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Knowledge Universe CEO says new owners want company to grow

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Blazers’ Robin Lopez helps as Beach Elementary students get new backpacks filled with school supplies

Employees of Portland-based Knowledge Universe head to Beach Elementary School in North Portland to give away backpacks filled with school supplies to the students at the school on Sept. 4, 2014.

(Randy L. Rasmussen/staff/file)

Knowledge Universe, the Portland-based early childhood education company, expects to increase its growth rate following its sale to a Swiss investment firm.

Partners Group AG, based in Zug, Switzerland, announced Thursday it had acquired Knowledge Universe, the operator of the KinderCare Learning Centers brand. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The company, which had $1.48 billion in revenue in 2013, employs more than 500 people at its Lloyd District headquarters and 31,000 nationwide.

The sales comes after a turnaround for the company.

Chief executive Tom Wyatt said when he arrived in early 2012, the company had seen falling revenue for 13 quarters — in part, he said, because it had strayed from its educational mission.

But Knowledge Universe reversed the quarterly revenue disappointments by July 2012, Wyatt said. Since then, it has closed more locations than it’s opened, but it’s increased in enrollment and seen revenue growth for the last 13 quarters.

Executives started meeting with families of children enrolled at its centers, and the company spent millions revamping curriculum. It started seeking accreditation from early childhood education agencies for its locations, and it started renovating the locations it was keeping open.

That’s when Partners Group came calling.

“They’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, and they feel like we’re going about it the right way,” Wyatt said.

Knowledge Universe, he said,  wasn’t looking for a buyer when it was approached by Partners Group earlier this year. By the end of the May, the discussions had turned more serious. (Eventually, three or four other potential suitors were also in the mix, Wyatt said.)

When the deal closes later this year, Wyatt expects the company will ramp up its growth, expanding into new geographic markets and seeking acquisitions for its Champions brand, which provides before- and after-school care.

“One thing Partner prides themselves on is growth,” Wyatt said. “The opportunity to grow at a faster pace is something they’re expecting.”

The leadership team will remain in place and the company will remain in Portland, Wyatt said. It’s in the midst of expanding its Lloyd District offices, where it expects to increase headcount.

— Elliot Njus

[email protected]
503-294-5034
@enjus

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Several theories of the end of the world – Only the most interesting – LJ

In the heyday of technology, we still really do not know anything about how the universe works. Just as we want to know what happens after death, science wants to know how the universe ends. No matter how many theories the scientific community puts forward, they are all fundamentally different from each other. This feed presents 10 interesting doomsday theories that are most common.

Big Crunch

The most common version of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang, when a colossal explosion of matter formed the universe that we see today. Large compression is the opposite process. All of this matter is now expanding outward, but is being affected by the force of gravity in the universe. According to the contraction theory, gravity will eventually cause this expansion to slow down, then stop, and eventually contract and contract in the opposite direction. The contraction will push all that material (planets, stars, galaxies, black holes) back toward the center until everything becomes an infinitely dense substance. Everything will return to the same conditions in which the Universe was before the Big Bang – to huge volumes of matter compressed into an infinitely small point. But this will happen, most likely, not on the basis of the knowledge that humanity currently owns.

Heat Death of the Universe

Heat death can be stated as the general opposite of the Big Crunch. In this case, gravity will not be strong enough to overcome the expansion. So the universe will just continue to expand exponentially. The galaxies will part like unhappy lovers, and the all-encompassing night between them will become wider. The universe follows the same rules as any thermodynamic system. They go the same way: with the heat evenly distributed throughout. If we extrapolate this to our universe, we end up with matter evenly scattered everywhere – in a cold, dark fog. Eventually the stars will go out, one by one, and there won’t be enough energy to “light up” new ones. Finally, the entire universe will go out. Matter will still exist, but in the form of particles and their movement will be completely random. The universe will be in a state of equilibrium, and these particles will stop exchanging energy.

Black holes

According to popular theory, most of the matter in the universe revolves around black holes. All galaxies have large black holes at the center. The black hole theory involves the “eating” of stars, or even entire galaxies, falling under the influence of a black hole. As a result, black holes can absorb most of the matter, leaving us in a dark universe. From time to time there would be a flash of light, similar to lightning, each time an object is pulled close enough to the black hole to emit energy and plunge into darkness. Eventually the larger black holes would consume the smaller ones, becoming even bigger. But even this would not be the final state of the universe. Over time, black holes evaporate and lose mass, which is why they are not eternal.

The end of time

If there is anything eternal, it certainly is time. Whether the universe exists or not, time must exist. Otherwise, there would be no way to distinguish one moment from the next. But what if time lost momentum and just froze? What if there are no more moments? Only one and the same moment. Forever. Time would simply stop working and, according to the scientists, “everything would be frozen like a snapshot of one moment, forever.” It would just happen that at one moment it stopped in time. You would never die, you would never grow old. It would be a kind of pseudo immortality, but no one would know about it, since everything is frozen in one moment.

Big Impact

Big Bounce is similar to Big Squeeze but much more optimistic. Imagine the same scenario: Gravity slows the expansion of the universe and condenses everything back into one single point. In this theory, the force of rapid contraction is enough to start another big bang and start the universe up again. In this model, matter is not destroyed, it is simply “recycled. According to proponents of the theory, the universe does not go through the entire contraction cycle to the end. When matter is compressed very strongly, it is reflected with a force similar to that which reflects a ball bouncing off the floor. This Big Collision, in theory, will produce a new universe.

Big Rip

No matter how the world ends, scientists most often use the word “big” to describe it. This theory contains an invisible force – “dark energy”, causing the accelerating expansion of the universe. Eventually the acceleration is so fast that the universe tears itself into nothingness. The scariest part of this theory is that most of these scenarios take place after the stars have burned out and there is nothing left, and the Big Rip will happen (at the earliest estimate) in 16 billion years. In this phase, planets (and theoretically life) will still exist in the universe. And this cataclysm of the whole universe can burn everyone alive. And the launch is just a guess, but it will undoubtedly be a much more violent death than a slow heat death.

Vacuum metastability

This theory is based on the idea that the universe exists in an unstable state. Some suggest that our universe is teetering on the brink of stability, and that in a few billion years it will finally collapse. When this happens, at some point a bubble will appear in the universe, something like an additional universe. This bubble will expand in all directions at the speed of light and erase everything it touches. Ultimately, this bubble will destroy everything in the universe. But don’t worry, the universe will still exist. The laws of physics will be different, and even life will be possible, but completely different.

Temporal Barrier

The theory of the temporal barrier is that there is a boundary – a real, physical boundary beyond which nothing can expand. And according to physics, over the next 3.7 billion years, we will cross that time barrier and the universe will end for us. At the moment, scientists do not have the understanding of physics to accurately describe this phenomenon, but it is clearly a terrifying prospect.

The end of the universe will not happen

In the multiverse scenario, with infinite universes, these universes can appear and disappear indefinitely. They can be born in Big Bangs, Compression, heat death and collapse in the same way. But that doesn’t matter: in the multiverse, our universe is just one of many. All of them are part of the whole multiverse. New universes are constantly being born in this system. According to physics, the number of new universes will always outnumber the old ones.

Eternal Universe

This is one of the first theories that people put forward about the nature of the universe, but there are new facts that make it more serious. Instead of the Big Bang, which was the beginning of time, time may have existed before. In this model, the universe is cyclic and will continue to expand forever. In the next 20 years, we will be able to find out more likely how true this or that theory is. This is a very long process of study and research that will last forever.

Secrets of Portland and Seattle – Travel World – Planet Earth

The Pacific Northwest – namely the states of Washington and Oregon – is the only part of the USA that is completely absent from the European consciousness. Yes, and in New York, to confess, too. It doesn’t even include stereotypes. You don’t need to know anything about America to immediately recognize the silhouettes of a Texas trucker, a New Orleans jazzman, a New Jersey mobster, a Chicago butcher. Who marks the Northwest? Woodcutter? Kurt Cobain?

Let me correct this state of affairs. Take in all the positive qualities of modern New York – with the exception of yellow taxis and thin pizza. And throw them across the country, to the opposite coast. Their rightful place is there.

It all started about a year ago. Brooklyn’s unbearably trendy neighborhood of Williamsburg is home to the unbearably trendy Blue Bottle Café. Its beauty lay not in its decor—like most new-style coffeehouses, it was a gloomy wood-and-concrete temple of caffeine—but in its obsession with grain itself: no more than a day passed between roasting, grinding, and serving, and the client was expected to know more than just coffee regions, but also individual plantations. In the first week of Blue Bottle’s existence, there were about ten articles about it; despite their age-old posture of weary cynicism, the New York press is terribly impressionable. Especially when we feel the presence of an even greater snob in our ranks. And since a new idol cannot be created without overthrowing the old one, almost all the articles have casually buried the previous favorite of the public: the Stumptown Cafe.

There was something wrong with this story. It took me a few days to put the two together: Blue Bottle was a branch of an Oakland cafe, and Stumptown was a branch of a Portland cafe. The original Blue Bottle has been operating since 2002, Stumptown since 1999. Thus, all the time we spent talking about “the best cafe in New York” we were inadvertently participating in a purely regional showdown of the Pacific coast ten years ago.

This episode sharpened my nose for such borrowings, and I began to track them in earnest. A month later, I came to a startling conclusion. New York – the center of the universe, the apogee of urbanism and so on and so forth – has owed its most pleasant innovations to Seattle, Portland and the surrounding area for several years now. We copy them like Dubai copies Paris. Our favorite gin, Aviation, is raced in Portland. Our flagship hotel for 2010, the Ace Hotel, is a Seattle franchise.

Advertising business? The most powerful agency in the US, Wieden + Kennedy, is based in Portland. They only have a branch on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue. Indie rock? We managed to visit the capital of the genre for at most three years, from 2001 to 2004; Meanwhile, The Dandy Warhols, Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists, M. Ward, Modest Mouse, The Shins, Sleater-Kinney and Spoon live in Portland, plus Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus and The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr have moved there. If these names mean nothing to you, imagine that I just named ten Nobel Peace Prize winners and stated that they are all cousins. The degree of credibility is about the same.

And most importantly, they have something that we do not have: nature. Mountains. Forest. Air. Real winters (Where do you think hipster fashion for flannel and full beards comes from? Where it first came from twenty years ago with grunge: Seattle). In other words, context. For context, I went to the North-West.

The very first stop – at the very Ace Hotel, the epicenter of the Northwest influence in New York – immediately demonstrated the difference between the two coasts. In New York, Ace is a six-story indie Disneyland. From different ends, the most popular Breslin restaurant is screwed into it, serving beef tongue with horseradish and other culinary hardcore, a bar, a boutique, a coffee shop (Stumptown, of course), a flower shop and an alternative music mini-shop. The rooms have turntables with a set of records, and the walls are painted with graffiti. The Seattle source of all this splendor turned out to be a two-story rooming house. There was, in my opinion, one person who worked in it, a friendly young man with the appearance of a bass player.

The aesthetics were the same – lumpen-minimalism, but the game element was gone. Half of the rooms did not have their own bathroom, but there was a zinc sink next to the bed. On the ground floor there was a kitchen with the only kettle in the hotel, a toaster and a huge washing machine in which someone’s laundry was spinning merrily. The next morning, attracted by the promise of breakfast, I looked in there again and found a heated waffle iron and a jug of dough.

Far more hospitable was the Arctic Club Hotel, built on the site of a private club for polar explorers. Expeditions to the North Pole once departed from Seattle, and the Arctic Club has taken the best out of this topic. High reliefs of fanged walruses guarded the entrance. The bar looked like a submarine from Captain Nemo’s time. Behind the concierge was a closet with rows of dusty top hats and shirt-fronts that had escaped here from somewhere in Terry Gilliam.

Cruises to Alaska now depart from here. All of Seattle is on islands; the water is visible from everywhere, and the huge liners of the Celebrity and Carnival companies, which have stood up in the port, are indistinguishable from portside condominiums … until they start moving, like in a dream or in a Nolan film. The heart of Seattle is in the shipyard. From here, the Starbucks empire, which grew out of one nondescript cafe at port warehouses, leads the pedigree. Here stands the famous Pike Place market with pleasantly stoned fishmongers; at eight in the morning, two of them, in matted dreadlocks and orange overalls, lazily laid out goods on the ice (dried belly of salmon, salmon jerky), quietly and snacking on it. Being caught, they offered us a strip.

Despite the abundance of tourists, the concentration of freaks on Pike Place has remained impressive. Not far from a barbel playing Dixieland on the banjo, an Asian in a well-worn cowboy attire was cleaning fish, behind whom the inevitable young clone of Cobain loomed aimlessly against the backdrop of seafood.

In general, the spirit of grunge in Seattle turned out to be not exactly alive, but alcoholized in a friendly and presentable way. In the local Museum of Modern Art, as if on purpose, there was an exhibition “Kurt”, dedicated to the legacy of “Nirvana” in multimedia interpretations. Looking at this mercantile idolatry, Kurt, perhaps, would have shot himself again. Fortunately, in the hall opposite was a wonderful selection of films and photographs of Andy Warhol.

The city has recently been attacked by two architectural luminaries, Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas. The first almost ruined his reputation by building the so-called Experience Music Project – something like an interactive rock and roll museum in the shadow of the Space Needle TV tower. The building, executed in chemical-rainbow tones, resembles a detachable model of the digestive tract. Next to it, the elegant Space Needle, built in 1962, looks even more elegant. Koolhaas got along much better with Seattle. His Public Library is a fantasy of utopian socialism, as libraries should be. It draws in the townspeople right from the street: there is no guard at the entrance, and, opening the glass doors, you find yourself immediately among the books.

I catch myself thinking that in New York such an experiment would end badly: at best, with empty shelves. In the Northwest, however, it looks quite natural: the palm in liberalism these places have also managed to be taken away from New York. In downtown Seattle and Portland, public transportation is free, tax-funded, and the main mode of transportation is the bicycle. At the same time, the buses have special mounts for bicycles, so changing from one to another is easier than ever. On the streets of Seattle there are boxes with a solar panel on the lid – they process organic waste into compost. In Portland, the mayor is gay, marijuana is legal, and nudity is considered a form of free speech (which makes the quiet college town not only the capital of indie rock, but also the American porn industry).

Unlike Seattle, downtown Portland looks ugly: its industrial past has not yet been scraped off. The city is cut in half by the Williamette River, girded with sooty metal bridges. Warehouses pile up on the banks; in the west they have already been reborn in the form of lofts and galleries, in the east the process is just beginning.

The Portland Ace turns out to be something between the ascetic Seattle and the maximalist New York. The neighborhood in which it is located is best told by the fact that nearby are the largest bookstore in the United States, Powell’s, three rock clubs and a Salvation Army-style thrift store, and four windmills proudly spinning on the roof of an apartment building opposite.

However, the first thing that catches your eye in Portland is the food. The whole city is a locavor paradise. Dozens of restaurants here are strictly geared towards vegetables from neighboring farms, fish from neighboring rivers and game from neighboring forests. It’s another idea that we’ve sneakily dragged to the East Coast. The best restaurants in Portland are Paley’s Place, Park Kitchen and the tiny Beast, which, as expected, does not have a menu: what the chef has cooked is welcome. We got (for brunch, as you can’t break through for dinners in the Beast without an assault) clafoutis from local cherries with whipped cream. A thick chunk of crispy bacon was stuck obliquely into the whipped cream. Northwestern cuisine at its best: a classic French base, local ingredients, a nod to simple American taste, plus an element of sheer madness.

Paley’s Place Bistro would hardly have made it at all without connections. But Portland is a small city – and connections were not long in coming. The bartender at retro cocktail place Beaker & Flask (it seems we sent this fashion to the West after all, and not vice versa) turned out to be a Park Kitchen veteran. After asking that we were from New York, he was inexplicably delighted, sent an SMS to another graduate of the same cuisine, now working at Paley’s Place, and within a minute we had a reservation. And a free cocktail at both locations.

For all their Rabelaisianism, the inhabitants of the Northwest are terribly athletic. Since water and mountains begin right behind the cities, a mountain bike or a kayak is attached to the roof of every second car. An hour from Portland, near the town of Hood River, there was a lake swarming with people on kiteboards – hellish combinations of a surfboard with a kite. Infernal in the truest sense of the word: the kite, executed in the form of membranous wings, gives the kiteboarder a distinct resemblance to Lucifer. The symbol of all Oregon awaits even more daring – 3429Mount Hood is an isosceles mountain, like Fujiyama, and suitable for amateur climbers (according to reassuring statistics, local services have to save only 50 people a year from its slopes). Mount Hood is a dormant volcano; the chance of an eruption in the coming years is seven percent. It gives life a pleasant touch of fatalism.

On the road from Portland to the ocean—a two-hour drive through coniferous forests with ever-improving mountain views—I finally realized what it all reminded me of. Northwest – roughly speaking, Scandinavia of America. It is located where Scandinavia is supposed to be, in the upper left corner of the map. Everything converges: rugged beauty, volcanoes, progressive politics, cutting-edge design. If New York City is the brightly lit showcase of the latest urban culture boutique, then the Northwest is the laboratory where these novelties are quietly and without fanfare invented and tested. The Scandinavians have the concept of hygge, which is not very easy to translate into Russian, and even into English. It means “comfort” and “functionality” at the same time. In the Northwest, this word is not, but the concept is. And no matter how many deer heads we hang on the walls of New York bars, no matter how many unplaned boards we fit under tables, no matter how many flannel shirts washed to cashmere softness we put on – we will not move a single step towards the calm and balance that pervades the life of these places. We’re left with Portland gin and Seattle coffee. And the aftertaste is a shadow of a feeling rarely experienced by New Yorkers: envy of people living somewhere else.

VISA

You can try to get a visa to the United States by yourself by finding out all the information at the contacts below, but due to realities, we strongly recommend that you contact the Unified Visa Application Center for advice and obtaining a visa.

Embassy of the United States of America in Moscow

Address: 123242, Moscow, Novinsky Boulevard, 21

Phone: +7 (495) 728-5000

Fax: +7 (495) 728-5090 9000 3

https: //ru.usembassy.gov/ru/

WHEN TO GO

January: +7°C.

April: +15°C

July: +24°C.

October: +16°C.

The main influx of tourists happens in the driest months – in July-August.

From November to March there are prolonged downpours, often accompanied by stormy winds.

HOW TO GET THERE

You can fly to the US Northwest with a transfer in Europe or another American airport.

The region’s main hub is Seattle, where most transcontinental flights land.

Aeroflot and Delta via New York or Los Angeles, KLM and Air France via Amsterdam or Paris, United Airlines and Lufthansa via Washington or Frankfurt, from €458 plus taxes, travel time from 15h.

WHERE TO LIVE

Seattle and Portland are rare American cities where you should look for housing closer to the center and count on more than just a car.

Arctic Club

700 3rd Avenue, Seattle

+1206 340 03 40

www.arcticclubhotel.com

double room — from $173

design hotel

The hotel was built in 1914 and has just undergone a major renovation. As a result, the once prim interiors have taken on a steampunk hue with a polar theme.

Hotel deLuxe

729 South West 15th Avenue, Portland

+1503 219 20 94

www.hoteldeluxeportland.com

double room – from $134

90 002 deluxe

Fresh hotel carefully crafted in the style of Hollywood 1930s.

McMenamins Kennedy School

5736 North East 33rd Avenue, Portland

+1 503 249 39 83

www.kennedyschool.com

double room – from $109,900 03

Boutique Hotel

Local entrepreneurs brothers The Menamins managed to squeeze a hotel, pub, restaurant, swimming pool, bar, cinema, beer factory and concert hall into the building of the former high school.

Ace Hotel

2423 First Avenue, Seattle 1022 South West Stark Street, Portland

www.acehotel.com

double room – from $99

designer hotels

A chain of hipster hotels where the bathroom can be shared and in the hallway, but the room will be decorated with some imagination. The very first hotel in Seattle is more modest than the branch in Portland, but guests regularly compare it with a hostel.

WHERE IT IS

The Northwest is at the forefront of the fight to renew American food traditions.

Beast

5425 North East 30th Avenue, Portland

+1 503 841 69 68

www. beastpdx.com

French cuisine

In a tiny restaurant, a team of tough girls cooks six-course dinner four times a week and a four-course brunch Sunday meals.

Matt’s in the Market

94 Pike Street, Seattle

+1 206 46779 09

www.mattsinthemarket.com

bistro

90 002 23-seat restaurant in the main building of the Pike Place market with the freshest ingredients and menu which is updated every day.

Paley’s Place

1204 North West 21st Avenue, Portland

+1503 243 24 03

www.paleysplace.net

bistro

Chef Vitaly Paley moved from New York to be closer to quality products. Booking a few days ahead.

Park Kitchen

422 North West 8th Avenue, Portland

+1503 223 72 75

www.parkkitchen.com

New American Kitchen

90 002 Skota Dolich’s restaurant is the best example of author’s northwestern cuisine.

Salumi

309 3rd Avenue South, Seattle

+1 206 62187 72

www.