Tag Archives: director

Future of Fashion Retail in Pop-ups

Reckoning with high rental fees, the onslaught of online shops and multinationals, brick-and-mortar fashion retailers are realising the perks of a pop-up shop.

Wait, pop-up what?

A pop-up is a store that takes up retail space temporarily (i.e. a few days to several months) as opposed to one taking on a year- or decades-long lease. The setup effectively frees the lessee from the constraints of a lengthy contract. (more…)

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Female company directors are better judges of longer-term company performance

Groundbreaking research by the University of Exeter Business School reveals that female company directors defy negative gender stereotyping by astutely valuing future company performance.

The stock market responds more positively to trades made by male directors in their own company stock than their female counterparts, new research reveals. 

However, over the longer term (3 – 12 months), returns made by female directors’ on trades in their own company stock are at least equal to, or exceed, those of their male counterparts.

The study by the University of Exeter Business School analysed over 80,000 legal trades made by directors of companies listed on the London and AIM stock exchanges. It is commonly assumed that when a director buys shares in their own company, they believe it to be undervalued by the stock market and this frequently leads to investors buying more stocks in that company and pushing up the share price. (more…)

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Film Producer’s “Pi” in the Sky Dreams Become Reality

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – You may not know Lee Berger by name, but you may have seen the work of his production teams in many of 2012’s biggest movies: “Django Unchained,” “The Hunger Games,” “Life of Pi” and “Snow White and the Huntsman.”

Berger ’76 is president of the film division of Rhythm & Hues Studios, a Los Angeles-based company that does everything from animating the Chipmunks to creating fantastic worlds (“The Chronicles of Narnia”).

“This is a very competitive industry,” says Berger. “We don’t normally get to pick and choose, and we’re lucky that Ang Lee chose us (for ‘Life of Pi’).” (more…)

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Not-So-Permanent Permafrost

MENLO PARK, Calif. — As much as 44 billion tons of nitrogen and 850 billion tons of carbon stored in arctic permafrost, or frozen ground, could be released into the environment as the region begins to thaw over the next century as a result of a warmer planet according to a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey. This nitrogen and carbon are likely to impact ecosystems, the atmosphere, and water resources including rivers and lakes. For context, this is roughly the amount of carbon stored in the atmosphere today.

The release of carbon and nitrogen in permafrost could exacerbate the warming phenomenon and will impact water systems on land and offshore according to USGS scientists and their domestic and international collaborators. The previously unpublished nitrogen figure is useful for scientists who are making climate predictions with computer climate models, while the carbon estimate is consistent and gives more credence to other scientific studies with similar carbon estimates. (more…)

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