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Since the 1980s, conventional wisdom has been that most acquisitions do not succeed. In 1987, Michael Porter of Harvard University observed that between 50% and 60% of acquisitions were failures; several other studies support this conclusion. Mercer Management Consulting noted that between 1984 and 1994, 60% of the firms in the "Business Week 500" that had made a major acquisition were less profitable than their industry. In 2004, McKinsey calculated that only 23% of acquisitions had a positive return on investment. Boston Consulting Group, in 2007, suggested that acquisitions transfer value from the acquirer's shareholders to those of the target. Results vary depending on the type of acquisition, the similarity of the two protagonists, the industry, involved international or domestic competition, etc. but the overall trend remains the same, even though there are major difficulties in measuring acquisition performance. Usual methods such as: measuring the stock market reaction; valuing the entity after acquisition; determining abnormal returns, synergies & economies of scale, are all unable to isolate the individual impact of the acquisition from those multitude of events that occur all the time in business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An excerpt from the book "The Spectacular Miss" by Sonia Bahl is presented which focuses on the story of a young girl, Nira discovering her womenhood.

A study was carried out to determine the incidence of Cryptococcus species in AIDS patients and their susceptibility pattern to the different antifungal drugs used for therapy. PCR as a rapid diagnostic tool for cryptococcal meningitis was evaluated. All the isolates were senstive to the three antifungal drugs tested indicating that the development of drug resistance is not a major problem in the treatment of cryptococcosis. All the culture positive specimens were positive by PCR which can be evolved into a very useful, rapid diagnostic tool to detect cryptococci in clinical specimens.