Google has done some pretty amazing doodles over the years adorning its homepage with beautiful graphics to mark important events or occasions. From the first doodle, designed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page themselves, to the gorgeous graphics Google has been getting us used to lately, things have progressed. But, whatever came before it, nothing will prepare you for the latest Google doodle, if you can call it that anymore.
It marks the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, a game few hav… (read more)
Natcore Technology and Vanguard Solar combine to advance the efficiency of solar energy conversion. Natcore Technology is the exclusive licensee, from Rice University, of a thin-film growth technology enabling room-temperature growth of various silicon oxides on silicon wafers in a liquid phase deposition (LPD) process. Natcore’s acquisition of Vanguard Solar will close after appropriate due diligence. …
… “The first-generation products from Vanguard’s method could produce 15%-16% efficiencies at module costs of 60¢ to 70¢ per watt. It is anticipated that second-generation technology could achieve 20% efficiencies at even lower costs per watt.
The investment for production facilities is projected as low as $10 million to $15 million per 100-megawatt to 150-megawatt production capability, as compared with current costs of as much as $250 million for standard solar-cell production facilities.
Vanguard’s production equipment would be designed for insertion into an existing roll-to-roll film-coating line of the sort that has been displaced by the emergence of digital photography. All production materials are widely available and dramatically cheaper than silicon and other thin film systems.
If successfully developed, the process would enable a very cost-efficient production capability in large-scale facilities.” …
Via Natcore: Solar Science Portfolio Expands.
Rocker Bret Michaels is back in Los Angeles hospital after having a warning stroke. It was just yesterday we saw him talking to Oprah and today he is in hospital again, this is really shocking news for the fans.
According to the news posted on Bret’s website he was taken back to the hospital after he complained numbness on the left side of his body, face and hands. According to doctors it is a warning stroke. Tests showed Bret has a hole in his heart which can operated and treated. But this was shocking news to his family and friends. Doctors said this is not related to the brain hemorrhage which he had last month.
Last few weeks have been tough on Bret and his family, but he is in good spirits and hopes everything will be fine in no time. His representative Janna thanked all his fans and people on his website for supporting Bret in tough times. Bret will be fine and he will be back soon in front of us. Janna also said “He is up, walking, talking, continuing his daily rehab and very happy to be alive.”
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The German sacrifice of voting yes to provide support for the eurozone bailout has buoyed European indices.
Germany’s DAX, showing signs of sacrifice, down around .8%
UK’s FTSE, flat
France’s CAC, roughly flat
Italy’s MIB, up 1.32%
Spain IBEX, up 1.48%
Portugal’s PSI, up .67%
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We don’t normally cover desktop Windows, but with all Microsoft’s OS’s now intermingling so much, this particular story did catch our eye.
According to Digitimes, the HP Slate, shown off at CES earlier this year, has not in fact been killed by HP’s purchase of Palm.
According to Monty Wong, vice president of personal computing systems group at HP Taiwan, who they interviewed, the TabletPC is still expected to hit the market before HP’s financial year ends in October this year.
We went on to promise consumers could see a wide range of software and application support at launch for the mobile computing device.
Read more at Digitimes here.
The Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC), located off the northeast coast of Long Island in New York, is one of the United States federal research facility that is responsible for the research and diagnosis to protect United States animal industries and exports against catastrophic economic losses caused by foreign animal disease (FAD) agents that are accidentally or deliberately introduced into the country. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has an important job in the PIADC for they help protect farm animals, farmers and ranchers, and the nation’s farm economy and export markets.
The USDA took over this island for about 50 years and was closed to the public because of the risk associated viruses. It was first introduced to the media in the year 1992. And now, the Department of Homeland Security had announced that this island will be closing soon.
There are a lot of species in the island, also, there are many wild and rare flowers and these are just some of the reasons why the conversation groups are advocating that the PIADC should be close. But the officials are still hoping that the Plum Island will remain as is.
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No es un secreto que Tesla Motors está necesitando dinero e inversiones para mantener a flote la producción futura del Tesla S. Tesla ha logrado un acuerdo con Toyota y básicamente la marca de eléctricos tendría que adquirir la planta de Freemont, California, cerrada desde hace unos meses por Toyota, por ineficiente, para desarrollar allí la base de futuros modelos de eléctricos.
El intercambio de tecnología que vendrá permitirá que Tesla y Toyota perfeccionen sus conocimientos sobre coches eléctricos y tecnología de baterías, aunque creo que en términos prácticos la que más gana por ahora con esto es Tesla, quién podrá impulsar aún más al Tesla S. A Toyota no le interesa el coche eléctrico lo suficiente, por ahora, pero podría hacer uso de mejor tecnología para las baterías que usa en sus híbridos.
Todo esto, mientras Tesla ha prometido cotizar en el mercado de valores y sigue esperando un crédito de parte del gobierno de Obama, de 465 millones, en apoyo a la construcción del Tesla S, un coche eléctrico más o menos accesible y que daría empleo a unas 10.000 personas.
Vía | Automotive News
So Europe’s week is over and we didn’t get a Lehman, so that’s good.
And the liquidation selling is now over?
Why do we think that?
Check out the big snapback in Apple (AAPL), which is up over $5 this morning. That stock had been getting killed on the sell-the-winners trade. At least today, nobody is doing that.
We included Apple in our 12 bellwether charts to watch to see when the meltdown is over >
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Janet Jackson appeared with her new look with the new hair cut she got, she chopped her locks. At present she is promoting her movie “Why did I get married too?” and the photographers caught her when she was leaving Cecconi restaurant in London.
Janet says she decided to get this new look because of a new man in her life who is a wealthy businessman from Qatar Wissam Al Mana. Though they did not confirm the news about their relationship, they were spotted when they were eating together at restaurant. Janet is busy promoting her movie in London which was stopped because of her older brother Michael Jackson’s death.
Janet broke up with her boyfriend, Jermaine Dupri after 7 years of relationship last summer and now she is news with Qatari businessman. She had been seen with him in many times in different restaurants, and they did not deny the news about their relationship either. We are not sure if this is true or not but the way she changed her whole look tells us something is going on for sure!
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Starting with Shrek Forever After, three AMC theaters in New York will begin selling $20 adult movie tickets on their IMAX screens. Even for a loose-moneyed film buff like me, that’s just too much. More »
IMAX – Movies – Arts – Filmmaking – Film Formats
Today is Dennis Blair’s last day in the office as Director of National Intelligence. His farewell message to the intelligence community workforce is admirably chipper, calling them “true heroes, just like the members of the Armed Forces, firefighters, and police whose job it is to keep our nation safe.” For excellent backstories on some of the active policy issues implicated in Blair’s departure, Marc Ambinder has an impressively comprehensive post. Mark Hosenball too. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper, who’s dual-hatted as Blair’s deputy for the massive Defense Department-hosted intelligence apparatus, appears to be a leading candidate to replace Blair, but I’ve been warned against reading too much into any one candidate.
Many of the murmurings I’ve heard from intelligence veterans have concerned the untenability of the DNI position, an intended fix to the old CIA-centric intelligence leadership that’s created an odd hybrid of management over 16 agencies without correlative budgetary authority and a perhaps naive distance from active intelligence operations. If people on TV are upset that a series of failed-but-attempted domestic terrorist attacks have happened on “Blair’s watch,” as I’ve heard more than one cable pundit say over the past 18 hours, they’re misunderstanding the DNI. S/he’s not supposed to prevent those attempts from happening. S/he’s supposed to organize, structure and resource the intelligence community so relevant agencies can prevent those attempts from happening. That’s why the Senate intelligence committee report that found a disorganized National Counterterrorism Center — something the DNI is responsible for — was damaging. What the DNI should also be doing is focusing the intelligence community around answering why these domestic terror attempts are happening, particularly using American citizens as operatives.
If that operational distance sounds untenable, that might be because five years of unhappy experience since the 9/11 Commission sought greater intelligence consolidation is prompting a re-think in intelligence circles. When I asked a veteran career intelligence officer with experience in various intel agencies what he made of Blair’s departure, the response I got back started with “Good!” Like several intelligence officers who serve out in the dangerous parts of the world, the prospect of an increasingly top-heavy bureaucracy distanced from field concerns is an unpleasant one.
“Blair’s biggest move was to try to grab turf from CIA over station chiefs, instead of doing serious work like developing a plan to better integrate [intelligence community] bureaucracies, where joint-minded personnel and promotion policies could create positive change. But that’s hard work and not sexy,” the intelligence officer emailed. “The current system creates bureaucrats whose focus is building their empire — more bodies, more money — all in the name of national security. His position was created to fix the intelligence bureaucratic failures, but growing bureaucracies to fix bureaucracies is a losing bet.”
In fairness to Blair, you can find an effort at “joint-minded personnel and promotion policies” — or, at the least, a commitment to the idea of them — in his August 2009 National Intelligence Strategy (PDF).
But don’t expect either the Obama administration or Congress to have any appetite for root-and-branch restructuring of the DNI position. That would be a major structural reform five years after the last major structural reform, and the national agenda is already too clogged to tolerate such a thing. Instead, expect the confirmation hearings of whoever ultimately replaces Blair to be a colloquy on what statutory changes are necessary to make the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a more coherent structure.
Whether that’s ultimately a laudable goal is up for debate. In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst, Robert Hutchings, testified to Congress that the creation of the DNI itself reflected what he called a “Coordination Myth” about intelligence. That myth, he said, was
that it is somehow possible to “coordinate” the work of hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of agencies operating in nearly every country of the world. Anyone who has worked in complex organizations knows, or should know, that it is possible to coordinate only a few select activities and that there are always tradeoffs, because every time you coordinate some activities you are simultaneously weakening coordination among others. To cite just one example, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center may have enhanced interagency coordination among terrorist operators, which is a good thing, but it has surely weakened coordination between them and the country and regional experts. The net result is that the Intelligence Community is probably stronger in tactical counter- terrorist coordination but is surely weaker in strategic counterterrorism. While we are looking for the next car bomb, we may be missing the next generation of terrorist threats.
Anyone observing the current debates over drone strikes, increased radicalization and their relationship surely recognizes the current relevance of Hutchings’ fear. When I asked him what he thought about the next DNI, he quipped, “Please quash those burgeoning rumors that I will be tapped.”
That harmless game of Truth or Dare—you know, the one you play when you have no intention of sharing past indiscretions—just got a techy new twist that may make it harder to fib. At the very least, it could open you up to all manner of accusation and humiliation. Let’s play! THQ, a video game company best known for releasing a lot of licensed WWE and UFC titles, might see some smackdowns in the living room when Truth or Lies debuts in the fall. The "party" game, in development now for the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, provides a bunch of "thought-provoking questions," according to its press materials. And with a "proprietary voice calibration system" that works with a USB mic or Xbox 360 wireless mic, the game will measure the stress level in players’ voices, acting like an on-the-spot lie detector. No detective required! So, parents can grill their kids (let’s just guess they’ll substitute their own questions) and gauge the answers in front of the whole family—all in the name of fun! I want to get a look at this ad campaign, which should include this caveat: Thumb tacks (for shoving into your feet and cheating the system) not included. Or maybe that’s the deluxe version.
—Posted by T.L. Stanley
Bono’s got back trouble. According to his rep, the U2 frontman underwent emergency surgery on his back in a Munich hospital Friday after injuring himself during rehearsals for the next leg of the band’s world tour.
“Bono has today undergone emergency back surgery for an injury sustained during tour preparation training,” the spokesperson said. “He was admitted to a specialist neuro surgery unit in a Munich hospital. Bono will spend the next few days there, before returning home to recuperate. Once his condition has been assessed further, a statement will be made regarding the impact on forthcoming tour dates.”
The Irish rocker had been preparing for the North American leg of U2’s 360 Degree World Tour which is due to kick off in Salt Lake City on June 3.
Dr. Dinan cookes up a spicy M3.
Back in the 1970s, a collegian named Steve Dinan kissed off an engineering career to bust his knuckles pumping up BMWs. One of his turbocharged Ultimate Driving Machines first laid a patch on these pages in 1988, and since then, we’ve tested eight Dinan BMWs, more or less melting for them all.
Keep Reading: Dinan S3-R BMW M3 – Specialty File
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Logitech is one of the first companies to bring a device based on the newly announced Google TV platform to market, the company said today at Google I/O. The company calls its as-of-yet unnamed product a “companion set-top box,” meaning that you connect it to your TV set as well as your TiVo, your DISH set-top box or whatever else you have on your living-room shelf. Consumers will essentially daisy-chain these devices via HDMI and then use Logitech’s box to control all devices in the chain.
Logitech’s box will be available in the fall. The company hasn’t made any information about pricing available yet, but a spokesperson told me today at a Logitech press event that DISH subscribers will be able to get a subsidized box through the satellite TV provider. Logitech gave members of the press a really short demo of the device, mostly showing off how it plays well with other devices while putting lesser emphasis on the actual Google platform. It also showed off two remote control apps for Android and iPhone OS that will be available at launch time.
The Logitech box prototype shown at the event featured two HDMI ports, as well as two USB ports, an IR blaster and an Ethernet port. It will initially be sold with a compact-sized keyboard, and there will be a camera for video chats available as an add-on.
Logitech’s CEO Jerry Quindlen told me that part of the reason the company embraces Google TV is the option to extend the TV experience, which in turn gives Logitech a chance to sell more peripherals. “People want to access the full web”, he said, and that adds the desire for new devices that people are used from a PC or web experience.
Quindlen also said that it’s not about adding another box to your living room, but about enabling a complete Internet experience, and said he believes people are willing to pay for that. Watch the complete interview below.
Related content on GigaOm Pro: TV Apps: Evolution from Novelty to Mainstream (subscription required)
Ah, Perfect 10. The adult content company has spent the last decade or so engaged in one copyright lawsuit after another, accusing pretty much every search engine out there of copyright infringement for hosting thumbnails of images that others uploaded. It has lost repeatedly. And yet, it keeps on suing. At some point, you have to wonder if its legal budget might have been better spent on, I don’t know, actually innovating and giving people a reason to buy. It looks like yet another of its legal theories isn’t working out so well in court. paperbag was the first of a few of you to send in the news that the district court in California’s Southern District has refused to grant an injunction against Rapidshare, suggesting that, as a mere file locker, Rapidshare would not be liable for the infringement done by its users.
Amusingly, the ruling came out just a day before a bunch of US politicians tagged Rapidshare as one of the worst copyright offenders out there, and suggested sanctions should be made against Germany for not stopping Rapidshare. Funny, then, that a US court also doesn’t seem to think Rapidshare is breaking copyright law…
Of course, this was just the ruling over the request for a preliminary injunction. TorrentFreak’s headline jumps the gun a bit in saying a court found Rapidshare “not guilty” for infringement. It sounds like we haven’t quite reached that stage yet. This was just a request for an injunction before the actual case goes to trial. That said, at this point, I can’t find a copy of the actual ruling, and the only information to go off of is Rapidshare’s own press release, which states “The court rejected the application in its entirety. In its ruling, the court stated that as a file-hosting company, RapidShare cannot be accused of any infringements of copyrights.” That sounds like the court said Rapidshare qualified for DMCA safe harbors, but without the full ruling, we don’t know for sure — and it’s entirely possible that Rapidshare is exaggerating the ruling.
If anyone has access to the actual ruling, and are willing to share it, it could be interesting (and potentially relevant to other ongoing cases, such as the Viacom v. YouTube case). Once I’ve seen a copy I’ll either update this post or post again, if the details warrant a separate post.
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Printmaking was a new technology in the 16th century, and artists who created prints for scientific texts not only illustrated the books, they enabled scientific advances by helping early scientists to visualize findings in ways they hadn’t before, according to curators of a new exhibit sponsored by the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.
The exhibit, “Paper Worlds: Printing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” is on the second floor of the Science Center in the temporary exhibit space managed by the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. It was created by 10 graduate students and a Harvard paper conservator studying the history of science and the history of art and architecture. It was the product of a graduate student seminar, “Prints and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” taught by Susan Dackerman, the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museum, and by Katharine Park, the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science.
Students who signed up for the class were involved in a semester-long exhibit-building exercise that included conducting background research, searching Harvard’s various museum collections for appropriate material, designing and building the exhibit itself, and even creating a 100-page catalog and accompanying Web material.
Adam Jasienski, a graduate student in the history of art and architecture, said a major benefit of the class was being able to handle so much historical material that is studied in other classes, but that students rarely get to see.
“I’m an early modernist, but we don’t have a class that gets you so close to these objects,” Jasienski said.
Stephanie Dick, a graduate student in the history of science, agreed, saying that the course provided a hands-on lesson in material culture.
“I find it interesting in the history of science, we are interested in material culture, but we rarely really deal with materials,” Dick said. “This class was an in-your-face experience in the materiality of materials.”
The idea for the class grew out of a series of seminars on prints and knowledge that Dackerman and Park collaborated on over the past several years. It is an unusual collaboration, teaming up the seemingly disparate disciplines of art history and the history of science. But Dackerman and Park’s take on the importance of printmaking to early scientific efforts binds the two disciplines together.
“Artists were already looking at natural objects and describing them in detail, but scholars weren’t,” Park said. “The visual skills of looking and seeing, which are part of the skill set of artists, began to be integrated into the skill set of doctors and medical professionals. Scientists became more interested in the details of scientific reality.”
Robin Kelsey, the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and chair of the Harvard University Committee on the Arts, said that although there have been student-created exhibits at Harvard before, what’s special about the printmaking exhibit is that its creation was integrated into the course, as opposed to the individual student efforts that resulted in most prior student-created exhibitions.
“To my mind, this is exemplary. It’s a terrific initiative and a great way to bring the collections and students together and produce new ways of thinking,” Kelsey said.
Kelsey said he believes this sort of effort will be happening more because the University is committed to making its collections’ vast resources a more integral part of student education.
Associate Provost for Arts and Culture Lori Gross echoed Kelsey’s comments, saying that better integrating the collections into Harvard’s educational mission is a key recommendation of the 2008 report of the Task Force on the Arts.
“‘Paper Worlds’ is an eloquent manifestation of a key recommendation of the Task Force on the Arts,” Gross said. “By integrating Harvard’s vast collections with innovative courses, the power of these amazing resources can reverberate through faculty, museum curators, and students to enrich the University as a whole.”
The exhibit, Dackerman said, is interdisciplinary, drawing on materials from several Harvard museums, including the Houghton Library, the Countway Library of Medicine, the Botany Libraries at the Harvard University Herbaria, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.
“The students used the vast resources within the Harvard collections to create an interdisciplinary exhibition on how printmaking enabled the production of new knowledge in the fields of botany, anatomy, astronomy, cartography, [and others],” Dackerman said. “It allowed knowledge to be conceptualized in new ways. Printmakers’ roles were not merely that of illustrators, but as participants in the creation of knowledge in those proto-scientific fields.”
The exhibit itself is organized around several themes: Thinking Visually, which emphasized the relationships between early modern theories of cognition and emotion; Animating Bodies, exploring how anatomical prints were used to produce knowledge of the body; Constructing Scale, illustrating that the prints often showed details and features beyond simple reflections of their subject matter; Printing Time, exploring engraved instruments such as sundials in relationship to printed images depicting the passage of time; and Making Prints, explaining the printmaking process itself.
The exhibit features several notable pieces, including a 16th century botanical encyclopedia and the woodblock used to make its intricate prints, sundials and engravings, single-leaf sheets and book illustrations, as well as several scientific instruments.
“Paper Worlds: Printing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” is on display through Aug. 27. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Mondays through Fridays.
About 15 hours after Massey CEO Don Blankenship told Congress that worker safety is the company’s top priority, another Massey miner died in West Virginia, The Associated Press reports.
State of West Virginia spokesman Hoy Murphy says 55-year-old James Erwin of Delbarton died about 6 a.m. Friday.
Murphy says Erwin was pinned between a piece of heavy equipment and the wall at Massey’s Ruby Energy mine in Mingo County on May 10.
The Ruby Energy Mine — one of the 57 operations highlighted last month by the Mine Safety and Health Administration for having a troubling safety record — has racked up 82 safety citations since April 5, when 29 miners were killed (and another seriously injured) at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in nearby Raleigh County. Twenty-seven of those violations were deemed “significant and substantial,” indicating that they are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness.”
It would appear that Sonic 4 has been delayed until the “latter half of 2010.” That’s the bad news. The good news? One, there’s a new trailer. Two, it’ll also come out for the iPhone and iPod touch (in addition to the platforms we already knew about). Hear that, Nintendo?
The full title of the game is Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, which is something of a mouthful. I’ll just say Sonic 4 from here on out.
In any event, the game has been delayed in order to “allow for more careful focus on the design of each level and to provide additional polish that an important game like this demands, ultimately providing fans with an unrivaled classic Sonic feel.”
Sonic 4 is a perfect fit for the iPhone. I mean, the controls consist entirely of holding the D-Pad left then occasionally pressing the jump button.
It’s probably too late to call anything on the iPhone a “killer app,” but Sonic 4 certainly fits the mold.
Filed under: Car Buying, Budget, Hatchback, Mazda
You only have two more months to wait for the Mazda2 to appear in your local showroom, but you can start practicing your mixing and matching right now with the newly freed dealer order guide. The 2011 Mazda2 starts at $13,980 plus a $750 destination charge and goes all the way up to $16,980, including destination charges for the top-flight automatic Touring model. That last figure is actually $945 more than the larger Mazda3, so if you might want to crunch some numbers if you’re pondering going high-end, but even if you do, you’re still looking pretty sweet against competitors like the Ford Fiesta, Honda Fit and Hyundai Accent.
On top of the a 100-horsepower, 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine that comes with the car, you can play around with options such as fog lights, portable Garmin navigation, a Motorola hands-free device and a kayak carrier. Check out the guide in our gallery below and let the configuration games begin.
Gallery: 2011 Mazda2 Dealer Order Guide
Gallery: 2011 Mazda2
[Source: Mazda via Inside Line]
2011 Mazda2 dealer order guide surfaces on the interwebs originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 21 May 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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