Author: Serkadis

Harper’s softball team had a rough day on the diamond last Saturday afternoon, dropping a doubleheader against Rock Valley, 15-0 and 33-9.

In the opener, Alyssa Collins went 2 for 2 batting for the Lady Hawks, and Becky Koeune took the loss.

In the second game slugfest, the Lady Hawks’ attack was led by Becky Koeune 2 for 3 with a double, Brea Blount 1 for 3 with a double, and Alyssa Collins 1 for 2. Pitcher Chelsea Mora took the loss.

The Lady Hawks (2-12) will travel to Glen Ellyn on Tuesday to take on the College of DuPage.

It seems T-mobile figured out the formula of getting more sales and new costumers, and with these new deals they might get more HD2 sales. The offer is only for participating T-mobile stores, but if you can find a store with this deal and some HD2 in stock here is what they require. One, an Iphone. That is all, if you have an Iphone and would like to upgrade to 1Ghz goodness, then this deal could help.

The deal does not pay for all the cost of your new HD2, it gives you store credit for your HD2 purchase. You can get as low as $100 credit and as much as $350, which if you remember is very close to the $450 HD2 price tag.

This could help people that need to save money, or cannot afford the HD2.

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While shooting some pictures recently at the SonyStyle store in Atlanta, Georgia, I happened to notice a larger circular display for the vibrant VAIO E series. The E series is basically a solid Core i3/i5 notebook with 15.5″ LCD, up to 8GB of RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 5470 (512MB VRAM), HDMI, Bluetooth, etc and Blu-ray Player/Burner options. The display was getting a lot of attention, and there is good reason for that – there were many E series VAIOs there in exotic colors such as Gunmetal Black, Coconut White, Lava Black, Hibiscus Pink, Iridescent Blue, and Caribbean Green. Plus, the laptop is pretty affordable at a starting price of $799. Sony also offers keyboard skins for the VAIO E series in green, blue, purple, black and pink. The skins, model number VGP-KBV3, are a cool $20 accessory that allows you to basically add a dash of style to your regular keyboard. Engineered for a perfect fit, this keyboard skin is also constructed of durable silicone rubber for durability.

VAIOE

The skin felt very soft and actually made the typing experience more comfortable. I didn’t notice any lack of accuracy when I was typing, even past 100WPM. I also noticed that it seemed unlikely that the keyboard skins would just randomly fall off after heavy use. However, I wasn’t able to test it for a prolonged period of time in various carrying situations.

After a month, it seems about right to updated our ROMs to the latest and greatest software available to us. We have been taking quite a while to release the updates, and we are sorry for that. I have been trying to stall so we can get the new graphics done before releasing this new update, but it seems I cannot stall any longer.

Many people have been asking for an update, we have not been ignoring you, just been counting down till we can get something new. We received a report saying some people have been getting a 30 day notice, well that happened to just about every cooked ROM last week, and so this updates should solve that.

Below, please comment and 1) tell me your device, 2) issue– for fixing,  3) what you want new. Those 3 things will really help when the cooks are producing the updates for you guys, which should be released next week. Some devices have yet to get a ROM, and at this point it does not seem they will. I have tried all the cooks, but no luck, sorry(especially Diamond 1 and 2), TG01, you are still getting something soon.

Well we are waiting for the comments to fix those issues and get your ROMs.

Filed under: Spy Photos, Minivan/Van, Honda

The current Honda Odyssey is widely considered to be the best of its breed, but let’s face facts: it’s old. Toyota has upped its game with the new Sienna; Nissan is on hiatus, preparing to spring an all-new Quest; and Chrysler continues to do its thing with the Town & Country and Dodge Grand Caravan. Oh, there’s also the Volkswagen Routan, but no one’ll hold it against you for forgetting it exists.

Anyway, Honda’s readying the next-gen Odyssey for release sometime later this year. We’ve already gotten a near-production preview in the form of the “concept” version introduced in Chicago and presently sitting on the floor at the New York Auto Show. Now, thanks to reader Bernardo Roque, we’ve got a few new spy shots of the next-gen van out testing in Las Vegas. One photo gives a peek at the interior via the open driver’s door and tailgate, but it’s still too far away to see anything in useful detail. What is obvious is that this thing is otherwise fundamentally identical to the so-called Odyssey Concept.

We’ll go out on a limb and guess that the 2011 Honda Odyssey is roomier, more powerful and/or more fuel-efficient than the current van, with a better interior and enough cupholders to service an entire preschool. Maybe two. Whether Honda will step up and offer all-wheel drive remains a mystery, but that’s the one thing Toyota holds over all its competitors’ heads right now. That’s gotta irk someone on the Big H’s org chart. We’re actually looking forward to seeing the finished product. Yeah, we just said that about a minivan. Sue us. Many thanks, Bernardo.

[Source: Bernardo Roque]

Reader Spy: 2011 Honda Odyssey out and about originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Etc., Work, Specialty, Luxury

Lots of things about commuting are aggravating. High on that list is the productivity that gets smothered while you’re snarled in traffic. You can only bang along on the steering wheel to Clyde Stubblefield for so long before you start getting antsy to convert the stop-and-go into some forward momentum on a project. Now, what if the whole commute could be as comfortable as the leather seats in an Infiniti G37 while you spent the entire ride with your nose buried in your laptop?

Bay Area commuters can park the car, pay a bit more for a luxuriously-outfitted bus, and recapture that formerly lost commute time. It’s more efficient and has a smaller carbon footprint than 52 individual cars with just a single occupant idling away, too. Bauer’s Limousine Service, a company that already zips Silicon Valley worker bees from hive to hive, has added four first-class-only buses to its fleet, and it calls the idea Wi-Drive. There’s Wi-Fi, power, TV, even meals and coffee on the Wi-Drive buses. A one-way ride will put the hurt on a ten-dollar bill, and there’s still some coordination to work out with pick-up and drop-off points, but it could be worthwhile for the increase in productivity and the better disposition you’ll have after spending that hour and a half working, or just surfing Bring A Trailer, instead of pounding your head against the wheel in frustration while you sit in traffic.

[Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Wi-Drive: Luxury commuter buses popping up in California originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The financial/hedge fund/banking crisis is over!

So sayeth Rick Bookstaber, a critic of financial complexity-turned-fed (he works for the SEC now).

On his personal blog he lays out where to look next for a serious crisis, and his answer is the municipal debt market.

But first, he lays out six preconditions for a serious crisis:

1. Problems occur where leverage and opacity occurs.
2. Things get serious when the market is big.
3. Investors hold a false-belief in diversity.
4. Portfolios that are apparently hedged often aren’t.
5. Ratings can’t be relied upon.
6. Defaults are not easy to manage.

Does the muni debt market meet the conditions?

You bet.

On  leverage and opacity, he writes:

Leverage and Opacity. Leverage in the municipal market comes from making future obligations to employees in order to pay them less now. This is borrowing in the form of high pension benefits and post-retirement health care, but borrowing nonetheless. Put another way, in taking lower pay today, the employees have lent money to the municipality, with that money to be repaid via their retirement benefits. The opaqueness comes from the methods of reporting. For example, municipalities are not held to the same standards as corporations in their disclosure.

The next five are just as clear.

Of course this doesn’t tell you when there’s going to be a problem, so that part’s up to you. Good luck.

Read Bookstaber’s full post >

Join the conversation about this story »

Black Rock Studio and Disney Interactive has released a brand new trailer for the upcoming action-pack racing title, Split/Second. Watch the highly explosive gameplay trailer after the jump.
 

Com o crescente número da frota de veículos nas ruas de nossas cidades associada a falta de consciência dos motoristas, ultimamente os índices de acidentes automobilísticos apresentarem recordes negativos em várias regiões do mundo. Alheio a esse problema, o órgão de prevenção de acidentes da cidade Victória (Transport Accident Comission), Austrália, divulgou um vídeo com uma compilação de outros vídeos de campanhas anteriores lançadas pela comissão nos últimos 20 anos, no combate aos acidentes automobilisticos e a conscientização no trânsito.

A retrospectiva do vídeo nos mostra em cinco minutos cenas tristes e emocionantes que retratam varias situações já ocorridas na vida real. De acordo com a TAC “a campanha é uma oportunidade de relembrar imagens de nossa memorias e recordar das milhares de pessoas que foram afetadas por acidentes rodoviários e para jamais esquecer, dirija com segurança“.

O vídeo criado pela agência Grey de Melborne, conta com a trilha musical Everybody Hurts do grupo Hem, e embora seja feito especialmente para a cidade australiana de Victória, também serve de alerta e de conscientização para todo o mundo.

Fonte: Ig

An email from Microsoft has apparently let slip the details of the the first DLC for Just Cause 2, the open world third-person shooter from Swedish developer Avalanche Studios.
 
 

Remember the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti real-time business conditions indicator maintained by the Philly Fed?

(Probably not; it’s never talked about.)

Here’s how the Philly Fed describes it (via EconBrowser):

The Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti business conditions index is designed to track real business conditions at high frequency. Its underlying economic indicators (weekly initial jobless claims; monthly payroll employment, industrial production, personal income less transfer payments, manufacturing and trade sales; and quarterly real GDP) blend high- and low-frequency information and stock and flow data. Both the ADS index and this web page are updated as data on the index’s underlying components are released.

The average value of the ADS index is zero. Progressively bigger positive values indicate progressively better-than-average conditions, whereas progressively more negative values indicate progressively worse-than-average conditions. The ADS index may be used to compare business conditions at different times. A value of -3.0, for example, would indicate business conditions significantly worse than at any time in either the 1990-91 or the 2001 recession, during which the ADS index never dropped below -2.0.

Anyway, last time we saw it it appeared to be rolling over… but as of March 31, that’s going away, and it’s almost back to even, providing another arrow in the optimist’s quiver.

This isn’t the end of the story, obviously, and no, it’s not quite even to 0 yet, but that dip early in the year is vanishing. The bleeding has been stopped.

Join the conversation about this story »

Capcom has announced that it has appointed former SCEE boss David Reeves to become the Chief Operating Officer of CE Europe, the company’s European Subsidiary.
 

Could there be anything more interesting than the start of the baseball season?

Maybe, because this is quite something:

In a major shift of HIV treatment policy, San Francisco public health doctors have begun to advise patients to start taking antiviral medicines as soon as they are found to be infected, rather than waiting — sometimes years — for signs that their immune systems have started to fail.

Yes, the field is heading in this direction, but thus far no one has had the guts actually to recommend universal treatment as policy.

In the early 2000s, I often referred to this review by my friend and colleague Keith Henry for why we might want to hold off on starting treatment for as long as possible.  How did we get from there to a policy to treat everyone?  Selected highlights:

• 2006:  SMART study stopped — intermittent therapy is worse than continuous treatment, including the risk of non-AIDS complications.  In other words, toxicity of ART notwithstanding, untreated HIV is worse.
• 2006:  One-pill a day treatment (TDF/FTC/EFV) approved. It wasn’t and still isn’t for for everyone, but it definitely was the next chapter in making treatment much easier to take, a far cry from the handful of toxic pills we prescribed in the late 1990’s.
• 2007:  SMART “naive” analysis is presented at the Sydney IAS meeting, (link is to published paper) showing that even for those starting SMART with high CD4’s but not on therapy, intermittent treatment was worse.
• 2008:  The famous “Swiss Statement” proclaimed that patients with undetectable HIV RNA on treatment cannot transmit HIV to others.  (If you read French, here is the original.)  A series of studies — some in serodiscordant couples, some population-based, some just mathematical models — have followed, all essentially demonstrating that HIV treatment is more effective than any other preventive strategy we currently have.
• 2009:  NA-ACCORD is presented at CROI, concluding that deferring therapy until the CD4 falls below 500 cells is associated with a nearly two-fold increased risk of death.  The paper is then published in the NEJM, adding credibility to the statistical gyrations required to do such an analysis.

That’s not a comprehensive list, of course, but these and other data led to a change in the latest HIV treatment guidelines, which despite raising the CD4 threshold for starting therapy, still do not go as far as the San Francisco recommendations.

Is their room for uncertainty?  You bet:

James D. Neaton of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, contends that a rigorous, randomized clinical trial is needed to show whether early intervention works. The risks of early treatment — giving powerful drugs to people at low risk of disease — – could outweigh the “modest predicted benefit,” Dr. Neaton wrote in an e-mail message. “That is why we do randomized trials.”

And more:

Dr. Lisa C. Capaldini, who runs an AIDS practice in the Castro district, also has strong reservations. “H.I.V. behaves differently in different people,” she said.  Although Dr. Capaldini recognizes that today’s drugs are a vast improvement over earlier therapies, the program, she said “is not ready for prime time.”

San Francisco has always had a distinctive role in the history of the HIV epidemic.

Why should now be any different?

Article Tags: Doug L. Hoffman

With the climate science party-line case for global warming rapidly unwinding there is growing interest by researchers from outside the climate change community in applying advanced statistical techniques to climate data. It has long been recognized that statistical acumen has been lacking among mainstream climate scientists. This dirty little secret was first publicly disclosed during Congressional hearings regarding the 2006 Wegman Report. Even newer analyses have revealed that many of the predictions made by the IPCC reports and other global warming boosters are wrong, often because inappropriate statistical techniques were applied.

The Wegman Report was the result of an ad hoc committee of independent statisticians who were asked by a congressional committee to assess the statistical information presented in the Michael Mann “Hockey Stick” papers. Dr. Edward Wegman, a prominent statistics professor at George Mason University and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, headed the panel of experts who examined the use of statistics in climate science. They found the climate science community was far too insular and did not consult with experts in statistics outside of their own field.

This self imposed isolation led, in the opinion of the committee, to misuse of statistics and a peer review process that only included the close-knit circle of researchers at the center of the global warming controversy. Wegman stated in testimony before the energy and commerce committee: “I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.” More on the Wegman Report can be found in Chapter 13 of The Resilient Earth.

More recently, Tom Siegfried, editor in chief of Science News, wrote an essay entitled “Odds Are, It’s Wrong.” In it he addressed the general problem of the misuse of statistics in science and medical research. While not talking speciffically about climate science, here is Siegfried’s take on the problem:

Click source to read FULL report by Doug L. Hoffman

Source: theresilientearth.com

Read in full with comments »   

Article Tags: Richard North, World Temperatures

Click source to read FULL report from Richard North

Source: eureferendum.blogspot.com

Read in full with comments »   

Filed under: Motorsports

Red Bull Racing has had a hell of an ascension over the past few seasons. It started out as Stewart Grand Prix then changed names to Jaguar Racing before the Austrian energy drink concern swooped in and took over. In the five years since, the team went from a solid mid-fielder (if sometime back-marker) to serious contender. Nobody could have seen it coming, but last season Red Bull finished second in both the constructors’ and drivers’ championships, coming this close to upsetting Jenson Button and the boys at Brawn GP for both titles.

This season, however, is quickly turning into Red Bull’s time to shine. But so far it’s only amounted to pole positions. A good place to start, sure, but not enough to claim titles on its own. In the opening two grands prix this season, Red Bull claimed pole at both: Sebastian Vettel leading Ferrari’s Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso in Bahrain, repeating the feat in Australia but with team-mate Mark Webber sandwiched between Vettel and Alonso. Neither race translated into victory, however, as the RB6 suffered technical failures both times out. Would the boys at Red Bull make it a hat-trick of poles at Sepang? And more importantly, would they translate their qualifying prowess into race victory? Follow the jump to find out.

Continue reading 2010 Malaysian Grand Prix: If at first you don’t succeed… [SPOILER ALERT]

2010 Malaysian Grand Prix: If at first you don’t succeed… [SPOILER ALERT] originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Article Tags: Philip Foster

Citizens!

Attached some great A5 leaflets from Philip Foster.

The one called WhatGreenH.pdf was produced after Philip and I met two weeks ago at the UKIP conference. Philip understood the issue of counting the same energy twice over instantly and also grasped the fact that the so-called greenhouse gases actually make the earth cooler rather than warmer.

It is these two issues that are not even grasped by the majority of skeptical academics and are the major stumbling block to being effective in stopping the ongoing madness over emissions.

Best,

Hans

Also see TheTrick.pdf

Note: Please use the “clockwise” position to see the PDF files in FULL as they are “sideways” on.

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Introduction and Summary:

This book is a great resource for students who need help with learning specific concepts about Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Ancient Egypt, whether it is out of curiosity or for a paper or project.  The book has great illustrations and hundreds of pages about almost anything anyone would like to know about these civilizations.  Examples include pages on Sparta, The Olympics, and city-states for Ancient Greece, Roman style, Roman armies, and prayers and sacrifices for Ancient Rome, and royalty, mummies, and tombs and temples in Ancient Egypt.  Students can learn a lot from the pictures (both illustrated and real) and the text in this book full of information.

Curriculum Connections:

This resource would go well with SOL 3.1, which has a purpose of explaining that Ancient Greece has influenced many things we have today, from governments to sports.  It would also go well with a unit on Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt.

Additional Resources:

This website is a great resource for students to build upon knowledge about Ancient Greece and is an easy way for them to discover more with links to different subjects involving Ancient Greece, including literature, people, and mythology.

Under “Lesson Plan” on this page, there are a lot of great ideas to get kids thinking about Ancient Rome, Greece, or Egypt.  For example, students can write a diary entry from the perspective of a person living in one of these times or from the perspective of a god or goddess, or a reader’s theater can be created where students act out important events relating to a certain god or goddess.

This is a whole list of great video clips to further explain Ancient Greece to students.

General Information:

Book:   500 Things You Should Know About History

Author: Miles Kelly

Illustrator: Joe Jones, Sally Lace, Louisa Leitao, Elaine Wilkinson

Publisher: Sandy Creek

Publication Date: 2009

Pages: 224

Grade Range: 3-5

ISBN: 13 978-1-4351-1980-2

Filed under: Ford, Earnings/Financials, UAW/Unions

The latest musical theme for Ford workers and shareholders could be Junior Mafia’s “Get Money.” The Blue Oval just told its salaried employees that 2010 bonuses would average three percent. Not only does that reinstate the bonus system missing for the past two years, it rewards salaried employees the same way it rewards executives. Of course, it depends on the year’s corporate and individual objectives being met, but there are few better ways to help ensure targets are delivered upon than by promising a bunch of extra credits in the form of greenbacks.

Employees aren’t the only folks at the Ford cash machine: banks get a dose, with Ford revealing it will write a check for almost ten percent of its debt by next Monday, and the UAW is looking at a jackpot of more than one billion dollars by cashing out stock warrants with a nearly 50-percent profit between their purchase and sell prices.

Make no mistake, Ford still needs to keep this up for a while yet – $31.45 billion in debt remains to be paid to the banks, and $7 billion remains due to the UAW’s Voluntary Employment Benefit Association (VEBA) for employee pensions and healthcare. But when you can pay things off and have enough left to spread some cream around, well, that’s a good start to the year.

[Source: Detroit Free Press | Image: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty]

Report: Ford assures workers of bonuses if targets are met originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 11:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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