Author: Serkadis

Google offers what it says will be a final carrot to shareholders at On2, a video compression company it wants to buy: It’s adding $26.5 million to its original offer of $106.5 million for the company.

That’s a 20 percent premium over the price Google (GOOG) originally announced it was paying for On2 in August, and Google says that’s the best it can do. Each On2 shareholder will get $0.15 in cash for each one of their shares, in addition to the $0.60 worth of Google Class A offered in the original deal.

Will that appease On2’s dissident investors, who think the company should be worth closer to $6 a share? We’ll know by February 17, when they put the deal to a vote.

Google, of course, could easily pay much more to get the angry On2 contingent to shut up. And at this point you have to wonder if the headaches associated with the deal are worth it — Google, remember, is worth $192 billion.

But Google is in the midst of a lengthy shopping spree. And it certainly doesn’t want to revisit the price of each purchase it makes. Presumably that’s why it’s playing hardball, or close to it, on this one.

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The content industry is fighting tooth and nail to protect its precious revenue stream while doing everything it can to stop anyone coming up with newer models. Netflix, one of the big exponents of a new way of getting content to people, has agreed to delay rentals of Warner Brothers new releases 28 days to help the studio “maximize the sales potential of those titles,” which translates into ‘squeeze every penny from movie fans’ by, essentially, creating artificial barriers.

Netflix doesn’t walk empty handed out of the deal, but it still doesn’t look like it had too much choice in the matter. The DVD mail rental service gets cheaper prices after the waiting period and it also gets more titles for its online streaming service. No financial details have been revealed and it’s not clear how substantial the said savings will be for Netflix.

“We’ve been discussing new approaches with Warner Bros. for some time now and believe we’ve come up with a creative solution that is a ‘win-win’ all around,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix.

“We’re able to help an important business partner meet its objectives while improving service levels for our members by acquiring substantially more units than in the past after a relat… (read more)

Motorola’s (MOT) added another SUPERPHONE to its Android portfolio, the Backflip. Unveiled at a press event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the device is similar to Verizon’s Droid in that it features both a touch-screen and keypad, but with one interesting twist: a reverse QWERTY flip keypad that folds out from behind the display. Most people are used to a forward flipping keyboard or an upward slider,” Motorola’s Paul Nicholson explained. “The Backflip’s keyboard opens up in the reverse direction.”

Otherwise, the BackFlip is similar to its predecessors. It’s got a 3.1-inch display with a 480×320 resolution (HVGA) touchscreen, a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, 32 GB of expandable memory, and a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash. It runs Android 1.5 and, like the Cliq before it, offers Motorola’s customized MOTOBLUR social networking service. Overall, a slick little device, though far more evolutionary than revolutionary.

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Taking advantage of the unveiling of a new three-axle travel coach during the New Delhi Auto Show, German manufacturer Daimler announced it will focus more on its bus business in India in the years to come, as its partnership with Sutlej Motors strengthens.

India is a very important future market for us, Hartmut Schick, Head of Daimler Buses said in a release. "Cooperation with Sutlej is an important component of our growth strategy."

"From the very… (read more)

Filed under: Hybrid, Performance, Porsche, Electric

Go to any major city worldwide and you’re likely to see a Porsche 911 roll by. It’s far more common than seeing one making the cornstalks blur in the middle of farm country, anyway. Porsche CEO Michael Macht disagrees that his sports cars frequent metro areas. “They’re not driven in the city,” Macht told the UK’s Autocar when discussing hybrid 987s and 997s. Of course, city driving is where hybrid powertrains rack up fuel economy credits, which Macht acknowledges before dismissing by saying, “It’s technically possible but it’s not part of the plan.”

Despite the verbot on hybrid 911s, Boxsters and Caymans, technology will be thrown at the sports cars to improve efficiency. “We want brake regeneration and stop-start for our sports cars, but not hybrid,” explains Macht. Just because there’s no hybrids other than the Cayenne doesn’t mean Porsche isn’t playing with electrons. “There are some efforts to make a pure electric supercar,” Macht notes, though such a vehicle would have to be capable of running as hard for as long as the petro-fueled Porsche cars – no 30-mile ranges here.

[Source: Autocar]

Porsche CEO reportedly says ‘no hybrid sports cars’ originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Survival improves but prognostication tool sorely outdated

Setting out to determine the survival of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center and their colleagues also discovered that an equation used for more than 20 years to predict survival is outdated.

Accordingly, they developed and recently published a new survival prediction equation that will impact clinical practice and the drug development process.

In PAH, the pulmonary arteries, which carry blood from the heart to the lungs to pick up oxygen, become restricted, forcing the lower right chamber of the heart to pump harder.

This leads to shortness of breath, limited exercise capacity, fatigue, heart failure and death.

Often the condition goes undetected until it is advanced. Untreated, patients with PAH have a very poor prognosis.

That prognosis is determined using an equation developed by a landmark National Institutes of Health study published in 1987, well before there were any Food and Drug Administration approved therapies for PAH.

The first such therapy was approved in 1995; today there are seven.

“Since 1987, great progress has been made in understanding and treating PAH, so a few years ago we decided that it was time to study contemporary survival,” said Mardi Gomberg-Maitland, MD, MSc, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of Pulmonary Hypertension at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“Our results show that survival is vastly improved today. That led us to rework the NIH equation, which has been a standard measuring stick for more than 22 years.”

Gomberg and her colleagues at the Medical Center and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine studied the survival of 576 PAH patients in their registry.

Of these patients, 282 had idiopathic, familial, and anorexigen-associated PAH, which matches the conditions of the 187 patients in the pioneering NIH study.

Using the NIH equation, these 282 patients would have been expected to have one-, three- and five-year survival rates of 65 percent, 43 percent and 32 percent, respectively. In fact, their survival rates were much higher: 92 percent, 75 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

“This new formula is important for patients who want to know what, on average, to expect from their disease and for doctors who want to give accurate advice,” said Stephen L. Archer, MD, Harold Hines Jr. Professor and Chief of Cardiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center and co-author of the study.

“We hope others will test our work. If it is validated by others it could be a very useful tool.”

Patients survive longer

The researchers were not able to determine why PAH patients survive longer today than in the 1980s, even though they measured the survival impact of many factors, including pulmonary function, demographics, medications, exercise treadmill, laboratory markers, echocardiography, and hemodynamics as well as the cause of the disease, which includes heart and lung disease, genetics, blood clots, connective tissue disease and other conditions.

None of these factors or causes had a significant impact on survival in multivariate analysis (when tested together statistically) — except hemodynamics. This explains why the new equation only incorporates hemodynamic parameters.

“Based on this result, physicians should stop drifting away from cardiac catheterization, which is the gold standard test to determine exact hemodynamics,” Gomberg said.

“Providers have been using more echocardiography and less cardiac catheterization but we need to reverse that trend because until you know the hemodynamics you can’t accurately predict survival and or cure the disease.

“You can estimate hemodynamics with echocardiography but not accurately enough,” she added.

Many clinical trials in PAH used the NIH equation to suggest improvement in survival by comparing observed survival rates on a study drug versus survival rates predicted by the NIH equation, the study says.

Since the NIH equation understates contemporary survival, it has led to more favorable comparisons of clinical trials testing new drugs to treat PAH, according to Gomberg.

“Our research suggests a reason that the drugs currently approved to treat PAH do not always work as well as we hope — because they were not held to a higher contemporary standard during their development and post-approval,” Gomberg said.

“The new equation should ameliorate this bias.

“Although some of these drugs dramatically improve the condition of some patients, none of them improves hemodynamics to normal levels,” she added.

“Therefore, we, as a medical community, have to acknowledge the fact that we have not yet cured PAH.”

“This research would not have been possible without the collaboration of the entire PAH team at the University of Chicago and the tireless efforts of two young physician scientists, Thenappan Thenappan, MD, Cardiology fellow at The University of Chicago, and Sanjiv Shah, MD, a former Cardiology fellow at The University of Chicago and current faculty member at Northwestern,” Archer said.

Both are co-authors of the study, along with Gomberg, Archer, Stuart Rich, MD (Cardiology at The University of Chicago), and Lu Tian, ScD, (Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University).

The research team hopes that this report will motivate development of novel agents and epidemiologic research.

Called “Contemporary Survival in Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension:

A Reappraisal of the National Institutes of Health Risk Stratification Equation,” the study was published on line December 23, 2009, by the European Respiratory Journal.

It looks as if the fate of Saab may soon be complete; barring an agreement between GM and Spyker, or an out-of-the-dark bidder in the next few days. Unlike other GM brands that have gone by the wayside, Saab’s potential demise brought out of the woodwork approximately 30 enthusiasts who braved snow flurries and the bitter cold outside of GM’s global headquarters.

The crowd event was organized by Ryan Emge, editor of Saab.History.com and included almost 30 Saab vehicles congregated near the GM headquarters.

“This is a nice, pleasant gathering,” said the 30-year-old Emge who came from Portland, Maine. “We’re here to gather and show our Saab spirit.”

We should hear something on the issue of Saab later today.

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: AutoWeek
Photo Credit: Saab History

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is on its way to the consoles and it’s not coming around without a bang. Apart from the Koei Tecmo character crossovers (qjnet/playstation-3/koei-tecmo-crossover-revealed-ninja-gaiden-meets-dynasty-warriors.html) for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, new console-exclusive features will

In response to last month’s legislation whereby Congress ordered GM and Chrysler to give independent arbitration hearings to those terminated dealers who so request them, General Motors’ CEO Ed Whitacre has announced that he expects hundreds of GM dealers to be reinstated.

He cautioned however, that the number could be as low as 100, and that the company might benefit from some of the dealers being reinstated.

Whitacre admitted that GM probably made a few mistakes during the closing process, but that by its very nature, an arbitrary line had to be drawn.

“It was a pretty arbitrary cutoff point, but you have to do it that way,” Whitacre said. “It probably caught some good ones and probably missed a bad one or two.”

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: Detroit News

Even though eating light can often mean eating less or more healthy foods — it can also be nice to cook with less “stuff.” We do a great deal of baking and quite often, we just don’t feel like pulling out the mixer and washing all the attachments when we’re done. Which is why we like this quick, customizable no mixer cake recipe!

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Ranking Senate Finance Committee member and Republican Senator from Iowa Charles Grassley, has asked the DOT for an accounting of the administrative costs for the ‘cash for clunkers’ program.

The program was risked out in a very ad-hoc manner, and this causes concern for Grassley. The Dept. has thus far spent $77 million and expects to keep the total to under $100 million. The legislation required the program to run in 30 days and that, says Grassley, creates an inherent risk error.

“‘Cash for clunkers’ was set up very quickly, and there hasn’t been an accounting of the administrative costs of the program,” Grassley said. “There also hasn’t been publicly available information about how contractors were picked to process the thousands of transactions that the program generated. My concern is the waste, fraud and abuse that may have resulted from the vulnerabilities that can come with such a quick start.”

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: Detroit News

Avatar has been named the fastest-bootlegged movie of all time!

James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster was illegally downloaded 500,000 times during its initial two days of release, building to 900,000 over the first week, according to Torrent Freak. Avatar has even surpassed the previous pirated record-holder, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which is believed to have been downloaded 610,000 times during its first week in theaters.

According to Variety, Avatar has raked in more than $1 billion at the international box office since its release on Dec. 19. The total makes it the fourth highest-grossing film of all time, behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (third place), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (second place), and Titanic — which earned $2 billion after its release in 1997.

Am I the only person left on the Planet who hasn’t seen this movie?

Guest contributor: Karen Collins, M.S., R.D., C.D.N.
Karen Collins holds a B.S. degree from Purdue and an M.S. degree from Cornell, both in nutrition. When she’s not writing or speaking, she conducts a private nutrition practice in Jamestown, New York.

Q: Is it true that selenium supplements help to prevent or control diabetes with its antioxidant power?

No. Selenium is an antioxidant, yet research repeatedly links high blood selenium and selenium supplements with increased risk of diabetes and shows no benefit for blood sugar control. Especially in the United States, where people have selenium intake well above recommended levels and selenium deficiency is rare, adding more selenium does not offer diabetes–prevention benefits.

In one study of selenium supplements, among those who began with high blood levels of selenium, those given selenium supplements were almost three times as likely to develop diabetes as those given a placebo. Several other studies also raise concerns about possible increased risk of diabetes, including the SELECT trial that was studying whether selenium supplements could reduce prostate cancer risk.

The strongest steps for prevention and control of type 2 diabetes (the most common type) remain weight control, regular physical activity and a healthy, high–fiber diet filled with antioxidant–rich foods.

Q: Breakfast is often said to be a vital meal. But it seems crazy to force myself to eat if I’m not hungry. What’s your advice?

Start by considering whether your current eating pattern seems to be working for you. When you don’t eat breakfast, do you have energy to get through your morning well, eat a healthy lunch and avoid overeating the rest of the day and evening? Do you reach recommended amounts of the healthy foods your body needs? Are you maintaining a healthy weight?

If your answer to all these questions is “yes,” then there’s probably no reason to force yourself to eat breakfast, unless you have a medical condition or take medicines that necessitate a morning meal.

However, if you answered “no” to any of those questions, perhaps you should reconsider. Studies show that people who eat breakfast tend to overeat less throughout the rest of the day. Many people who report lack of early morning hunger are those who eat large amounts of food through the evening.

Because this pattern often involves lots of excess calories and “junk food,” perhaps once you address the evening eating problems, you will want breakfast.

Some people run around so frantically in the morning they don’t have time to notice or respond to hunger signals. Whether they call it breakfast or a morning snack, they often find that if they take time to re–fuel with a balanced selection of healthy foods once the initial frantic activity subsides, it does help the day go better than when they wait until they’re famished to grab candy, a doughnut or whatever’s handy.

Q: Can I assume the nutrition information in blogs posted on websites of reputable companies and organizations is as accurate as the information elsewhere on their sites?

Not necessarily. Blogs have become popular ways of sharing ideas with a wide community of people. Blogs posted on some websites may be screened or hosted by a nutrition expert who adds comments to clarify that someone’s posting is not supported by well–controlled research. Other blogs include comments that have not been screened or evaluated in any way.

Although you may feel comfortable trying a recipe or considering a new way of tackling a barrier to healthy eating that you see in one of these blogs, it’s not wise to make significant changes, like avoiding certain foods or choosing a supplement, based on this advice.

Even when the blogger is sharing information conveyed to them by a health professional, advice appropriate to the blogger is not necessarily appropriate for others, and sometimes someone is repeating a misunderstanding of what they were told (kind of like the game called “telephone”).

The Internet can be a great source of nutrition information, but make sure that both the website and the source of individual information are trustworthy. If what you see seems questionable, check it with another authoritative website or a registered dietitian with expertise in that area.

(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)

Selenium and diabetes, the importance of breakfast and trust us, we’re bloggers

Now when the demand of sound techno people is increasing, the students are ready to deliver the innovation to the world of technology and the management. As many companies provide the best features like client value creation, talented development people, global network, research and development capabilities, business transformation outsourcing and the other broad and involving services the students must lean about the working procedure.

These all features attract the students of B. Tech to get jobs in the leading company that is the Accenture. They start dreaming during their study years for Accenture, as this is the world’s leading management and technology company. Here some guidelines are being given for the B. Tech students that are helpful to successfully clear the interview. There are mainly 4 rounds in accenture placement procedure-

1. Written aptitude test
2. Group Discussion
3. Technical interview
4. HR interview

Here some links are given below that also may help in the selection procedure of Accenture

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7368031/accenture-placement-papers

http://www.123eng.com/placementpapers/accenture_placement_papers.pdf

http://www.placementpapers.net/helpingroot/search/node/accenture

http://previouspapers.blogspot.com/2008/03/accenture-all-placement-papers-and.html

http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/77259-Accenture-Placement-Paper-Numerical-Ability.aspx

By using the upper mentioned links, the B. Tech student can see the papers of Accenture placement procedure and also the experiences of the last appeared students.

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