Author: Serkadis

Nissan North America Inc. has taken legal steps to create a performance segment for its Infiniti Division product line, similar to its larger luxury rivals Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

Nissan has filed for trademark protection for the names “IPL” and “Infiniti Performance Line,” according to documents on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

According to the applications, the IPL trademark would cover the brand’s use of “high-performance motor vehicle parts,” including turbochargers and superchargers for engines, cat-back exhaust and muffler systems, shifter knobs, suspension parts, brakes, sports seats and off-road headlights.

A spokesman at Infiniti’s North American headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., declined to discuss the trademark filings or the brand’s product plans.

This month in Louisville, Ky., the vice president of the Infiniti Business Unit, Ben Poore, told reporters that he intends to reveal a new performance-oriented offering this summer. He did not elaborate.

At the same time, Nissan confirmed that it is considering more use of high-output, small-displacement turbocharged engines for Infiniti.

Infiniti has been at a product disadvantage among luxury brands for years. Older competitors such as Mercedes, BMW and even Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus brand offer a much broader model line than Infiniti. Additionally, Mercedes markets variations of its models under the AMG performance subbrand, while BMW produces performance-level M versions of some models.

The performance brand options typically retail for a much higher premium. While the 2010 Mercedes S-class sedan has a base manufacturer’s list price of $87,950, Mercedes’ AMG Web site lists the price of the S63 AMG sedan at $133,550.

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Source: Car news, reviews and auto show stories

Fresh from Namco Bandai’s Pre-E3 event last week comes the debut trailer of Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2, the latest title from the highly successful Dragon Ball video game series.
 

Patients Like Me [patientslikeme.com] seems like the most useful example of the combination of sophisticated data visualization and online social media. It demonstrates the power of the social aggregation of data, and the tilting equilibrium between privacy and value creation for people who crave to access valuable information about their own faith.

The first, almost obvious, feature allows people with a life-changing disease (e.g. ALS, HIV, Parkinson’s, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MS) to connect to others in the same situation, for instance to learn how they treat their disease or to compare one’s own health progress with those of others. Even more, by sharing their own health profile, patients are empowered to exchange valuable data about the real-world effects of specific medical treatments. In practice, this means anyone can explore a rich collection of crowd-sourced data about individual diseases, symptoms or treatments.

For instance, patients are able to explore the efficacy, side effects, adherence and burden of the “Carbidopa-Levodopa” treatment meant to remedy Parkinson’s disease, or investigate the effects of Lithium intake on the ALS disease, solely based on the quantitative and qualitative input of thousands of individuals.

In what seems a quite revolutionary take on medical privacy, the diseases, treatments and symptoms of individual patients can be filtered, searched and compared. Alternatively, people with a specific symptom, let’s say “fatigued”, can investigate the effectiveness of the most popular treatments or compare their faith with the other 27,000 patients that experience this very symptom.

See also Who is Sick Map, Google Flu Trends, CureHunter, Diseasome, Visualizing Health Issues, The Cost of Getting Sick and Epidemiological Diseases Map.

The National Hockey League announced today the schedule for the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals.

The schedule is official and both teams will fight to grab the Stanley cup. The finals between the Western Conference champion Chicago Blackhawks and the Eastern Conference champion Philadelphia Flyers will really be exciting.

Chicago Blackhawks won the Clarence Campbell Trophy by beating the San Jose Sharks. The Blackhawks completed a four-game sweep of the San Jose Sharks 4-2 to reach their first Stanley Cup final in 18 years. Chicago Black Hawks won the final of the Western Conference with the fantastic play of forward Dustin Byfuglien.

You can watch the games on NHL.com. They provide all-access pass to the most comprehensive and extensive digital hockey coverage.

Here is the official schedule (courtesy of NHL.com):

Saturday, May 29 at Chicago, 8 p.m. NBC, CBC, RDS
Monday, May 31 at Chicago, 8 p.m. NBC, CBC, RDS
Wednesday, June 2 at Philadelphia, 8 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
Friday, June 4 at Philadelphia, 8 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
*Sunday, June 6 at Chicago, 8 p.m. NBC, CBC, RDS
*Wednesday, June 9 at Philadelphia, 8 p.m. NBC, CBC, RDS
*Friday, June 11 at Chicago, 8 p.m. NBC, CBC, RDS

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Slipknot bassist Paul Gray was found in an Urbandale, Iowa, hotel room Monday morning. He was 38.

The cause of death has not been announced but an autopsy will be done on Paul Gray. Police are not suspecting foul play and any speculation on the cause of death would be premature. He leaves behind a wife, Brenna Paul, who is expecting a child.

Slipknot burst onto the nu-metal scene with their self-titled album in 1995. Known initially for their appearance and masks, the nine-member band subsequently won over many fans. Their first three albums have all gone platinum. Their fourth, 2008’s All Hope is Gone, was their first to debut at #1 and will go platinum later this year.

When asked about the success of their album, Paul Gray said, “It makes you kind of speechless, man. Some kid who’s so depressed or things are going so bad for them that they actually want to take their own lives, and then they listen to a Slipknot lyric or a song … and that actually gets them through that? I mean, what can you say?”

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Stormy action takes place in this latest trailer for Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2. Game won’t be out till Fall later this year, so might as well check out this impressive HD showcase of Naruto’s latest

Still’s Disease is a form of arthritis that is characterized by high spiking fevers and evanescent salmon-colored rash. Still’s disease is one type of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA) and is also known as systemic-onset JRA. It was first described in children, but it is now known to occur in adults.

Still’s Disease is a disease of inflammation. It can effect the joints, tissues, and organs in the person given the diagnosis. Still’s is a rare disease. It occurs in approximately 1 out 100,000 people.

The cause of Still’s disease is still unknown but there have been a number of schools of thought regarding its cause. One is that Still’s disease is due to infection with a microbe. Another concept is that Still’s disease is a hypersensitive or autoimmune disorder.

Symptoms of Still’s Disease include extreme fatigue with waves of high fevers that rise to 104 degrees F (41 degrees C) or even higher, faint salmon-colored skin rash, swelling of the lymph glands, enlargement of the spleen and liver, and sore throat. Some patients develop inflammation of the lungs (pleuritis) or around the heart (pericarditis). Joints are also affected in Still’s Disease.

Treatment of Still’s Disease is directed toward the individual areas of inflammation. Antiinflammatory drugs, such as aspirin or other non-steroid drugs are also used to control the disease. Research for other treatment methods is still ongoing.

Source: stillsdisease.org

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The future of thousands of workers at the Opel unit of General Motors Co. remains undetermined. A steering committee is set to meet on Tuesday to discuss if it will recommend that taxpayers’ money be used to provide loans to Opel to fund about 8,300 job cuts.

However, Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said no decision is expected with regards to the German aid that the GM unit has been asking for. If granted, the state aid worth about 1.3 billion euros ($1.6 billion) will be used by Opel to become profitable once again after about 12 months. Continued after the jump!

In an interview at Brussels, Bruederle said that the committee isn’t likely to arrive at “a definitive decision” during the meeting. GM is willing to contribute only half of the 3.7 billion euros that Opel requires, saying that European taxpayers should handle this problem since after all, Opel is a European carmaker.

The senior members of the German government will consider the affected states in making its final decision. Up to 120,000 jobs in Germany alone are at stake here.

According to German business daily Handelsblatt, three of four German states with Opel plants are prepared to grant guarantees to GM.

Handelsblatt said that its government sources have pointed to the states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Thuringia and North Rhine-Westphalia to be willing to back these guarantees. Hesse had held back. This definitely raises the pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to grant GM’s request.

[via autonews – sub. required]

Source: Car news, Car reviews, Spy shots

Ali Fedotowsky was the contestant who left the last season of “The Bachelor” because she had to go back to work as an account executive at Facebook.

Now the beautiful and career-oriented Ali Fedotowsky is back as the new Bachelorette. She quits her job and gave up her apartment to come on the show. She said she “re-prioritized her life.”

During the Bachelorette season 6 premiere, Ali Fedotowsky meets her 24 suitors. There was Ty from Tennessee; Chris L, the beach-blonde from Cape Cod; Roberto, the quiet dark-haired guy; Kirk, who made a scrapbook for Ali; Chris, a graduate of Providence College; and some unnamed guys.

Chris Harrison asked each contestant to write down the name of a guy he considered to be there on false pretenses. The guy with the highest number of votes was Justin, an “entertainment wrestler”. But Ali figured that just because he fakes it in the ring doesn’t mean he’s faking his feelings for her.

Ali’s soul mate search is on!

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This one comes via Jay Rosen, who points us to an article at NowToronto.com that trashes a new Toronto-based journalism project called OpenFile, for being a “citizen journalism” project. The main complaint seems to be that so-called “citizen journalism” companies haven’t done well, and thus, this new one won’t do well either. It also complains that “the tone” is “all over the place” because it doesn’t have an institutional voice. That point struck me as odd, because any news publication that has many opinion writers and columnists often has a tone that is “all over the place” due to the conflicting views of those opinion writers. Just look at the NY Times and its varied op-ed writers.

But what made the story more amusing is the note in the comments that the guy trashing this “citizen journalism” project got pretty much all of the facts wrong, including the idea that it’s a “citizen journalism” project. As the comment noted:

We don’t do citizen journalism, and people don’t vote on the pitches. Maybe you want to consider linking to this comment in the piece, or offering a correction.

Your points about the challenges faced by sites like NowPublic etc. are valid, but in all honesty they don’t apply. It’s incorrect to say we’re practicing citizen journalism in light of the fact that we actually hire professional journalists to follow up on pitches submitted by the public. That’s one of the distinguishing characteristics of our model.

When you ask whose perspective is offered in the piece about Sonny Yeung, it’s perfectly clear that it’s the perspective of the author of the piece, who also happens to be working at the Toronto Star for the summer. It wasn’t written by a citizen journalist. It has professional byline just like the above post does.

We take suggestions from the public and encourage them to be part of the reporting process, but the work is done by professionals

It would seem that, if you’re working for an established publication, and want to dump on “citizen journalism” for not being of particularly high quality, it would behoove you to make sure that your own article on the subject is at least close to accurate.

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Sony’s doing surprisingly good running up to this year’s E3. If you remember last year, they were getting a lot of flak, left and right, for all the leakages that went down, as well as the major

After the series finale of TV show ‘24‘ tonight, Jack Bauer says goodbye but not for a long time, because there may be a ‘24′ movie after all.

There are plans to make a movie based on the TV show. It’s supposedly going to involve Jack Bauer fighting some form of evil in Europe.

According to Howard Gordon, Executive producer of ‘24′, “The current status of the movie is that Billy Ray has written a draft which Kiefer Sutherland has read, and we’re all working together on the second draft.”

Right now there is no official status whether the movie will be pursued or not. The executive producer believes that there’s a tricky balance in crafting the movie script. “There are two sets of requirements, which is honoring the series and the creative integrity of the character, and also potentially bringing in a whole new group of people into the franchise who can then go back and watch, and believe it’s been consistent. So I think we recognize that we’re serving two masters or two audiences here, not that they are mutually exclusive but there are two requirements,” Gordon said.

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I bet you’re all very curious as to why the development of Gran Turismo 5 has been stalled at 90%. Well, we just might have the answer now as MCV reports that it’s actually because of the

Ninja Theory is working on a secret title, that much we’re sure of. They did reveal that it was in the works a couple of months back after all. What we don’t know is whether or not

Irmscher has launched a special edition of the Dodge Journey Crossover in Germany to give the family car a complete makeover. The Journey SR is the product, and it receives a sporty look for the so called SUV, but it really still holds minivan features. It’s a family van that has been taken under the wing of the German tuning firm Irmscher, along with the cooperation of Dodge. The modifications are all cosmetic, so there are no performance gains for the stock 2.0-liter turbo diesel engine producing 140 horsepower. Included in the styling kit is a new front apron, roof spoiler, chrome tail pipes, and tinted rear windows.

Inside the Irmscher Dodge Journey Crossover you will find a full leather treatment to the instrument panel, aluminum sport pedals, leather sports steering wheel, and unique floor mats. An interesting customization to the metallic black exterior are twin rally stripes running throughout the body in a vintage orange. Black alloy rims with an orange lip complete the tuning package for the Dodge Journey SR. Irmscher will begin to offer this program for the Dodge Crossover at a starting price of €31,190.

[Source: carscoop]

Source: Fancy Tuning – the latest car tuning news

Dragon Ball Z Kai is remake or the director’s cut of the Dragon Ball Z for its 20th anniversary. Dragon Ball Z Kai  along with One Piece are being maketed together as the hour in which they both air, “Dream 9“. The premier of Dragon Ball Z Kai was on Fuji TV on April 5, 2009 at 9:00am just before One Piece.

FUNimation Entertainment would take the honor of dubbing Dragon Ball Kai into English under the release title of Dragon Ball Z Kai. The first season of the dub would be released and premiered on Nicktoons network on May 24th 2010. Another change as the Dragon Ball series has always been premiered on Cartoon Network in the United States.

Dragon Ball Z Kai is described as the “remastered” edit of certain events in Dragon Ball Z. The  editing also includes the extending of the format picture to 16:9 widescreen. The editing did not also lessen the damages and noise on Dragon Ball Z, but removed the damages completely.

The Kai means ‘altered’ or ‘modified’ fits well the description of the series thus chosen as the extension in the title Dragon Ball Kai. On the other hand, Dragon Ball Z Kai is also appeared to be known as Dragon Ball Kai in Japan. Interestingly, the Z is removed.

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Hollywood’s “tremendous amount of interest” in adapting Mass Effect into a movie has finally paid off. As reports would have it, Legendary Pictures has officially picked up the rights to film it.
 
 
 
 

On Lancia’s official website, several pictures were posted of known cars such as the Fulvia Coupe and Granturismo Stilnovo alongside some unfamiliar coupes. The designs originate from Fiat Group’s Centro Stile in-house design division while there are also proposals for the replacement of the five-door Ypsilon. But don’t set your hopes on seeing these vehicles on the road soon as Lancia may not bring any of these into production as the carmaker as it has been known to withhold them in the past.

[source worldcarfans via autoblog.it]

Source: Car news, Car reviews, Spy shots

Carmakers could be exposed to a barrage of consumer lawsuits if the US Supreme Court agrees that an accident victim’s family can file a suit against Mazda Motor Corp. over the type of seatbelts fitted in a 1993 MPV minivan.

To decide on this matter, the justices will have to revisit the scope of a 2000 decision that indicated that federal law protects carmakers from claims under state product-liability law that they should have switched more quickly to add air bags. In fact, the lower courts that considered the issue concluded that seatbelt-design suits are similarly barred.

For the Supreme Court to mull over this case is unusual but then again, the justices are doing so at the request of US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, whom President Barack Obama has since nominated for the court.

Kagan said that lower courts “repeatedly have over-read” the 2000 ruling to mean that federal safety regulations for seatbelts prohibit consumer lawsuits that attempt to hold the carmakers to higher standards. She reasoned that the lower courts’ view is inconsistent with that of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets motor vehicle safety standards.

The argument is focused on the use of two-point seatbelts (lap belts without a shoulder strap). Before 1989, the NHTSA allowed these two-point seatbelts in some minivan seats. Three-point belts were required in 1989 but only for the outboard seats (those next to a window).

[via autonews – sub. required]

Source: Car news, Car reviews, Spy shots

The Slipknot bassist Paul Gray found dead this morning in his room at the Town Plaza hotel  in Urbandale, Iowa, found by a local hotel worker.

The 38-year old founding member known as “The Pig” or “#2” of Slipknot played for the entire career of the band up to this point, but Gray had certain rough times regarding drugs and alcohol abuse.

There were no certain  details as to how Paul Gray die. There were no evidence or signs of foul play, but there are plans for an autopsy tomorrow. Also, there were indications of drug overdose, reported from a source.

A great loss for his wife Brenna, as they were expecting a child this year, as announced by his mySpace page. As for the fans of the Grammy-Award winning rock band Slipknot,  Paul Gray will surely be missed.

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