Merck beats forecast, but issues cautious 2013 view

(Reuters) - Merck & Co's quarterly results beat forecasts, helped by strong sales of its Januvia diabetes drug and Gardasil vaccine against cervical cancer, but the company issued a full-year 2013 profit view at the low end of Wall Street expectations

The No. 2 U.S. drugmaker on Friday said it earned $1.4 billion, or 46 cents per share, in the fourth quarter. That compared with $1.51 billion, or 49 cents per share, in the year-earlier period, when the company took charges for acquisition and restructuring expenses.

Excluding special items, Merck earned 83 cents per share. Analysts, on average, had expected 81 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Global company revenue of $11.74 billion topped Wall Street forecasts of $11.48 billion.

(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Gerald E. McCormick)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/merck-beats-forecast-issues-cautious-2013-view-121142796--finance.html

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Ask the vet's pets: February is National Pet Dental Health Month

Dear Christopher Cat: My cat was diagnosed with periodontal disease and needs to have her teeth cleaned. What exactly is periodontal disease?

Christopher responds:

By age 2, 70 percent of cats have periodontal disease. It is the most commonly diagnosed and most undertreated medical problem we cats face.

Periodontal disease occurs in two stages: gingivitis and periodontitis.

Gingivitis, the initial stage, is characterized by reddened and sometimes swollen gums. It is reversible through dental prophylaxis (cleaning and polishing), followed by home care.

Without treatment, gingivitis progresses to periodontitis, an inflammation of the tooth's supporting structures, including the connective tissue, periodontal ligament, the cementum covering the root and the bone that forms the tooth socket. Periodontitis is irreversible but still responds to treatment.

Periodontal disease begins when oral bacteria adhere to teeth, forming plaque. Daily brushing removes plaque before minerals in the saliva can harden it into calculus, or tartar.

Plaque bacteria secrete toxins that destroy dental structures, leading to recession of the gums with root exposure, pocket formation and bone loss.

Worse, these oral bacteria circulate in the blood to distant organs, causing kidney, liver and heart disease. So treatment of periodontal disease is an essential part of keeping your cat healthy.

February is National Pet Dental Health Month, the ideal time to have your veterinarian address your pet's oral health.

Dear Daisy Dog: Lulu, my 12-year-old Yorkshire terrier, broke one of her lower canine teeth. Does the tooth need to be repaired, or will she be OK without treatment?

Daisy responds: Treatment is probably necessary, or infection may invade the pulp cavity and give Lulu a nasty toothache.

Your veterinarian can examine her and advise you about treatment options. Be prepared for your vet to recommend a root canal and refer you to a veterinary dentist.

The other treatment option is to extract the tooth, which carries some risks.

First, our canine teeth, which look like long fangs, have equally long roots that stabilize the jaw and provide much of the lower jaw's strength, especially in a small-breed dog with a tiny jaw. Removing a lower canine tooth weakens the jaw, predisposing it to fracture either during the extraction or later, when chewing hard food or a toy.

Also, without a lower canine tooth, the tongue hangs out, and most dogs drool.

If Lulu's lower canine tooth does need to be extracted because of severe periodontal disease or a tooth root abscess, many veterinary dentists will graft bone into the jaw to reduce the risk of fracture associated with chewing.

Ask the Vet's Pets appears Friday in the print edition of the Reading Eagle. The animal authors of the column live with Lee Pickett, V.M.D., who practices companion animal medicine at Bernville Veterinary Clinic. Contact them at www.askthevetspets.com, 610-488-0166 or P.O. Box 302, Bernville, PA 19506-0302.

Source: http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=448427

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Here's GoDaddy's Super Bowl Commercial with a Supermodel Kissing a Nerd

Because the Super Bowl brings out the sleaziest in GoDaddy (no small feat!), its commercial is always water cooler fodder the Monday after Super Bowl. So get this: supermodel Bar Refaeli making out with uber-nerd (and extraordinary extra) Jesse Heiman because that sells websites. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/46zAvfDuXK8/heres-godaddys-super-bowl-commercial-with-a-nerd-kissing-a-supermodel

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Report: Mainstream Websites Host Majority of Malware | threatpost

While Android malware continues to grow faster than other malware types, it still accounts for only a minute fraction of all malware on the Web, according to Cisco?s annual security report released this week.

Compromised websites hosting malicious Java and iFrame attacks and other malware far and away outpaces all other delivery vectors for malware, Cisco?s report said.

?These types of attacks often represent malicious code on ?trusted? webpages that users may visit every day? meaning an attacker is able to compromise users without even raising their suspicion,? the report added.

Infecting benign sites with malware remains at the heart of malware propagation as attackers continue to find great success delivering malware over infected banner ads on Websites, malicious media files or redirects via iFrame

?Web malware encounters occur everywhere people visit on the Internet?including the most legitimate of websites that they visit frequently, even for business purposes,? said Mary Landesman, senior security researcher with Cisco. ?Indeed, business and industry sites are one of the top three categories visited when a malware encounter occurred. Of course, this isn?t the result of business sites that are designed to be malicious.?

Malicious scripts, include iFrame attacks, accounted for 83 percent of attacks, Cisco said. Exploits delivered malware in almost 10 percent of attacks, followed by data-stealing malware, downloaders, worms and viruses.

Dynamic content on mainstream websites represented 18.3 percent of the delivery mechanisms exploited by malware. Online syndicated advertising was next followed by business and industry websites, gaming sites, web hosts and search engines and portals.

?The majority of encounters happen in the places that online users visit the most?and think are safe,? the report said.

Despite the explosion of Android malware, mobile malware accounted for less than a half percent of all malware encounters, according to the report. Malicious applications deliver the majority of mobile malware, in particular on the Android platform. Most security incidents occur because users either jailbreak devices or install applications from untrusted third-party app stores.

As the recent spate of zero-day vulnerabilities in Java pointed out, attackers find it most efficient to target cross-platform technologies such as Java, or third-party apps such as Adobe Flash or Reader, for example. The availability and ease of use of exploit kits makes it that much simpler for attackers to deliver malware. In the Cisco report, Java accounted for 87 percent of exploits reported in the survey, dwarfing the number of PDF, Flash and ActiveX attacks.

??With over three billion devices running Java, the technology represents a clear way for hackers to scale their attacks across multiple platforms,? the report said.

Mirroring a similar state of the industry report released this week by Arbor Networks, Cisco identified distributed denial of service attacks as another means of disrupting online services. Hacktivists involved in the banking DDoS attacks of late 2012, in particular attacks targeting DNS infrastructure with amplification and reflection attacks. These attacks use DNS recursive resolvers to increase how much attack traffic is sent to a victim, the report said.

?We are seeing a trend in DDoS, with attackers adding additional context about their target site to make the outage more significant,? says Cisco?s Gavin Reid. ?Instead of doing a SYN flood, the DDoS now attempts to manipulate a specific application in the organization?potentially causing a cascading set of damage if it fails.?

The average throughput in DDoS attacks went up 27 percent to 1.57 Gbps, demonstrating how much of an anomaly the DDoS attacks against the major banks were. Those topped out at 100.84 Gbps, Cisco said, and lasted upwards of 20 minutes at a time. Attackers there were able to fire bad traffic simultaneously to different targets, another rarity in DDoS attacks.

Other noteworthy trends mentioned in the Cisco report:

• Spam was down 18 percent worldwide, with India, the United States and Korea the top three originators of spam messages;
• The top spoofed brands in order: prescription drugs; luxury watches; credit cards; business reviews, professional networks
• 91 percent of young consumers believe the age of privacy is over; one-third are not concerned about data about them that is captured and stored;
• 45 percent of young consumers believe their online identity is different from offline; only eight percent believe the two are the same.
• Large companies with more than 25,000 employees are 2.5 times more at risk for running into malware online.

Source: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/report-mainstream-websites-host-majority-malware-013113

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New study might exonerate the egg - The Orange County Register

People of a certain age have heard it all about the egg, back and forth: They're good for you, they're terrible for you. Drinking a glass of five raw eggs like Rocky did is never a good idea.

But a new analysis might help the egg get back in consumers' good graces. The British Medical Journal report, involving eight studies and nearly 264,000 subjects, indicates that eating an egg a day doesn't significantly elevate the risk of heart disease and stroke. Here's the New York Times' post on the study.

One large egg contains about 210 milligrams of cholesterol, the study notes, well below the suggested limit of 300 mg set by the American Heart Association. Eggs also are a relatively cheap source of many nutrients.

"This meta-analysis identified no significant association between egg consumption and risk of coronary heart disease or stroke," the study said.

The exception was a small study of diabetics, who did show a "significantly elevated" risk of heart disease.

Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/lunch-413987-study-egg.html

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Dialling out: Three new ways to make prospecting ... - Natural Training

Essentially, prospecting is like an aeroplane taking off: It uses 50% of its fuel between take-off and landing. The rest of the time it?s flying it mostly uses momentum and air currents to get from A to B.

Prospecting at the start of the year is like that, so the best sales strategies make the most of their fuel in the first 90 days of the year so that they can coast for the rest of the year.

Prospecting and connecting is and always will be a crucial stage of the sales cycle. Without building up the leads and momentum at the start, how will we ever close the great deals at the end? The problem with prospecting is that it has a nasty knack of becoming one of the most laborious and painful jobs going. ?When you consider that the best sales people are at their happiest when they?re negotiating and closing deals, you start to see why long days of prospective ?door knocking? are universally dreaded.

However, at this early stage of the year, it?s essential. Success during the rest of the year is dependent on effective prospecting in January and February.

The way we see it, sales professionals have two choices: Either prospect the same way they always have (usually endless ?smile as you dial? phone calling), or actually inject some variety into the process. How? Simple really, just mix it up and get more creative with the prospecting processes rather than just pinning all your time and hope on one route.

The phone is still an integral part of this process, but it?s only one option. There are plenty of others that will help keep your creative mind buzzing and your engagement levels high.

Here are THREE prospecting methods that will help you tear yourself away from the phone during the prospecting months of January and February?

1. Go [even] further with Linkedin:

Developing a prospect list has got easier with Linkedin. I know we tend to go on and on about Linkedin (we even dedicated a chapter to it in our book ? The Natural Sales Evolution!) here at Natural Training but it is such a useful sales resource you should be using it to its fullest.

When it comes to prospecting, Linkedin allows you to create your own hotlist of potential business ? all you have to do is be precise with who you are identifying as a prospect and then drill down using the search tools.

If you go to the company section you can focus on companies in London, for instance, and get a list of people within each company. The more contacts you have the more people (and potential prospects) you are exposed to. So if you?re a third level contact, you may only get a name or initial, but at first or second level you get a pretty much everything you need. So, spending 30 minutes linking in with as many people as you can, and then creating a list of people to contact and sell to is a great prospecting strategy.

Here?s a great example:

I did some sales training with a business consultancy firm some time ago, and while they were struggling with some areas of the sales cycle, their prospecting methods were innovative and original ? particularly on Linkedin.

Remembering that people love to feel important and that they had a whole heap of potential business logged into Linkedin at any one time, they created a number of groups inviting so-called ?experts? to join. Those ?experts? happened to be their exact target market.

Every day the groups grew in size ? their prospect list organically developed and grew on its own.

2. Creative posting:

Sending a letter in the post to your target market may sound like a backwards step in the digital world we live in. But, I still think there is a place for it in the prospecting process ? even today. The reason I say that is because of a rather clever direct mail campaign that I was sent a short while ago from a confectionary company.
The engaging and innovative letter told me all about their latest chocolate bar, but to get my hands on the free sample I had to go online to the company?s website.

The beauty of online is that it naturally captures and records the actions of your prospects in a way that offline will never be able to. However, if you can grab attention offline then drive your prospects to take action online, you?re leveraging the best of both worlds. Another productive way to burn up the prospecting hours that doesn?t involve endless phoning!

3. Email marketing:

Often, the problem with hitting the phones with a cold list of prospective customers for hours on end is that you have little idea where the interest really is. You could make 100 calls before someone even gives you the two minutes you need to deliver your well-oiled pitch.

Enter the world of email marketing. Email marketing software allows you to send emails to your list of prospects and actually see who opened, clicked and forwarded your email on.

And, while database-wide newsletters will remain the responsibility of the marketing team, sales professionals should look at opportunities to send emails to their own list of potential prospects and customers. Go through your contact list, business cards and emails, find all your potential business for 2013 and devise an engaging email to send out.

Click here to watch our fabulous webinar on this very subject!

You can instantly see which areas of your email were ?interesting? to your database and then when you go back to the phone calling you can be far more targeted with what you say and who you say it to. Plus, spending an hour or two writing an engaging newsletter with links to your online brochures or relevant web pages will be a fruitful and productive break from the traditional smile and dial approach.

In truth, prospecting should be an exciting part of the sales cycle ? it?s an opportunity to try out new methods of reaching out to customers, being creative and developing a strategy to keep you ahead of your competition.

The moment it gets boring and monotonous, change it up.

Want to discover more creative and innovative ways to carry out your prospecting? Develop your selling strategy for 2013 with the sales training experts at Natural Training.

Call the team on 020 7613 7830 or email hello@naturaltraining.com. Remember, you can still download your FREE chapters of The Natural Sales Evolution by clicking here.

Source: http://www.naturaltraining.com/blog/2013/01/30/dialling-out-three-new-ways-to-make-prospecting-interesting-exciting-and-effective/

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Deflation in Japan?

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

The topic of deflation has risen to new heights in Japan because the new Prime Minister has promised to fight deflation and to set new minimum inflation targets for the Bank of Japan.
In this article Frank Shostak shows why Japan should not try to fight inflation. Instead they should fight their apoplithorsismosphobia.

Source: http://bastiat.mises.org/2013/01/deflation-in-japan/

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