Bizarre Data Loss: What’s Your Story?

Computer users have lost data under very bizarre circumstances.

As data storage technology expands to accommodate business production - including email histories, company records and research - digital data forms a large part of a company’s backbone. In one famous case, an employee left a rotting banana on an external hard drive, which seeped into the mechanism and compromised all of his saved data. Do you have a messy desk? Don’t leave your lunch on your computer because even breadcrumbs can jam the tiny mechanisms that make the drive run.

When a data storage medium is crammed with photograph albums, Mp3 music and private records or calendars, it’s a big part of our personal lives, too. And we take it with us everywhere. If you’re clumsy, don’t leave a cup of coffee within an arm’s reach of your hard drive. Liquids and oils will almost certainly make your data too slippery to handle. Nevertheless one person greased his hard drive with mechanical grease because it was squeaking!

Pack your belongings for travel with care. Don’t slide toiletries into your laptop bag and risk spilled shampoo on your personal or professional hard drive. Every year, data recovery firms receive hard drives that have been left in the path of moving vehicles. At the airport, laptop bags and external devices have been crushed under luggage carriers. Don’t drop your laptop, ever. Not from a high counter, a moving car, over a balcony, or - and this really happened - from a helicopter. Remember that digital data - although recoverable in all of the instances above - is easily lost.

Protect your data and save yourself plenty of personal and professional trouble.

Nevada Doctor Charged with Medical Malpractice

Kevin Buckwalter, a Las Vegas-area family doctor, has recently been stripped of his medical license after a series of investigations revealed that at least eight of his patients died due to negligence and medical malpractice.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the state medical board, Buckwalter has allegedly over-prescribed prescription drugs and failed to monitor their use among his patients for years.

In one shocking example, medical records reveal that Buckwalter prescribed a single patient over 17,000 narcotic painkillers within a 4-year period – even after that man had already experienced an overdose on the same pain medication.

Details of Buckwalter's Medical Malpractice

Through the investigations of the Nevada Medical Examiner's Board, state officials have found evidence indicating that Buckwalter has recklessly prescribed potent drugs, without performing proper medical exams of patients, in dozens of cases.

While, to date, eight patients are known to have died due to Buckwalter's malpractice, tens of others have filed reports with the state medical board indicating that they have experienced severe injuries as a result of Buckwalter's reckless practices.

Along with prescribing the highly addictive drug OxyContin, Buckwalter also has a history of inappropriately prescribing patients:

• Hydrocodone (an addictive opiate-based painkiller that is commonly marketed as Vicodin)
• Methadone
• Xanax
  

refinance: Billionaire Wilbur L. Ross makes bizzare corporate bankruptcy prediction for 2007. Private Equity firms to blame?

From this Reuters Article.

"Ross, dubbed the 'King of Bankruptcy' by Fortune magazine in 1998, said at a conference in London on Wednesday that defaults would rise to about 7 percent of all companies by the end of next year -- one of the most bearish predictions in the industry -- from about 1 percent now."

More information from an article in US News and World Report:

"A shakeout is coming, experts say. It is just a question of when. Many banks, law firms, hedge funds, and private-equity groups are already bolstering the ranks of their distressed-debt units and are gathering bankruptcy specialists for just such an occasion. Private-equity player Wilbur Ross, known for his astute nose in picking up distressed companies on the cheap, says it won't be long. Too much money is being paid to take on too much risk with too much debt, Ross warns, adding that bets by some highly leveraged buyout firms that they will be able to cheaply refinance their deals in a few years have "been building in a time bomb." In this scenario, higher default rates aren't just likely, he concludes; "they are quite inevitable.""

From what I can tell, Ross is saying that the debt markets are in big trouble because of the rise of Private Equity firms and their extensive use of leveraged buyouts to the point where the companies can't support the debt burden. A great example of this is the recent Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) IPO flop in which a few private equity firms dumped Hertz on the open market after increasing it's already heavy debt load in order to pay themselves a quick cash dividend.

If Ross's prediction is correct, the corporate debt markets are in for a real hammering in the next few years. It might be time to start looking carefully at the loan portfolios of major banks.