Category: News

Sectors, the catch share management system adopted in New England, have opened up the door to groundfishing in Down East Maine. According to the Bar Harbor Times, until sectors came into effect May 1, it had been more than 15 years since groundfish had been caught and landed in commercial numbers in the eastern Gulf of Maine. The article tells one fisherman’s story of how sectors have allowed him to get back into the groundfishing industry.

As most of you know the BlackBerry Pearl 3G launch has been a little delayed around the world, and with that being said I’m still curious to know why. While this interview doesn’t disclose any reasons why (or even acknowledge its delayed) it’s still cool to know what went into both the Pearl 3G models being designed and even re-invented. The interview comes from the Official BlackBerry blog, where RIM’s very own Product Manager Joesph Gordon talks about his thoughts of both the Suretype QWERTY Pearl 9100, and the condensed QWERTY Pearl 9105.

You will find questions like this:

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone design seems to amalgam pieces of many familiar BlackBerry smartphones. What was your inspiration for the look of the BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone design?

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone had two of the best possible inspirations:  the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 smartphone and the BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone.  We wanted a handset that was true to the form of the original BlackBerry Pearl 8100 smartphone, but brought in some of the high-end styling of the BlackBerry Bold smartphone line.  Also key was how it felt in the hand: we wanted something that was comfortable and easy to use, particularly in one-handed situations, which is very popular with the younger demographic. Like both products, it combines power and elegance to deliver not only an attractive smartphone but one that can handle whatever applications the customer needs.

You can read the entire review here.

You’re reading a story which originated at BlackBerrySync.com, Where you find BlackBerry News You Can Sync With…

This story is sponsored by the new BlackBerry Sync Mobile App Store. Grab your free copy today at www.GetAppStore.com from your BlackBerry.

An Inside Look at the BlackBerry Pearl 3G from RIM…

Related posts:

1. RIM announces the BlackBerry Pearl 3G (Pearl 9100 and 9105) Alright, let’s kick of the WES 2010 news with…
2. BlackBerry Pearl 9100 vs. Pearl 8130 – Size Comparison Photos Over the past month we’ve seen a lot of…
3. BlackBerry Pearl 9100 to Feature Full QWERTY Keyboard Option?! Not too sure what to say about this one, but…

20. Ashley Judd

Age: 42

19. Elle McPherson

Age: 47

18. Jennifer Aniston

Age: 41

17. Elizabeth Hurley

Age: 44

16. Faith Hill

Age: 42

15. Salma Hayek

Age: 43

14. Julie Bowen

Age: 40

13. Kristin Davis

Age: 45

12. Kristen Chenoweth

Age: 41

11. Lauren Graham

Age: 43

Click here for the top 10 50 hottest cougars!

 

Palm has just filed what looks to be the final an definitive version of their Proxy Statement to the SEC for the impending ‘merger’ with HP. An earlier version of the statement gave us the juicy details on the history of the merger, this version lets us know when shareholders get their chance to vote on the deal: June 25th at 9am Pacific.

Naturally, Palm’s board of directors unanimously suggests shareholders vote yes on the deal. If you’re really feeling antsy, you can read the opinions from Qatalyst Partners and Goldman, Sachs & Co calling the $5.70 per share price ‘fair.’

Naturally we’re eager to see HP throw gobs of cash at Palm to help webOS take off, so we’re hoping that things go as smoothly as they appear to be right now. Today’s all-hands-meeting at PalmHQ no doubt will provide more details to Palm’s own, we trust the news will be sunny.

Palm SEC Filing

10. Demi Moore

Age: 47

9. Connie Britton

Age: 42

8. Ellen Pompeo

Age: 40

7. Gwen Stefani

Age: 40

6. Julia Roberts

Age: 42

5. Shania Twain

Age: 44

4. Monica Bellucci

Age: 45

3. Courteney Cox

Age: 45

2. Mary Louise Parker

Age: 45

1. Halle Berry

Age: 43

From Brooks Brothers: Inspired by our heritage of mixing vivid patterns and colors (our legendary “Fun Shirt” is a splendid example), the Social Primer for Brooks Brothers Bow Tie Collection is yet another innovative – and playful – take on a classic.

Exclusively designed in collaboration with socialprimer.com founder K. Cooper Ray and just in time for the Summer bow tie season, the iconic Brooks Brothers bow tie has been re-imagined with a traditional, yet irreverent, perspective. Taking our own authentic fabrics, the collection features reversible styles that can create not one, but many ways to wear the bow tie.

The voice of SocialPrimer.com, “SP”, is a stickler for tradition and good manners. He reminds men to walk on the curbside of a lady and to always stand when they shake a man’s hand. SP is sometimes a dandy and always a gentleman.

Continue reading for more images.

How the elites are vying to undo the social safety net — and hurt our chances for recovery.

Harold Meyerson is spot on: “Of all the gaps between elite and mass opinion in America today, perhaps the greatest is this: The elites don’t really believe we’re still in recession. Or maybe, they just don’t care.” What is even more galling is that, having been the greatest beneficiaries of the government’s largesse over the past 2 years, these very same people now decry the government’s “irresponsible” and “unsustainable” fiscal policy.

The collective amnesia and moral turpitude of these elites is truly mind-boggling.

Why do we have a deficit of about 10% of GDP right now when it was less than 2% about 3 years ago? The reasons are: the Obama stimulus, the TARP, and the slower economy (which arose in response to a major financial crisis, not because the government began an irrational and irresponsible spending binge). A slower economy leads to lower revenues (less income=less taxes paid since most tax revenue is based on income, and lower tax brackets) and higher spending on the social safety net.

Conveniently lost in all of this furor about the deficit are the beneficiaries of this recent government largesse. It’s certainly not the unemployed or the vast majority of people who do not work in the financial services industry.

And let’s stop with the now prevailing meme (regurgitated most recently in John Heilemann’s New Yorker Magazine piece, “Obama is from Mars, Wall Street is from Venus”) that the costs of the financial bailout are minimal thanks to the “successful” measures taken to “save” our financial system (as if it is worth saving in its current incarnation). With the conspicuous exception of Simon Johnson, virtually all analysts fail to factor in the fact that our public debt to GDP ratio has moved from 40% of GDP to 90% in the space of 2 years, directly as a consequence of the crisis of 2008.

Naturally, the deficit terrorists are now out in force about this fact, conveniently forgetting the underlying cause of this increase. So are the journalists who cover it, Meyerson being a conspicuous exception. In a market economy, where most of us have to work to make a material living, the threats posed by the likes of Pete Peterson and the deficit hawk brigade represent a true impingement on our right to work. As my friend Bill Mitchell notes, “the neo-liberals deliberately undermine the right to work of millions and force them into a state of welfare dependence and then start hacking into the welfare system to deny them the pittance that the system delivers.”

The elites who decry this government spending (especially the ones from Wall Street) are akin to a person providing someone with 5 packs of cigarettes a day and then bemoaning the fact that the recipient irresponsibly contracted lung cancer.

What will happen to the deficit as and when the economy finally improves? The Obama stimulus and TARP go away in a few years regardless. Tax revenues increase and safety net spending falls. We’re back to “norma,l” with deficits around 2-4% depending on the state of the economy, which is where we’ve been for the past 30 years aside from 1998-2001. Even CBO agrees, though what happens to the Bush tax cuts will have an effect of about + or – 2% of GDP (depending on whether they are extended or ended, respectively).

In fact, full employment is also the best “financial stability” reform we could implement, because with jobs growth comes higher income growth and a corresponding ability to service debt. That means less write-offs for banks and a correspondingly smaller need to provide government bailouts.

Fiscal austerity, by contrast, won’t cut it. Our elites seem think that you can cut “wasteful government spending” (that is, reduce private demand further) and cut wages and hence private incomes and not expect major multiplier effects to make things significantly worse. Of course, that “wasteful”, “unsustainable” spending never seems to apply to the Department of Defense, where we always seem to be able to appropriate a few billion, whenever necessary. “Affordability” principles never extend to the Pentagon, it appears.

Our policy-making elites also seem to have bought the IMF line that the fiscal multipliers are relatively low and that the automatic stabilizers (working to increase deficits as GDP falls) will not drown out the discretionary cuts in net spending arising from the austerity packages. The overwhelming evidence is that this viewpoint is wrong and implementation of policies based on it cause generational damages in lost output, lost incomes, bankruptcy and lost employment (especially denying new entrants from the schooling system a robust start to their working life).

The real issue is that those who are better off don’t want to have government intervention in economic affairs unless it benefits them. With typical ingratitude, Wall Street is now threatening to cut campaign donations for Obama and the Democrats because of their proposals to impose more regulation on the financial sector. However, when the government intervenes with bailouts, Wall Street stands first in the queue, cap in hand. No one wants to bear the actual discipline of markets if that means losses. Those at the high end of income distribution aren’t against every kind of government intervention, but are frequently against certain types of government intervention that might make the workers stronger, or create competition for private businesses (in the case of a public option in health care reform, for example).

Full employment is the real value that should guide economic policy, not the bogus emphasis on financial ratios that just play into the hands of the financial sector. Somehow, I doubt that this is the underlying principle guiding our “counsel of wise men” who are deliberating the future of Social Security and Medicare behind closed doors as the rest of us debate this issue in the open.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator. Read more at New Deal 2.0 –>

Join the conversation about this story »

by Subhankar Banerjee.

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is
republished here with Tom’s kind permission.

——-

Bear with me. I’ll get to the oil. But first you have
to understand where I’ve been and where you undoubtedly won’t go, but
Shell’s drilling rigs surely will—unless someone stops them.

Over the last decade, I’ve come to know Arctic Alaska about as
intimately as a photographer can. I’ve been there many times, starting
with the 14 months I spent back in 2001-2002 crisscrossing the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge—4,000 miles in all seasons by foot, raft,
kayak, and snowmobile, regularly accompanied by Inupiat hunter and
conservationist Robert Thompson from Kaktovik, a community of about 300
on the Arctic coast, or with Gwich’in hunters and conservationists
Charlie Swaney and Jimmy John from Arctic Village, a community of about
150 residents on the south side of the Brooks Range Mountains.

In the winter of 2002, Robert and I camped for 29 days at the Canning
River delta along the Beaufort Sea coast to observe a polar bear den.
It’s hard even to describe the world we encountered. Only four calm
days out of that near-month. The rest of the time a blizzard blew
steadily, its winds reaching a top speed of 65 miles per hour, while the
temperature hovered in the minus-40-degree range, bringing the
wind-chill factor down to something you’ll never hear on your local
weather report: around minus 110 degrees.

If that’s too cold for you, believe me, it was way too cold for
someone who grew up in Kolkata, India, even if we did observe the bear
and her two cubs playing outside the den.

During the summer months, you probably can’t imagine the difficulty I
had sleeping on the Alaskan Arctic tundra. The sun is up 24 hours a
day and a cacophony of calls from more than 180 species of birds
converging there to nest and rear their young never ceases, day or
“night.” Those birds come from all 49 other American states and six
continents. And what they conduct in those brief months is a planetary
celebration on an unimaginably epic scale, one that connects the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge to just about every other place on Earth.

When you hear the clicking sound
of the hooves of the tens of thousands of caribou that also congregate
on this great Arctic coastal plain to give birth to their young—some
not far from where my tent was set up—you know that you are in a
place that is a global resource and does not deserve to be despoiled.

Millions of Americans have come to know the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, even if at a distance, thanks to the massive media attention it
got when the Bush administration indicated that one of its top energy
priorities was to open it up to oil and gas development. Thanks to the
efforts of environmental organizations, the Gwich’in Steering
Committee, and activists from around the country, George W. Bush
fortunately failed in his attempt to turn the refuge into an industrial
wasteland.

While significant numbers of Americans have indeed come to care for
the Arctic Refuge, they know very little about the Alaskan Arctic Ocean
regions—the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea (which the refuge
abuts).

I came to know these near-shore coastal areas better years later and
discovered what the local Inupiats had known for millennia: these two
Arctic seas are verdant ecological habitats for remarkable numbers of
marine species, including endangered Bowhead whales and threatened polar
bears, Beluga whales, walruses, various kinds of seals, and numerous
species of fish and birds, not to mention the vast range of
“non-charismatic” marine creatures we can’t see right down to the krill —tiny shrimp-like marine invertebrates—that provide the food that
makes much of this life possible.

The Kasegaluk lagoon, which I spent much time documenting as a
photographer, along the Chukchi Sea is one of the most important coastal
treasures of the entire circumpolar north. It is 125 miles long and
only separated from the sea by a thin stretch of barrier islands. Five
icy rivers drain into the lagoon, creating a nutrient-rich habitat for a
host of species. An estimated 4,000 Beluga whales are known to calve
along its southern edge, and more than 2,000 spotted seals use the
barrier islands as haul-out places in late summer, while 40,000 Black
Brant goose use its northern reaches as feeding grounds in fall.

In July 2006, during a late evening walk, wildlife biologist Robert
Suydam and I even spotted a couple of yellow wagtails—not imposing
whales, but tiny songbirds. Still, the sight moved me. “Did you know,”
I told my companion, “that some of them migrate to the Arctic from my
home, India?”

Can oil be cleaned up under Arctic ice?

Unfortunately, as you’ve already guessed, I’m not here just to tell
you about the glories—and extremity—of the Alaskan Arctic, which
happens to be the most biologically diverse quadrant of the entire
circumpolar north. I’m writing this piece because of the oil, because
under all that life and beauty in the melting Arctic there’s something
our industrial civilization wants, something oil companies have had
their eyes on for a long time now.

If you’ve been following the increasing ecological
devastation unfolding before our collective eyes in the Gulf of
Mexico since BP’s rented Deepwater Horizon exploratory drilling rig went
up in flames (and then under the waves), then you should know about—
and protest—Shell Oil’s plan to begin exploratory oil drilling in the
Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer.

On March 31, standing in front of an F-18 “Green Hornet” fighter
jet and a large American flag at Andrews Air Force Base, President Obama
announced a new energy proposal, which would open up vast expanses of America’s
coastlines, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to oil and gas
development. Then, on May 13, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals handed a victory to
Shell Oil. It rejected the claims of a group of environmental
organizations and Native Inupiat communities that had sued Shell and the
Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to stop
exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic seas.

Fortunately, Shell still needs air quality permits from the
Environmental Protection Agency as well as final authorization from
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before the company can send its 514-foot
drilling ship, Frontier Discoverer, north this summer to drill
three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort Sea.
Given what should by now be obvious to all about the dangers of such
deep-water drilling, even in far less extreme climates, let’s hope they
don’t get either the permits or the authorization.

On May 14, I called Robert Thompson, the current board chair of
Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL).
“I’m very stressed right now,” he told me. “We’ve been watching the
development of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf on television. We’re praying
for the animals and people there. We don’t want Shell to be drilling in
our Arctic waters this summer.”

As it happened, I was there when, in August 2006, Shell’s first small
ship arrived in the Beaufort Sea. Robert’s wife Jane caught it in her
binoculars from her living-room window and I photographed it as it was
scoping out the sea bottom in a near-shore area just outside Kaktovik.
Its job was to prepare the way for a larger seismic ship due later that
month.

Since then, Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were
a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be
cleaned up?

He’s asked it in numerous venues—at Shell’s Annual General Meeting
in The Hague in 2008, for instance, and at the Arctic Frontiers
Conference in Tromsø, Norway, that same year. At Tromsø, Larry Persily —then associate director of the Washington office of Alaska Governor
Sarah Palin, and since December 2009, the federal natural gas pipeline
coordinator in the Obama administration—gave a 20-minute talk on the
role oil revenue plays in Alaska’s economy.

During the question-and-answer period afterwards, Robert typically asked:
“Can oil be cleaned up in the Arctic Ocean? And if you can’t answer
yes, or if it can’t be cleaned up, why are you involved in leasing this
land? And I’d also like to know if there are any studies on oil toxicity
in the Arctic Ocean, and how long will it take for oil there to break
down to where it’s not harmful to our marine environment?”

Persily responded: “I think everyone agrees that there is no good way
to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice. I have not read anyone
disagreeing with that statement, so you’re correct on that. As far as
why the federal government and the state government want to lease
offshore, I’m not prepared to answer that. They’re not my leases, to be
real honest with everyone.”

A month after that conference, Shell paid an unprecedented $2.1
billion to the MMS for oil leases in the Chukchi Sea. In October and December 2009, MMS approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells. In the
permit it issued, the MMS concluded that a large spill was “too remote
and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis, even though the
agency acknowledged that such a spill could have devastating
consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to
clean up.

It would be an irony of sorts if the only thing that stood between
the Obama administration and an Arctic disaster-in-the-making was BP’s
present catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

The first oil rush in Arctic waters

This isn’t the first time that America’s Arctic seas have been
exploited for oil. If you want to know more, check out John Bockstoce’s
book, Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western
Arctic. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century,
commercial whalers regularly ventured into those seas to kill Bowhead
whales for whale oil, used as illuminant in lamps and as candle wax. It
was also the finest lubricating oil then available for watches, clocks,
chronometers, and other machinery. Later, after petroleum was
discovered, whale baleen became a useful material for making women’s
corsets.

In 1848, when the first New England whaling ship arrived in Alaska,
an estimated 30,000 Bowhead whales lived in those Arctic seas. Just two
years later, there were 200 American whaling vessels plying those waters
and they had already harvested 1,700 Bowheads.

Within 50 years, an estimated 20,000 Bowhead whales had been
slaughtered. By 1921, commercial whaling of Bowheads ended as whale oil
was no longer needed and the worldwide population of Bowheads had, in
any case, declined to about 3,000—with the very survival of the species in question.

Afterwards, the Bowhead population began to bounce back. Today, more
than 10,000 Bowheads and more than 60,000 Beluga whales migrate through
the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The Bowhead is believed to be perhaps
the longest-lived
mammal. It is now categorized as “endangered” under the Endangered
Species Act of 1973 and receives additional protection under the Marine
Mammal Protection Act of 1972. It would, of course, be unforgivably
ironic if, having barely outlived the first Arctic oil rush, the
species were to fall victim to the second.

Inupiat communities have been hunting Bowheads for more than two
millennia for subsistence food. In recent decades, the International
Whaling Commission has approved an annual quota of 67 whales for
nine Inupiat villages in Alaska. This subsistence harvest is deemed
ecologically sustainable and not detrimental to the recovery of the
population.

My first experience of a Bowhead hunt in Kaktovik was in September
2001. After the whale was brought ashore, everyone—from infants to
elders—gathered around the creature to offer a prayer to the creator,
and thank the whale for giving itself up to, and providing needed food
for, the community. The muktuk (whale skin and blubber) was
then shared among community members in three formal celebrations over
the year to come—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Naluqatuk (a June
whaling feast), two of which I attended.

In 2007,  with writer Peter
  Matthiessen I visited Point Hope and Point Lay, two Inupiat
communities of about 1,000 inhabitants on the Chukchi Sea coast. Point
Hope is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements
in North America. At Point Lay, we accompanied Bill and Marie Tracey on a
17-hour boat ride during a Beluga whale hunt. After the whales were
beached, four generations gathered in a circle to offer prayer and
thanks to the whales. In other words, for such Alaskan Inupiat
communities whales are far more than food on the table. Their cultural
and spiritual identity is inextricably linked to the whales and the
sea. If Shell’s vessels head north, the question is: How long will
these communities survive?

And it’s not just whales and the communities that live off them that
are at stake. Oil drilling, even at a distance, has already taken a
toll in the Arctic. After all, the survival of several Arctic species,
including polar bears, walruses, seals, and sea birds, is seriously
threatened by the widespread melting of sea ice, the result of climate
change (caused, of course, by the use of fossil fuels).

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Interior listed the polar
bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. In
addition, millions of birds use the near-shore Arctic waters, barrier
islands, coastal lagoons, and river deltas for nesting and rearing their
young in spring, and for feeding in summer before they start migrating
to their southern wintering grounds. When the Arctic wind blows in one
direction, nutrient-rich fresh water from the rivers is pushed out into
the ocean; when it blows in the other direction, saltwater from the sea
enters the lagoon. This mixing of fresh and saltwater creates a
nutrient-rich near-shore ecological habitat for birds, many species of
fish, and several species of seals.

All this is my way of saying that if oil drilling begins in the
Arctic seas and anything goes wrong, the nature of the disaster in the
calving, nesting, and spawning grounds of so many creatures would be
hard to grasp.

Don’t let Shell’s drilling ship head north

With the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico ongoing, scientists are
beginning to worry about hurricane season. It officially begins on June
1 and doesn’t officially end until November 30. Any significant
storm entering the Gulf would, of course, only exacerbate the disaster,
moving oil all over the place, while hindering clean-up operations. Now,
think about the Arctic Ocean, where blizzards and storms aren’t
seasonal events, but an all-year-round reality and—thanks (many
scientists believe) to the effects of climate change—their intensity
is actually on the rise. Even in summer, they can blow in at 80 miles
per hour, bringing any oil spill on the high seas very quickly into
ecologically rich coastal areas.

On May 5, Native Village of Point Hope and REDOIL joined 14
environmental organizations in sending a letter to Interior Secretary Salazar. In light of the oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico, it urges him to reconsider his decision to allow Shell to
proceed with its drilling plan. That same week, Secretary Salazar did
finally order a halt to all new offshore drilling projects and asked
Shell to explain how it could improve its ability to prevent a spill—
and, if one happens, to respond to it effectively in the Arctic.

On May 18, Shell responded publicly that it would employ a pre-made dome to contain any leaking
well and deploy chemical dispersants underwater at the source of any oil
leak. From what I gather, both methods have been attempted by BP in the
Gulf of Mexico. The dome has so far failed,
developing hydrates and becoming unusable before ever being placed over
the leak. Scientists now believe that those toxic chemical dispersants
have resulted in significant ecological
devastation to coral reefs and could be dangerous to other sea
life. None of this bodes well for the Arctic.

There is, I’m beginning to realize, another crisis we have to face in
the Gulf, the Arctic, and elsewhere: How do we talk about—and show —what we can’t see? Yes, via video, we can see the gushing oil
at the source of BP’s well a mile below the surface of the water, and
thanks to TV and newspapers we can sometimes see (or read about)
oil-slicked dead birds, dead sea turtles, and dead dolphins washing up
on coastlines.

But what about all the other aspects of life under water that we
can’t see, that won’t simply wash up on some beach, that in terms of our
daily lives might as well be on Mars? What’s happening to the
incredible diversity of marine life inhabiting that mile-deep water, and
what cumulative impact will all that still-spilling oil have on it, on
the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly—in ways we may not
yet be able to imagine—on our lives?

These are questions that desperately need to be asked and answered
before we allow oil ships to head north and drilling to spread to
America’s Arctic Ocean. Keep in mind that there, unlike in the temperate
and tropical oceans where things grow relatively fast, everything grows
very slowly. On the other hand, toxins left behind from oil spills
will take far longer to break down in the frigid climate. Bad as the
Gulf may be, a damaged Arctic will take far more time to heal.

Whatever we can’t see, what we already can see on the front pages of
our newspapers and in the TV news should be more than enough to convince
us not to take seriously the safety claims of giant oil companies desperate
to drill under some of the worst conditions imaginable. Send those
drill rigs into Arctic waters and, sooner or later, you know just what
you’ll get.

If the remaining permits are approved for Shell in the coming weeks,
the Frontier Discoverer will be in the Chukchi Sea less than
six weeks later.

President Obama and Secretary Salazar should stop this folly now. It’s important for them to listen to those who really know what’s at
stake, the environmental groups and human rights organizations of the
indigenous Inupiat communities. It’s time to put a stop to Shell’s
drilling plan in America’s Arctic Ocean for this summer—and all the
summers to come.

Related Links:

Obama’s finally connecting the Gulf spill and clean energy. Champagne time?

The federal government needs to take command of the disaster response

How would you stop the Gulf oil leak?

Governor Bobby Jindal wants President Obama to arrive in Louisiana armed with an emergency permit from Army Corp of Engineers to allow dredging to create man made barrier islands.

Jindal says it’s an absolute necessity to saving marshes and grasslands.

I traveled with a convoy of boats with the governor to the mouth of Pass a l’Outre where thick syrupy oil is destroying more and more each day.

Tall reeds stretching out of the smelly oil-saturated water are slowly being smothered and no wildlife can live in the muck. We could barely breathe just being near the area.

Jindal says a boom was not placed around the area in time and he became more and more agitated with each breath, talking about how this area will likely never be saved.

It was bizarre to see the change in the water as we arrived. The thin oil sheen stretched on and on with its rust-and-burnt-orange colorations. It would then give way to large clumps and globs then a continuous thick syrupy muck.

The absorbent boom that is now in Pass a l’Outre is now fully saturated and needs to be removed.

The smell burns in my throat. It rises from the water with a hint of paint thinner heavy gasoline odor and finishes in the nostrils with the scent of raw sewage. It feels like its pulling air from my lungs.

Also on the boats with Jindal and media types is the Plaquemines Parrish president who not really so jokingly suggested leaving a few BP executives in the oil for a while to truly get a first hand snoot full of the gaseous putrid smell.

Heading out of Pass a l’Outre we pass miles and miles opaque oil sheen.

Law & Order won’t be getting a new lease on life on TNT after all.

TNT has announced that it has no plans to broadcast new episodes of Law & Order. Earlier this month, the crime drama was cancelled by NBC after 20 seasons. TNT was later named as a possible new home for the series after speculation that the rights to the program could be purchased by a cable network. Even L&O creator Dick Wolf was optimistic about forging ahead with a historic 21st season of the gritty drama:

“The patient is not dead,” Wolf told The New York Times last week. “It is in a medically induced coma, and we are hoping for a cure.” Wolf claimed that he was courting offers for the show from other networks, and there might even be a two-hour Law & Order TV movie in the works.

However, The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Turner Broadcasting, which owns TNT, have dismissed the rumors and have no interest in airing new episode of the show.

In a statement Wednesday, network chiefs said: “We are not in current talks, and we are not interested in season 21.”

TNT currently holds the rights to reruns of Law & Order.

Despite the NBA postseason being in its 13th month, basketball fans are still hungry to see their favorite teams. And now they can feed that hunger, literally, as the NBA has licensed the use of team logos on everything from pizzas to toast.

With the recession causing a crimp in $150 official jersey sales, the NBA is looking for more creative ways to squeeze revenue from its licenses. So they’ve sold off rights to put officially licensed NBA logos and images on just about any item possible.

Says the NBA’s head of global merchandising, “As key licensing categories have matured, it’s an ongoing goal of the NBA to expand the brand into places that may attract new customers.” So why branded pizzas? “A lot of people watching NBA games on TV tend to eat,” he explains.

USA Today rounded up these details on the edible products:
•Pizza. The logos, to be available next season for all 30 teams, are made of sugar, starch and food coloring. They’ll add about $5 to the pizza price.

•Toaster logos. Priced at $34.99, NBA Pro Toast Toasters are specially made to “burn” golden brown team logos onto bread as it toasts.

The company that makes the toasters says they also plan on releasing team logo panini sandwich presses.

NBA cooks up edible logos to make mark on pizza and toast [USA Today]

From Green Right Now Reports

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today awarded its Clean Air Excellence Award to America’s Greenest Campus. The winners – the college with the greatest number of participants, and the college with the greatest per-person carbon reduction – were each awarded $5,000 for sustainability projects of their choosing. University of Maryland, College Park (with 2,257 participants) and Arizona’s Rio Salado College (with 4.4% carbon reduced per person) were the victors.

The nationwide contest engaged college students through social media and on-campus organizing, encouraging participants to track their energy use and reduce their carbon footprints.

Carbon output wasn’t all that college students reduced during America’s Greenest Campus. The results reflected $4.25 million in savings and significant energy/resource reductions across the board:

• 186,705 therms of gas
• 156,743 gallons of gasoline
• 154,838 tons of paper
• 28.41 million gallons of water
• 5,984 megawatt hours of electricity

America’s Greenest Campus, the nation’s largest on-campus energy efficiency campaign, is a partnership between SmartPower, the nation’s leading non-profit marketers of clean, renewable energy and energy efficiency, and Efficiency 2.0, the premier online energy efficiency software company for utilities and governments, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

America’s Greenest Campus will re-launch this fall.

Filed under: Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Renault

Renault–Nissan and Daimler recently announced a strategic alliance that promised technology and facility sharing that could result in the saving of over $1 billion per year. We’ll have to wait a while before we can see any parts or factory sharing, but that isn’t stopping the rumormill from running rampant.

The latest tease comes courtesy of Japanese enthusiast rag Best Car, which claims that the Infiniti M and G will share a common platform architecture with the Mercedes E-Class. The move would make sense from a money-saving perspective, as Infiniti could save hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs. Daimler could reap huge sums of savings through increased economies of scale, while likely receiving funding from Renault-Nissan to help pay for the costs of developing the architecture. The two companies are reportedly also looking into sharing engines, factory space in the U.S. and possibly even commercial vans.

But while it makes sense for Daimler to share the E-Class platform with Infiniti from a cash standpoint, we’re taking this bit of news with a healthy dose of skepticism. Infiniti already has an excellent rear-wheel drive platform and there’s a good chance that it’s cheaper to build. But then again, if Daimler and Renault-Nissan are truly serious about saving over $1 billion per year, these are exactly the kinds of parts-sharing agreements that will help them reach their cost-saving goals.

[Source: Pistonheads]

Report: Next Infiniti M and G to share platform with Mercedes-Benz E Class? originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 26 May 2010 16:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Managing what’s being said about them online has become “a defining feature of online life” for many Internet users, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “especially the young.” The center surveyed 2,253 users over the age of 18 about their attitudes and behavior online, and found that younger users in particular are more likely to both search for information about themselves and modify what they share with others, and also tend to be less trusting of social networks and other sharing sites.

Compared with older users, young adults are not only the most attentive to customizing their privacy settings and limiting what they share via their profiles, but they are also generally less trusting of the sites that host their content. When asked how much of the time they think they can trust social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, 28 percent of users ages 18-29 say “never.”

The Center noted that young adults “are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions” and are the most likely to customize what they share and whom they share it with. Among other things, they:

• Take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online (44 percent of young adults say they do this, compared with just 25 percent of those between 50 and 64).
• Change privacy settings: a majority (71 percent) of social networking users between 18 and 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online, compared with just 55 percent of older users.
• Delete unwanted comments: Almost half of those users between 18 and 29 have deleted comments others have made on their profile, compared with just 26 percent of older users.
• Remove their names from photos: Over 40 percent of those users between 18 and 29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged by others, compared with just 18 percent of older users.

The report also notes that managing your reputation online is increasingly important because it’s where employers are searching for information about potential hires (a claim that’s backed up by other research). In fact, 27 percent of employed Internet users were found to work for an employer that has policies about how they present themselves online, including what they can post on blogs and websites or what information they can share about themselves, while 31 percent of employed Internet users said they’ve searched online for information about co-workers, professional colleagues or business competitors.

The Center said its research showed several major trends, including:

• Reputation monitoring via search engines has increased, with more than half of Internet users searching for information about themselves online.
• More people are creating profiles on social networking sites, with over 46 percent of adults saying they have done this, up from just 20 percent in 2006.
• Many also search for information about their friends: Almost half of those surveyed said they searched online to find information about people from their past or existing friends.

There’s a full version of the report available here (PDF link).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stefan

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The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and ARAMARK, the university’s food service provider, are taking steps to reduce the amount of waste that is produced during the Destination ImagiNation Global Finals event on campus this week. ARAMARK plans to serve about 111,000 meals to over 5,400 guests on campus attending the event.

Destination ImagiNation, Inc. is a non-profit organization that provides two educational programs for students to learn and experience creativity, teamwork and problem solving. Global Finals is the culminating event of every Destination ImagiNation season. Each year, hundreds of teams gather at the Global Finals to showcase their Challenge solutions, and the atmosphere is always electric. More than 16,000 people attended Global Finals 2009, which took place in late May at UT.

Waste reduction efforts next week include:

• Trayless Dining – Serving approximately 72,800 trayless meals will save approximately 109,200 gallons of water.

• Reusable Dishware and Compostable Dish and Silverware – Using reusable dishware instead of Styrofoam dishware, which was used last year, will divert 23,000 non-compostable pounds of waste from our landfills. For the outside dining events, ARAMARK will be using a cornstarch based compostable dishware and silverware.

• Reusable Condiment Containers will be used saving 1 metric cube of landfill space this week.

• Composting Coffee Grounds – UT Facilities Services and ARAMARK will compost the used coffee grounds from the Starbucks locations on campus.

• UT Biodiesel Production – Vegetable oil is collected from the Volunteer Dining locations on campus and turned into biodiesel fuel by students for use in UT diesel vehicles. The recycled biodiesel reduces harmful emissions, reduces the use of foreign oil and doesn’t waste the cooking oil.

• Aluminum and Plastic – Facilities Services will be assisting with the recycling of aluminum and plastics used during the event in addition to the compostable products.

For more information, contact UT Facilities Services at 974-7780 or ARAMARK at 974-4111.

Freitag will release their new F23 iPad sleeve around August this year. The renowned bag manufacturers will be putting out sleeves in different colors and as some of you might already know, Freitag uses truck tarps to craft their special items. As for the iPad, it will get the same treatment, but will come with a velvety lining to protect your iPad from prints or scratches. It also comes with a strap system to secure and allow you to access your pad with ease. Email [email protected] to be put on the Preferred Pad list, and you will get notified when and where to get one as soon as the drop happens.

Sorry for the radio silence around here of late. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been traveling like a mad person. The good news is that I just got back from UC Davis, where I had the chance to meet John Conway for the first time in person.

The bad news is: no time for blogging. But I recently received an email pointing out that some links have died in an old post, which I proceeded to update. And that gave me the idea of stooping to a classic blogospheric move in times of sparse content: reposting old stuff! So here is the post in question, from several years ago. If people don’t complain too loudly, maybe we’ll dig up some more ancient blogging and bring it back to the surface.

————

Quantum mechanics, as we all know, is weird. It’s weird enough in its own right, but when some determined experimenters do tricks that really bring out the weirdness in all its glory, and the results are conveyed to us by well-intentioned but occasionally murky vulgarizations in the popular press, it can seem even weirder than usual.

Last week was a classic example: the computer that could figure out the answer without actually doing a calculation! (See Uncertain Principles, Crooked Timber, 3 Quarks Daily.) The articles refer to an experiment performed by Onur Hosten and collaborators in Paul Kwiat’s group at Urbana-Champaign, involving an ingenious series of quantum-mechanical miracles. On the surface, these results seem nearly impossible to make sense of. (Indeed, Brad DeLong has nearly given up hope.) How can you get an answer without doing a calculation? Half of the problem is that imprecise language makes the experiment seem even more fantastical than it really is — the other half is that it really is quite astonishing.

Let me make a stab at explaining, perhaps not the entire exercise in quantum computation, but at least the most surprising part of the whole story — how you can detect something without actually looking at it. The substance of everything that I will say is simply a translation of the nice explanation of quantum interrogation at Kwiat’s page, with the exception that I will forgo the typically violent metaphors of blowing up bombs and killing cats in favor of a discussion of cute little puppies.

So here is our problem: a large box lies before us, and we would like to know whether there is a sleeping puppy inside. Except that, sensitive souls that we are, it’s really important that we don’t wake up the puppy. Furthermore, due to circumstances too complicated to get into right now, we only have one technique at our disposal: the ability to pass an item of food into a small flap in the box. If the food is something uninteresting to puppies, like a salad, we will get no reaction — the puppy will just keep slumbering peacefully, oblivious to the food. But if the food is something delicious (from the canine point of view), like a nice juicy steak, the aromas will awaken the puppy, which will begin to bark like mad.

It would seem that we are stuck. If we stick a salad into the box, we don’t learn anything, as from the outside we can’t tell the difference between a sleeping puppy and no puppy at all. If we stick a steak into the box, we will definitely learn whether there is a puppy in there, but only because it will wake up and start barking if it’s there, and that would break our over-sensitive hearts. Puppies need their sleep, after all.

Fortunately, we are not only very considerate, we are also excellent experimental physicists with a keen grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, according to the conventional interpretations that are good enough for our purposes here, says three crucial and amazing things.

• First, objects can exist in “superpositions” of the characteristics we can measure about them. For example, if we have an item of food, according to old-fashioned classical mechanics it could perhaps be “salad” or “steak.” But according to quantum mechanics, the true state of the food could be a combination, known as a wavefunction, which takes the form (food) = a(salad) + b(steak), where a and b are some numerical coefficients. That is not to say (as you might get the impression) that we are not sure whether the food is salad or steak; rather, it really is a simultaneous superposition of both possibilities.
• The second amazing thing is that we can never observe the food to be in such a superposition; whenever we (or sleeping puppies) observe the food, we always find that it appears to be either salad or steak. (Eigenstates of the food operator, for you experts.) The numerical coefficients a and b tell us the probability of measuring either alternative; the chance we will observe salad is a², while the chance we will observe steak is b². (Obviously, then, we must have a² + b² = 1, since the total probability must add up to one [at least, in a world in which the only kinds of food are salad and steak, which we are assuming for simplicity].)
• Third and finally, the act of observing the food changes its state once and for all, to be purely whatever we have observed it to be. If we look and it’s salad, the state of the food item is henceforth (food) = (salad), while if we saw that it was steak we would have (food) = (steak). That’s the “collapse of the wavefunction.”

You can read all that again, it’s okay. It contains everything important you need to know about quantum mechanics; the rest is just some equations to make it look like science.

Now let’s put it to work to find some puppies without waking them up. Imagine we have our morsel of food, and that we are able to manipulate its wavefunction; that is, we can do various operations on the state described by (food) = a(salad) + b(steak). In particular, imagine that we can rotate that wavefunction, without actually observing it. In using this language, we are thinking of the state of the food as a vector in a two-dimensional space, whose axes are labeled (salad) and (steak). The components of the vector are just (a, b). And then “rotate” just means what it sounds like: rotate that vector in its two-dimensional space. A rotation by ninety degrees, for example, turns (salad) into (steak), and (steak) into -(salad); that minus sign is really there, but doesn’t affect the probabilities, since they are given by the square of the coefficients. This operation of rotating the food vector without observing it is perfectly legitimate, since, if we didn’t know the state beforehand, we still don’t know it afterwards.

So what happens? Start with some food in the (salad) state. Stick it into the box; whether there is a puppy inside or not, no barking ensues, as puppies wouldn’t be interested in salad anyway. Now rotate the state by ninety degrees, converting it into the (steak) state. We stick it into the box again; the puppy, unfortunately, observes the steak (by smelling it, most likely) and starts barking. Okay, that didn’t do us much good.

But now imagine starting with the food in the (salad) state, and rotating it by 45 degrees instead of ninety degrees. We are then in an equal superposition, (food) = a(salad) + a(steak), with a given by one over the square root of two (about 0.71). If we were to observe it (which we won’t), there would be a 50% chance (i.e., [one over the square root of two]²) that we would see salad, and a 50% chance that we would see steak. Now stick it into the box — what happens? If there is no puppy in there, nothing happens. If there is a puppy, we have a 50% chance that the puppy thinks it’s salad and stays asleep, and a 50% chance that the puppy thinks it’s steak and starts barking. Either way, the puppy has observed the food, and collapsed the wavefunction into either purely (salad) or purely (steak). So, if we don’t hear any barking, either there’s no puppy and the state is still in a 45-degree superposition, or there is a puppy in there and the food is in the pure (salad) state.

Let’s assume that we didn’t hear any barking. Next, carefully, without observing the food ourselves, take it out of the box and rotate the state by another 45 degrees. If there were no puppy in the box, all that we’ve done is two consecutive rotations by 45 degrees, which is simply a single rotation by 90 degrees; we’ve turned a pure (salad) state into a pure (steak) state. But if there is a puppy in there, and we didn’t hear it bark, the state that emerged from the box was not a superposition, but a pure (salad) state. Our rotation therefore turns it back into the state (food) = 0.71(salad) + 0.71(steak). And now we observe it ourselves. If there were no puppy in the box, after all that manipulation we have a pure (steak) state, and we observe the food to be steak with probability one. But if there is a puppy inside, even in the case that we didn’t hear it bark, our final observation has a (0.71)² = 0.5 chance of finding that the food is salad! So, if we happen to go through all that work and measure the food to be salad at the end of our procedure, we can be sure there is a puppy inside the box, even though we didn’t disturb it! The existence of the puppy affected the state, even though we didn’t (in this branch of the wavefunction, where the puppy didn’t start barking) actually interact with the puppy at all. That’s “non-destructive quantum measurement,” and it’s the truly amazing part of this whole story.

But it gets better. Note that, if there were a puppy in the box in the above story, there was a 50% chance that it would start barking, despite our wishes not to disturb it. Is there any way to detect the puppy, without worrying that we might wake it up? You know there is. Start with the food again in the (salad) state. Now rotate it by just one degree, rather than by 45 degrees. That leaves the food in a state (food) = 0.999(salad) + 0.017(steak). [Because cos(1 degree) = 0.999 and sin(1 degree) = 0.017, if you must know.] Stick the food into the box. The chance that the puppy smells steak and starts barking is 0.017² = 0.0003, a tiny number indeed. Now pull the food out, and rotate the state by another 1 degree without observing it. Stick back into the box, and repeat 90 times. If there is no puppy in there, we’ve just done a rotation by 90 degrees, and the food ends up in the purely (steak) state. If there is a puppy in there, we must accept that there is some chance of waking it up — but it’s only 90*0.0003, which is less than three percent! Meanwhile, if there is a puppy in there and it doesn’t bark, when we observe the final state there is a better than 97% chance that we will measure it to be (salad) — a sure sign there is a puppy inside! Thus, we have about a 95% chance of knowing for sure that there is a puppy in there, without waking it up. It’s obvious enough that this procedure can, in principle, be improved as much as we like, by rotating the state by arbitrarily tiny intervals and sticking the food into the box a correspondingly large number of times. This is the “quantum Zeno effect,” named after a Greek philosopher who had little idea the trouble he was causing.

So, through the miracle of quantum mechanics, we can detect whether there is a puppy in the box, even though we never disturb its state. Of course there is always some probability that we do wake it up, but by being careful we can make that probability as small as we like. We’ve taken profound advantage of the most mysterious features of quantum mechanics — superposition and collapse of the wavefunction. In a real sense, quantum mechanics allows us to arrange a system in which the existence of some feature — in our case, the puppy in the box — affects the evolution of the wavefunction, even if we don’t directly access (or disturb) that feature.

Now we simply replace “there is a puppy in the box” with “the result of the desired calculation is x.” In other words, we arrange an experiment so that the final quantum state will look a certain way if the calculation has a certain answer, even if we don’t technically “do” the calculation. That’s all there is to it, really — if I may blithely pass over the heroic efforts of some extremely talented experimenters.

Quantum mechanics is the coolest thing ever invented, ever.

Update: Be sure not to miss Paul Kwiat’s clarification of some of these issues.

One of the pictures you see here represents the online future of print journalism in a sleek, easy-to-access open Google web app format. The other comes in a 500-megabyte (that’s half a gigabyte, people) download on a tightly locked-down device.

Above is Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell at Google I/O, showing us the new HTML5-optimized version of last week’s issue. And we expressed our excitement for it at the time. And we’re even more excited about it now that we’ve seen Wired magazine come out with its gianormous 500MB file size for its first iPad issue.

Judging from the screen shots at TiPB (we haven’t gotten a chance to actually use the app yet), the Wired app indeed looks like a beautifully designed translation from print to online (an endeavor I know a thing or two about). But the mere act of having to download the app (Will each update be the full 500MB? We hope not.) doesn’t sound so futuristic to us. No, Google’s SI web app beats the pants off this one.

Don’t believe us? Check out McDonell’s segment from Google I/O after the break. Just like the Wired app, there’s no Flash. (Erm, except for the YouTube video on our site, but that’s changing.) And there’s noo 500MB download. Just pure web goodness.

This is a post by Android Central. It is sponsored by the Android Central Accessories Store

It’s that time again! The BBSync Store in partnership with Mobihand is holding a three day Mobile Heist sale, which offers 10 of the top selling BlackBerry games at 50% off. The sale starts today (May 26th) and runs for three days ending May 28th. With this sale you will get a chance to grab awesome games like Druglord Wars, Pac, Addictive Tower Defense, Labyrinth, Aces Texas Hold’em, and others… All at 50% off! All you have to do is follow the link below to see all the great deals available. Enjoy!

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The “ultimate in road legal quad biking” is how the makers of the Venom Evil describe their creation. If its exclusive designer styling and the splash of shiny chrome on the front crash bars and speedos don’t manage to turn heads, then perhaps the water-cooled 250cc engine, twin exhaust and sporty alloy wheels will. ..
Continue Reading The Venom Evil street legal quad

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