Being a zinfandel(*) maven as well as a geek, I bought into the Ravenswood IPO.
This was the first IPO done under the auction system for which William Vickery won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1996.
The system makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of the company going public as well as for the individual investor. It works like this: A deadline for offers is set, along with a target price. Investors bid a number of shares they wish to purchase, along with the highest price they are willing to pay. When all the bids are in, the banker starts filling orders beginning with the highest bid. Everyone who bid at that level gets all the shares they ordered, then the banker goes down to the next highest bid, fills all the orders at that bid, and so on until all the shares are distributed.
The bid price where the shares run out is the price everybody pays, even if they bid higher. So in the case of Ravenswood, I bid 12, and got my shares at 10 1/2. (**)
Everyone bids once, so you don't get the bidding frenzy of a typical auction and everyone gets an equal opportunity to buy (unlike eBay).
The company selling the shares leaves less money on the table, because the price they get is set by the auction and not by an investment banker who underwrites the IPO (and makes windfall profits if it can sell the IPO shares for more than they paid they company for them)
And since the market sets the initial price, you don't get those huge first-day runups and subsequent collapses that marked many IPOs in the stock market bubble.
It's even more efficient to do since most of the deal can be done online, and you don't have to pay brokers for schmoozing big institutional investors.
*--I'm enough of a zinfandel fan that my office is decorated with posters signed by winemakers like Joel Peterson ( Ravenswood ), Kent Rosenblum (Rosenblum Cellars), and Matt Cline (Cline Cellars), so I was familiar with the Ravenswood business plan (***) and knew the shares would be a good investment.
**--It indeed turned out to be a very good investment. A coupla years later, Canandaigua Brands (Almaden, Paul Masson) bought out Ravenswood for $29.50 a share, so I nearly tripled my money.
***--They used the proceeds of the IPO to construct a second winemaking facility, so they could expand production of their County series zins, and start making merlot too.
I recall an article about someone using cucumber oil aromatherapy (no $#!^!) as an anti-anxiety treatment during MRI. Don't think it was in a peer-reviewed journal though.
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[remembers when the state-of-the-art MRI patient comfort system was Ed Heidelberger playing his guitar]
Don't know how much the committee concerns itself with such things, but Damadian was rather crass in his demand for equal (if not higher) billing with Lauterbur. I witnessed a shouting match between the two sides in the hallways of an SMRM meeting in 1985 or so, and the majority siding with Lauterbur.
Everyone knew there was going to eventually be a Nobel, so there was some jostling for recognition. Nobody jostled more, or was more offended at being left out, than Damadian.
In the end, neither Lauterbur's method (reconstruction from projections, analogous to CT) or Damadian's method (sensitive point) lasted very long; neither was anywhere near as efficient as spin-warp imaging and subsequent methods.
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[did the first clinical trial quantitatively proving MRI to be more effective than other modalities for a particular diagnosis (in this case avascular necrosis of the hip) (published in AJR 1984). Wasn't groundbreaking stuff, but it did eventually lead ten years later to my current job in technology assessment.]
It wasn't an unreasonable call by the committee. They have to draw the line somewhere, and while the Aberdeen group made important and early contributions, they were not alone.
Though when I thought years ago about who would get the inevitable Nobel for MRI, I figured they'd recognize Bill Edelstein for spin-warp imaging along with Lauterbur. It was an elegant synthesis of the advances that had been made to that point, and it's what moved NMR imaging from the research lab into clinical practice.
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[gave enough consideration to doing his grad work at Aberdeen to go and interview with Hutchison]
Is it worth flaming this guy over all the stuff he made up? (hint: I was _there_ when Lauterbur built his first human size scanner, and the magnet rooms were in the _basement_)
Whaddya think, "100percent"? You really want us to believe all that malarkey?
I remember the debate over that issue--it took place at a meeting of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine about 1984 or 85.
On one side were the clinicians who felt that the word "nuclear" would unnecessarily scare the public about a modality that in face uses no ionizing radiation, and possibly set back the development of clinical MRI. On the other side were the physicists who knew "nuclear" wasn't synonymous with "radioactive" (of cource the clinicians did too) and didn't want their perfectly good scientific term bowdlerized.
Incidentally, Lauterbur coined the term zeugmatography for the technology, but obviously it didn't stick.
http://www.google.com/search?q=zeugmatography&ie=U TF-8&oe=UTF-8 : 398 hits, MRI: 8.1 million hits
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[Lauterbur lab, Stony Brook, 1982]
Slashdot Mirror
The system makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of the company going public as well as for the individual investor. It works like this: A deadline for offers is set, along with a target price. Investors bid a number of shares they wish to purchase, along with the highest price they are willing to pay. When all the bids are in, the banker starts filling orders beginning with the highest bid. Everyone who bid at that level gets all the shares they ordered, then the banker goes down to the next highest bid, fills all the orders at that bid, and so on until all the shares are distributed.
The bid price where the shares run out is the price everybody pays, even if they bid higher. So in the case of Ravenswood, I bid 12, and got my shares at 10 1/2. (**)
Everyone bids once, so you don't get the bidding frenzy of a typical auction and everyone gets an equal opportunity to buy (unlike eBay).
The company selling the shares leaves less money on the table, because the price they get is set by the auction and not by an investment banker who underwrites the IPO (and makes windfall profits if it can sell the IPO shares for more than they paid they company for them)
And since the market sets the initial price, you don't get those huge first-day runups and subsequent collapses that marked many IPOs in the stock market bubble.
It's even more efficient to do since most of the deal can be done online, and you don't have to pay brokers for schmoozing big institutional investors.
*--I'm enough of a zinfandel fan that my office is decorated with posters signed by winemakers like Joel Peterson ( Ravenswood ), Kent Rosenblum (Rosenblum Cellars), and Matt Cline (Cline Cellars), so I was familiar with the Ravenswood business plan (***) and knew the shares would be a good investment.
**--It indeed turned out to be a very good investment. A coupla years later, Canandaigua Brands (Almaden, Paul Masson) bought out Ravenswood for $29.50 a share, so I nearly tripled my money.
***--They used the proceeds of the IPO to construct a second winemaking facility, so they could expand production of their County series zins, and start making merlot too.
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[remembers when the state-of-the-art MRI patient comfort system was Ed Heidelberger playing his guitar]
Everyone knew there was going to eventually be a Nobel, so there was some jostling for recognition. Nobody jostled more, or was more offended at being left out, than Damadian.
In the end, neither Lauterbur's method (reconstruction from projections, analogous to CT) or Damadian's method (sensitive point) lasted very long; neither was anywhere near as efficient as spin-warp imaging and subsequent methods.
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[did the first clinical trial quantitatively proving MRI to be more effective than other modalities for a particular diagnosis (in this case avascular necrosis of the hip) (published in AJR 1984). Wasn't groundbreaking stuff, but it did eventually lead ten years later to my current job in technology assessment.]
It wasn't an unreasonable call by the committee. They have to draw the line somewhere, and while the Aberdeen group made important and early contributions, they were not alone. Though when I thought years ago about who would get the inevitable Nobel for MRI, I figured they'd recognize Bill Edelstein for spin-warp imaging along with Lauterbur. It was an elegant synthesis of the advances that had been made to that point, and it's what moved NMR imaging from the research lab into clinical practice. Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D. [gave enough consideration to doing his grad work at Aberdeen to go and interview with Hutchison]
Is it worth flaming this guy over all the stuff he made up? (hint: I was _there_ when Lauterbur built his first human size scanner, and the magnet rooms were in the _basement_) Whaddya think, "100percent"? You really want us to believe all that malarkey?
I remember the debate over that issue--it took place at a meeting of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine about 1984 or 85. On one side were the clinicians who felt that the word "nuclear" would unnecessarily scare the public about a modality that in face uses no ionizing radiation, and possibly set back the development of clinical MRI. On the other side were the physicists who knew "nuclear" wasn't synonymous with "radioactive" (of cource the clinicians did too) and didn't want their perfectly good scientific term bowdlerized. Incidentally, Lauterbur coined the term zeugmatography for the technology, but obviously it didn't stick. http://www.google.com/search?q=zeugmatography&ie=U TF-8&oe=UTF-8 : 398 hits, MRI: 8.1 million hits
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[Lauterbur lab, Stony Brook, 1982]
>The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with its Sunday edition.
Who cares about the Times on CD?
We want the Sun--page three(*) in particular!
*--for explanation see http://home.freeuk.com/webbuk/page3/about.htm