doesn't start with the first acquisition. The most effective practitioners diligence the whole opportunity, not just the component parts. That means understanding how the strategy will create value in a given sector using a specific platform company to acquire a well-defined type of add-on. Are there enough targets in the sector, and is it stable enough to support growth? Does the platform already have the right infrastructure to make acquisitions, or will you need to build those capabilities? Who are the potential targets, and what do they add? Deep answers to questions like these are a necessary prerequisite to evaluating the real potential of a buy-and-build thesis.
Execution is as important as the investment. Great diligence leads to a great playbook. The best firms have a clear plan for what to buy, how to integrate it, and what roles fund management and platform company leadership will play. This starts with building a leadership team that is fit for purpose. It also means identifying bottlenecks (e.g., IT systems, integration team) and addressing them quickly. There are multiple models that can work—some rely on extensive involvement from deal teams, while others assume strong platform management will take the wheel. But given the PE time frame, the imperative is to have a clear plan up front and to accelerate acquisition activity during what inevitably feels like a very short holding period.
Pattern recognition counts. Being able to see what works comes with time and experience. Learning, however, relies on a conscious effort to diagnose what worked well (or didn't) with past deals. This forensic analysis should include the choice of targets, as well as how decisions along each link of the investment value chain (either by fund management or platform company management) created or destroyed value. Outcomes improve only when leaders use insights from past deals to make better choices the next time.
At a time when soaring asset prices are dialing up the need for GPs to create value any way they can, an increasing number of firms are turning to buy-and-build strategies. The potential for value creation is there; capturing it requires
sophisticated due diligence,
a clear playbook,
and strong, experienced leadership.
Merger integration: Stepping up to the challenge
PE funds are increasingly turning to large-scale M&A to solve what has become one of the industry's most intractable problems—record amounts of money to spend and too few targets. GPs have put more money to work over the past five years than during any five-year period in the buyout industry's history. Still, dry powder, or uncalled capital, has soared 64% over the same period, setting new records annually and ramping up pressure on PE firms to accelerate the pace of dealmaking.
One reason for the imbalance is hardly a bad problem: Beginning in 2014, enthusiastic investors have flooded buyout funds with more than $1 trillion in fresh capital. Another issue, however, poses a significant conundrum: PE firms are too often having to withdraw from auctions amid fierce competition from strategic corporate buyers, many of which have a decided advantage in bidding. Given that large and mega-buyout funds of $1.5 billion or more hold two-thirds of the uncalled capital, chipping away at the mountain of dry powder will require more and bigger deals by the industry's largest players (see Figure 2.6). Very large public-to-private transactions are on the rise for precisely this reason.
But increasingly, large funds are looking to win M&A deals by recreating the economics that corporate buyers enjoy. This involves using a platform company to hunt for large-scale merger partners that add strategic value through scale, scope or both.
Making it all work, of course, is another matter. Large-scale, strategic M&A solves one problem for large PE firms by putting a lot of capital to work at once, but it also creates a major challenge: capturing value by integrating two or more complex organizations into a bigger one that makes strategic and operational sense. Bain research shows that, while there is clear value in making acquisitions large enough to have material impact on the acquirer, the success rate is uneven and correlates closely to buyer experience (see Figure 2.7). The winners do this sort of deal relatively frequently and turn large-scale M&A into a repeatable model. The laggards make infrequent big bets, often in an attempt to swing for the fences strategically. Broken deals tend to fail because firms stumble over merger integration. They enter the deal without an integration thesis or try to do everything at once. They don't identify synergies with any precision, or fail to capture the ones they have identified. GPs neglect to sort out leadership issues soon enough, or they underestimate the challenge of merging systems and processes. For many firms, large-scale merger integration presents a steep learning curve.
In our experience, success in a PE context requires a different way of approaching three key phases of the value-creation cycle:
due diligence,
the post-announcement period
and the post-close integration period (see Figure 2.8).
In many ways, what happens before the deal closes is almost as important as what happens after a firm assumes ownership. Top firms invest in deep thinking about integration from the outset of due diligence. And they bring a sharp focus to how the firm can move quickly and decisively during the holding period to maximize time to value.
In a standalone due diligence process, deal teams focus on a target's market potential, its competitiveness, and opportunities to cut costs or improve performance. In a merger situation, those things still matter, but since the firm's portfolio company should have a good understanding of the market already, the diligence imperative switches to a bottom-up assessment of the potential synergies:
Measuring synergies. Synergies typically represent most of a merger deal's value, so precision in underwriting them is critical. High-level benchmarks aren't sufficient; strong diligence demands rigorous quantification. The firm has to decide which synergies are most important, how much value they represent and how likely they are to be captured within the deal's time frame. A full understanding of the synergies available in a deal like this allows a firm to bid as aggressively as possible. It often gives the deal team the option to share the value of synergies with the seller in the form of a higher acquisition price. On the other hand, the team also needs to account for dis-synergies—the kinds of negative outcomes that can easily lead to value destruction.
Tapping the balance sheet. One area of potential synergies often underappreciated by corporate buyers is the balance sheet. Because companies in the same industry frequently share suppliers and customers, combining them presents opportunities to negotiate better contracts and improve working capital. There might also be a chance to reduce inventory costs by pooling inventory, consolidating warehouses or rationalizing distribution centers. At many target companies, these opportunities represent low-hanging fruit, especially at corporate spin-offs, since parent companies rarely manage the working capital of individual units aggressively. Combined businesses can also trim capital expenditures.
Managing the "soft" stuff. While these balance sheet issues play to a GP's strong suit, people and culture issues usually don't. PE firms aren't known for their skill in diagnosing culture conflicts, retaining talent or working through the inevitable HR crises raised by integration. Firms often view these so-called soft issues as secondary to the things they can really measure. Yet people problems can quickly undermine synergies and other sources of value, not to mention overall performance of the combined company. To avoid these problems, it helps to focus on two things in due diligence. First, which of the target company's core capabilities need to be preserved, and what will it take to retain the top 10 people who deliver them? Second, does the existing leadership team—on either side of the transaction—understand how to integrate a business? The firm needs to know whether those responsible for leading the integration have done it before, whether they've been successful and whether the firm can trust them to do it successfully in this situation. PE owners are often more involved in integration than the board of a typical corporation. It's important not to overstep, however. Bigfooting the management team is a sure way to spur a talent exodus. For PE firms eager to put money to work, great diligence in a merger context is critical. It should not only answer questions such as "How much value can we underwrite?" but also evaluate whether to do the deal at all. Deal teams have to resist the urge to make an acquisition simply because the clock is ticking. Corporate buyers often take years to identify and court the right target. While it's true that PE firms rarely have that luxury, no amount of merger integration prowess can make up for acquiring a company that just doesn't fit.
Once the hard work of underwriting value and generating a robust integration thesis is complete, integration planning begins in earnest. A successful integration has three major objectives:
capturing the identified value,
managing the people issues,
and integrating processes and systems (see Figure 2.9).
This is where the Integration Management Office (IMO) needs to shine. As the central leadership office, its role is to keep the integration effort on track and to hit the ground running on day one. Pre- and post-close, the IMO
monitors risks (including interdependences),
tracks and reports on team progress,
resolves conflicts,
and works to achieve a consistent drumbeat of decisions and outcomes.
It manages dozens of integration teams, each with its own detailed work plan, key performance indicators and milestones. It also communicates effectively to all stakeholders.
Capturing value. An often-underappreciated aspect of the early merger integration process is the art of maintaining continuity in the base business. Knitting together the two organizations and realizing synergies is essential, but value can be lost quickly if a chaotic integration process gets in the way of running the core. Management needs to reserve focus for day-to-day operations, keeping close tabs on customers and vendors, and intervening quickly if problems crop up. At the same time, it is important to validate and resize the value-creation initiatives and synergies identified in diligence. The team has to create a new value roadmap that articulates in detail the value available and how to capture it. This document redefines the size of the prize based on real data. It should be cascaded down through the organization to inform detailed team-level work plans.
Tackling the people challenge. Integrating large groups of people is very often the most challenging— and overlooked—aspect of bringing two companies together. Mergers are emotionally charged events that take employees out of their comfort zone. While top leadership may be thinking about pulling the team together to find value, the people on the ground, understandably, are focused on what it means for them. The change disrupts everybody; nobody knows what's coming, and human nature being what it is, people often shut down. Getting ahead of potential disaster involves three critical areas of focus:
retaining key talent,
devising a clear operating model
and solving any culture issues.
Talent retention boils down to identifying who creates the most value at the company and understanding what motivates them. Firms need to isolate the top 50 to 100 individuals most responsible for the combined company's value and devise a retention plan tailored to each one. Keeping these people on board will likely involve financial incentives, but it may be more important to present these stars with a clear vision for the future and how they can bring it to life by excelling in mission-critical roles. It is also essential to be decisive and fair in making talent decisions (see Figure 2.10). Assigning these roles is an outgrowth of a larger challenge: devising a fit-for-purpose operating model that aligns with the overall vision for the company. This is the set of organizational elements that helps translate business strategy into action. It defines roles, reporting relationships and decision rights, as well as accountabilities. Whether this new model works will have a lot to do with how well leadership manages the cultural integration challenge. Nothing can destroy value faster than internal dysfunction, but getting it right can be a delicate exercise.
Processes and systems. The final integration imperative—designing and implementing the new company's processes and systems—is all about anticipating how things will get done in the new company and building the right infrastructure to support that activity. PE firms must consider which processes to integrate and which to leave alone. The north star on these decisions is which efforts will directly accrue to value within the deal time frame and which can wait. Often, this means designing an interim and an end-state solution, ensuring delivery of critical functionality now while laying the foundation for the optimal long-term solution. Integrating IT systems requires a similar decision-making process, focused on what will create the most value. If capturing synergies in the finance department involves cutting headcount within several financial planning and analysis teams, that might only happen when they are on a single system. Likewise, if the optimal operating model calls for a fully integrated sales and marketing team, then working from a single CRM system makes sense. Most PE firms are hyperfocused on the expense involved in these sorts of decisions. They weigh the onetime costs of integration against a sometimes-vague potential return and ultimately decide not to push forward. This may be a mistake. Taking a more expansive view of potential value often pays off. Early investments in IT, for instance, may look expensive in the short run. But to the extent that they make possible future investments in better capabilities or continued acquisitions, they can be invaluable.
Adjacency strategy: Taking another shot at diversification
Given the amount of capital gushing into private equity, it's not surprising that PE firms are diversifying their fund offerings by launching new strategies. The question is whether this wave of diversification can produce better results than the last one. History has shown that expanding thoughtfully into the right adjacencies can deliver great results. But devoting time, capital and talent to strategies that stray too far afield can quickly sap performance.
In the mid-1990s, the industry faced a similar challenge in putting excess capital to work. As institutions and other large investors scoured the investment landscape for returns, they increased allocations to alternative investments, including private equity. Larger PE funds eagerly took advantage of the situation by branching into different geographies and asset classes. This opened up new fee and revenue streams, and allowed the funds to offer talented associates new opportunities. Funds first expanded geographically, typically by crossing the Atlantic from the US to Europe, then extending into Asia and other regions by the early 2000s (see Figure 2.12). Larger firms next began to experiment with asset class diversification, creating
growth and venture capital funds,
real estate funds,
mezzanine financing
and distressed debt vehicles.
Many PE firms found it more challenging to succeed in new geographies and especially in different asset classes. Credit, infrastructure, real estate and hedge funds held much appeal, in part because they were less correlated with equity markets and offered new pools of opportunity. But critically, most of these asset classes also required buyout investors to get up to speed on very different capabilities, and they offered few synergies. Compared with buyouts, most of these adjacent asset classes had a different investment thesis, virtually no deal-sourcing overlap, little staff or support-function cost sharing, and a different Limited Partners (LP) risk profile. To complicate matters, PE firms found that many of these adjacencies offered lower margins than their core buyout business. Some came with lower fees, and others did not live up to performance targets. Inherently lower returns for LPs made it difficult to apply the same fee structures as for traditional buyouts. To create attractive total economics and pay for investment teams, PE firms needed to scale up some of these new products well beyond what they might do in buyouts. That, in turn, threatened to change the nature of the firm.
For large firms that ultimately went public, like KKR, Blackstone and Apollo, the shift in ownership intensified the need to produce recurring, predictable streams of fees and capital gains. Expanding at scale in different asset classes became an imperative. And today, buyouts represent a minority of their assets under management.
As other firms pursued diversification, however, the combination of different capabilities and lower returns wasn't always worth the trade-off. When the global financial crisis hit, money dried up, causing funds to retrench from adjacencies that did not work well—either because of a lack of strategic rationale or because an asset class struggled overall. Of the 100 buyout firms that added adjacencies before 2008 (roughly 1 in 10 firms active then), 20% stopped raising capital after the crisis, and nearly 65% of those left had to pull out from at least one of their asset classes (see Figure 2.13).
Diversification, it became clear, was trickier to navigate than anticipated. Succeeding in any business that's far from a company's core capabilities presents a stiff challenge—and private equity is no different. To test this point, we looked at a sample of funds launched between 1998 and 2013 by 184 buyout firms for which we had performance data, each of which had raised at least $1.5 billion during that period. We found that, when it comes to maintaining a high level of returns, staying close to the core definitely matters. Our study defined "core/near-in" firms as those that dedicated at least 90% of their raised capital to buyouts and less than 5% to adjacencies (including infrastructure, real estate and debt). We compared them to firms that moved further away from the core (dedicating more than 5% to adjacencies). The results: On average, 28% of core/near-in firms' buyout funds generated top-quartile IRR performance, vs. 21% for firms that moved further afield (see Figure 2.14). The IRR gap for geographic diversification is more muted, because making such moves is generally easier than crossing asset types. But expanding into a new country or region does require developing or acquiring a local network, as well as transferring certain capabilities. And the mixed IRR record that we identified still serves as a caution: Firms need to be clear on what they excel at and exactly how their strengths could transfer to adjacent spaces.
With a record amount of capital flowing into private equity in recent years, GPs again face the question of how to deploy more capital through diversification. While a few firms, such as Hellman & Friedman, remain fully committed to funding their core buyout strategy, not many can achieve such massive scale in one asset class. As a result, a new wave of PE products is finding favor with both GPs and LPs. Top performers are considering adjacencies that are one step removed from the core, rather than two or three steps removed. The best options take advantage of existing platforms, investment themes and expertise. They're more closely related to what PE buyout firms know how to do, and they also hold the prospect of higher margins for the GP and better net returns for LPs. In other words, these new products are a different way to play a familiar song.
There are any number of ways for firms to diversify, but several stand out in today's market (see Figure 2.15):
Long-hold funds have a life span of up to 15 years or so, offering a number of benefits. Extending a fund's holding period allows PE firms to better align with the longer investment horizon of sovereign wealth funds and pension funds. It also provides access to a larger pool of target companies and allows for flexibility on exit timing with fewer distractions. These funds represent a small but growing share of total capital.
Growth equity funds target minority stakes in growing companies, usually in a specific sector such as technology or healthcare. Though the field is getting more crowded, growth equity has been attractive given buyout-like returns, strong deal flow and less competition than for other types of assets. Here, a traditional buyout firm can transfer many of its core capabilities. Most common in Asia, growth equity has been making inroads in the US and Europe of late.
Sector funds focus exclusively on one sector in which the PE firm has notable strengths. These funds allow firms to take advantage of their expertise and network in a defined part of the investing landscape.
Mid-market funds target companies whose enterprise value typically ranges between $50 million and $500 million, allowing the firm to tap opportunities that would be out of scope for a large buyout fund.
All of the options described here have implications for a PE firm's operating model, especially in terms of retaining talent, communicating an adjacency play to LPs, avoiding cannibalization of the firm's traditional buyout funds and sorting out which deal belongs in which bucket.
GPs committed to adjacency expansion should ask themselves a few key questions:
Do we have the resident capabilities to execute well on this product today, or can we add them easily?
Does the asset class leverage our cost structure?
Do our customers—our LPs—want these new products?
Can we provide the products through the same channels?
Have we set appropriate expectations for the expansion, both for returns and for investments?
Clear-eyed answers to these questions will determine whether, and which, adjacencies make sense. The past failures and retrenchments serve as a reminder that investing too far afield risks distracting GPs from their core buyout funds. Instead, a repeatable model consists of understanding which strengths a fund can export and thoughtfully mapping those strengths to the right opportunities (see Figure 2.16).
Adjacency expansion will remain a popular tack among funds looking for alternative routes to put their capital to work. Funds that leverage their strengths in a disciplined, structured way stand the best chance of reaping healthy profits from expansion.
Advanced analytics: Delivering quicker and better insights
At a time when PE firms face soaring asset prices and heavy competition for deals, advanced analytics can help them derive the kinds of proprietary insights that give them an essential edge against rivals. These emerging technologies can offer fund managers rapid access to deep information about a target company and its competitive position, significantly improving the firm's ability to assess opportunities and threats. That improves the firm's confidence in bidding aggressively for companies it believes in—or walking away from a target with underlying issues.
What's clear, however, is that advanced analytics isn't for novices. Funds need help in taking advantage of these powerful new tools. The technology is evolving rapidly, and steady innovation creates a perplexing array of options. Using analytics to full advantage requires staying on top of emerging trends, building relationships with the right vendors, and knowing when it makes sense to unleash teams of data scientists, coders and statisticians on a given problem. Bain works with leading PE firms to sort through these issues, evaluate opportunities and build effective solutions. We see firms taking advantage of analytics in several key areas.
Many PE funds already use scraping tools to extract and analyze data from the web. Often, the goal is to evaluate customer sentiment or to obtain competitive data on product pricing or assortment. New tools make it possible to scrape the web much more efficiently, while gaining significantly deeper insights. Deployed properly, they can also give GPs the option to build proprietary databases over time by gathering information daily, weekly or at other intervals. Using a programming language such as Python, data scientists can direct web robots to search for and extract specific data much more quickly than in the past (see Figure 2.17). With the right code and the right set of target websites, new tools can also allow firms to assemble proprietary databases of historical information on pricing, assortment, geographic footprint, employee count or organizational structure. Analytics tools can access and extract visible and hidden data (metadata) as frequently as fund managers find useful.
Most target companies these days sell through online channels and rely heavily on digital marketing. Fewer do it well. The challenge for GPs during due diligence is to understand quickly if a target company could use digital technology more effectively to create new growth opportunities. Post-acquisition, firms often need similar insights to help a portfolio company extract more value from its digital marketing strategy. Assessing a company's digital positioning—call it a digital X-ray—is a fast and effective way to gain these insights. For well-trained teams, it requires a few hours to build the assessment, and it can be done from the outside in—before a fund even bids. It is also relatively easy to ask for access to a target company's Google AdWords and Google Analytics platforms. That can produce a raft of digital metrics and further information on the target's market position.
One challenge for PE funds historically has been accessing data from large networks or from scattered and remote locations. But new tools let deal teams complete such efforts in a fraction of the time and cost.
One issue that PE deal teams often ponder in evaluating companies is traffic patterns around retail networks, manufacturing facilities and transport hubs. Is traffic rising or declining? What's the potential to increase it? In some industries, it's difficult to track such data, especially for competitors. But high-definition satellite images or drones can glean insights from traffic flows over time.
Another advantage of analytics tools is the ability to see around corners, helping fund managers anticipate how disruptive new technologies or business models may change the market. Early signs of disruption are notoriously hard to quantify. Traditional measures such as client satisfaction or profitability won't ring the warning bells soon enough. Even those who know the industry best often fail to anticipate technological disruptions. With access to huge volumes of data, however, it's easier to track possible warning signs, such as the level of innovation or venture capital investment in a sector. That's paved the way for advanced analytics tools that allow PE funds to spot early signals of industry disruption, understand the level of risk and devise effective responses. These insights can be invaluable, enabling firms to account for disruption as they formulate bidding strategies and value-creation plans.
These are just a few of the ways that PE firms can apply advanced analytics to improve deal analysis and portfolio company performance. We believe that the burst of innovation in this area will have profound implications for how PE funds go about due diligence and manage their portfolio companies. But most funds will need to tap external expertise to stay on top of what's possible. A team-based approach that assembles the right expertise for a given problem helps ensure that advanced analytics tools deliver on their promise.
Click here to access Bain's Private Equity Report 2019
Posté dans Non classéTagué Advanced Analytics, Build-Up, Due Dilligence, IRR, IT, M&A, Performance, Private Equity
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