Category: News

At BlackBerry Live 2013, BlackBerry has announced BlackBerry Channels. Channels is a natural evolution for BBM as it adds a more public and social element to what has always been a fairly private network of users. BBM has gone from what was a very intimate adding process to what seems more open, with brands and individuals being able to set up a space within BBM where people can interact. It should be interesting to see how well this is received because social networks are generally more open than being smartphone-specific.

Channels launches in beta today with a few channels already set up including Mercedes, Alicia Keys, Goo Goo Dolls and more.

Every few years someone pops up with a claim that they’ve uncovered the legendary formula for Coca-Cola. The soft drink company has kept the formula a carefully guarded secret for decades, and always shoots down claims. In 2011, public radio show This American Life spoke with one of the people who claim to have the original formula, but Coca-Cola officially denied the authenticity of the recipe:

Now, another person has come forward with what they believe to be the world’s most sought-after formula. According to an NBC 11 report, a Ringgold, Georgia man named Cliff Kluge states that the has “accidentally” found the formula.

The man told reporters that he and his wife bought a box of letters at an estate sale. The box contained a cola recipe that Kluge believes is the real deal. He states that it is very similar to the recipe uncovered by This American Life.

Kluge is now auctioning off the formula on eBay, asking for a starting bid of $5 million and a Buy Now price of $15 million.

Coca-Cola has stated, as it always has, that this formula is another in a series of failed attempts to recreate Coca-Cola, and that the only copy of the real thing is locked in a vault in Atlanta.

Final Book Now Available

Responding to the challenges of fostering regional growth and employment in an increasingly competitive global economy, many U.S. states and regions have developed programs to attract and grow companies as well as attract the talent and resources necessary to develop innovation clusters. These state and regionally based initiatives have a broad range of goals and increasingly include significant resources, often with a sector focus and often in partnership with foundations and universities. These are being joined by recent initiatives to coordinate and concentrate investments from a variety of federal agencies that provide significant resources to develop regional centers of innovation, business incubators, and other strategies to encourage entrepreneurship and high-tech development.

Building the Illinois Innovation Economy is a study of selected state and regional programs to identify best practices with regard to their goals, structures, instruments, modes of operation, synergies across private and public programs, funding mechanisms and levels, and evaluation efforts. This report reviews selected state and regional efforts to capitalize on federal and state investments in areas of critical national needs. This review includes both efforts to strengthen existing industries as well as specific new technology focus areas such as nanotechnology, stem cells, and energy in order to improve our understanding of program goals, challenges, and accomplishments. As a part of this review, The Committee on Competing in the 21st Century: Best Practice in State and Regional Innovation Initiatives is convening a series of public workshops and symposia involving responsible local, state, and federal officials and other stakeholders. These meetings and symposia will enable an exchange of views, information, experience, and analysis to identify best practice in the range of programs and incentives adopted.

Building the Illinois Innovation Economy summarizes discussions at these symposia, fact-finding meetings, and commissioned analyses of existing state and regional programs and technology focus areas, the committee will subsequently produce a final report with findings and recommendations focused on lessons, issues, and opportunities for complementary U.S. policies created by these state and regional initiatives.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Industry and Labor

Prepublication Now Available

Despite efforts over the past several decades to reduce sodium intake in the United States, adults still consume an average of 3,400 mg of sodium every day. A number of scientific bodies and professional health organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association, support reducing dietary sodium intake. These organizations support a common goal to reduce daily sodium intake to less than 2,300 milligrams and further reduce intake to 1,500 mg among persons who are 51 years of age and older and those of any age who are African-American or have hypertension, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease.

A substantial body of evidence supports these efforts to reduce sodium intake. This evidence links excessive dietary sodium to high blood pressure, a surrogate marker for cardiovascular disease (CVD), stroke, and cardiac-related mortality. However, concerns have been raised that a low sodium intake may adversely affect certain risk factors, including blood lipids and insulin resistance, and thus potentially increase risk of heart disease and stroke. In fact, several recent reports have challenged sodium reduction in the population as a strategy to reduce this risk.

Sodium Intake in Populations recognizes the limitations of the available evidence, and explains that there is no consistent evidence to support an association between sodium intake and either a beneficial or adverse effect on most direct health outcomes other than some CVD outcomes (including stroke and CVD mortality) and all-cause mortality. Some evidence suggested that decreasing sodium intake could possibly reduce the risk of gastric cancer. However, the evidence was too limited to conclude the converse—that higher sodium intake could possibly increase the risk of gastric cancer. Interpreting these findings was particularly challenging because most studies were conducted outside the United States in populations consuming much higher levels of sodium than those consumed in this country. Sodium Intake in Populations is a summary of the findings and conclusions on evidence for associations between sodium intake and risk of CVD-related events and mortality.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Food and Nutrition

If you’re anything like me, seeing that ‘R’ in a delivered BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) message is like colour to my eyes (see what I did there?). I am obsessed with knowing that my messages have been delivered, read and when they’re being responded to.

Today, BlackBerry takes BBM to the next level with BBM Channels
extending the BBM experience to brands, artists, businesses and communities, you will now be able to connect with individuals and groups in real time. Stay up to date on your favorite things. Receive timely updates and participate by commenting on, liking and sharing posts. Or choose to express yourself and create a channel of your own – and create, edit & publish in an instant.Starting today, BBM customers can connect and share the MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team on their BBM Channels.

Top BBM Channels Features:

• Create a channel – Create, edit and publish in an instant, and there are no limits to the number of followers you can have in your channel. Securely manage your channel from either a BlackBerry smartphone or the web.
• Discover channels – BBM Channels includes a carousel that lets you discover new channels. You can share channel invites within a BBM chat, and people can be added or invited using the channel’s PIN or QR code.
• View – View profiles for each BBM Channel you choose to follow.
• Subscribe – Subscribing to a channel allows the channel owner to send you timely and relevant updates, giving the subscriber instant access to your news, deals, events or whatever you want to communicate. Subscribers can choose to receive notifications when new posts are available.
• Participate – Participate and engage in conversations with your favorite people or communities by “Commenting” and “Liking” posts from channels you subscribe to. Channel owners have the option to directly chat one-on-one with a subscriber.
• Monitor engagement – Easily use built-in measuring tools to assess and monitor follower engagement and interaction

Today, BlackBerry also announced plans to bring BBM to iOS® and Android™ users this summer. BlackBerry expects that iOS and Android users will also be able to experience BBM Channels later this year, subject to approval by the Apple App Store and Google Play.

BBM with BBM Channels is now available in beta for BlackBerry 10 smartphones, as well as BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 5 OS through 7.1. For BlackBerry OS customers*, BBM Channels is part of the new BBM version 8, which also offers enhanced navigation tools, with tabbed viewing for quick and easy access to contacts, chats, groups, recent updates and BBM Channels. Furthermore, it allows the option to share your enhanced profile information with BBM contacts or within invitations. The beta releases can be downloaded for free on BlackBerry Beta Zone**. Customers can sign up to BlackBerry Beta Zone for free at www.BlackBerry.com/betazone. For more information about BBM, please visit www.blackberry.com/bbm.

*BBM requires a BlackBerry service plan on BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry OS.
**BlackBerry Beta Zone is not available in all markets.

Google Glass probably shouldn’t be operated by two-year-olds. The $1,500 hardware seems to be pretty fragile, and I would be afraid that a kid would break it. One father, YouTube user chrisangelini, threw caution to the wind, however, when he let his two-year-old son take Google’s new hardware for a test drive.

As expected, the results are adorable.

[h/t: Reddit]

A lot of people are asking about Alicia Keys’ role at BlackBerry and at BlackBerry Live 2013, she announced a few projects that she’s working on at the company under Frank Boulben’s leadership. Keys began her keynote talking about how women are central to BlackBerry and she wants to help foster that relationship. She mentioned that women, while they graduate at higher rates then men, have a problem getting into the technology industry at the same rate as men.

The BlackBerry Scholars program is a program to help encourage women to get into the tech industry by providing four year scholarships for women in science and technology programs. She also announced that BlackBerry will be funding creative projects around the world and helping artists to create.

Go to blackberry.com/scholars for more details.

A Houston woman has been charged with one count of injury to a child with intent to commit bodily injury, a felony, after waiting seven hours to take her son (aged 14) to the hospital after he suffered a gunshot wound to the leg.

What was Deborah Tagle, aged 55, doing during that time? Apparently she was attempting to find treatment options using WebMD. And the whole thing was caught on in-house surveillance video. From KHOU in Houston:

The video shows Pete Jesse Rodriguez, 24, who is also a resident of the home, pointed a pistol directly at the teen, police said. Rodriguez is accused of tracking the teen’s movement with the pistol and eventually pulling the trigger. The victim was shot once in the upper left thigh with a high-caliber bullet, police said. The teen lay on the floor for several minutes before getting up. Police said the teen and his mother initially looked up gunshots on WebMD.com. Then, seven hours later, the teen’s mother drove him to Mainland Center hospital, police said.

The shooter is charged with injury to a child with intent to commit serious bodily harm and is being held on bond.

The kid is reportedly recovering and in stable condition.

Police did not say whether or not the mom’s WebMD searching produced any viable treatment options. A quick search of WebMD leaves much to be desired in terms of gunshot treatment advice – although after spending a few minutes on the site I’m 100% convinced I have a brain tumor.

[KHOU via UPROXX]

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s news headlines from the network sector:

Level 3 Announces Carrier Cloud Voice Solution.  Level 3 Communications (LVLT) announced the launch of a Carrier Cloud Voice solution. This frees CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier), wireless carriers, cable multiple system operators (MSOs) and telcos to focus on growth, rather than concentrating efforts on building or expanding a voice network. Through an agreement with cloud-based voice platform provider Alianza, Level 3 is providing a complete outsourced voice solution for service providers that are looking for ways to add voice, while avoiding significant up-front investment and ongoing operational costs. The joint solution combines Level 3′s Enhanced Local Service and Alianza’s cloud-based voice platform, which includes a hardened set of APIs for back-office integration, billing and service management. ”For communications providers expanding in today’s market, adopting a cloud-based voice platform solution can reduce costs and allow them to concentrate resources around more critical core business activities,” stated Cindy Whelan, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “Level 3′s carrier cloud voice solution is an attractive hosted VoIP platform enabling communications providers to accelerate the time to market, while avoiding onerous capital investment costs and minimizing the operating costs associated with operating a carrier-grade voice service.”

Juniper Launches JunosV Contrail Products.  Juniper Networks (JNPR) introduced JunosV Contrail, a family of products which includes the JunosV Contrail Controller, an open, standards-based controller for software-defined networks (SDN). Products in the JunosV Contrail family are based off of intellectual property that Juniper gained when it acquired software networking startup Contrail Systems late last year. The products will deliver a virtual network solution that easily integrates into existing data centers to centralize control across different client IT architectures and multiple cloud platforms. The solution virtualizes the network to enable seamless automation and orchestration among private and public cloud environments, elastic management of IP-based network and security services, and a “Big Data for Infrastructure” offering for enhanced analytics, diagnostics and reporting. ”After reviewing SDN solutions from different vendors, China Mobile Research believes that Juniper Networks’ JunosV Contrail provides a very competitive architecture for a scalable and interoperable infrastructure,” said Lu Huang, Technical Manager, China Mobile Research Institute. ”After completion of the trials later this year, we expect to lead the market with production deployment of a multi-vendor SDN solution.”

Infinera Selected by BICS.  Infinera (INFN) and BICS, a global provider of international wholesale carrier services, announced the selection of the Infinera DTN-X platform to upgrade BICS’ Pan-European network. The Infinera DTN-X delivers 500 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) long haul super-channels, enabling BICS to deliver flexible and cost effective 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) services. The DTN-X platform was selected for the scalability, efficiency and simplicity that the solution delivers. “The Infinera DTN-X allows BICS to provide flexible solutions and ensures a faster service implementation, translating into a shorter time to market for our customers,” said Johan Wouters, SVP Capacity Business Management at BICS. “This new platform will enable the aggregation of multiple high speed services on a single OTN interface. The advanced control plane offers the possibility of self-provisioning for high capacity services, making BICS the perfect network outsourcing partner.”

For more on networking, visit our Networking Channel.

Every day, women around the world are helping to lead, transform and innovate in the fields of technology and science. BlackBerry and Alicia Keys want to celebrate these leaders and help encourage young women to explore the opportunities presented in the STEM fields.

This morning, BlackBerry and Alicia Keys have announced the creation of  the BlackBerry Scholars Program, a scholarship program designed to inspire women to enter fields of study that will shape the future of technology and mobile computing.

Starting today, women around the world entering four-year degree programs in accredited colleges and universities in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math with an interest and/or aptitude in the mobile computing space are encouraged to submit their application nominations for scholars for the 2013 school year.

The BlackBerry Scholars Program will provide full, four-year tuition scholarships to outstanding women globally who are seeking degrees at accredited colleges and universities in the areas of STEM with a particular interest or aptitude in the area of mobile computing.  This scholarship program is the first step in BlackBerry’s long-term commitment and multi-tiered strategy to engage young women at every step of their education from high school to college, and as they rise through the workforce.

Applications for the 2013 school year will be accepted online only and will be due by 5pm EDT on June 26, 2013. To learn more about the “BlackBerry Scholars” Program and the nomination and application process, please visit www.BlackBerry.com/scholars .

For more information on other projects that BlackBerry’s Global Creative Director Alicia Keys is working on please visit http://www.BlackBerry.com/KeepMoving.

Tim Tebow is a man without a country these days; after a season with the Jets which can only be described as disappointing, the young QB was cut in favor of Mark Sanchez, and there are rumors floating around that several teams don’t want him because of the media baggage that will inevitably follow. But one team has made an offer, and if he takes it, it’ll mean no NFL training camp this season.

The Philadelphia Soul says they want to see him on the gridiron and have reportedly sent him an offer, including a list of plays they would use with him. Tebow has yet to respond, but co-owner Ron Jaworski and Coach Clint Dolezel say they’re hoping they’ll get a chance.

“I haven’t heard back from him and I’m not going to push it,” Jaworksi said. “If he decides he wants to play Arena Football, we’ll make a spot for him.”

Jaworski thinks Arena Football could be just the thing Tebow needs to strengthen his game and says it would force him to really look at his weaknesses.

“One [criticism] of Tebow is that he is slow and methodical,” Jaworski said. “He would be forced to quicken it up in this league and it would be good training for him. You can learn a lot in this league. It’s about processing information and getting the ball out . . . or you get whacked.”

GraphLab, a popular open source project dedicated to graph analysis and machine learning, is trying to capitalize on the excitement around graphs by spinning off a commercial entity, GraphLab Inc. GraphLab creator — a University of Washington machine learning professor — Carlos Guestrin will lead the new Seattle-based company, which has raised $6.75 million from Madrona Venture Group and NEA.

Graph analysis is among the hottest techniques around for making sense out large datasets, primarily by determining how tightly different data points are related or how similar they are. The term “graph” came into the broader lexicon along with social networks which built social graphs to assess the relationships among their millions of users, but the technique has much broader uses.

My LinkedIn social graph

Guestrin said GraphLab’s algorithms are used in a lot of recommender systems, but he also cites fraud detection in banking networks and intrusion detection in computer networks as potential applications. We’ve covered graphs as the analytical model of choice for everything from content recommendation to tracking lab work in genomics. Really, though — especially when combined with machine learning — graph analysis can be applied to anything where there’s too much data for a person to possibly analyze the relationships between every point.

One of Ayasdi’s graph-like data maps

Google also famously uses a graph-processing system called Pregel as part of PageRank. Although a number of graph databases and other projects have popped up in the past few years, Guestrin said GraphLab is actually a contemporary of Pregel. He and some colleagues at Carnegie Mellon built a small system for their lab about five years ago, then released it into the open-source world with few expectations that it would catch on. Now, he added, Pandora and WalmartLabs are among the project’s user base.

Among those other projects are graph databases such as Giraph (an open source, Hadoop-based Pregel clone developed at Facebook) and Neo4j (which also has a commercial arm, called Neo Technologies), as well as Twitter’s Cassovary and fellow University of Washington project Grappa. Guestrin said GraphLab can work with most of them, particularly if they’re not designed to do machine learning at scale like GraphLab is. Some efforts, he noted, are focused on simply storing data in graph form (e.g., databases) or in providing simple graph analysis.

As for when we’ll actually see the results of the effort to commercialize GraphLab, Guestrin said it will be a while. Right now, he’s focused on the next open source release of GraphLab in July. However, the company will begin engaging with commercial users over the next several months to determine what types of features they would expect in commercial graph-analysis software.

The bigger question to come out of all this graph activity, though, is how big a market we’ll ultimately see for graph-analysis or any other specific technique. As companies get more comfortable with big data from a technical standpoint, they’re getting more interested in the different types of analysis it allows for too. This is evidenced by the quest to make Hadoop support myriad processing frameworks aside from MapReduce.

We already have a handful of commercial graph products on the market — including an industrial grade one called YarcData from supercomputer maker Cray — but how many will there eventually be? And if graph analysis is all the rage right now, what comes next?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• A near-term outlook for big data
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

This is the fourth article in a series on DCK Executive Guide to Data Center Designs.

While most data centers have some basic form of Build Management System (BMS), any new design needs to include a highly granular network of sensors in virtually all of the systems and sub-systems of the facility power and cooling infrastructure. Older, general purpose BMS systems typically had simple alarms to warn of equipment failures and perhaps a moderate amount of basic information on energy use. In recent years, it became clear that as data centers grew larger and used more complex systems, it became more difficult for operators to keep track of all the critical infrastructure system operational details on maintenance requirements and energy efficiency.

A newer more sophisticated class of systems designed specifically for data centers have been developed which are known as Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). They not only encompass monitoring energy usage and efficiency optimization, they can improve operational reliability, by early detection of operational anomalies. DCIM systems also can help track and schedule preventive maintenance and spot any trends of recurring problems.

While DCIM software varies widely based on vendor offerings and continues to evolve, the data center design should include pre-installed or provision for sensors at all the critical systems and sub-systems. You need to in review a variety of DCIM vendor offering to see which product features offers what you need. Regardless of your choice, make sure that you include the pre-installation of sensors in the design phase. Adding sensors after building the facility is both costly and can be intrusive if the systems are already operational. Examples would be energy monitoring for every CRAC/CRAH and if a chiller system is involved Chilled water flow metering, as well as energy monitoring all the individual components such as compressors, pumps and fans. This information will allow you to optimize cooling system operation and energy efficiency. Moreover, with real-time monitoring and maintenance management you can detect trends and anomalies and proactively address potential issues before they become critical problems.

In addition, every point in power distribution system to the IT equipment should have Branch Circuit Monitoring pre-installed. This will allow you to integrate real-time information from IT systems energy usage and correlate it to computing activity to provide for better capacity planning, resource optimization and avoid islands of stranded capacity and improve facility side provisioning of IT equipment deployments. No new data center should be designed or built without some form of DCIM system as part of the base infrastructure system. While DCIM requires additional investment, it can ultimately lower the TCO by improving operational and energy efficiency, while reducing the number of data center and IT support staff.

The complete Data Center Knowledge Executive Guide on Data Center Design is available in PDF complements of Digital Realty. Click here to download.

Welcome to the world of the sub-$1,000 3D printer. Manufacturer Pirate3D has promised that their Buccaneer printer will cost a mere $347, about $1,700 less than the cheapest extrusion-based printer available. The printer can print at a maximum of 100 microns – the same as the Makerbot’s – and prints at 50mm/s. It connects to your computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi and is made of stamped steel.

The output of the printer looks to be just on the edge of acceptable, especially given the price, but as this stream of photos shows, the Buccaneer has a 5.8×3.9×4.7 in build area, about half the size of a Replicator 2 and the prints are a bit jagged. The renders they’ve provided show a 3D printer that looks, at best, to be on par with the Form One in terms of quality.

Am I certain this thing will ever ship? Not really. Depends far too much on exciting “blog updates” and highly stylized photos to be an actual product just yet and $347 is quite low. Given that a good extruder is somewhere in the $50 to $75 range, there can’t be much going on in the brains of this machine and they’re going to have to cut corners somewhere. I obviously hope that this thing works as advertised – given that you can now sell a home games console for $99 it seems feasible that they can get 3D printer prices down as well – but, as in everything, you get what you pay for.

They are also planning a Kickstarter campaign shortly so you’ll be able to line up for one of these puppies in a few days.

On Monday, news came out that Groupon had a new POS app for the iPad available in the App Store. Well, it turns out there’s a little more to the story than that.

“What happened was that a limited beta version of the app that we’re announcing today slipped out into the store for a short period and was quickly taken down,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.

The official announcement is now out, and it’s really the new Breadcrumb POS. It’s a free iPad app for eateries, salons, spas and retail merchants to “replace their outdated cash registers”.

“Breadcrumb POS expands the number of merchants currently served by the company’s Breadcrumb family of POS products from restaurants and bars to include all brick-and-mortar businesses,” the company says.

“With this launch we can help every local business replace their outdated cash registers with a modern, affordable, money-saving tool that allows them to save on credit card transaction fees and run their businesses better,” said Mihir Shah, VP Merchant OS at Groupon. “The successful adoption of Breadcrumb Pro by restaurants and bars has been very encouraging, with some of the finest venues in the country using it to run their businesses. As a result, we decided to launch Breadcrumb POS and bring the power and simplicity of this product to more merchants.”

Rates are 1.8 percent plus $0.15 per transaction (MasterCard, Visa and Discover) with no hidden costs or monthly fees. Processing is free on the first $5,000 in credit card transactions (promotional offer).

More on the offering here.

Fox has confirmed the long-discussed reboot of Carl Sagan’s landmark documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage starring none other than famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

According to the LA Times, the network made their announcement on Monday at their upfront presentation. The series will start with 13 episodes, set to air sometime in 2014. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane is attached as a producer.

Sagan’s original Cosmos series is one of the most beloved and popular documentary series in the history of television. Broadcast on PBS in 1980, Cosmos was the most watched series in the public television history until Ken Burns’ The Civil War series overtook that title.

We’ve known that something like this was in the works, as reports of a Cosmos reboot starring Tyson was reported back in 2011. No additional details emerged at that time, and nearly a year later Tyson confirmed on Twitter that we could expect the new Cosmos series to launch in Spring of 2014.

The new show’s host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is easily the most renowned astrophysicist around. He currently directs the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and has hosted a PBS show before – NOVA ScienceNow from 2006 to 2011. He’s also a frequent contributor to the alternative nightly show circuit, including The Daily Show, and Real Time with Bill Maher. Oh, and he’s quite popular on the internet.

Earlier this week we learned that Fox is also bringing back the popular action series 24 – but at this point it’s a one-time thing and it will only run 12 more episodes.

[Image via]

It’s been a while since NVIDIA announced its game-changing Project SHIELD handheld gaming system, but the wait is finally over gang as NVIDIA is finally taking pre-orders will begin as early as next week, May 20th. In case you’ve forgotten about this puppy— the Jelly Bean-powered handheld gaming system features a boatload of sweet features including the killer Tegra 4 chip + 2 gigs of RAM, a 5-inch 720p retinal multi-touch display, custom bass reflex tuned port audio system and a full-fledged control pad.

Oh and for those of you that want to stream the sweet gaming content to a larger display, SHIELD will also give you the power to wirelessly access your NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPU-powered computer from the comfort of your couch with GeForce game streaming– while NVIDIA promises to bring PC streaming to SHIELD devices at a later date. Speaking of games, it’s looking like there will certainly be a nice lineup of titles for gamers to choose from once SHIELD is finally available. Among the games that will be headed to TegraZone are Broken Age, Costume Quest, Flyhunter: Origins, Skiing Fred and Chuck’s Challenge. Naturally, there will be more titles released as time moves forward and all that good stuff.

And now for the important deets— pricing and availability. As mentioned earlier, the device will be available for pre-order from Newegg, Gamestop, Micro Center and Canada Computers on May 20th, while devices will ship around sometime in June. Additionally, SHIELD will cost $349, so it won’t break the bank too much.

Come comment on this article: NVIDIA announces SHIELD pre-orders will begin May 20th and will have a cost of $349

The word ‘hipster’ has taken on many meanings over the years, from jazz potheads to ironic 20-somethings, but whatever Americans currently believe it to mean, they are now turning on the subculture in a big way. A new poll has found that 42% of American voters have an “unfavorable” opinion of hipsters.

The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling (PPP), surveyed 571 U.S. voters who, overall, did not have a favorable picture of hipsters, though 43% “aren’t sure” what the think about them. While 23% of the voters polled thought hipsters had made “a positive cultural contribution to society,” a full 46% chose the polling option that said, “They just soullessly appropriate cultural tropes from the past for their own ironic amusement.”

The results were split slightly between Democrats and Republicans, with 34% of Democrats having an unfavorable opinion of the group and 18% having a favorable one. 48% of Republicans had an unfavorable opinion and only 9% had a favorable one. Only 2% of Republicans stated they would be more likely to vote for a hipster for political office, while 27% of independent voters stated they would be more likely to vote for a hipster.

The results were even more disparate when taken by age group. 43% of voters 18-29 actually have a favorable opinion of hipsters, to 29% who have an unfavorable opinion of them. Only 6% of voters over age 65 have a favorable opinion, while 37% of them have an unfavorable one.

By race, Hispanics were generally most favorable toward hipsters (46% favorable) while only 8% of white voters were favorable toward hipsters. A full 33% of the Hispanic voters polled considered themselves hipsters, while only 6% of white voters and 10% of black voters considered themselves hipsters.

(Jeff Martin, National Women’s Law Center)

During his State of the Union address in February, President Obama called on Congress to expand access to high-quality preschool to every four-year old in America. As the President put it that day:

In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own. We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure to meet with mothers, leaders, and tireless advocates that understand that the best investment we can make as a country is in our children’s future.

The coalition came to the White House to deliver 30,000 letters and art work thanking the President for his proposal to make high-quality preschool available for all children – and I used the opportunity to thank them for all their hard work, and to hear from them about the work they continue to do advocating for children.

They understand that for every dollar spent on high-quality early education, we save more than seven dollars in the long run by boosting kindergarten readiness, graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, and even reducing violent crime. They also understand that providing our children with the best start possible in life is not only a moral imperative, but an economic imperative that will benefit our communities and our nation far into the future.

read more

The question of which hurts more (childbirth or a kick in the balls) continues to plague the curious, as it has for generations. Well, here a couple guys you might be able to ask.

They say it was worse than they expected, with reactions like, “That was not good,” and, “It sucked.”

But the real evidence is in the clear agony that they are feeling as it is happening. Having witnessed two childbirths firsthand, and now this video, I have to lean toward childbirth as the more painful scenario.

[via reddit]