Author: Serkadis

Carl Zeiss recently set up the largest MMZ G gantry measuring machine in Oberndorf. This highly accurate coordinate measuring machine has a measuring range of 5 x 11 x 3.5 meters. It is used to measure ship engines.

MMZ G coordinate measuring machines can accommodate parts on the ground or on a clamping plate. Special loading systems considerably reduce downtimes. Together with CAD-based CALYPSO® measuring software, VAST® technology from Carl Zeiss optimizes measuring processes. It can deliver form, size and position information, and also determine the roundness of parts in a single measuring run. The performance of VAST navigator during the form measurement of parts with deep-laying features is practically unparalleled. The highly accurate VAST gold active scanning probe permits the use of extensions up to 1000 mm, enabling measurement of deep-lying geometric elements. Therefore, this scanning technology is ideal for complex part geometries and automated CNC measuring runs.

The flexible modular system of the MMZ G line enables full customization. On the largest model, the linear measuring uncertainty MPEE is no more than 7+L/250 µm. The Z-axis ram has featured an optical ram protection system since 2009. If an object enters the detection area of the light barriers, the measuring machine stops immediately.

Thanks to these and many additional features, the MMZ G line from Carl Zeiss is the best choice when large parts have to be measured reliably and very accurately. In addition to ship engines, these include components for printing machines and wind turbines.

Tobacco biofuel to solve energy/environment crisis?Register"Tobacco is very attractive as a biofuel because the idea is to use plants that aren't used in food production," says Dr Vyacheslav Andrianov of Thomas …Tobacco plant leaves can…

I’m always amazed at the claims by some of our usual band of critics in the comments that “remixing isn’t creative.” They never seem to explain how something like what Kutiman has done could ever be considered not creative. Nor do they explain how taking a clip of a note and using it to make a new song is really different from using a keyboard (which plays “pre-recorded” notes) and playing a song. And we’ve certainly seem plenty of content creators encourage remixing of their work, and now more and more musicians have been purposely releasing stems and asking fans to make their own mixes. But how about with a book?

A few months back, we wrote about how author Robin Sloan was offering a tiered support model, similar to what many musicians have done, so he could write a novella. He used Kickstarter, and it turned out to be a huge success, with him earning much more than he originally targeted as his goal. The novella has been published, and apparently it’s getting quite a response. But Sloan has realized that you don’t stop there.

He’s taking things a step further, and has reserved $1,000 as a “remix fund,” to encourage people to take the book that he just wrote (which is available for download in a variety of formats under a Creative Commons license) and do some sort of remix project on it. He’s asking his supporters to pitch remix ideas (including how much it would cost to do), and then those who helped pay for the creation of the original story will vote on the ideas — and the top ones will get funded (until the $1,000 runs out):

I wrote and published Annabel Scheme with the help of about 600 patrons. It’s got­ten a warm reception from read­ers, but I’m greedy! I want more: I want other people to trans­form it and make it their own. If you’re a writer, an artist, a musician, a mathematician, a pastry chef–or a fan of one of the above–where could you or they take this story? I want to find out.

It’s yet another cool way of connecting with fans, and going explicitly against what copyright allows. It’s explicitly encouraging people to copy his work and even offering money to them if they do a good job. I imagine this will confuse those who will say “but… wait, he should be getting paid any time anyone wants to do something with his characters.” But what Sloan appears to recognize is that building up a larger audience for his works will certainly pay off a lot more in the long run than trying to squeeze people in the short run.

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Rick Warren is the conservative evangelical minister who somehow has become a trusted friend to both Republicans and Democrats. Obama came to his Saddleback Church during the campaign, and then Warren spoke at his inauguration.

But the bad economy is taking its toll on his empire, and yesterday he sent out an emergency fundraising appeal to the church’s members.

Here’s part of what he posted it on the Saddleback Church blog:

Dear Saddleback Family,

THIS IS AN URGENT LETTER unlike any I’ve written in 30 years. Please read all of it and get back to me in the next 48 hours.

I have thrilling news to share with you below but first some seriously bad news:

With 10% of our church family out of work due to the recession, our expenses in caring for our community in 2009 rose dramatically while our income stagnated. Still, with wise management, we’ve stayed close to our budget all year. Then… this last weekend the bottom dropped out.

On the last weekend of 2009, our total offerings were less than half of what we normally receive – leaving us $900,000 in the red for the year, unless you help make up the difference today and tomorrow.

It sounds like the church will be fine either way. We suspect they’ll come up with the money and it’s probably not the end of the world if they end 2009 in the red, like so many other organizations did.

What is interesting is that the bottom fell out “this last weekend,” which is somewhat ominous sounding. Presumably it means some kind of unprecedented tension between buying Christmas gifts and donating to the church.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Church Of England Stands Up For Hedge Funds!
• Wall Street Church Gears Up For Increasing Attendance
• Bankers Beg God For Forgiveness

The University of Wisconsin-Extension and St. Croix Valley Homebuilders Association are offering a workshop for contractors on federal and state funding programs for energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements for homes and small businesses …

Despite being rather conservative about its homepage, Google frequently features customized logos to mark special occasions and events. From sporting events to national holidays, from rather obscure celebrations to obvious choices like Christmas, Google isn’t missing too many occasions to treat its users to a new doodle. Google has been celebrating the first day of the new year for 10 years now and has come up with some pretty interesting designs over this period which also provide a small glimpse at its evolution from a promising startup in 2000 to the biggest company on the web in 2009.

The very first New Year’s doodle popped up on January 1st, 2000, and was one of the earliest doodles for Google, the eighth to be precise. Interestingly, Google is likely to do more doodles in a month these days than it did in its first two years. The 2000 doodle isn’t particularly good looking, but we have to remember that those were simpler times when Geocities was still going strong and the AOL – Time Warner seemed like a brilliant idea.

In 2001, Google returned with another New Year doodle featuring white teddy-bears, you can’t go wrong with cute furry animals, a theme that has carried on since then. The following years, Google continued with the animals theme and then in 2003 and 2004 as well. The doodles themselves… (read more)

One of the oldest, most popular bets — that the Japanese government would collapse under the weight of its debt — has a fresh round of adherents who believe that this time it’s going to work out.

Among them: Hayman Capital manager Kyle Bass, who made a fortune shorting subprime.

He tells the Journal a Japanese bond market collapse is merely a matter of when, not if.

Again though, this bet has been made for a long time, and bond yields have only gotten lower, while the Yen has only gotten stronger.

What’s different this time? Ostensibly it’s about demographics. Japan’s debt is self-financed by famously aggressive Japanese savers.

But…

Some predict that as Japan ages, more people retire and savings rates dip, some purchasers will start pulling back on buying or even turn into sellers. Japan’s public pension fund, the world’s largest, has said it could become a net seller of holdings in 2010. About three-quarters of the fund’s holdings have been in Japanese bonds.

“The biggest buyer is now a seller. That’s the biggest difference today,” said Mr. Bass of Hayman Advisors. To attract buyers, particularly from overseas, yields will have to rise significantly, the bears assert, making it painful for Japan to service its debt.

Indeed there’s some evidence of this happening. Japan recently opened its bond market wider to foreign participants, suggesting the unlimited well of domestic demand for debt may be reaching its end.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Stocks Fall Worldwide, Fresh Fears Mount Over Japan
• Japan Suddenly Extends The Welcome Mat To Foreign Bond Buyers
• Japan Denies Reports About It Dumping Treasuries

Our Chinese is a bit rusty and the details are sparse but it looks like Motorola may be brewing up another Android-powered handset. This handset, codenamed the Mirage or the Shadow, breaks the mold by sporting a 4.3 inch, 800×484 display instead of the now standard 3.7 inch display. It is also rumored to include an HDMI port, 8 megapixel camera, 1080p video playback and measures a mere 9.0mm in thickness. The rendering provided is crude but the handset appears to have the same angular design of the Motorola DROID and Milestone. That is all we have on this Mirage/Shadow as no other details are available. Anyone out there care to fill in the blanks?

Thanks, Bryan!Read

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Continue reading Stanley Torch Watch lights your path, highlights your odd aesthetic sensibilities

Stanley Torch Watch lights your path, highlights your odd aesthetic sensibilities originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As 2009 draws to a close, did you also realize it’s the end of the decade and the start of a new one? So what should we call the upcoming period of 2010-2019? The Teenies? The Tenties? The Tenners? How about the Twenty Tens?

‘Twenty Tens’ was the most popular name for the upcoming decade, according to a survey of 5,000 Brits conducted by insurance comparison site Gocompare.com. Nearly a third of those surveyed said ‘Twenty Tens’ was the most catchy name.

So there you have it. Start throwing around the term ‘Twenty Tens’ and you’ll be ahead of the curve.

photo credit: Robbert van der Steeg

Related posts:

1. Are You Ready to Hop on the Bromance Trend?
2. Ready for a Little ‘Manscaping’?
3. Britain: Get Ready for Stormtrooper Firemen

	Study: Plug-in cars are cleaner than gas, hydrogen cars could be worse But some hydrogen cars are as clean as EVs, say the study authors.		Gas To Electric, Santa Monica make up in PHEV conversion fight It’s kind of clear who has the last laugh, considering.
	Video: Electric scooter gets the Snow Kit Solution This could be dangerous fun.	Other news: China’s largest electric vehicle infrastructure project opens in Shenzhen Ward’s columnist makes the case for tech agnostic efficiency incentives New 99 g/km Audi 1.6 TDI now available for order in the UK

AutoblogGreen for 12.31.09 originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup ChaCha. They launched in 2007 as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. Pranksters, obviously, loved it. And we noted the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people.

The human powered web search never really worked out. But ChaCha evolved. In 2008 they launched a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. Putting a human into the mix makes sense with mobile, with poor (or no) data connectivity and hard to use keyboards. But all phones have SMS, and ChaCha had a hit on their hands (they also had the infamous Eiffel Tower incident).

And ChaCha also made another smart move. They started archiving questions and answers on their website in January 2009. 300 million of them are now published on their website – you can view and search them from the ChaCha home page. Those pages have lots of ads generating revenue, and the search engines tend to rank pages like these highly. The company serves just under a million page views to answer pages per day, they say.

CEO Scott Jones says the company has had “explosive growth” in usage of their mobile product. In fact, the company has had to take steps in the past to control that growth, by limiting the number of questions people can ask each month. Even so, people now ask ChaCha a million questions a day via SMS. They recently passed Google and ChaCha is the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.

Those mobile questions bring in revenue, too. I asked ChaCha tonight “When and where is Avatar IMAX playing in San Francisco?” The first response, less than a minute later, was an advertisement. The second message came a minute later with the correct information: “AMC Loews Metreon 16 101 4th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 369-6201. Showtimes for 12/31/09. Avatar IMAX 9:45 am, 1:15, 4:45, 8:15, 11:45. ChaCha!” Even on a smartphone, and even dealing with the ad, it was far easier to use ChaCha than doing a mobile search via Google.

And while there are a number of easy-to-use movie apps for the iPhone and Android, ChaCha is a multi-purpose app. I can just as easily ask it for flight schedules. Or the first king of England (answer: “No one is universally recognized as the first King of England. Some historians start with Egbert, the king of Wessex”).

We’ve said all along, though, that the ChaCha mobile service was useful. But we questioned its scalability since it involves humans.

Jones says they’re scaling just fine, thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily, so they must think it’s a reasonable deal. The cost of answering a question has dropped from $0.50 two years ago to just a few cents today, and Jones says they’ll get it to under a cent soon. They’re able to recycle a lot of answers, he says, and they’ve built tools to make it easier for guides to quickly answer most queries.

The company is now profitable per query, says Jones, meaning they are making more money from those SMS ads than they pay the guides. And when you add revenue from the archived website questions, the company is on path to profitability. Their current revenue run rate is $9 million or so. My guess is they need to roughly double that to become profitable as a business and support their 60 or so full time employees.

Jones says has raised $52 million, including a recent $7 million round from insiders. We’re tracking more than that on CrunchBase and have asked the company for clarification.

So ChaCha may just have a real business on its hands, despite the near constant criticism from us and others over the years. This is one time that I won’t mind at all being wrong.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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just like last year, and the year before that.
here’s the list of my top 10 movies & albums of 2009.

avatar / the september issue / district 9 / inglourious basterds / harry potter and the half-blood prince
up / drag me to hell / curious case of benjamin button / star trek / monsters vs aliens

haven’t got much time to watch on dvds and stuff, here is my top 5.

slumdog millionaire / låt den rätte komma in / vicky cristina barcelono
entre les murs / il y a longtemps que je t’aime

and lastly my top 10 albums of 2009.

just ballade (misia) / splendor in the grass (pink martini) / this is war (30 seconds to mars) / the boy who knew too much (mika) / my one and only thrill (melody gardot) / sacrificium (cecilia bartoli) / found songs (ólafur arnalds ) / the big machine (émilie simon) / caféine (christophe willem) / memoirs of an imperfect angel (mariah carey)

related :

1. favorites 2008
2. favorites 2007
3. favorites 2006

Viewers who tuned into the Weather Channel Sunday night were treated to a tearjerker with a side of sunny skies as meteorologist Kim Perez got an on-air proposal from her longtime boyfriend, police sergeant Marty Cunningham. Kim had just predicted rainfall for Florida and the Southeast this New Year’s Eve when Marty stumbled onto the set.

“Hi!” said the mother of three.

“How are you?” Marty asked.

“Good!” Kim replied.

“We’ve been talking about this for a long time, and I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So I’m asking you today,” he started getting down on one knee, “Will you please marry me?”

“I will,” Kim said, smiling.

Don’t you just love a happy ending?

Kim has been obsessed with meteorology ever since she was a little girl.

“I first realized that gender may be an issue very young,” Kim wrote on The Weather Channel website. “When I told someone I wanted to be a meteorologist, they asked why a nice girl like me would want to study meteors! I didn’t understand the problem until I started looking though books and doing research, I couldn’t find any women meteorologists, not even on TV!”

A spokesperson for the Atlanta-based Weather Channel says the couple plan to have a small wedding with family and friends — likely on the 13th of whatever month they choose, since Marty’s lucky number is 13.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) – Officials associated with wind energy want Congress to establish a national renewable energy standard that they say would promote jobs in South Dakota and spark the economy. Steve Wegman with the South Dakota Wind Energy …

Article Tags: Andrew Neil, BBC, Joe Bastardi, Met Office, UK Winter Forecast 2009/10, World Temperatures

As much of the country braces itself for further snow falls and freezing temperatures word reaches me from several US forecasters that the whole of the Northern Hemisphere is in for a very cold start to 2010. Apparently there’s been a strong downspike in something called the Arctic Oscillation Index and the North Atlantic Oscillation Index is also strongly negative.

Click source link to read FULL report by Andrew Neil

Source: bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics

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Article Tags: Financial, Sammy Benoit

When we look back at the decade 2000-2009, we may well define it by three crises: the crisis that didn’t happen, the crisis that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the crisis that we don’t realize is happening. We haven’t learned the lessons of the first two, and our ignorance of the third may doom us to be slaves to our government, rather than the other way around.

Leading into the changeover from 1999-2000, we faced Y2K, the crisis that didn’t happen. Many people thought computers’ dates would go from 1999 back to 1900, causing our computer-dominated world to fail: bank accounts disappearing, air-traffic systems (and airplanes) crashing, and everything leading to economic collapse and a return to the Stone Age.

Some scientists told us the world would end, but it didn’t. And the solution didn’t necessitate everyone throwing out their computers and buying new ones. We should remember this non-crisis when we think about global warming.

Source: americanthinker.com

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Hyundai Motor America decides to extend and expand their Hyundai Assurance system in 2010. The system will include from now on America’s Best Warranty and 24-hour Roadside Assistance. This assurance program was first introduced in January 2009 as a way to protect consumers in the event they would lose their income by taking the vehicle back.

The system was offered as a complimentary service with every new Hyundai model sold in the United States. America’s Best Warranty refers to a… (read more)