Category: News

Posted by Rick Pearson at 3:02 p.m.

SPRINGFIELD—Republican governor candidate Sen. Bill Brady today said he will not revisit the issue of the way he released income-tax information to the public last week and defended his decision not to release copies of his tax returns.

Brady’s campaign allowed reporters to view and take notes off them during a three-hour period at his Springfield campaign headquarters last Friday. Today, the Republican state senator from Bloomington said he didn’t offer actual copies of his return because he didn’t want competitors to his home-building business waving them at prospective home buyers.

Brady’s tax information showed that he paid no federal income taxes in 2008, based on a loss of $116,679 and paid no federal tax last year because of the effects of losses and a federal stimulus tax break on his adjusted gross income of $119,910.



Speaking to reporters after an appearance at a Sangamon County Republican luncheon, Brady was asked why he made the decision to choose Springfield for viewing his tax information instead of the much larger media center of Chicago.



“I think we’ve often criticized governors for not living in Springfield, not being in the state capital,” Brady said, referring to complaints raised about disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s avoidance of Springfield. “We picked a location–the state of Illinois’ capital.”



Brady said no reporters who viewed his tax returns said they needed more than the three hour time period he allotted. But he said those calling for him to release copies of his tax returns, as many politicians do, don’t “understand the competitive nature of my business.”



“I have business partners. We’re in a retail business. We’re in a business where we sit down and we try to sell a home to people, and I don’t feel it’s proper that my competitors should have a copy of my tax returns that they’re going to show people when we’re negotiating about whether or not we’re going to build them a home or not,” Brady said.



Brady, however, had no problems touting his business during his talk to Sangamon County Republicans. He noted Brady Homes is involved with two subdivisions in Sangamon County “if you’re looking for a new house,” and touted a federal tax credit for home purchases that expires at the end of this month.”



“Just a little plug. Brady Homes is the name of that company, if you didn’t know. Help build the economy,” Brady said. Later, he told reporters that it was “important people know I’m a businessman who is struggling just like most businesses I talk to in Illinois.”

DJIA: Up 122 points to 11,167.

NASDAQ: Up 40 points to 2511.

S&P 500: Up 15 points to 1206.

Commodities:
Oil: Up 2.5% or $2.07 to $85.29 a barrel.
Gold: Down 0.3% or $4.20 to $1167.60 an ounce.
Silver: Down 2.1% or $0.38 to $18.52 an ounce.

Now here’s what you need to know as you leave work today:

• Dendreon (DNDN) gets its prostate cancer drug, Provenge, approved by the FDA. Shares were up 26% at the close.
• Senator Carl “Shitty” Levin is looking to ban banks from participating in proprietary trading.
• The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to worsen and has lowered both BP and Transocean’s market cap significantly.
• Analyst Dave Rosenberg tells us that Greece is going to default no matter what happens.
• Tim Geithner and the Treasury vow to crack down on mortgage servicers. Could this be the end of subprime as we know it?

Join the conversation about this story »

A whole bunch of people have sent in variations on this story, which involves scientist Michael Mann, one of the main figures involved in the recent (misleading and totally blown out of proportion) controversy over climate change research, threatening legal action against people who made a satire video, which includes his image. Honestly, it’s hard to think of a move more likely to backfire than this. His lawyers should have done everything in their power to talk him out of making such a threat. Think about it:

• You have groups who want publicity making fun of him
• These groups also want a legal battle with him where they might be able to gather additional info from him
• They made a clearly legally protected video

Sending a legal threat here not only doesn’t work, because the legal basis is suspect, but it plays perfectly into the hands of those who made the video in the first place. No matter what you think of Mann’s work, it’s hard not to think that it’s an incredibly dumb thing to threaten legal action in this situation. The actual cease & desist letter also raises some legal threats that have little basis in the law. It threatens the group that posted the video for using Dr. Mann’s likeness, claiming that it was pulled off the Penn State website, and “is not authorized, and infringes on various copyrights.” First of all, merely making use of a publicity photo in the video is unlikely to actually infringe on anyone’s copyrights, but more to the point, it almost certainly does not infringe on Mann’s copyrights. If anyone holds a copyright on that image, it would be the photographer who took the image or (more likely) Penn State. The lawyers do cc a photographer — so perhaps they’re suggesting he holds the copyrights, but they make no claim that they represent him.

Either way, it’s hard not to see the video as protected free speech. The use of his likeness is not (as the letter claims) for commercial purposes, but to mock him. It clearly hurts his feelings, but that’s not illegal. The claims of defamation are also ridiculous. Even if you believe that Mann’s infamous comments were taken out of context, there’s a widespread discussion over what happened with the data in question, and arguing that it’s defamatory to make such a claim is a stretch.

Yet again, we see a legal cease & desist threat being used not for an actual legal reason, but because someone doesn’t like something on the internet… and the result, in true “Streisand Effect” fashion, is to call significantly more attention to the content they hoped would disappear. This video wasn’t going to convince people one way or the other in this debate. People who want to believe that climate change data was falsified were going to believe it no matter what. Those who feel otherwise aren’t going to have their mind changed by a silly video. Threatening legal action does nothing but draw more attention to the the issue.

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In the last 3 years, car sharing services such as ZipCar have seen tremendous growth. According to some estimates, between 2007 and 2009 the industry saw a 117% increase in the number of users in North America. By 2016, that same study expects there to be 4.4 million car sharing users in North America and 5.5 million in Europe.

So it’s no surprise that the number of players in the car sharing world has been increasing at a breakneck pace. And now the next step in its evolution seems to be coming to fruition: renting your own personal car out to complete strangers for a price you set but through an online service that organizes the whole thing.

Known as personal car sharing or distributed car sharing, the concept is very intriguing… and runs somewhat contrary to how many people view their cars.

(more…)

Saab has lined up a couple of interesting new models, with the new 2012 Saab 9-5 Wagon, also known as the SportCombi, the most interesting to make it to the market. A fresh image of the commuter has surfaced courtesy of a sales presentation and the leaked image reveals the sleek design with a distinctive profile. It gets sloping C pillars which will, by all means, reduce the luggage capacity of the estate wagon and it will hold 540 liters of cargo with the seats folded down. The wagon will share the engine from its sedan variant which runs on three options — 162 kW turbocharged 2.0-liter petrol, a 118 kW 2.0-liter turbodiesel, and a turbocharged 2.8-liter V6 with 221 kW output. The 2012 Saab 9-5 Wagon will probably break cover at the Paris Motor Show later this year.

Among all the hype of the Palm buyout, it’s good to see that Palm can stay focused and still be churning out some updates for webOS. The update is intended to fix some known, very annoying issues, and improve overall performance. This update is nothing to write home about, but it is an update to refine an already beautiful OS. The full changelog as listed on Verizon’s software update site is listed below.

Enhancements:

• Easier to use Bluetooth.®
  • Improved battery life when turning off Bluetooth without unpairing a device.
• Displayed time feature is more accurate.
  • Automatic updates for Daylight Saving Time.
• Easier connection management.
  • More consistent EV-DO connections when switching from Wi-Fi to CDMA.
• Better Touchstone™ charger integration.
  • The screen will now turn off and display the lock icon and time after the Pixi Plus is docked with the Touchstone charger.
• Newly taken photos and videos do not overwrite existing ones.
  • Improved picture display when cropping a picture for a contact.

Improvements:

• Pinch to zoom now works in more applications.
• The onscreen volume slider now appears correctly.
• The forward gesture now works in the browser.
• The back gesture now returns to the file list screen in certain applications.
• The shutter sound is more responsive when taking a picture.
• A single press of the power button now reliably wakes up the display.
• The LCD reset issue has been resolved.

To update your Verizon Wireless webOS device manually, run the ‘Updates’ application. Otherwise, your phone will automatically update over the next 48 hours. If you have already updated your Pre Plus or Pixi Plus and notice some differences not stated, feel free to share them with us!

Via Engadget
Download: Pre Plus | Pixi Plus

According to sources familiar with the matter, Microsoft has cancelled Courier, the folding, two-screen prototype tablet that was first uncovered by Gizmodo. More »

Newegg suggests you buy, among other things,a Hitachi Magic Wand for your Mom for Mother’s Day. Um.

I guess we shouldn’t judge. The reviews on Amazon are overall pretty positive… (possibly NSFW) We’re just glad Newegg didn’t suggest bundling some of those attachments.

(Thanks, madanthony!)

Filed under: Classics, Coupe, Performance, Europe, Bugatti, Design/Style

Bugatti buffs know that only one Type 64 was ever built way back in 1939. What they may not know is that an extra two Type 64 chassis were stamped at the factory in Molsheim but sadly never finished. That is, never finished until now. One of the two Type 64 chassis wound up in the hands of car collector extraordinaire Peter Mullin and is currently on naked display at his new Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, CA. Thanks to a design contest at Pasadena’s Art Center, Stewart Reed Design will be building a brand new body for chassis #64002. A new gullwing body, we should add. Continue reading, after the jump.

Photos by Drew Phillips / Copyright (C)2010 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading Never-built Bugatti Type 64 Coupe to be resurrected on Chassis #002

Never-built Bugatti Type 64 Coupe to be resurrected on Chassis #002 originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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»  Acer will launch its full line of mobile internet devices by the end of May. [PCWorld]

»  Skyfire releases its 2.0 platform as well as an Android client that allows users to play Flash video. [Pocket-lint]

»  Verizon and TeleNav team up to offer enterprise features, including the ability to track employee locations. [CrackBerry.com]

»  CBS (NYSE: CBS) Mobile wins its second Emmy, this time for its NCAA March Madness on Demand (MMOD) iPhone app. A few days ago the company won an Emmy for interactivity. [Release]

Reflecting on the Afghanistan counterinsurgency diagram in the NYTimes, Scott Johnson asked me whether I found causal loop diagrams (CLDs) to be useful. Some system dynamics hardliners don’t like them, and others use them routinely.

Here’s a CLD:

And here’s it’s stock-flow sibling:

My bottom line is:

• CLDs are very useful, if developed and presented with a little care.
• It’s often clearer to use a hybrid diagram that includes stock-flow “main chains”. However, that also involves a higher burden of explanation of the visual language.
• You can get into a lot of trouble if you try to mentally simulate the dynamics of a complex CLD, because they’re so underspecified (but you might be better off than talking, or making lists).
• You’re more likely to know what you’re talking about if you go through the process of building a model.
• A big, messy picture of a whole problem space can be a nice complement to a focused, high quality model.

Here’s why:

There are well documented conceptual problems with CLD notation. More importantly, it’s easy to make very bad CLDs. Just use lots of crossing lines (spaghetti), variable names with no sense of direction, neglect to label loop and link polarity, and mix in some clip art for good measure. (There’s some good advice on CLD notation here, but replace the S and O arrow polarity notation with + and -). As a practical matter, it’s been my experience that most causal loop diagrams leave a lot to the imagination, which you can easily discover by attempting to formalize one as a model. You’ll discover unstated parameters, aggregation questions, and other leaps of logic.

The Afghanistan diagram share’s many of those problems. It has the dreaded spaghetti topology. It doesn’t indicate loop polarities. Some variables are really concept areas of interest, rather than quantities that can vary. There’s no way to translate it directly to equations (however, the rumor mill has it that there is an underlying model).

Still, the Afghanistan diagram and other messy mind maps like it aren’t useless, as many NYT commenters asserted. First, it might be a good way to summarize the output of a brainstorming session. In that case, the goal is to surface as many relationships as possible up front. Detailed critique of each link or loop along the way tends to bog down such generative processes. If you don’t later drill into the details of the spaghetti to sort out the dynamics, you might remain as muddled as you were when you started, but that doesn’t make the spaghetti intrinsically useless.

Similarly, a spaghetti diagram can be a useful overview of the complicated territory covered by a model. With most audiences, you’d be crazy to start with the full diagram – you’ll just turn people off. Instead, the presentation should build up the big picture from smaller pieces, reflecting on the contribution of each link or loop to the overall dynamics. (Apparently this is how the Afghanistan diagram was actually presented). Of course, that only works if you have an underlying model; otherwise the incomplete formalization of a CLD makes it really easy to draw spurious conclusions. Without a model, all you really have is a dynamic hypothesis – which still might be a lot more than you had before you drew the diagram.

In my own work, I don’t use CLDs very much. I prefer stock-flow diagrams, and I can hardly get out of bed without a real model. Still, thinking back, I can think of two CLDs that have been very successful.

The first (below, click to enlarge) is a work product from the first day of a collaborative workshop on emissions offsets, which Ron Suiter and I ran in California. With support of WSPA, we assembled industry, regulators, NGOs, and offset providers to talk about the pros and cons of including offsets in AB32 regulations (particularly the cap & trade system). Immediately two worldviews emerged: offsets are essential, and offsets are a scam. This diagram explains both worldviews as competing perceptions about the relative strength of various feedback loops in the diagram.

Like most CLDs, this one’s not completely explicit about the “physics” of the system. Still, it communicated very well. I walked through it at the start of the second day of the workshop, and their were lots of positive comments and subsequent references to the framework. It’s important to note that I didn’t present this as a monolith – I built it up piece by piece (as you can see in the report), with color coding and references to the elements of the first day conversation that backed up each link or loop. I probably could translate this to a stock-flow diagram, but there’s no way I could have created and described it within the time available.

The second is a map of the transport fuels policy space, developed to support conversations with the Energy Commission and others in California:

The colored regions represent three models that were in use at the CEC and CalTrans at the time (around 2005, following AB2076 study). The key insight is not so much the about the specifics of the structure, but that the existing models don’t span the space. The supply and demand side (yellow & red) are covered by separate models, and the only integration is provided by a general equilibrium model (green) with incompatible aggregation and units of measure. I do present this diagram all at once, but only to subject matter experts who can quickly recognize the content.

This model does have a working model counterpart that maps more or less one to one to the CLD concepts:

I find that the stock-flow version (even with a few hidden parameters, as above) does freak people out on first contact, at least if they aren’t familiar with stock-flow diagrams. However, when presented in digestible chunks, it does make sense to them.

It’s interesting to contrast my diagrams with a hybrid stock-flow representation of the transport space, from Jeroen Struben and John Sterman’s work on the alt fuel/vehicle transition:

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

It’s a race against time for people here in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. A massive oil spill looms less than 20 miles from the coastal town of Venice, threatening wildlife and the livelihoods of people who work in the area. More than 700,000 feet of orange boom have been stretched along the Louisiana coastline in anticipation of the inevitable- oil reaching shore. Louisiana has a complex and fragile eco-system, which is already suffering from the effects of coastal erosion. Some worry the oil spill may spell its death knell. Experts increased their estimates and now say 5000, not 1000, barrels of oil are spewing into the water after a drilling rig exploded off shore last week.

There are about 700 shrimpers in Venice. Many have volunteered to help in the effort to shield the coastline with a boom, but so far they haven’t mobilized. Earlier today, our photographers were able to get out near where the spill happened and where the cleanup efforts are underway. They say they noticed the smell long before they got near any oily water. The area near the site of the spill, they say, is black. In video they captured, you can see the wake of the back of the boat. It’s brown.

Square Enix has already announced and detailed (qjnet/news/square-enix-announces-dlc-packs-for-just-cause-2.html) upcoming DLC for Just Cause 2. But in case you need more convincing than text descriptions of the new goods, here’s a taste of what’s to come.

Ah, memories. 

Eight days before the NASDAQ peaked in March, 2000, Palm (PALM) was spun off from 3com.  That day, on a split-adjusted basis, the stock (briefly) hit $803.

(No, I didn’t cover the stock in my former life as a Dotcom Bubble Analyst, so don’t blame this one on me.  Yes, if I had covered it, I probably would have rated it Outperform or something.)

Floyd Norris has the call (March 3, 2000)…

Continuing a wave of enthusiasm for companies involved in the Internet and wireless communications, investors snapped up shares yesterday of Palm Inc., the maker of the popular Palm Pilot hand-held devices.

The shares traded as high as $165, more than four times the offering price of $38, before retreating to slightly more than $95.

At that price, the market is valuing Palm at $53.3 billion, far more than the value of its parent, the 3Com Corporation, which still owns most of Palm. Palm’s market value is higher than that of many far larger companies, including General Motors, Chevron and McDonald’s.

Keep reading at the NYT >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• 10 Reasons Palm Failed And Had To Sell To HP
• Why HP Is Buying Palm And Why It Will Fail
• Palm Is On The Block And Getting Desperate

Experts offer up their top picks of web 2.0 apps that are having a big impact on teaching and learning in higher education.

[Source: Campus Technology]

Connecticut Post columnist Ken Dixon has been known to be candid.

As a reporter for decades, he has seen many politicians come and go. So, as a veteran journalist, he was asked to be the moderator this week at a Bridgeport hotel for a debate that featured 10 aspirants for the governor’s office.

Before the debate even started, Dixon looked down the long, long table at the 10 candidates and said to the crowd: “I, like you, am looking forward to the conventions next week when half of these people will disappear.”

The crowd that gathered for the debate, sponsored by the Bridgeport Regional Business Council, both laughed and groaned.

The Republican and Democratic state conventions will be held on the same days – May 21 and May 22 – and they will both be held in Hartford. The Democrats will have 1,834 delegates at the Expo Center in the North Meadows, while the Republicans will have 1,465 delegates at the Connecticut Convention Center.

Luke Timmerman wrote:

[Updated: 12:55 pm Pacific] Dendreon’s groundbreaking new immune-booster for prostate cancer helps men live longer, and it will not be cheap. The Seattle-based biotech company (NASDAQ: DNDN) said it is planning to charge $93,000 per patient for the new drug.

The product, sipuleucel-T (Provenge) will cost $31,000 per infusion, and patients will get three infusions over a one-month period, chief operating officer Hans Bishop said today on a conference call with analysts. That price is far higher than the $62,000 average estimate that Wall Street analysts had been expecting. Dendreon stock surged more than 25 percent to over $50 after the company disclosed the price today. [Updated with stock price.]

The company made history early today when the FDA cleared sipuleucel-T (Provenge) for men with prostate cancer that has spread through the body and no longer responds to standard hormone-deprivation treatment. The drug showed in a pivotal clinical trial that patients lived a median time of 25.8 months on Provenge, compared with 21.7 months if they got a placebo. Dendreon’s pricing equation assumes that people are willing to pay about $23,000 per extra month of life, which is comparable to other cancer drugs for terminal groups of patients, Bishop said today.

Dendreon also is benchmarking its overall cost of treatment not just against competitors’ prices, but how much supportive care and hospital expenses other treatments require because they force patients to endure more side effects, Bishop said. Sanofi-Aventis’s docetaxel (Taxotere), for example, costs about $60,000 per patient when you factor in the cost of extra supportive care, and Dendreon’s drug has been shown to help people live longer.

“Our price compares favorably to other cancer drugs,” Bishop said.

Pricing is obviously a touchy issue. Set the price too low, and Dendreon might not recoup enough of the $1 billion that has been invested in the company over the past 15 years, and it could create major shortages over the next year. Set the price too high, and it runs the risk of upsetting insurers and alienating its allies in the patient advocacy community.

Dendreon isn’t equipped yet to meet all the demand it anticipates for the drug. Only about 2,000 patients will be able to get Provenge in the first 12 months that it is available, while the company relies on a single factory in New Jersey that’s operating at one-fourth of full capacity. By the middle of 2011, Dendreon hopes to have two more factories in southern California and Georgia, as well as the New Jersey plant, operating at full tilt. That should enable the company to sell about $1.2 to $2.5 billion worth of Provenge per year, CEO Mitchell Gold said.

Dealing with scarcity has been a big issue for Dendreon. It consulted doctors, patients, and medical societies for advice on what to do. In the early days, it will only allow 50 medical centers in the U.S. to fill orders for Provenge, and they are all places that have experience with the product in clinical trials. The company isn’t going to establish a waiting list—it will allow doctors to decide which patients should get the drug first. Dendreon is going to donate some undisclosed amounts of money to a nonprofit foundation which will help patients make their co-payments if they can’t afford the drug, the company said.

It will be interesting to see if insurers balk at the price, or create lots of red tape to make it hard on doctors who prescribe it. Dendreon has had some preliminary conversations with private insurers, and plans to meet with officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services next week, Bishop said. Since prostate cancer generally afflicts older men, about three-fourths of the patients are expected to be eligible for Medicare, Bishop said.

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

The oil spill surged back in the news today after reports that BP’s deepwater rig is spewing out far more oil than expected.

Jumping from 1,000 barrels-per-day to 5,000 barrels-per-day has a big multiplier effect on the political and environmental consequences of the wreck.

If the leak continues for 53 days, the spill volume will exceed Exxon Valdez.

2001: Transocean builds the Deepwater Horizon, hailed as a “marvel of modern technology.” It is leased by BP through 2013

September 2009: Deepwater drills the deepest oil well in history

April 20, 2010: An underwater explosion… the rig catches fire…

April 20: Nearly 100 workers escape by life boat… another 17 are rescued by helicopter

April 20: 11 workers are presumed dead

The explosion is caused when a blowout preventer fails to close as pressure increased

April 21: BP estimates oil leakage at 1,000 barrels per day

April 28: Louisiana shrimp farmers file suit against BP

April 29: After discovering a third leak, government experts increase their estimate to 5,000 barrels per day. BP accepts the new estimate

Three stocks take a big hit: BP, Transocean (RIG), and blowout-prevention-part-marker Cameron (CAM)

Wind and ocean currents push the oil spill towards the continental US.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal declares a state of national emergency. Barack Obama confirms.

At 5,000 bbl per day, it will take only 53 days for the spill to exceed Exxon-Valdez.

Thousands of fish and birds are at risk (note the flock of gulls). Environmentalists are furious

BP is spending $6 million-a-day on cleanup, and they’re just getting started

The most environmental option could be setting the oil on fire!

BP has been unable to close the leak using rovs. The next option involves putting a dome over the well head — which could take weeks — or introducing a second rig to siphon flow — which could take months

Wikipedia has the latest >

The oil is 20 miles from Louisiana and will make landfall late Friday (even if containment efforts go well)

How does this effect the future of off-shore drilling?

Here’s why we need deep-ocean drilling…

15 Drill Crazy Countries That Are Rapidly Running Out Of Oil >>

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