Author: Serkadis

Former Beverly Hills, 90210 star Shannen Doherty has been slapped with a lawsuit for breach of contract and unjust enrichment after allegedly failing to repay a loan to a California bank.

The acid-tongued actress is being sued by City National Bank (CNB) for $85,000. Bank officials say Doherty faliled to make an agreed upon principal payment plus interest on a loan she took out last summer. In court documents obtained by TMZ.com, CNB claims the star “made, executed and delivered to Cnb a promissory note (a contract to provide payment) in the original sum of $90,000.00.”

After she missed a June 1 payment, the agreement was amended to allow Shannen until Sept. 1 to pay back the cash, but she allegedly failed to meet that deadline, too. Executives at City National Bank are demanding the outstanding payment plus interest, and ask that Doherty cover court costs and attorney fees.

In case you’re not aware, CES isn’t the only show in Vegas this past weekend, it also hosted the Adult Entertainment Expo. One of the highlights of the said event is a panel discussion on the influences

The global money pump will continue flowing!

China has given one of its surest signals to date that it plans on keeping its pro-stimulus policies alive. More specifically, it plans to spend the full amount of its planned stimulus this year.

We’ll point out again that all the major powers — the US, Europe, China, and Japan — are in some way taking actions to weaken their currencies. It makes it hard not to like gold, and alas…

Gold is blasting higher:

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See Also:

• Who Needs Gold As An Inflation Hedge When You’ve Got Coke?
• With The US Spending, The Euro Crumbling, And Japan Debauching, It’s Hard Not To Like Gold
• Gartman: Don’t Be Fooled, Buy Gold In Euros And Other Currencies

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last eight days:

What to watch for at the Consumer Electronics Show — VentureBeat writer and veteran CES attendee Dean Takahashi made a list of likely significant news at the “SuperBowl for the gadget industry.” You can compare his predictions with our actual CES coverage here.

Cool stuff unveiled at the opening of Consumer Electronics Show — Speaking of CES, here are our photos from the CES Unveiled event, where members of the press get an early peek at the cool gadgets launching at the conference.

Is Google’s army-of-Androids strategy working? — We used the launch of Google and HTC’s Nexus One “superphone” as an opportunity to examine the search giant’s broader mobile strategy. The big question: Is Google’s method of incremental improvement (compared to Apple’s more perfectionist approach) working?

Microsoft Arc keyboard replaces squarepants design with lightweight curves – Another product launch from CES: The Arc keyboard debuted by Microsoft, which updates the stodgy PS/2 keyboard with a slim, light, gracefully curved aesthetic. The keyboard weighs under a pound and is designed to be usable both on a desk and in your lap on the couch.

Nexus One, Droid or iPhone — VentureBeat writer Paul Boutin breaks down the pricing and features for each of the three smartphones, and comes up with a surprising pick as the best phone for readers. (In fact, his choice prompted plenty of protest and argument from other VentureBeat writers.)

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Predictions for 2010: Tablets will fail, Google will pummel Microsoft — Our look at the year ahead also covers Twitter, Facebook, the Chevy Volt, and more.

How Jajah, a little phone company, sold for $207M, while everyone else got killed — Two weeks ago, the Spanish phone giant Telefonica said it had acquired Internet phone company Jajah for $207 million in cash. In interviews with several employees, former employees and other observers, we asked how the Mountain View, Calif. company managed to succeed even as a host of other VoIP companies, including names like Jangl and Jaxtr, either went out of business or were sold for pennies in asset sales.

Google applies to buy and sell energy, is a Googley utility imminent? — Here’s another big announcement from Google this week: The creation of Google Energy, a subsidiary that it will use to buy and sell electricity on federally-regulated wholesale energy markets.

Crunchies: Google Voice is coming to the iPhone “one way or another” — At the Crunchies award ceremony Friday, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said the Google Voice application, which is still in limbo after Apple declined to give it the greenlight for the app store, will come to the iPhone “one way or the other.”

Boxee Beta goes public, now for a look inside the box — Media center software maker Boxee announced the public launch of its Boxee Beta software this week, after only a month in private beta. The downloadable software allows users to connect their computers to any TV and instantly stream different types of media, including TV shows, music and movies.

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‘3-point’ USB 3.0 hub is self-referential fun and functionality originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sorry girls, New York Yankees hunk Derek Jeter has set a wedding date with his actress girlfriend, Minka Kelly. The beautiful twosome will make it official two days after the World Series ends on Nov. 5, The New York Post scooped on Sunday.

The starting shortstop and Kelly, star of the small screen cult drama Friday Night Lights, are expected to tie the knot next fall at The Oheka Castle, a glorious turn-of-the-century French-style chateau situated on a sprawling estate in suburban Long Island.

The Oheka Castle is the second-largest private residence in the United States and recently hosted the wedding of pop tart Kevin Jonas.

Acting on a tip from a celebrity snitch, a Post reporter, posing as a bride-to-be, spotted an entry reading “JETER Wedding” on the calendar for the Huntington, NY castle. However, sales manager Rick Bellando refused to the confirm that Oheka will host a Jeter/Kelly wedding, insisting that a celebrity wouldn’t be listed under their real name when the reporter pointed out the date.

Los Angeles, California | Unique Collections

In the late 1700s and early 1900s a new form of interactive media was invented. Considered lowbrow at the time, it was the 3D movie of its day, a fully engaging visual experience for the masses, known as panoramic paintings.

Generally displayed either in a large circular room, and surrounding the viewer, or occasionally stretched across two rollers like a ribbon and cranked across them to create a moving landscape for the audience, they were wildly popular in their day. Good panorama painters, such as John Banvard (who at one point painted a half a mile long panorama the longest in the world at the time), were made rich and famous. But with the advent of photography, optical toys and later film, panorama paintings all but disappeared, with most of the world forgetting they and their creators ever even existed.

Taking a cue from these popular panoramic paintings, the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angelos is a curious throwback to this old form media. Here, visitors are engaged once again in a fully immersive, 360-degree representation of landscape painting, complete with lighting and sound.

The current exhibition, Effulgence of the North, is an arctic landscape created by Sara Velas, an artist and Los Angeles native who founded The Velaslavasay Panorama in 2001. Effulgence is a rare, contemporary re-production of an otherwise outdated medium, exhibited in a traditional rotunda which features a spiral staircase that allows viewers to enter from the center of the cylindrical room.

A subtle 35-minute soundtrack and light show accompanies the painting and three-dimensional foreground, further adding to a “complete sensory phenomenon” similar to the panoramic spectacles of the past which also often included sound and mood lighting.

Eventually, the rise of the motion picture industry aided in the demise of the panorama as an art form. As such, The Velaslavasay Panorama occupies a somewhat ironic location in an old 1920s silent film theater and only draws more attention to how technology has drastically changed our visual experiences.

The old Union Theater, which once served as a tile layers’ union headquarters in the 1970s, is still used by The Velaslavasay Panorama Enthusiasts Society today. In line with the “magnetic showmanship and spectacle” of this era in media and Los Angeles culture, past events have featured Alpine yodelers, esoteric instruments and automata. The front desk even provides sensational pamphlets, such as one on The Alabaster Isle of Penglai, a garden behind the theater which is home to pet bunnies and carnivorous plants.

To cap off the CES coverage, we’d like to give a shout-out to our partners and also discuss our coverage. We do this for you guys, after all, so feel free to chime in with your opinion on both the show and us. The biggest electronics show in the world is a difficult thing to report as it is with only a handful of timid bloggers, ripped from their natural habitat as it were, and placed in an unfamiliar environment. But to put them in front of a live camera and ask them to provide meaningful commentary for hours on end is to invite calamity.

Fortunately, thanks to our great Livestream team and partners like Alienware, who provided our rendering computers, I think we did passably well. Impressions and notes on the show and our coverage follow.

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Using agave in place traditional sugars in recipes is a snap to do, but it does take a little know-how. We have a few quick tips to aide you in your baking adventures to make sure each and every treat hits the sweet spot without any let down.

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Peru, South America | Inspired Inventions

The primary instrument at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory is an incoherent scatter radar, a type of atmospheric probe of which there are only a handful in the world. While your ordinary radar system or radio telescope has an appearance similar to a gigantic TV dish, the instrument at Jicamarca takes the form of 18,432 dipole antennae spread over nearly 85,000 square meters of Peruvian desert. Located about 25 kilometers outside the capital city of Lima, the observatory was built from 1960-61 for the purpose of studying the furthest reaches of our planet’s atmosphere.

The underlying concept of radar (radio detection and ranging) is simple: a radio wave is transmitted in the direction of a target and the reflection of that wave is analyzed. From the time delay between transmission and reception of the signal, the distance to the object can be determined. And from other characteristics of the reflected signal, various properties of the target itself may also be investigated. At Jicamarca, the target is the ionosphere, the uppermost part of the atmosphere located from about 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface and beyond.

Usually radar targets are discrete, solid objects such as planes or satellites. However, the ionosphere is a rather sparse layer of gas, where the density can drop to a mere 10,000 particles per cubic centimeter. For this reason, the radar at Jicamarca requires both an enormous power output and the utmost sensitivity to record the atmosphere’s weak reflections. While the power of the transmitted signal measures around two million watts (more power than 33,000 sixty watt light bulbs), the strength of the return signal is typically measured in only picowatts. To get an idea, a picowatt is one millionth of a microwatt, which is in turn one millionth of a watt. Put roughly, if the transmitted signal represented an entire beach, the returns would amount to only a few meager grains of sand.

The reason why the atmospheric reflections are so weak has to do with the name of the instrument, “incoherent scatter radar.” Through a process known as Thomson scattering, the transmitted radio waves cause electrons in the ionosphere to oscillate and subsequently emit small amounts of energy of their own. This energy constitutes the return signal and the “incoherent” in the instrument’s name comes from the fact that scientists are observing the collective emissions from a group of electrons rather than the energy from one single particle. So, while an incoherent scatter radar might sound like a machine used to produce a random mess of stuff, it is in fact a precise scientific instrument!

The Jicamarca observatory is operated by the Geophysical Institute of Peru. As one of the most sensitive atmospheric radars in the world, the Jicamarca instrument can probe the atmosphere up to altitudes of 5000 kilometers and higher.

Charles Barkley and Alicia Keys kicked off the decade’s first episode of Saturday Night Live over the weekend.

Perhaps Barkley’s funniest turn as host was as Alicia herself. The 6′5″ former NBA hoopster donned a curly wig and took his place behind a piano to play the sultry chart-topper during a sketch that aired during NBC coverage of the NFL Playoff game before the show.

The Grammy winner performed a couple of her hit songs during the show, most notably a version of “Empire State of Mind” to pay tribute to SNL’s hometown of New York City. A. Keys previously performed on a 2001 episode of SNL hosted by Reese Witherspoon. Charles made his last Live appearance alongside grunge pioneers Nirvana back in 1993.

Our Tether for BlackBerry Giveaway ended last night and we selected our 25 winners this Sunday morning. Emails are on their way to the winners whose usernames are listed below:

patrick, George Baker, dan, Brandon, C, willy, Laz, Marc Uydess, VS, abram, ben, joshgibsonpgh, oldandroid, strayduck, Paul, RT Muir, melvin, Capt AJ, Ryan, J.W. Price, Mark Schutt, Colleen, Alan Chan, joseph g, and Francisco Lara

Many thanks to those who entered and, if you didn’t win, you can score yourself a copy of Tether while it is still 50% off.

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