Author: Serkadis

The majority of the wireless music options we’ve seen rocking Kleer have, to this point, been of the ear bud variety — nice, but not if you’re more of a can man. For those who like a little more heft, welcome to TDK’s TH-WR700 wireless headphones, a $190 set that still looks to be too small if you’re going for the completely immersive over-the-ear style, but are said to provide less noise than comparable Bluetooth units and pledge to perform with 32Ω impedance, 20Hz-20kHz frequency response, and 108 dB/mW sensitivity. That price also nabs you the Kleer transmitter adapter, which has a 3.5mm input and just so happens to be fit perfectly on an iPhone. Coincidence? Don’t bet on it.

TDK’s TH-WR700 cans do wireless over Kleer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SEATTLE (AP) – As students around the country anxiously wait for college acceptance letters, their parents are sweating the looming tuition bills at public universities.

Florida college students could face yearly 15 percent tuition increases for years, and University of Illinois students will pay at least 9 percent more.

The University of Washington will charge 14 percent more at its flagship campus. And in California, tuition increases of more than 30 percent have sparked protests reminiscent of the 1960s.

Tuition has been trending upward for years, but debate in statehouses and trustee meeting rooms has been more urgent this year as most states struggle their way out of the economic meltdown.

The College Board says families are paying about $172 to $1,096 more in tuition and fees this school year. The national average for 2009-2010 is about $7,020, not including room and board, according to the nonprofit association of colleges that oversees the SATs and Advanced Placement tests.

Mike Sarb, a University of Illinois senior from suburban-Chicago Elk Grove Village, says money is a big concern for his blue-collar family scrambling to find the money to pay more than $20,000 for tuition, room and board.

They are not pleased that university officials are likely to raise tuition 9 percent this summer.

“They do complain that the school’s taking advantage of people (by raising tuition),” Sarb said.

But interim President Stanley Ikenberry says the school has run out of options.

With a budget deficit expected to top $11 billion this year, the state of Illinois owes the university more than $430 million, money he doesn’t expect to see any time soon.

In some cases, one student’s tuition disaster is another’s bargain.

State officials have told Florida students they can expect 15 percent tuition increases every year until tuition reaches the national average.

That could be a long slog, as the state is starting its tuition realignment from a place other students envy – about $3,000 a year.

In California, unprecedented budget cuts to higher education have led to huge fee increases at the state’s two public university systems, as well as layoffs, furloughs, enrollment cuts and reduced course offerings.

At the University of California, which has 10 campuses and about 220,000 students, in-state undergraduate fees in fall 2010 are set to reach $10,302 – 32 percent more than in fall 2009 and three times what California residents paid 10 years ago.

But at California State University, the nation’s largest public university system with 23 campuses and 450,000 students, resident undergraduate fees rose 32 percent from fall 2008 to fall 2009 to $4,026, which is nearly three times what students paid 10 years ago. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal for 2010-2011 assumes that the system will raise fees another 10 percent in the coming academic year.

Other states have been more subtle in their budget balancing attempts.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is in the first year of a four-year tuition increase plan aimed at improving quality.

In addition to statewide tuition increases of about 5.5 percent, in-state students at UW-Madison will pay an extra $250 a year each year.

This year, tuition went up by $617 to $7,296 or about 9.2 percent, but financial aid increased at the same time.

Still, few are complaining because the extra money – $100 million in the first four years and $40 million each year afterward – is reserved for providing more classes, improving student services and increasing need-based financial aid.

So far a few states, like Oklahoma and Missouri, have avoided tuition increases entirely. And the Oklahoma Legislature gave its state universities no reason to complain when it fulfilled the state higher education budget request.

Read the original article from Herald & Review.

We’ve pointed this out in the past, but those who support regulations in favor of net neutrality should be careful. Once the lobbyists get done with them, any rules won’t resemble what you think they should. The EFF is already up in arms over the fact that the proposed net neutrality rules would allow blocking BitTorrent, even though it was Comcast’s blocking of BitTorrent that helped kick off the latest round of attention in net neutrality. That does seem a bit ironic… but, again, it shows that, just because you call something “net neutrality,” it doesn’t mean it is about a neutral network. With the entertainment industry redefining net neutrality to their own liking (i.e., so that file sharing can still be blocked), you can bet that other lobbyists (including the telcos) will work hard to redefine it to their liking as well.

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Forget the debt burdens of Greece or Spain in isolation, the debt situation for the Eurozone as a whole (of which they are part of since they use the euro) isn’t looking too pretty these days either.

Just year to date, Eurozone governments have borrowed a record $175 billion according to the Financial Times.

Says Theodora Zemek, the head of Axa Investment Managers fixed income: “The problem of sovereign risk is just beginning. Countries with high debt levels will have to pay higher and higher yields to issue new bonds.”

Countries within the euro currency system may think that they are independent sovereign nations, but in reality they’re all joined at the hip in one of the most significant ways — monetarily. Thus while the horrendous financial situation of weaker nations such as Greece or Spain is well known, perhaps investors should be keeping an eye on aggregate Eurozone debt as well. Especially since the region will borrow another $38 billion just this week according to Barclays Capital.

Read more at the Financial Times >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Greece Now In Complete Denial: Claims There’s No Debt Problem, Blames Speculators For Strangling The Economy
• Forget Greece, With Nearly 19% Unemployment, Spain Should Have You Freaking Out
• Spain Goes On Offensive, Cuts Everything To Combat Debt Crisis

Lately, Ford has been collecting awards in the United Kingdom. After the Mondeo was crowned king of the fleet sales, now it’s the other two models’ turn to step in the spotlight. The S-Max and the Galaxy have been confirmed as 2010 BusinessCar magazine awards winners.

The Ford S-Max was recognized as the Best Mini-MPV, while the Ford Galaxy was voted as business customer’s Best MPV for the fourth consecutive year. The winners of these awards are voted by participants in the business car indus… (read more)

Lotus expands the marketing campaign for its Evora saleshorse, as the company has decided to sponsor the Bob Champion 60:60 Challenge and support both the Injured Jockeys Fund and the Bob Champion Cancer Trust in their charity efforts.

The Bob Champion Cancer trust is a foundation created with the aim of detecting and treating male cancers. Lotus has decided to bring this problem to raise awareness amongst its male customer and not only.

The British company will offer Bob an Evora to use o… (read more)

Rubens Barrichello switched teams prior to the start of the 2010 Formula One season, leaving the title-winning Brawn organization for a leading spot in the Williams F1 Team. However, before agreeing to the Williams deal, the Brazilian veteran was reportedly asked by McLaren Mercedes if he would be willing to drive for the Woking based team this season.

And it’s not some media making these allegations, but Barrichello himself to reveal the offer. According to his latest sayings, the current re… (read more)

According to Sophos’ 2010 Security Threat Report, there has been a dramatic rise in attacks on social networks in the past year. So reports this morning from a number of Twitter users claiming they’ve received an e-mail from the company asking them to reset their password after a suspected phishing attack are certainly cause for concern — either because they have indeed fallen victim to a phishing attack or because they’re about to fall victim to one by following the e-mail’s instructions.

Certainly, it’s difficult to determine if the e-mail is genuine. After all, its subject line is “Please change your twitter password” and conventional wisdom is to never click a password-reset link in an e-mail. That said Twitter users who’ve received it and followed its instructions have regained access to the service after being locked out.

So, if you’ve received such an e-mail, tread carefully.

As of this writing, Twitter has not commented on these reports on its blog or status page — though that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In any event, I’ve asked the company for an explanation and will update here if and when I receive one.

[Image credit: Andrew R.H. Girdwood]

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And the nominees are…..Sci-fi epic Avatar and war saga The Hurt Locker earned a leading nine Oscar nominations at Tuesday morning’s press conference announcing the 2010 Academy Award nominees. Both films are up for Best Film and Best Director in a race that will see lensman James Cameron face off against ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.

For the first time, the Oscars will feature 10 Best Picture contenders instead of the usual five.

Other movies among the nominees for 2010 Best Picture include Up in the Air, The Blind Side, Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, District 9, Up, A Serious Man, Inglourious Basterds, and An Education.

Click Here For The Complete List of 82nd Annual Academy Award Nominees…….

To recognize February as American Heart Month, the McHenry County Department of Health is offering a cardiovascular screening Feb. 18.

The screening will be from 8:30 to 11 a.m. at McHenry County College, 8900 Route 14, Crystal Lake.

The screening requires a 12-hour fast and includes total cholesterol (HDL and LDL), fasting blood sugar, triglycerides, blood pressure and cardiovascular education.

A new offering this year is a body composition analysis.

Appointments are required, and the cost is $35.

Each year, more Illinoisans die from heart disease than from cancer, unintentional injuries, lung disease, pneumonia, influenza and diabetes combined, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Age, gender and family history are risk factors beyond our control.

However, changes in lifestyle and early treatment for risk factors, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise and poor nutrition can have a significant impact.

To schedule an appointment, call 815-334-4536.

Read the original article from the Northwest Herald.

Throughout the day, our beloved world wide web got swamped with information regarding some sort of peculiar behavior from Toyota’s head honcho, Akio Toyoda. As you all know by now, the respected Toyoda is to be found these days in Davos, where he is attending the 40th edition of the World Economic Forum.

There, some journalist managed to get Toyoda in front of a camera, sticked a microphone into his face and asked him about possibly the biggest recall mankind has ever seen. Humble, or just lo… (read more)

Father of the Year Michael Lohan is planning a missionary pilgrimage to Haiti. The controversial ex-con is reportedly planning to travel to the devastated Caribbean island to offer aid to survivors of last month’s earthquake. The tremor flattened buildings and killed at least 200,000 people when it slammed into the capital city of Port-au-Prince Jan. 12

Michael Lohan said that he is hoping to visit the Caribbean island with girlfriend Kate Major, 26, later this month.

He tells RadarOnline: “I’ll be going there in about three weeks. I’ve raised about $125,000 in goods for Haiti….”

DECATUR  – Voters who think their ballots don’t matter could be sorely mistaken in today’s primary election.

Mix the high number of candidates with the short campaign season and experts predict that any one candidate could struggle to receive the majority of voter support.

“Every vote is going to count for the candidate you might favor,” said Macon County Clerk Steve Bean.

With the primary date coming just one month after the holiday season, voters have had less than 30 days to acquaint themselves with the multiple candidates asking for their votes.

Republican voters must choose among seven gubernatorial candidates, six lieutenant governor candidates and six U.S. Senate candidates.

Democrats must choose among two candidates for governor, six candidates for lieutenant governor and five for the U.S. Senate.

“It’s going to create some kind of ambivalence or confusion for whom to vote for,” said Larry Klugman, political science professor at Richland Community College.

The results of today’s primary will lead Illinoisans into a general election season where stakes are high for politicians, and the issues are serious for voters.

Republicans are trying to capitalize on voter frustration with the current Democratic leadership. As voters try to choose the best people to deal with the state’s $13 billion deficit, Democrats could be poised to lose some of their seats to Republicans.

“I don’t know when I’ve seen a primary where the actual stakes are so high,” Klugman said.

Despite the importance of the election, he doesn’t expect a repeat of the high turnout during 2008 primary election.

“I believe it’s an extremely important primary and there should be a big turnout, but I don’t see it coming,” he said.

Based on early voters and absentee ballots, Bean said he expects 10 to 15 percent of the county’s 71,000 registered voters to participate in the primary.

“Which is a little disappointing because of the primary races statewide,” Bean said.

“If there aren’t a lot of votes down here, then it’s all the impact of the votes in Cook County and the northern part of the state.”

In 2006, Bean said just 8,600 Macon County residents voted in the primary.

Two years later during the 2008 primary, nearly 27,000 voters were motivated to cast their ballot because of the presidential election and the possibility of changing Decatur’s form of city government.

Bean said he expected this year’s local races including the county treasurer’s office and the 51<+>st Senate District to draw more voter attention, but they’re just not doing the trick this year.

[email protected]|421-6986

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The PS3 may be in for a great January. One analyst has predicted that the Sony console will keep the momentum it generated in December for another good showing in January. Not so for the Nintendo Wii.

Android: Despite being otherwise entirely hooked into the Googleverse, your Android phone can’t edit Google Docs files on its own. The handy GDocs app steps in to download and edit (some) docs, upload files from your phone, and view PDFs.

It’s not an elegant cloud solution to your Android system’s lack of Docs connectivity, but GDocs gets the job done. Set it up with your Google credentials, and the app grabs your Google Docs folder and file list. Press and hold on any file to edit its title, delete it, or download it to your SD card. If it’s a word processing document, you can download the file, edit it through GDocs (or another word processing app you might have), then re-upload it to Docs. Not exactly an automatic, save-as-you-type setup, but then again, you probably wouldn’t use your phone for more than just quick, minor edits.

If you need to view a PDF file from your account, GDocs can do that natively, and with Docs now allowing any type of file upload, you can use GDocs to push files off your phone to your Docs account.

GDocs is a free download for Android systems. If you’re having trouble connecting to your account and listing files after GDocs updates, be sure to visit the “Accounts” section, under the “More” options, and hit “OK” to re-verify your credentials (and hopefully that wonky bit gets fixed).

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ImageSpan has teamed up with Arvato Finance Services to create a global clearinghouse for web site owners to license digital content such as photos and videos and then pay the proper owners of the property, regardless of what country they’re in.

The deal helps ImageSpan grease the skids for LicenseStream, a service that wraps a photo with tracking information so that the owner of the photo can figure out who is using it on the web. Meanwhile, Arvato Financial Services, a subsidiary of Arvato, which itself is a subsidiary of media giant Bertelsmann, has a payment system that takes the money from a licensee and then distributes the proper share of the revenues to the different parties that created or distributed it.

“It effectively enables the global trade of digital content,” said Iain Scholnick, chief executive of ImageSpan, in an interview. “This is like creating American Express for digital goods.”

This kind of deal enables artists and the owners of their work to get paid for it, based on how much it is consumed on web sites across the Internet, and to get wider exposure to bigger audiences. The company launched LicenseStream in 2008 and it has deals in place with big owners of digital content such as The Chicago Tribune newspaper and McEvoy Group, publisher of media properties such as Spin magazine and Chronicle Books. Those ImageSpan customers have millions of photos, videos and other content to license.

Most big companies with libraries of content don’t make a ton of money from them. That’s because they’re often too afraid or technologically unable to share them across the Internet. But ImageSpan automates the process of wrapping the content in pirate-proof technology and then making it available to those who want to license it, such as news web sites. ImageSpan tracks how many times the photo is viewed and thereby can figure out how much money the news site would have to play the library owner.

Arvato Finance Services completes the picture by enabling payments based on the transactional data in more than 60 countries. The Chicago Tribune and McEvoy Group are already generating revenue from the combined service of ImageSpan and Arvato Finance Services. They get direct control over how much they will sell their digital content for, and whether it will be handled as a one-time purchase or a subscription. Scholnick says the process saves his customers from engaging in manual efforts that take a huge amount of time and resources.

It essentially shortens the time between searching for content, discovering it, licensing it, and paying for it. And it also simplifies the tedious process of taking the payment and distributing it among all of the relevant rights holders. And with the transactional data, media companies can better figure out what consumers will pay for and how to give them more of it. That drives revenue at a time when all newspapers are looking for ways to offset the decline of traditional revenue streams, said Randall Weissman, news administration editor at the Chicago Tribune.

For customers who license the photos and other assets, it means a wider selection of content that can be searched more easily. And that, in turn, means that they can produce better content for the end consumers who view the images and other content.

Based in Sausalito, ImageSpan was founded in 2003 and has 20 employees. It has raised $16 million to date. Rivals include Getty Images, iTunes, Amazon.com, Hulu.com, Photrade and GumGum. Investors include Bertelsmann, Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures, the New York City Investment Fund, City Light Capital Management and Ackerley Partners.

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areview.co.cc: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) Rabita Committee (RC) has accused Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) of trying take over Karachi. PPP is conspiring to shed blood in Karachi. RC said that the non parliamentary language against Mustafa Kamal is an insult to MQM. MQM party leader Anis Kaimkhani was addressing the media from Muttahida Head quarter 90. He said that some people believe on the policy of offense instead of reconciliation. Anis accused Siraj Durrani and Zulfikar Mirza of using non parliamentary language against MQM members. Anis also said that Aga Siraj Durrani claimed that the next Nazim of Karachi would be from PPP and thus PPP is shedding blood in to occupy Karachi. He also recommended that Aga Siraj Durrani to consult a doctor to check his mental state of mind. Anis said that Zulfikar Mirza is just playing tricks to make fool of the people. He informed that workers of Rehman Dacoat have been appointed into the Police, PPP is plotting to bath Karachi with blood. Anis demanded that the honest Police officers should take note of the ongoing killings in Karachi. MQM RC also warned that if an elected leader is harmed only Zulifkar Mirza would be responsible.

Filed under: Motorsports, Aston Martin, Racing

Aston Martin announced its initial plans for the upcoming 2010 racing season which will continue to include a two car attack on the 24 hours of Le Mans. However, before they get to Le Mans, Aston will run three warm up races with one car going to the Le Mans Series opener at Paul Ricard in April and the other coming to the United States for the ALMS races at Sebring and Long Beach.

The Lola built coupes will again carry the traditional blue and orange Gulf livery on the track as they try to better last year’s fourth place finish at Le Mans. The V12 powered Astons were the top finishing gasoline-fueled racers last year behind the Peugeots and Audis. The 2009 lineup of Chris Buncombe (GB), Stefan Mücke (DE), Harold Primat (CH) and Darren Turner (GB) will be joined this year by Adrian Fernandez who recently wound down his own Acura ALMS team.

[Source: Aston Martin]

Continue reading Aston Martin to run two works LMP1 cars at Le Mans, debut at Sebring

Aston Martin to run two works LMP1 cars at Le Mans, debut at Sebring originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Etc., Videos, Audi, Canada

Audi’s got a thing going with its Truth in Motion films. The first installment took a lush, slow-motion look at what it took to win the 2008 24 Hours of Le Mans, and this second installment charts the U.S. ski team’s snow-and-drama-covered run to the 2010 Winter Olympics. Like that first doc, it is now available free in iTunes in both regular and HD resolutions. You can read Audi’s press release after the jump, or better yet, click the link and get straight to downloading.

[Source: Audi]

Continue reading Audi’s ‘Truth in Motion’ documentary available for free on iTunes

Audi’s ‘Truth in Motion’ documentary available for free on iTunes originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Honda’s British division launched a series of TV advertising idents to support its sponsorship of Channel 4 documentaries for the coming year.  The first phase of short films, created by Wieden + Kennedy London, will debut on More 4 today and on Channel 4 on February 4. The first features Honda apprentices and technicians learning their trade at its training facility, the Honda Institute, and carry the line ‘Curiosity Is Everywhere’.

It’s great for us to be associated with this strand o… (read more)