Facebook and Its Big Stock Offering
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.
Investors soon will be able to own shares of Facebook stock. The world’s biggest social media network presented documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday. The documents are required before the company can make its initial public offering, or IPO. A date for the stock sale has yet to be announced.
Experts say Facebook could raise about five billion dollars. That would be one of the biggest IPO sales ever. And it would be much bigger than Google’s first public stock sale in two thousand four. At that time, the Internet search company raised almost two billion dollars.
Facebook has eight hundred million users around the world. It is the second most visited website after Google. Now, experts say the social media network is in a position to become one of the most valuable Internet companies.
Stock expert Anupam Palit at Greencrest Capital says that among social media sites, Facebook is in a class by itself.
ANUPAM PALIT: “It is the biggest company in this space and we believe what makes it very unique from every other company that went public last year in this space is that it is very, very profitable.”
Early estimates place the total value of the social network between seventy-five and one hundred billion dollars. That includes earlier investments by other companies. David Kirkpatrick wrote the book “The Facebook Effect.” He says Facebook’s IPO will be historic.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: “Will Facebook’s IPO be the biggest IPO in American history, probably not, but it will certainly be by far the biggest Internet or technology IPO we’ve ever seen.”
The stock sale also could make Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg one of the world’s youngest billionaires. He is only twenty-seven.
Investment companies are likely to buy Facebook stock first. But investment manager Jim O’Shaugnessy says that is not so bad. He says the price of some IPO stocks are too high and fall not long after they first go on sale.
JIM O’SHAUGHNESSY: “Many IPO’s come out being very, very overvalued because they get so hyped up and investors are so taken in by the story that they’re willing to pay any amount just to be able to get into the stock. That generally translates to being very overvalued. So we generally tell investors that they should wait, probably a good full year before they look at buying stock that was recently IPO’d.”
Recently, share prices of some Internet businesses have fallen after their stock was first offered. For example, stock of LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga, dropped in price by as much as twenty-five percent after going public.
There were similar questions eight years ago when Google first sold stock to the public. Today, Google is one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.
And that’s the VOA Special English Economics Report. Visit us at voaspecialenglish.com. And find teaching and learning activities in The Classroom at VOA Learning English. I’m Mario Ritter.
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Contributing: Mil Arcega
Book Cooks Up Recipe for Innovation
Correction attached
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Shirley Griffith.
STEVE EMBER: And I’m Steve Ember. This week on our program, we hear from the author of a book about the makings of innovation. Then, we learn how a Native American is bringing back the art and culture of his tribe from Alaska. And later we tell you about an American naturalist and the results of his work in Africa.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Simply put, innovation is doing something new that works. Steven Johnson has written a new book called “The Innovator’s Cookbook.” Mr. Johnson says all progress depends on innovation and creativity.
STEVEN JOHNSON: “There is no kind of occupation that can’t be improved with innovative thinking.”
Are there secrets to innovation? Mr. Johnson talked to a group of innovative people. They included businesspeople, software designers, artists and musicians. Among them was composer Brian Eno.
STEVEN JOHNSON: “One of the great things that he does is that when he sits down in the studio to start working on an album, he often has the band switch up their instruments.”
So think of the drummer playing guitar and the keyboardist playing violin. How does it sound? Pretty bad at first, Mr. Eno admits. But he told Mr. Johnson that the process is liberating.
STEVEN JOHNSON: “They end up generating new sounds, new ways of playing together they wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. That’s a great metaphor for what you want to do in your own life. Go and try things that you haven’t tried before, and don’t worry about sounding bad because what may happen is you’re taken to some new place.”
STEVE EMBER: Being open to new things also helped IDO, a design and innovation company in California, to expand around the world. Mr. Johnson talked with IDO co-founder Tom Kelley for his book. Mr. Kelley described a weekly meeting, held every Monday morning, for the company’s top managers.
STEVEN JOHNSON: “That meeting, for twenty years, has started with show and tell. People are asked to present interesting things they stumbled across that weekend. Someone would say, ‘Hey, I went to see a movie with my kids last night’ or ‘You guys seen this new game my kids are playing?’ or ‘I went to an art gallery the other day and it’s really interesting.’ Tom said it ends up triggering all these new associations and there is something unpredictable about it that leads to new ideas for their actual business.”
Steven Johnson shares his interviews in “The Innovator’s Cookbook.” It also includes nine essays written by business researchers. These essays explore the conditions that can either allow creativity to grow, or kill it.
One of those essays is by Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor and co-author of the book “The Progress Principle.”
TERESA AMABILE: “It is absolutely possible to kill creativity. In fact, it seems to be more common inside most workplaces for the work environment to undermine creativity, to kill it, rather than to stimulate it and keep it alive.”
In her essay, Professor Amabile offers guidelines for supporting innovation in the workplace.
TERESA AMABILE: “First of all, people need to feel that they have some degree of autonomy in what they are doing. They also need to feel personally involved in what they are doing, that they find it in some way interesting, satisfying, enjoyable and personally challenging. When people are in that mindset, they’re much more likely to come up with new and useful ideas. People also need to feel, across the organization, they have encouragement for coming up with new ideas.”
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Innovator’s Cookbook” author Steven Johnson says creative minds also need to work together, to collaborate.
STEVEN JOHNSON: “You think about Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founding that company. Very different people; a brilliant engineer and a brilliant visionary and salesman, two totally different kinds of minds, and they needed each other.”
True. But author Susan Cain wrote recently that “If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself.” Ms. Cain, writing in the New York Times, noted Mr. Wozniak’s own words to would-be inventors: “I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone.”
Susan Cain has just published a book called “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” She wrote in the Times: “Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
“But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”
In other words, there can be too many cooks in the innovator’s kitchen.
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STEVE EMBER: David Boxley is a member of the Tsimshian tribe. The tribe’s home state is Alaska. Mr. Boxley is a dancer, songwriter and wood carver. He is also an ambassador for Tsimshian culture and heritage.
DAVID BOXLEY: “We call it art now, but it was a way for people to say, this is how I am. This belongs to me, or this is my clan, this is my crest, this is my family history, carved and painted in wood.”
Mr. Boxley was raised by his grandparents. He says the influence of Christian missionaries was strong while he was young, so he learned little about his native culture.
David Boxley works at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington on one of the totem poles that he created with his son
VOA
DAVID BOXLEY: “I guess I came along at the right time. Our people really needed a shot in the arm. Our culture wasn’t very prominent after all that missionary influence, and years and years of not having anybody be in that kind of position to guide.”
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: That was almost thirty years ago. Since then Mr. Boxley has created seventy totem poles. Totem poles tell a story. Several months ago he began carving his most recent totem pole from a seven-meter-long piece of red cedar.
DAVID BOXLEY: “We don’t use sandpaper. We use the knives and the chisels to get it as smooth as possible. Get the lines clean.”
He worked on it at his home near Seattle, in the northwestern state of Washington. Then the totem pole was shipped by truck across the country to the other Washington. It will stand in the permanent collection at the National Museum of the American Indian.
DAVID BOXLEY: “The title is Eagle and the Young Chief.”
The totem pole tells the story of a young chief who rescued an eagle caught in a fishing net. Years later, when the chief’s village was starving, the eagle repaid the chief for his kindness.
DAVID BOXLEY: “A live salmon fell out of the sky, and he looked up and he saw the eagle flying away. And every day for days and days, the eagle brought salmon to feed the village.”
STEVE EMBER: David Boxley has other wood carvings in the permanent collection at the museum. His dance group of family and friends performed for a crowd on the day the totem pole was presented to the public.
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Mr. Boxley says a totem pole that he carved in honor of his grandfather is closest to his heart. But this new one, at the museum, is a close second.
DAVID BOXLEY: “This one is going to be seen by millions over the next hundred years. And it is not just me and my son; it is all of my people that are proud. My tribe.”
We have a video about David Boxley and his work at voaspecialenglish.com.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Mike Fay calls himself a “nature boy.” Mr. Fay is a naturalist and explorer. His work has been supported by organizations like National Geographic and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
In nineteen ninety-nine, Mr. Fay began a fifteen-month project called the MegaTransect. He walked more than three thousand kilometers across the Congo basin to study plants and wildlife. Mr. Fay and a team of Pygmy guides crossed the dense tropical forests of the Congo and Gabon.
MIKE FAY: “You know, we were [on] like an epic voyage out there. Every day you have to find food for thirteen people, you have to keep everyone healthy, you have to be the mother, the father, the coach, everybody, for all these guys.”
Mike Fay
Veronique LaCapra
At one point, they stopped at a small village. Mr. Fay warned his group not to drink the water because of the risk of disease.
MIKE FAY: “And sure enough, one of the Pygmies gets hepatitis like probably two or three weeks later. And the first reaction of those guys to something like that is to scarify them with razor blades and bleed them, you know, to get the bad blood out. And so here you’ve got this highly infectious guy, who all of a sudden everybody’s touching his blood, and I just had these nightmares of the whole crew getting hepatitis.”
He says it took about a week to carry the sick man to a river. Then they used a dugout canoe to transport him to safety.
STEVE EMBER: Mr. Fay documented his experiences on the MegaTransect. He used a satellite-based positioning system, digital cameras and a laptop computer. He and his guides cut through dense vegetation and crossed rivers and deep, muddy swamps. Along the way, they saw elephants, aardvarks, gorillas and other wildlife. They also saw roads and machinery that logging companies were using to remove trees.
MIKE FAY: “It was hard. But we didn’t lose a single person, and it was an expedition of a lifetime, for sure.”
The knowledge that came out of the trip, and the attention it received, helped lead Gabon to create thirteen national parks. These placed more than four million hectares of forest under protection.
Mr. Fay moved to Washington to write his findings after he finished the MegaTransect in two thousand. But he says he had a difficult time re-entering city life after sleeping outdoors in the forest for so long.
Mike Fay is now in his fifties. Since the MegaTransect he has completed other surveys of biodiversity. His latest trip was in two thousand seven. He hiked three thousand kilometers through California’s redwood forests. But wherever he is, he says, he still tries to avoid sleeping inside.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Our program was produced by Brianna Blake, with reporting by Faiza Elmasry, Jeff Swicord and Veronique LaCapra. I’m Shirley Griffith.
STEVE EMBER: And I’m Steve Ember. You can find texts, MP3s and podcasts of our programs, along with English teaching activities, at voaspecialenglish.com. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.
Correction: The caption below a picture of inventors Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz has been changed to remove an incorrect time reference. (The photo could not have been taken “during the Great Depression,” as Steinmetz died in 1923.)
For Some, Religion is Part of the College Experience
FAITH LAPIDUS: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.
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I’m Faith Lapidus. Today on our show, we play music from singer Lana Del Rey.
We also answer a question from Burma about the way Americans elect a president.
But, first we go to real college to hear how some students combine religion with their school life.
College Religious Life
FAITH LAPIDUS: Going to college is often a chance for young adults to explore ideas and beliefs different from those they grew up with. As they do, college students are finding new ways to express their beliefs. As we hear from Christopher Cruise, American clergy say many young people are remaining true to their religious faith.
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CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: A traditional observance gives Indian students a chance to share their faith and culture with others. Many did that at this recent event, says Chandni Raja of the Hindu Student Organization at the University of Southern California.
CHANDNI RAJA: “Meeting other groups on campus and trying to get that dialogue going, while also maintaining our own communities as a strong place where people can come together.”
Varun Soni works as dean of religious life at the University of Southern California. He says many students keep religion on their own terms.
VARUN SONI: “They’re more interested, I find, in making religion work for them as opposed to working for it. So they interpret their religious and spiritual traditions in a way that makes sense for them.”
Scotty McLennan is dean for religious life at Stanford University in California. He is also seeing a new openness.
SCOTTY MCLENNAN: “I think the most exciting thing that’s happening is that students really are learning how to listen to each other across traditions, and they really are getting more interested in that kind of empathetic listening and presence to each other, hearing each others’ stories.”
Some students use religious traditions to support their beliefs. Others become less observant, but many want to share their faith and culture with others.
Omer Bajwa directs Muslim religious activities at Yale University in Connecticut. He advises Muslim students. He says they have many questions about the importance of faith.
OMER BAJWA: “In a time of increasing religiosity but also increasing secularism, where are the fault lines, and what are the tensions and what are the areas of conversation? I think we find common questions coming across.”
Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann is senior associate dean for religious life at Stanford University. She says discussions in the classroom and with students from different religious traditions can lead to questions in a student’s faith.
PATRICIA KARLIN-NEUMANN: “The question in my mind is whether that questioning leads to a falling off of commitment or a deepening of commitment. And my experience is that people who claim their religious traditions after having or in the process of being engaged with other people are far more inclined to see what they have as something precious.”
Tahera Ahmad is associate university chaplain at Northwestern University in Illinois. She says interfaith service projects and community discussions are bringing students together at schools all across the country.
TAHERA AHMAD: “What I’ve seen on college campuses is that the young students who are from various faith backgrounds are coming together and not necessarily leaving their faith at the door, but not also wearing their faith on their sleeve, so to say, but finding some kind of balance as to saying, ‘This is who I am. I am a Muslim, I am a Christian, I am a Jew. We’re all coming together towards making the world a better place.’”
These clergymen and women say college students are growing in their faith by meeting and learning from those of other religions.
Electoral College
FAITH LAPIDUS: Our question this week comes from Burma. Ko Maw Gyi wants to know about the Electoral College. This is the name of the system Americans use to elect a president.
The Electoral College is made up of representatives from all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Electors are appointed representatives who promise to vote as the people of the state guide them. Different states have different laws on the appointment of the electors. In some states, the names of the electors appear on the ballot, below the names of the candidates.
The number of electoral votes in each state equals the number of representatives and senators in Congress from that state. This depends on population. So, states with more people have more electoral votes. In all, there are five hundred thirty-eight electoral votes. To become president, a candidate must win a simple majority, at least two hundred seventy.
AP
What this means is that it is possible for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the country but lose the election. This has happened four times. The most recent was in two thousand, when George W. Bush was elected to his first term in office. Five hundred thousand more Americans voted for Vice President Al Gore for president. But Mister Bush received more electoral votes.
This is because forty-eight of the fifty states have a winner-take-all electoral votes policy. The candidate who wins the highest number of popular votes in a state receives all of that state’s electoral votes.
Critics of the Electoral College say it is undemocratic, difficult to understand and dangerous to the political system. Supporters say it helps to guarantee the rights of states with small populations. They say it also requires candidates to campaign in many states, not just those with large populations.
There have been hundreds of proposals in Congress to end or reform the Electoral College. But amending the Constitution is a difficult process.
Ko Maw Gyi in Burma also asked about American presidential debates. We will answer that question next week.
Lana Del Rey
FAITH LAPIDUS: Twenty-five year old singer and songwriter Lana Del Rey has an album set for release Tuesday. But, she already has been getting a lot of attention with the release of several singles and music videos. Shirley Griffith has more.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” was first released in June of last year. Her smoky, sexy sound and the somewhat strange song became popular on the World Wide Web. So did her video that went with it. The artist says she made it herself, using film and video clips she found on the Web. The video is an interesting, piece filled with images that bring old Hollywood and new love to mind.
Lana Del Rey
AP
In October, “Video Games” was re-released as a single from her new album “Born to Die.” The album is supposed to come out on January thirty-first. However, it was leaked on the Internet Tuesday.
“Blue Jeans” is another single from the new recording.
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Lana Del Rey was born Elizabeth Grant in New York City. She grew up in Lake Placid, New York, but returned to the city to begin her music career. She told a reporter she often performed in small Brooklyn music clubs on nights when anyone was permitted to get on stage.
We leave you with her performing the title song from her new album, “Born to Die.”
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FAITH LAPIDUS: I’m Faith Lapidus. We’re thinking about starting a new feature on American Mosaic. It would offer advice to people who have a problem in a relationship. It could be a problem in a romantic relationship, or with a family member or a friend, or at school or work.
We would talk to experts for advice and gather opinions from users of our social media sites. We would give a brief summary of the problem but never identify you. We would give our answer online and on radio during our program AMERICAN MOSAIC.
To test this idea, we need your help. If you have a relationship problem write to us about it. Give us enough details to understand the situation. Make sure you tell us how old you are, whether you’re a man or a woman, and the country you live in.
Write to mosaic@voanews.com and type “Relationship” in the subject line.
This program was written by Christopher Cruise and Caty Weaver, who also was our producer. We had additional reporting from Mike O’Sullivan.
Join us again next week for music and more on AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.
