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Facebook Targets Huge IPO
计时一
FacebookInc. is inching closer to an initial public offering that it hopes will valuethe company at more than $100 billion, according to people familiar with thematter.
Thesocial networking firm is now targeting a time frame of April to June 2012 foran initial public offering, said people familiar with the matter. The companyis exploring raising $10 billion in its IPO—what would be one of the largest offerings ever—in a deal that might assign Facebook a $100 billion valuation,a number greater than twice that of such stalwarts as Hewlett-Packard Co. and3M Co.
Facebookis looking to go public between April and June 2012, with a possible filing bythe end of this year. WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler discusses the latest details on themuch anticipated IPO with Stacey Delo. (Photo: Getty Images)
AFacebook IPO has been hotly anticipated for several years, and viewed as adefining moment for the latest Web investing boom. The company has been vagueabout whether it would even make such an offering and silent on timing of anIPO. "We're not going to participate in speculation about an IPO,"said Facebook spokesman Larry Yu.
Thecompany now appears poised to go ahead with a deal. But it will likely come tomarket at a time when investors are beginning to question the value of somenewer Internet businesses.
Themost recent IPO, an $805 million float of discount-deal service Groupon Inc. onNov. 3, has plummeted 42% in price in the past five trading days after surgingin its first day of trading. Business-networking service LinkedIn Corp., whosestock more than doubled from its IPO price on its first day of trading May 19,has since fallen 36%, but remains 33% above its IPO.
FacebookChief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has in the past publicly expressed reluctanceto do an IPO. And he has opted to keep Facebook private longer than manysuspected he would.
Buthe is warming to the idea. Facebook is now in internal discussions over thetiming of its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and isconsidering filing dates as early as this year, said these people. Mr.Zuckerberg hasn't made any final decisions, these people cautioned.
Facebookremains aloof from Wall Street and shows signs of wanting to play by its ownrules.
Companiesoften explore an IPO once they have $100 million in revenue. Facebook isexpected to debut with more than $4 billion in revenue, making it bigger thanWeb veteran Yahoo Inc.
Facebookhas gone so far as to craft its own prospectus, said the people familiar withthe matter. A prospectus document—which is filed with the SECoutlining the company's business—is typically prepared by bankersand lawyers hired by a company.
FacebookChief Financial Officer David Ebersman has been leading the company's talkswith Silicon Valley bankers about an IPO, said people familiar with the matter.
Bankersare aggressively pursuing the company, but Facebook remains elusive about acommitment to specific banks, even though an IPO looms. Mr. Ebersman told somebankers that he is skeptical over what contribution investment banks could maketo a Facebook IPO, since the company is so highly sought after by majorinvestors, said people familiar with the matter.
Thesocial network, which was started by Mr. Zuckerberg in 2004 out of his HarvardUniversity dorm room, has led the way in reshaping how people share informationand interact with others on the Web. It now counts 800 million users, with 500million users logging into the site daily.
Facebookwill be required to make its financial information public by April, because thecompany will cross the 500-shareholder limit by the end of this year. The SECrequires companies with more than 500 shareholders to publicly disclose itsfinancial information.
Facebook'sGrowing Ambitions
Facebookcould publish its financial information come April without an IPO, but boardmembers and top executives have privately acknowledged that it would leave thecompany at a severe disadvantage, since they would have most of the liabilitythat comes with being a public company, but lose out on the fundraisingbenefits of a public offering, said these people.
Only13 IPOs have ever been completed with a value greater than $10 billion, andjust three of those have been for U.S. companies, according to Dealogic, whichtracks new securities issues. The only U.S. issuers at that size level havebeen Visa Inc. at $19.7 billion in 2008; General Motors Co. at $18.1 billion in2010; and AT&T Wireless Services Inc. at $10.6 billion in 2000.
Themost valuable company ever to go public was Industrial & Commercial Bank ofChina, which sold $21.9 billion of stock in October 2006 and finished its firstday of trading with a market value of $148 billion, Dealogic said.
AFacebook offering of $10 billion would be the largest IPO by any technology orInternet company. The largest U.S. Internet IPO, the $1.9 billion sale in 2004by Google Inc. which valued Google at $23 billion, ranks No. 3 among globalInternet IPOs.
Facebook'srevenue is driven by its online advertising business, as big brands rush to thesite to interact with consumers through display ads and fan pages. Facebook'sworld-wide ad revenue is expected to hit $3.8 billion this year, up from $1.86billion a year earlier, according to data compiled by eMarketer. Facebook'sshare of display ad revenue in the US is expected to grow to 16.3% in 2011 and19.5% in 2012, eMarketer found.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia—Hundreds of Malaysian lawyers staged a rare protestmarch Tuesday demanding that the government abandon plans for a law that willforbid street rallies.
The protest, led by Malaysia's main grouping of lawyers, occurred hoursbefore federal legislators were scheduled to debate and potentially pass thePeaceful Assembly Act proposed by Prime Minister Najib Razak's rulingcoalition.
Malaysian and international rights groups call the the repressive, notingit would ban street demonstrations and impose tough restrictions and penaltieson rally organizers.
Malaysian lawyers protesting a proposed street-rally ban; rakyat isa Malay term for ordinary people.
About 500 lawyers representing Malaysia's Bar Council and rights activistsmarched to Parliament, chanting "Freedom to assembly" and"Freedom to the people," before police stopped most of them fromentering the complex.
The protesters accused Mr. Najib's National Front coalition of rushing toenact the law without proper public consultation. It was announced only lastweek.
"We hope the government will listen to the voice of the people,"said Bar Council President Lim Chee Wee.
The ban on street demonstrations—and on holding rallies near schools,hospitals, places of worship, airports or gasoline stations—would restrict themto stadiums and public halls. Organizers could be required to give 10-dayadvance notification to police, who would determine whether the date and venueare allowed. Children under 15 and noncitizens would be barred from attending.
Demonstrators who break the law could be fined 20,000 ringgit ($6,200).
V.K. Liew, a deputy Cabinet minister in Najib's office who received aprotest note from the lawyers Tuesday, suggested that critics not be too quickto denounce the law.
"We should look at it holistically, not piecemeal," he toldreporters.
Officials have said the law is intended to strike a balance between publicorder and the right to peaceful assembly.
Malaysian authorities have long been wary of political demonstrations. InJuly, police briefly arrested hundreds of protesters and fired tear gas at morethan 20,000 people who marched in Kuala Lumpur to demand greater electoraltransparency. National elections are widely expected next year.
Rights group Amnesty International on Monday called the Peaceful AssemblyAct "a legislative attack on Malaysians' right to peaceful protest,"while Human Rights Watch said the law was being pushed through Parliament with"undue haste."
Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim told reporters at Parliament on Tuesdaythat he believed the law would be "more Draconian" than laws inZimbabwe or Myanmar.
越障
Lunarhistory
EARTH’S moon has a split personality. One half of itssurface—the half which, thanks to the vagaries of orbital mechanics, alwaysfaces Earth—is dominated by dark, smooth expanses of ancient, frozen lava knownas maria (early astronomers, thinking they might be bodies of water, named themafter the Latin word for “sea”). The contrast between the darkness of the mariaand the brightness of the surrounding highlands forms a pattern popularlyknown, depending on the culture of the observer, as the man in the moon, therabbit on the moon or one of many other optical illusions.
When astronomers got their first glimpses of the moon’s far side, however, theysaw a strikingly different landscape. Early lunar probes revealed a surfacethat was mountainous, rugged, heavily cratered and virtually devoid of maria.To quote Bill Anders, one of the astronauts on Apollo 8 and thus one of thefirst three people to see the far side of the moon directly, it “looks like asand pile my kids have been playing in...all beat up, no definition, just a lotof bumps and holes.”
Selenologists, as those who study the moon call themselves, have kicked aroundmany theories to explain the differences between the moon’s two faces: Earthpartly shielding the moon from meteoritic impacts; uneven heating from beneath;the collision that excavated a 2,500km-wide crater at the lunar south pole, oneof the biggest in the solar system. None seems satisfactory. But in a paperjust published in NatureMartin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug of the University of California,Santa Cruz, examine yet another idea. This is that the mountains of the lunarfar side may be debris left over from an even bigger collision than the one atthe south pole—a collision that left lumps on the lunar surface rather thandigging holes in it.
Moonstruck
The most widely accepted theory of how the moon formed suggests it is theresult of a cosmic smash-up between Earth and an object roughly the size ofMars that happened about 4.5 billion years ago during the solar system’sturbulent youth. This impact would have sprayed huge quantities of materialinto space, forming a ring around Earth similar to, but much thicker than,those that now adorn Saturn.
The moon is thought to have condensed rapidly from this ring. Computersimulation of the process suggests, however, that several smaller moons mayhave formed at the same time. Some would then have collided with Earth or themoon, while others would have been ejected from the system altogether. But oneor more of them often end up, according to the simulations, in what are knownas Trojan orbits, where they followed the proto-moon endlessly around Earth.
Or, rather, almost endlessly. For the hypothesis of Dr Jutzi and Dr Asphaug isthat a large moonlet did eventually catch up and collide with the proto-moon—ata relatively low speed given that they shared an orbit—and produced thehighlands on its far side as a result.
To test their theory, the two researchers simulated such a collision on acomputer. They found that, assuming the second moon was indeed smaller than themain one, and was made of similar stuff (which, given that it is assumed tohave formed from the same ring of debris, seems reasonable), then acomparatively low-speed collision at around 2.4 kilometres a second would meanthat much more material from the moonlet was deposited on the lunar surfacethan was blasted off by the impact. Most of the excess rock, moreover, wouldhave stayed near the point of impact, covering about half of the moon with athicker, mountainous layer of crust—just what is seen on the real moon.
Of course, computer simulations can say only what could have happened, not whatdid. For that, physical evidence is required. Some suggestive evidence doesexist, though. For a start, the crust on the far side of the moon is indeedmuch thicker than that on the nearside. Also, because the second moon wouldhave been smaller than the main one, it would have cooled and solidified morequickly, meaning that its rocks would be older. Sure enough, different parts ofthe present moon’s crust, recovered by various missions to the lunar surface,differ in age by up to 200m years, a fact that has long puzzled selenologistsbut which the impact theory neatly explains. Moreover, such a huge collision onthe far side would have shifted much of the magma ocean that then underlay themoon’s surface to the near side, which led to the formation of the maria.
More evidence may surface when the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratorymission, an American spacecraft designed to map the moon’s gravitational field,arrives in lunar orbit in around six months’ time. That should yield a detailedmap of the lunar crust, and how its thickness varies from place to place. Butthe best way to check the new hypothesis would be for selenologists to get theirhands on rocks from the far side.
Sadly, that is unlikely to happen soon. Neither America nor Russia has anysample-recovery missions planned for the moon. China does (scheduled for 2017).But, like the American and Soviet missions of the 1960s and 1970s, the Chineseare expected to opt for the safety of a landing on the near side. Selenologistsmay therefore have to wait a long time before they can test the Jutzi-Asphaugmodel properly.
Although numbers of animals in a givenregion may fluctuate from year to year, the fluctuations are often temporaryand, over long periods, trivial. Scientists have advanced three theories ofpopulation control to account for this relative constancy.
The first theory attributes a relativelyconstant population to periodic climatic catastrophes that decimatepopulations with such frequency as to prevent them from exceedingsome particular limit. In the case of small organisms with short life cycles,climatic changes need not be catastrophic: normal seasonal changes inphotoperiod (daily amount of sunlight), for example, can govern populationgrowth. This theory—the density-independent view—asserts that climatic factorsexert the same regulatory effect on population regardless of the number ofindividuals in a region.
A second theory argues that populationgrowth is primarily density-dependent—that is, the rate of growth of apopulation in a region decreases as the number of animals increases. Themechanisms that manage regulation may vary. For example, as numbers increase,the food supply would probably diminish, which would increase mortality. Inaddition, as Lotka and Volterra have shown, predators can find prey more easilyin high-density populations. Other regulators include physiological control mechanisms:for example, Christian and Davis have demonstrated how the crowding thatresults from a rise in numbers may bring about hormonal changes in thepituitary and adrenal glands that in turn may regulate population by loweringsexual activity and inhibiting sexual maturation. There is evidence that theseeffects may persist for three generations in the absence of the originalprovocation. One challenge for density-dependent theorists is to develop modelsthat would allow the precise prediction of the effects of crowding.（第二题定位）
A third theory, proposed by Wynne-Edwardsand termed “epideictic,” argues that organisms have evolved a “code” in theform of social or epideictic behavior displays, such aswinter-roosting aggregations or group vocalizing; such codes provide organismswith information on population size in a region so that they can, if necessary,exercise reproductive restraint（第四题定位）.However, Wynne-Edwards’ theory, linking animal social behavior and populationcontrol, has been challenged, with some justification, by several studies.
1. Theprimary purpose of the passage is to 【 】
(A) argue against those scientists whomaintain that animal populations tend to fluctuate
(B) compare and contrast thedensity-dependent and epideictic theories of population control
(C) provide example of some of the ways inwhich animals exercise reproductive restraint to control their own numbers
(D) suggests that theories of populationcontrol that concentrate on the social behavior of animals are more open to debatethan are theories that do not
(E) summarize a number of scientifictheories that attempt to explain why animal populations do not exceed certainlimits
2. Itcan be inferred from the passage that proponents of the density-dependent theoryof population control have not yet been able to 【 】
(A) use their theory to explain thepopulation growth of organisms with short life cycles
(B) reproduce the results of the study ofChristian and Davis
(C) explain adequately why the numbers of apopulation can increase as the population’s rate of growth decreases
(D) make sufficiently accurate predictionsabout the effects of crowding
(E) demonstrate how predator populationsare themselves regulated
3. Whichof the following, if true, would best support the density-dependent theory ofpopulation control as it is described in the passage? 【 】
(A) As the number of foxes in Minnesotadecrease, the growth rate of this population of foxes begins to increase.
(B) As the number of woodpeckers in Vermontdecreases, the growth rate of this population of woodpeckers also begins todecrease.
(C) As the number of prairie dogs inOklahoma increases, the growth rate of this population of prairie dogs alsobegins to increase.
(D) After the number of beavers inTennessee decreases, the number of predators of these beavers begins toincrease.
(E) After the number of eagles in Montanadecreases, the food supply of this population of eagles also begins todecrease.
4. Accordingto the Wynne-Edwards theory as it is described in the passage, epideictic behaviordisplays serve the function of 【 】
(A) determining roosting aggregations
(B) locating food
(C) attracting predators
(D) regulating sexual activity
(E) triggering hormonal changes
5. Thechallenge posed to the Wynne-Edwards-theory by several studies is regarded bythe author with 【 】
(A) complete indifference
(B) qualified acceptance
(C) skeptical amusement
(D) perplexed astonishment
(E) agitated dismay
6. Whichof the following statements would provide the most of logical continuation ofthe final paragraph of the passage? 【 】
(A) Thus Wynne-Edwards’ theory raisesserious questions about the constancy of animal population in a region.
(B) Because Wynne-Edwards’ theory is ableto explain more kinds of animal behavior than is the density-dependent theory,epideictic explanations of population regulation are now widely accepted.
(C) The results of one study, for instance,have suggested that group vocalizing is more often used to defend territorythan to provide information about population density.
(D) Some of these studies have, in fact,worked out a systematic and complex code of social behavior that can regulatepopulation size.
(E) One study, for example, hasdemonstrated that birds are more likely to use winter-roosting aggregationsthan group vocalizing in order to provide information on population size.
1. E 2. D 3. A 4. D 5. B 6. C
科技类文章，我的最爱了。基本不用动脑子了。先说有的同学认为这种文章难，无非就是因为单词生僻吧。可是平时大家如果去看杂志上的一些中文写的科普文章，其间不也是夹杂类似怪异的生词嘛。三聚氰胺，如果没有前些时候的毒牛奶事件，忽然以中文形式出现在人们眼前，鬼才愿意了解这是个神马东西呢。所以啦，碰见生词不要慌，不要怕，认真读题一切都很简单的。
看文章，第一段最给力的形式告诉你这篇文章在讲什么，针对一个问题的三个解释而已。
第二段，记住这几个词periodicclimatic catastrophes that decimate populations，继续到下一段，其他内容，做题的时候再看。
第三段，同样记住第一句话，就好。其他省略。
第四段，处理方法同上。只能说这篇文章的结构让我想起来刚才做的一套四级题。无压力吧？这篇好像也没啥生僻词吧。忽然联想到一篇OG上的阅读，讲的是陆地蛇和海蛇的血液循环问题。大家做完这篇以后可以回去做做那个，那个很有难度的。
看题目。第一题，第一段就告诉我们了选啥了吧。各种理论啊。
第二题，会文章找density-dependenttheory去。说实话这题把我给坑了，第二个理论看到最后才发现答题点。实际考试的时候，即便看全段也需要技巧的。比如一见到举例的那几个词立马跳过跳过！省事啊。
第三题，压根就没必要回头细看那几个例子。趁着在第二题记住的内容还没忘干净，马上可以把所有的同向变化词干掉了。然后再选同种生物间就好了。
第四题，定位到最后一段，找找看那些词符合题意。先找到原文中的句子，然后reproduction的同义词就是sexualactivity 不懂得同学回家补习生理知识去。可能有人定位到前面一句了，注意了，such as 和for instance是一类的东西，有些时候你就当它后面的内容不存在。这个地方只不过是对the form of social or epideictic behavior displays举例而已。
第五题，作者态度，反正没有看到作者对它的感情倾向，所以是比较客观的感觉。那就是作者对这观点也是可以接受的。
第六题，文章最后讲有的研究会削弱W的观点。那么接下来就会来举个关于这个方面的例子对吧？看选项的话，BDE可以立马排掉。可能有点疑问的是A，A中说的是W提出了问题来攻击生物数量的稳定性。可W是再解释，而最后一句话仅仅是说W解释错了而已。所以可以排掉了。
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发表于 2011-11-29 20:33:51
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