Author: Serkadis

Article Tags: You could not make it up

LET’S hear it for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A big round of applause, please. Really. It has done amazing, Herculean work.

We still need the IPCC to serve as a seeker of truth whose deliberations are open to scrutiny. There is plenty of new science to assess. But it makes little sense to have to wait six years between assessments: though reflection, and time for the replication of findings, are essential, why not have an annual report?

Click source to read a more, don’t click if you have read enough!

Source: newscientist.com

Read in full with comments »   

The American Institute of Cancer Research recently asked a group of top experts studying the relationship of cancer to diet, nutrition, and weight management what they believe to be the most significant research findings of the past 10 years, and what to expect in the next 10. They talked a lot about the growing links between diet and cancer development and predicted that health recommendations may get a lot more specific in the future.

Body fat and cancer

“One clear finding that has emerged is the importance of obesity in cancer prevention,” said Elisa V. Bandera, MD, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “Maintaining a healthy weight is now the top recommendation for cancer prevention from both AICR and the American Cancer Society. This is particularly important as obesity rates have been increasing exponentially at state, national and global levels.

“Another important discovery over the past decade is the relevance of early life events in modulating cancer risk. Now we know that early life events, even in-utero and early childhood exposures can have an impact on the risk of developing breast cancer later in life.”

Looking at diet and gene connections

“Research now shows that healthy eating means much more than getting enough of a few specific nutrients like vitamin C and beta-carotene,” AICR nutrition adviser Karen Collins noted. “Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds contain thousands of phytochemicals, many of which influence one or more stages of cancer development.

“Some of these compounds can ‘turn on’ genes that protect us from cancer and ‘turn off’ genes that can promote cancer development. This is a key message because it makes variety in the plant foods we eat more important than ever. It also explains why studies using supplements often don’t show the cancer protection that might have been expected.”

Becoming more aware of links between diet and cancer

“Over the past decade, we, and many others, have been excited by our contributions to better understanding the basic science of these associations, and the epidemiologic evidence has continued to grow,” Jed Fahey, MS, ScD, a nutritional biochemist at Johns Hopkins, told AICR. “For me, the most pleasant surprise of the past decade has been the dramatic increase in public awareness of these interrelationships, and the increase in people practicing — or at least talking about — healthy lifestyles.”

Into the future

Looking ahead, AICR’s Susan Higginbotham says research methods will continue to improve. As that happens, she predicts, expect to see the advice that organizations like AICR provide to become more precisely targeted.

“There will be a lot of progress identifying subgroups of people who can best benefit from certain interventions, such as cutting down on alcohol or adding specific components to their diets,” she said.

“We will know a lot more about cancer survivorship and what survivors can do to improve their health and quality of life as well as decrease their chances of recurrence.

“It’s an exciting time to be in this field — the past 10 years have transformed our understanding of how lifestyle can help to prevent, treat and survive cancer. There are studies in the pipeline right now that could provide the answers to questions we couldn’t even contemplate just a decade ago.”

(This article was provided by the American Institute for Cancer Research in Washington, D.C. A registered dietician is available to respond to questions about diet, nutrition, and cancer at the free AICR Hotline at 1 (800) 843-8114 during business hours.)

From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)

How has the diet-cancer link changed cancer research in the past decade?

On Friday evening, we noticed that books from major publisher Macmillan had disappeared from Amazon.com, but couldn’t explain why. The fact that Macmillan was a partner on Apple’s iPad, which should be a formidable competitor to Amazon’s Kindle, seemed suggestive, but again: We didn’t know.

Now The New York Times has an explanation. Citing an anonymous source “in the industry with knowledge of the dispute,” The Times said the removal was caused by a disagreement between Macmillan and Amazon over the pricing of e-books on the Kindle. Amazon insists that publishers charge $9.99 for most e-books, while Macmillan wanted to raise the price to $15. So the online retailer is “expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books.”

Meanwhile, Apple is allowing publishers to set the prices they want on the iPad’s iBookstore. The Wall Street Journal actually pressed Apple chief executive Steve Jobs on this issue at the iPad launch event, asking why someone would buy a $15 e-book from Apple when they could get the same book from Amazon for $9.99.

“The prices will be the same,” Jobs said, implying that Amazon will eventually be forced to adopt more flexible pricing models. If The Times is correct, Macmillan’s removal could signal the next stage in that battle.

Amazon and Macmillan still haven’t responded to emails asking for an explanation.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

It appears as though Google has quietly added the ability to send SMS messages to multiple contacts via its Google Voice web interface. Those who rely heavily, or primarily, on Google Voice have been requesting this feature for quite some time. There has been no official announcement from Google yet, but those of you with GV access can head over to google.com/voice and give it a whirl.

Read

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

We’d say so! From $59 to $7,000, if you want an Apple product, there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ll be able to pick something in your price range. Simply brilliant. Full size image link after the break…

Read

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

Article Tags: Lawrence Solomon

As far as I know, no Canadian university has ever had a formal debate on climate change.

Climate change is natural. Spending time and money on the issue is largely a waste,” posited Steve Paikin, host of TV Ontario’s The Agenda, to his live studio audience at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies Thursday evening. Paikin’s statement to the students came in the middle of an hour-long debate on climate change in which I participated, along with four other panelists.

The statement, the first of three that Paikin posed to the university students, came from an earlier Leger public opinion poll, but unlike the results that Leger found (16% agreed with the statement), not a single student among the 80 in attendance raised a hand in agreement. Are these students so accepting of the prevailing orthodoxy that none believes that climate change is natural, I thought, scanning their faces from my perch on the stage. Or are these students too intimidated by their peers or by the presence of the Munk Centre’s director — Janice Stein, also on the stage with me — to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy on climate change?

I found the students’ silence disquieting. The majority of the public in the English speaking world no longer gives credence to the view that humans are responsible for climate change. In the U.S. where the abandonment is most pronounced, only 36% blame humans, according a recent Pew poll. In the U.K., the figure is 41%. The abandonment is across the board, involving members of all major political parties, and all age groups, youths included. In the U.S., 45% of those under 30 blame humans, in the UK, 42%.

So why would no student in the room — either out of youthful brashness or defiance of authority or conviction based on knowledge — utter a peep? If any of them had done their homework on this issue, they would have found that the Arctic ice is expanding, not shrinking; that the Antarctic, too, is gaining ice, not melting; that polar bear populations are not in decline, that global temperatures have been dropping over the last decade, not warming as the computer models had predicted; and that, in any event, none of the computer models on which claims of climate change rest — not one — has been made to work.

Click source to read FULL article by Lawrence Solomon

Source: network.nationalpost.com

Read in full with comments »   



O iPad é, para Steve Jobs, o projecto mais importante da sua vida. Nesta caricatura vemos Steve Jobs pegando na ultima criação da sua empresa, será este também o ultimo projecto de Steve na Apple?

WebTuga – Steve Jobs “Caricatura”

Google today released a Mac version of its Google Email Uploader, an application geared toward easing the transition to a Google Apps account. The application is designed to simplify the process of uploading hundreds of messages at a time from any three of the major Mac e-mail applications: Mail, Eudora, and Thunderbird. Currently, the Email Uploader will not transfer mail to an ordinary Gmail account; it requires a Google Apps for a business account.

This is good news for Mac-based businesses looking to outsource their e-mail and take advantage of Google’s system, but have dreaded transferring years’ worth of old messages. The application is far from perfect, though: for instance, the system limits the uploader to one message per second after 500 messages, but the automation might make it worthwhile to do 500 messages at a time.

One can only hope that Google will soon allow the same thing for regular users of Gmail. Painlessly uploading thousands of old messages from one of my older e-mail accounts would not only be a good use of the space Google provides, but it would allow me to use Google’s search to sift through them all.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article

These two charts tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of the US economy.  They also, unfortunately, provide some clues as to how this movie will end.

First, from John Mauldin, the state of the U.S. government’s finances.  The red line is spending.  The blue line is tax revenue.

Can you imagine if that was your household?

Second, from Ned Davis, the state of our country’s debts, as measured by debt as a percentage of GDP.  The little peak to the left was the debt mountain we accumulated during the Great Depression, which took a decade to work off.  The, um, bigger peak to the right, is the one we’ve accumulated now.

So how will this movie end?

Well, in the near-term, we can try to borrow more to fill the hole between the red line and the blue line in the chart on the top.  That will postpone the ending and give us a chance to kickstart the economy again. 

Of course, every dollar we borrow will also drop down to the chart at the bottom, making the mountain even taller (unless private-market debt shrinks by an offsetting amount–this chart includes both government and private debt).

If we’re lucky, in the intermediate term, the economy will start growing more rapidly (blue line turns up) and the government will be able to ease off on spending (red line turns down), making it so we can borrow less every year.  If that happy trend continues, we’ll eventually only have to deal with the nasty looking chart at the bottom: The debt mountain.

As to that…  The accumulation of the debt mountain is what has fueled the impressive GDP growth we’ve enjoyed for the past 30 years.  It’s fun borrowing more money, because when you borrow more money, you can spend more money, which is fun!

Of course, in the end, when you’ve borrowed as much as you can, you have to start paying some of the money back (or, at the very least, borrow less each year than you used to).  And to pay the money back, you have to start spending less.

So, again, how do you think this movie will end?

If we’re lucky, it will end gradually, in a long, boring couple of decades in which we gradually get our discipline and competitiveness back and bring our finances under control.

And if we’re not lucky?

Well, then, the movie will have a more exciting ending.

See Also: We Are So Screwed

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• We Are So Screwed
• We Have Seen The Amazing Future Of Apple’s iPad And This Is It
• McKinsey: You Won’t Believe How Much Pain We’re Still In For

Filed under: Etc.

The movie Cars 2 is slated for release in Summer 2011, and that means that Hollywood CGI types are busy sketching, rendering and compositing. Production artwork (seen above) found in Disney’s annual report, has Lightning McQueen running in Japan ahead of what we’d imagine is a Formula 1 car. The plot has McQueen dashing around the world with Mater to win the Race of Champions. Mater gets confused for a top spy, and we can only hope that will be much funnier in Pixar’s hands than Larry the Cable Guy’s last outing as a government operative.

[Source: Pixar Planet]

First image from Pixar’s Cars 2 revealed? originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Article Tags: Web Article

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often held up as representing “the consensus of scientists”—a pretty grandiose and presumptuous claim. And one that in recent days, weeks, and months, has been unraveling. So too, therefore, must all of the secondary assessments that are based on the IPCC findings—the most notable of which is the EPA’s Endangerment Finding—that “greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

Recent events have shown, rather embarrassingly, that the IPCC is not “the” consensus of scientists, but rather the opinions of a few scientists (in some cases as few as one) in various subject areas whose consensus among themselves is then kludged together by the designers of the IPCC final product who a priori know what they want the ultimate outcome to be (that greenhouse gases are leading to dangerous climate change and need to be restricted). So clearly you can see why the EPA (who has a similar objective) would decide to rely on the IPCC findings rather than have to conduct an independent assessment of the science with the same predetermined outcome. Why go through the extra effort to arrive at the same conclusion?

Click source to read FULL report from Chip Knappenberger

Source: masterresource.org

Read in full with comments »   

Areview: 3 Responses to “ Herbal Remedies For Blocked Fallopian Tubes”. lips82100. January 30th, 2010 at 10:50 am. hey hi ,been trying to get pregnant,how can i get ur herbs for fallopian tubes. mylatasiajewelry. January 30th, 2010 at 11:49 am …

Apple has yet to sell its first e-book, but it is already engaged in a bruising battle with Amazon for control of the market. The most recent salvo: Amazon has stopped selling all books — both digital and physical — from MacMillan, apparently in response to the publisher’s plans to sell its books at a higher price point through Apple.

Amazon sells most of its e-books at $9.99 or less, and Apple plans to sell its e-books for 30 percent to 50 percent more. How long can that disparity last? It won’t, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg on Wednesday: “The prices will be the same”.

The implication of that comment is clear: Jobs believes publishers will use Apple’s (AAPL) e-book store as leverage to force Amazon’s (AMZN) prices up.

As I noted earlier, this is an inversion of Apple’s relationship with the big music labels, where it demanded that those companies sell their songs as $1 songs instead of $15 CDs — and helped accelerate the industry’s demise along the way.

In that scenario, the labels didn’t have an option but to play along, because Apple controlled the digital music market. Here, Amazon has the clear lead in digital books, having sold “millions” of Kindles, but the market is still nascent, so that lead alone isn’t enough.

But Amazon does own the market for physical books sold on the Web, so pulling those off its virtual shelves is a powerful leverage indeed.

Next step: Keep an eye on books from the other four publishers Apple touted during Wednesday’s iPad launch — Pearson’s Penguin Group, News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, CBS’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster.

All of them are still selling their wares through Amazon for the time being. Wonder how long that will last.

Below, Kara Swisher’s video of Mossberg’s chat with Jobs following the iPad debut, in which the two men discuss the brewing book war.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

As if you needed any more evidence of the tech supremacy of your Nokia N900 or N810, here’s Firefox making its official mobile debut on the most righteous Maemo OS. Available for download right now, version 1.0 will come with a pretty sweet feature named Weave Sync, which harmonizes your bookmarks, tabs, history and passwords across devices, making for a seamless transition between your desktop computer and your mobile one. We reckon we could get used to that. Alas, Flash support is still somewhat shaky, and does not come enabled by default, though you’re free to flip the switch and ride the lightning as it were. We’re sure Mozilla will appreciate any crash reports you might want to throw its way as well. So come on already, download the darn thing and let us know if it improves on the already spectacular browsing experience of the N900.

[Thanks, Ross M.]

Firefox for Mobile makes Maemo its first home originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink fone arena  |  The Mozilla Blog  | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article

Article Tags: Himalayan Glacier Data, Richard North, Video Link

Less than a week after he claimed the IPCC’s credibility had increased as a result of its handling of the “Glaciergate” scandal, Pachauri’s own personal credibility lies in tatters as The Times accuses him of a direct lie.

This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri’s version on 22 January being that he had only known about it “for a few days” – i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times.

However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla – who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) – claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

Bagla interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, he asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.”

Source: eureferendum.blogspot.com

Read in full with comments »   

San Mateo County, California | Unique Collections

When Viennese confectioner Eduard Haas III began marketing his Pfefferminz, peppermint candies in small altoid like tins, and later in a cigarette lighter shaped dispenser (the “regular” designed in 1950 to help folks quite smoking) he couldn’t have possibly predicted the kind of pop culture phenomenon that he was unleashing on the world.

Pfefferminz would go on to become PEZ and those dispensers would gain a kind of cult following among collectors around the world. Today conventions are held every year in Missouri, California, Minnesota, Connecticut, South Carolina, Austria, Finland and Sweden where PEZ aficionados gather to trade and collect Pez dispensers. In 2011 there may even be a “Pezhead Cruise.” The rarest of dispensers can fetch quite a bit of money with the largest official sale at 7000 for a dispenser, and an ebay sale of 11,000 dollars for a dispenser, which was later proved to be a fake.

So it is with great pride that Gary and Nancy Doss display their collection at the Burlingame, California Museum of Pez Memorabilia. The museum was once a computer retail and repair business with a display of the Doss’ personal PEZ collection it slowly morphed into all pez all the time, business and museum and the Doss’ make their living shipping and trading PEZ around the world.

Part of what makes their collection unique is that it contains all 550 (plus) characters that Pez ever produced, including 70s psychedelic Pez, Mozart and Princess Sissi Pez, Lost in Space Pez, and the largest Pez dispenser in the world which looks like a snowman. They also have a collection of homebrew Pez dispensers including the infamous “Hitler” pez, of which only 80 were sold before the Pez lawyers put a stop to it.

Unfortunately the Pez lawyers also seem determined to put a stop the the Museum of Pez Memorabilia, despite it being a huge endorsement and advertisement for the company. The Doss’s have retained a lawyer and are keeping both the worlds largest Pez dispenser (which the company demanded by destroyed) and the museum open and operating, for now at least.

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Ask the Attorney: What issues do I need to consider when forming a start-up? – In part two of this column, attorney Scott Edward Walker looks at the things you need to address as you’re ramping up your company, including IP, management and employment issues.

50 Three-word phrases that can make your start-up a success – The best advice is digestible advice – not long rambling statements. Serial software entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah consolidates his best tips for start-up owners into a series of three word statements, with a little help from a friend.

A new way of looking at sales and marketing – Sometimes, getting a different perspective on things can make an enormous difference. Marketing specialist Brant Cooper offers a different want to view the sales and marketing process – and how that can save your company money.

Speed and Tempo: Fearless decision making for start-ups – Too many entrepreneurs overanalyze their decisions, which can cost their companies dearly. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank looks at why quick decision-making – about the right things – can move your company forward exponentially.

The start-up chronicles: My Website’s not working: Now what? – Bruce Judson’s bootstrapped start-up has been getting plenty of page views, but the conversion rates haven’t been what they were hoping for. In the latest installment of this continuing series, he talks about the process that went in to an upcoming site redesign.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article