“They don’t ask me to take my clothes off in movies anymore! It’s so sad! This industry is terrible for women of a certain age. But if you’re positive and you think you’re good, you can get roles for older women, and you’ll work,” Melanie Griffith, 52, who famously stripped down for roles in Ha-Gan and Night Moves, Hello Magazine, May 2010
98 years ago, there was a terrible volcanic eruption on Martinique, an island in the Caribbean. What’s been dubbed as the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century, it killed all residents—except the sole drunk in this prison. More »
Geely GE
Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. says that it has no immediate plans to export its own brand cars to developed markets. Speaking at the 2010 Beijing Motor Show, Frank Zhao, the company’s vice president for technology, said that the company will remain focused on the domestic market and other development markets.
“Regarding (selling to) developed markets, I think that will be something a couple of years down the road,” Zhao said. However, he said that Geely is studying developed markets.
“We are watching those markets on technology progress and also legal requirements very carefully, but we don’t have any closer structured plan,” Zhao said.
Geely purchased Volvo from Ford for a total of $1.8 billion for Volvo and its related assets. Speaking on the acquisition, Zhao said that Geely and Volvo operations will be kept separate.
“Our chairman Li Shufu has made it very clear that Geely is Geely and Volvo is Volvo. That means a lot because we have totally different customer segments and different markets,” he said.
– By: Stephen Calogera
Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)
The Refugee Studies Centre, (at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford) is pleased to announce that Professor Saskia Sassen will give the Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture on 26 May 2010.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her latest books are “Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global” “Assemblages” (Princeton University Press 2008) and “A Sociology of Globalization” (Norton 2007). She has recently completed a five-year project for UNESCO on sustainable human settlement, the results of which have been published as one of the volumes of the “Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems” (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers).
The lecture will be entitled “The complexity of Powerlessness: What makes human rights law perform?” Saskia Sassen will speak about the limits of power and the complexities of powerlessness – the direct or mediated resistances that the powerless can deploy knowingly or not.
Immigration and human rights help to explore these more abstract issues – especially in powerful countries vis-à-vis undocumented workers, who are among the most vulnerable subjects in those same countries. And yet, under certain conditions, the powerless can make history, even if they do not gain power in this process. She will discuss two institutional domains where powerlessness can become complex and the powerless have made history.
The lecture will take place at the Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre, St Catherine’s College, Manor Road, Oxford (0X1 3UJ). The event will start at 5pm and will be followed by a drinks reception.
For more information or to reserve a seat, please contact Wouter te Kloeze: [email protected], +44(0)1865 281726
New Zealand has been working on putting in place a three strikes law which is only marginally better than the one that it originally tried to pass. Right now, it looks like the “new bill” is moving forward with little opposition, even though there are some serious unanswered questions. Reader Matt Perryman has written up a detailed look at some of the bigger issues, asking about things like the privacy issues and the costs put on ISPs. However, his final two points are perhaps the most important. First, he notes that no details have been released or discussed about this special “copyright tribunal” that will handle these cases, even though that’s pretty central to the whole deal:
You’re creating a copyright tribunal to handle all of these complaints, and yet we’ve heard exactly nothing about what this will entail, regarding standards of evidence and valid defenses….The dilemma: I have a wifi hotspot in my home, attached to my internet account. It’s unsecured. A hacker or ne’er do well logs in to my hotspot, torrents a bunch of movies without my knowledge. Later I receive infringement notices and have to show up at the tribunal. I’m stunned, because I know nothing about it.
Is my defense of an unsecured wifi hotspot, combined with total ignorance of the matter, valid?
Change the parameters a little. My hotspot is secured by WEP, and a hacker cracks it (which is amazingly easy to do). Same scenario ensues. Is this a valid defense?
What about IP spoofing? What if someone frames me for infringement when I’ve not engaged in the activity? Is that a valid defense?
No matter what you feel the answers to the above questions are, the fact that this is not clear and has not been discussed with regards to New Zealand’s proposed law seems tremendously problematic. It leaves all sorts of questions on the table that could make the law incredibly bad. And the answers to those questions — no matter which way they go, raise questions about this law:
If these defenses are valid, then the copyright tribunal is redundant; anyone aware of these issues has so many plausible defenses that there is no way to prove infringement.If these defenses are not valid, then the tribunal is a sham and a rubber-stamp for industry interests, because there is no way to prove your innocence in light of accusation.
His final point is that this bill would create a new class of criminals totally at the behest of an industry — which isn’t quite how things are supposed to work:
You’re criminalizing a non-criminal behavior based on exactly nothing of substance, and at the behest of a private industry.I’m of the mindset that if you’re going to criminalize a behavior, you had best meet the burden of proof as to why that behavior is being outlawed.
Can the NZ MPs do that? If they can, they’re doing their best to hide their evidence. The industry’s own statistics have been called into question and ultimately they’ve been debunked.
So the obvious question: on what grounds are you justifying this?
Good questions — but somehow I doubt we’ll get any substantial answers from New Zealand MPs.
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Paris Hilton has reportedly rekindled her romance with her former fiance mere days after splitting from The Hills’ Doug Reinhardt.
The heiress-socialite was snapped over the weekend enjoying dinner with model Jason Shaw at NYC’s Woo Lae Oak. Hilton dated Shaw for almost three years before calling off their engagement in 2003 — but tattles say the pair’s feelings for one another have stood the test of time.
“When Jason found out that she had ended her relationship with Doug, he was thrilled and made plans with her right away,” one pal told E! Online. “Paris has always loved Jason and cared about him deeply. But when they were together she was just a kid and not ready for such a commitment.”
Isn’t it ironic that when the times in your life when you’re broke, you want to drink the most? Well, Alanis, 7-11 feels your pain and has met your cries for cheap swill with a new, bespoke beer sold only at 7-11’s.
The new brew goes by the moniker “Game Day”, though it can apparently be consumed both during the off-season and at night. What else do we know about this beer? It’s available in regular and light varieties, it’s cheap ($6.99 for 12), and it’s beer. 7-11 claims it performed “well” in taste tests against other premium beers, which probably means it did not perform “well” and tastes like Lone Star or Pabst, sans the irony. However, given time, might 7-11 beer become the beverage equivalent of thrift-store clothing? That’s up to the hipsters.
While the coolness factor is pending, drink up. Why? It’s REALLY cheap. Isn’t that enough?
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Wow. In a rare instance of customization actually making a car look more tasteful and sophisticated, this matte black treatment of the new Panamera is an elegant take on a car that I was actually on the fence about in its stock colors.
For more images of this automotive pornography, click here.
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On 12 May Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will be delivering a lecture entitled ‘Enriching the Arguments: the Refugee Contribution to British Life’.
Dr Rowan Williams will speak at UCL’s (University College London) Bloomsbury Theatres in London on the topic of: ‘Enriching the Arguments: the Refugee Contribution to British Life’. His talk will be followed by a drinks reception.
This event is organized by UCL, in partnership with the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA). To attend, please RSVP by 5 May. RSVP is essential and places will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis.
Programme:
18:15 Registration, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre
19:00 Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams
20:00 Reception
21.00 Close
Venue:
UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AH
Hate ordering bottles of vodka at clubs? Hate other people that order bottles of vodka at clubs? Take a number. And life just got slightly worse.
Ugh.
Bottle service – the ultimate testament to conspicuous consumption just got a little more conspicuous with the advent of the programmable LCD-screen bottle. In addition to enjoying the parade of waitresses carrying sparklers to draw attention to your new purchase, now you can exhibit scrolling sleazy messages (or even worse, your name) on your newly purchased bottle. Hopefully, this will reduce the need for guidos to stand up and wave the fucking bottle in the air every time the club plays “Blame It on the Alcohol.”
Medea Vodka has introduced a bottle with an LCD screen that can be programmed to scroll, well, whatever a person who buys a bottle of vodka feels the need for their bottle to announce. A 750ml bottle of vodka with the programmable screen will retail for about $40, which means that they should be priced to move at clubs for about $400 a pop. Hooray?
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Goldman Sachs was not the only investment bank selling the complex securities that ultimately resulted in staggering losses for the German bank IKB Deutsche Industriebank. Traders at Deutsche Bank sold similar collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) — built from credit protection on a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities selected in consultation with hedge fund manager John Paulson — to the German bank. And like Goldman, Deutsche Bank didn’t reveal Paulson’s role in the construction of the CDOs. So far, the SEC has not charged Deutsche with fraud relating to these transactions.
The failure of Goldman to disclose the role of Paulson to buyers of a single synthetic CDO forms the heart of the fraud charges the Securities and Exchange Commission filed against Goldman earlier this month. Paulson’s hedge fund, Paulson & Co, made billions of dollars by betting against portfolios of mortgage-backed securities, often by purchasing the short position in CDOs structured by large investment banks.
Two Deutsche Bank traders who requested anonymity say that Paulson’s role, both in selecting a reference portfolio and in shorting it, was never disclosed to any customers taking the other side of the trade on CDO deals. In fact, they never told clients who was on the other side of a trade. The traders cited IKB as one of the customers who bought CDO trades for which Paulson & Co helped select the reference portfolios.
In a typical synthetic CDO deal, an investor will approach an investment bank with specific criteria for the long or short position it wishes to take — say, a certain vintage mortgage backed security, with a certain rating, and the type of underlying loans. A “reference portfolio” that lists securities matching those criteria is constructed and the bank takes the position opposite the investor’s. If an investor wants to be long the reference portfolio, for example, the bank will initially take the short side of the trade by purchasing credit protection from the investor on the portfolio. Often, the bank will then seek out another customer who wants to buy the opposite side of the trade, either simultaneously with the closing of the deal or sometime afterwards.
Both IKB and Paulson & Co made requests for new CDO deals. IKB was a long investor, which meant it wanted to sell credit protection on a reference portfolio. As we reported this weekend, IKB often sought deals offering the highest yields, which meant that they needed to sell protection on portfolios referencing subprime mortgage bonds. Paulson & Co was a short investor, which meant it wanted to buy credit protection on a reference portfolio.
Deutsche Bank’s U.S. CDO underwriting group that worked with IKB was co-headed by Michael Lamont, who left the firm in 2008 to work for Seer Capital. When Lamont was reached for comment he wouldn’t talk about his trades at Deutsche Bank. Traders who worked with Lamont at Deutsche confirmed he was the point man to sell CDOs to IKB.
Greg Lippmann, head of ABS trading at Deutsche Bank, was also involved in working with hedge fund clients like Paulson who wanted to short the housing market and bet against the CDOs his bank was selling to IKB. Traders we spoke to who worked on an IKB-Paulson deal think the transaction did not violate securities laws and instead were simply offering each client what they were asking for: two different directional bets on the housing market.
“Deutsche’s view was: you’re all big boys, you do your own research. Here is what’s in the security — you choose if you want it or not. IKB knew exactly what they were buying,” said a Deutsche Bank trader who sold CDOs.
Deutsche Bank’s head of communications Ted Meyer said he wouldn’t comment on specific client transactions. But he did say that the absence of a third party collateral manager distinguished the Deutsche Bank deals from Goldman’s Abacus 2007 deal.
“What distinguishes Deutsche Bank’s CDO transactions is that both long and short investors were given the opportunity to select the specific collateral to which they were seeking exposure and mutually agreed on the CDO portfolio. No third-party collateral manager was utilized for these deals, which eliminated the potential for deception with respect to the role of such a manager,” Meyer said.
This was a crucial difference between the Deutsche Bank transactions and the Goldman Sachs deal targeted by the SEC. The Deutsche Bank traders did not use third party collateral managers who would put an independent stamp of approval on the deal. Most Goldman deals did not use an independent collateral manager, either.
But the 2007 Abacus deal did use ACA as a collateral manager; the SEC complaint says IKB wouldn’t buy from Goldman without a third-party manager. According to the SEC, the thought was the third party would add another brand name to help add credibility to the risky product.
In late 2006 IKB had lost the senior portfolio manager who had founded its Rhineland conduit that purchased many of its CDOs. Perhaps it believed that an outside expert could fill the role of the portfolio manager — a sort of outsourcing of investment decision making with the hope that an independent manager would offer an ethics check on the deal. Still, as late as March 2007, our sources indicated that IKB was meeting with Deutsche Bank executives to inquire about the purchase of new CDOs — without a third party collateral manager.
Larry McDonald, author of the book on Lehman Brothers “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense,” experienced the cowboy style of derivative bond trading first hand during this time. McDonald says, “Look: things were moving so fast on the trading desks at all banks during this time — it was like the Wild West. We didn’t have laws on most of these derivates trades. But just because everyone was doing it doesn’t mean it passed an internal ethics check. I worked next to these guys. They knew what they were creating could be viewed as morally wrong, but there was no real law to stop it and the profits were so big.”
Note: Robert Khuzami, the head of SEC enforcement, was previously a lawyer at Deutsche who oversaw a legal team that helped build the bank’s CDOs.
I don’t remember those baking soda and vinegar volcano eruptions in elementary school lasting quite this long.
As you probably already know, the recent eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull have disrupted travelers around the world over the last couple of weeks. On Friday the ash from the eruptions caused airport closures in Iceland, Sweden and Norway. Although flights are leaving open airports in Europe, they are still canceled sporadically. The United States
Geological Survey explains why volcanic ash is dangerous to planes and Iceland’s president has stated that these eruptions could continue for a long time.
I want to give you some resources so if your travel is affected by the eruptions, you’ll have some places to turn. If you are in Europe, the U.S. Department of State has created a webpage to aid U.S. citizens who have flight cancellations. If you are a foreign national visiting the U.S. and are unable to get back home, here is how you go about legally extending your stay. If you are just interested in active volcanoes, the USGS has you covered.
Have you been affected by the Eyjafjallajökull eruptions?
A recent study by ABI Research has shown that about 1% of global wireless phone subscribers recycle their cell phones but that 98% would recycle their cell phones with the right incentives.
In order to help move us from 1% towards that 98% potential, two former chief executives of two major electronics companies — Sprint and RadioShack — have teamed up to create a new cell phone recycling firm.
President Barack Obama with auto industry executives
Presidebt Barack Obama said that the government-funded bailouts of the auto industry had paid off. During his weekly radio and Web address on Saturday, Obama said that he will keep pressure for an overhaul of U.S. financial regulations, saying the promising news from the auto industry had not reduced the need for Wall Street changes.
General Motors and Chrysler both reported progress this week in their government-financed turnarounds. Nonetheless, the Obama administration said that it still forecasts some loss on the taxpayer bailout of both companies to help them recover from the economic downturn.
GM announced last week that it has made its final payment of $5.8 billion to the U.S. Treasury and Export Development Canada, paying back its government loans in full.
Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican on the Finance Committee, later said that GM’s payment was coming from U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program funds in an escrow account, rather than from GM earnings.
– By: Stephen Calogera
Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)
Inhabitat has a post on efforts to turn the clock both back and forward and have solar panels re-installed on the roof of the White House – Solar Coalition Calls to Install Solar Panels on the White House.
Some of you probably know that President Jimmy Carter installed an array of solar panels on the White House roof in 1979. You also may remember that they were unceremoniously removed in 1986 — about the same time that President Ronald Reagan allowed President Carter’s solar power tax credits to expire. Well, now a coalition of solar power companies led by Sungevity are calling on the American people to sign a petition to convince the Obama Administration to have a solar panel system permanently reinstalled on White House roof — one that would lower White House utility bills by 81%.
While watching YouTube videos, sometimes you may want to see the lyrics of the song. One of the ways is to search Lyrics.com for the song lyrics, but you have to navigate away from the YouTube video page for searching the lyrics. You can not watch the video and read the lyrics of the song from the same page.
Another way to find lyrics is to search the captions or in the comments section of the YouTube video. But there is no surity that the lyrics will be there in the captions or in video comments, because it depends on the person who has uploaded that video.
TubeOke makes this possible by showing the lyrics of the song in the same page where the video is played. Works quite simple – just go to the site and search for an artist or a song name.
Hit “Search”and this will open the search result page containing a list of videos. Click a video thumbnail and you can watch the video and read the lyrics of the song from the same browser window.
The concept of the site is to provide an easy “Karaoke” service so that you can sing along while watching a YouTube video.
I tried the service with some songs and the results were very accurate. It can’t get better than this – watch the video and perform a “Karaoke” of the song by reading the lyrics.
Do you know of any similar service which does the job even better? Please share your ideas in the comments section.
Techie Buzz rating: 4/5 (Excellent).
Jim Vicevich is getting his old job back.
The former business reporter for Channel 3 is scheduled to return to the airwaves Monday morning on WTIC-AM 1080.
Various hosts, including Sebastian, Channel 8 reporter Mark Davis, morning radio personality Ray Dunaway, and UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, have served as guest hosts recently.
Vicevich will be back in the Farmington studio in his regular time slot from 9 a.m. to noon.
Wade Roush wrote:
If you ask people who’s lighting the innovation fires around Detroit, pretty soon you get directed to the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan. This coalition of 10 community and philanthropic organizations was formed in 2008 with the goal of pooling resources to “restore southeast Michigan to a position of leadership in the new global economy,” according to the group’s website.
Ambitious seems like the right word for that vision, given the scale of Detroit’s problems.The population has dropped by more than half since 1950, the city budget deficit is likely to hit $450 million by the end of this year, and there are nearly 50 square miles of vacant, abandoned land within the city limits. The area would be lucky to regain a position of leadership in the Midwest, much less top rank on the global stage.
But if you were the type to let the difficulties get you down, you’d never even get started on solving them. And David Egner, the New Economy Initiative’s executive director, is not easily discouraged.
“The uncertainty will eat you alive if you let it,” says Egner, who is also president of the Hudson-Webber Foundation, a legacy of the family that founded Hudson’s department stores. In Detroit, he says, “We have to strike a balance between the comfortable certainty of going in a known direction, even if it is wrong—which is what Detroit has been doing for the last couple of decades—and the fear and uncertainty of limitless possibilities.”
Of course, optimism and a tolerance for uncertainty are practically a job requirement for people in Michigan’s non-profit sector. (Before taking the reins at the Hudson-Webber Foundation in 1997, Egner was an executive at Junior Achievement and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and CEO of the Michigan Nonprofit Association.) In a long conversation with Xconomy, the first part of which is included below, Egner emphasized all the things Detroit has going for it, such as its manufacturing infrastructure and its strategic location as an international port and a hub for rail, truck, and water traffic. Even the city’s empty land can be seen as an opportunity, Egner argues. That’s because it makes business expansion cheaper and creates room for experiments like Hantz Farms, planned to become the world’s largest urban farm.
Egner is realistic, too. He acknowledges that the city is still paying for its history of political discord and the complacency of its anchor employers, the big three automakers. Egner says the regional economy probably hasn’t hit bottom yet, with a new wave of business failures likely among auto suppliers who are slow to adapt to the new patterns of manufacturing. But he thinks the money the New Economy Initiative is committed to spending in Detroit—$100 million over eight years—will go a long way toward accomplishing the group’s three major goals. The initiative is seeking to create a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem, make better use of the region’s existing industrial assets, and build up a better-educated better-trained workforce.
For the record, the members of the New Economy Initiative are the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan (based in Detroit), the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation (Southfield, MI), the Ford Foundation (New York), the Hudson-Webber Foundation (Detroit), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (Battle Creek, MI), the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (Miami), the Kresge Foundation (Troy, MI), the McGregor Fund (Detroit), the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (Flint, MI), and the Skillman Foundation (Detroit).
While Egner still runs the Hudson-Webber Foundation, he puts half of his time toward overseeing the New Economy Initiative, which has downtown offices just blocks from Detroit’s landmark Renaissance Center. The coalition has to work fast; barring an extension of the understanding that binds its members together, Egner says, the initiative will run out of money in 2012 and disband by 2015.
Part 1 of my interview with Egner is below. We’ll publish Part 2 later this week.
Xconomy: This question may sound mean or inappropriate, but I mean it in a constructive way. Why is Detroit worth saving?
David Egner: That’s not an inappropriate question at all. Let’s start with the historical aspects. Seventy to 80 years ago, this was Silicon Valley. It was where people came if they wanted to make something and create a business. Today, it’s largely driven by autos.But before that it was stoves, and before that it was lumber. Detroit has always been a town of hard-working innovators.
It really was the institutionalization of the auto industry that led to us becoming complacent, and in some respects, entitled. Whether that was through how union contracts were drawn up, or how executives got compensated, there was this entitlement mentality that because of what Detroit had built, it didn’t matter how we got it, we were entitled to have it.
But all of that DNA, or hard work and creative spirit, is still here in a major way. And we’re seeing it now at TechTown, where Randal Charlton is running the largest accelerator in the world, and receiving 100 inquiries a day from people trying to figure out how to start businesses.
Look at the comparative advantage points of Detroit versus the rest of the world, or the rest of North America. You’ve got the most cross-border international traffic in all of North America. You’ve got more goods coming over the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor than …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
A tree lined community has come up with a solar energy solution that could serve as a model for others. In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind arrangement, a group of individuals in University Park, Maryland have established a limited liability corporation that will use a local church as the site of a new distributed solar power installation. The plan mirrors a much larger distributed solar energy program embarked upon last year by Duke Energy, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S.
University Park Solar LLC will reduce the community’s reliance on coal-generated electricity and support green jobs in the U.S. (the solar panels are made in the U.S. by solar energy pioneer Sharp). Like Duke Energy, University Solar sees a great benefit in distributed solar power. By becoming part of the everyday landscape of community life, solar energy makes the leap from exotic newcomer to just another reliable, dependable source of electrical power.
"UPS … became the first small package carrier to offer its customers the ability to offset the carbon dioxide emissions generated by the transport of their packages within the United States."
" … offer U.S. shippers the option of paying a small fee to calculate and offset the climate impact of the shipment of each of their packages. information about UPS carbon neutral services is available at ups.com/carbonneutral."
" … To encourage customers to participate … UPS will match the offset purchases, effectively doubling the offsets purchased in 2009-2010, up to $1 million."
" … the carbon offset process is … certified by The CarbonNeutral Company. "
Via: UPS LINK
