Category: News

by Tom Laskawy

Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity agenda would have kids a little less round ‘round the middle.White House Flickr streamWhile we await Michelle Obama’s speech this Wednesday to the United States Conference of Mayors that will likely launch her new campaign against childhood obesity, I thought I’d offer a little perspective as well as a few bits of research that shed light on the enormity and complexity of the obesity epidemic.

First off, let’s be clear: The First Lady will, of course, do everything she can to avoid picking a fight with Big Food—I wouldn’t be surprised to see corporate partnerships coming out of her efforts. Indeed, her team’s first foray into the food policy arena, which included rumors of a White House embrace of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler’s “junk food addiction” model for obesity, the president himself raising the possibility of a soda tax and the somewhat defensive posture of her policy team in an interview with NPR, were overshadowed by industry objections.

Even the most common-sense advice from her (drink water not soda, eat less processed food) prompted howls of outrage from food companies. We’ll know for sure next week, but school food will probably be the focus of all her efforts. After all, school food is already the government’s responsibility and even in the “reform-proof” Senate there is a fair amount of momentum for reducing access to junk food in the lunchroom and improving the quality of school food.

Unfortunately, the school environment is not the only one at issue for kids. I wrote back in September about a Temple University study which showed corner stores to be a scourge to school nutritionists:

[R]esearchers perform[ed] voluntary
inspections for students’ purchases—most obesity studies rely on
self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable. And what’s inside
those before- and after-school shopping bags is pretty depressing. One
researcher saw an eighth-grader’s $1.80 haul—a Coke, chips, and piece
of chocolate cake. 500 calories—calorically (though not
nutritionally) equal to the lunch served that day at school. These
lunches are free to most students as the school in question
participates in Philly’s Universal Feeding program. As the article
points out, the hard work that went into getting junk food out of these
Philly schools is being almost totally undermined.

But it’s not just corner stores. A study just published in the American Journal of Public Health surveyed all kinds of non-food stores in 19 US cities—small, medium and large—to see how many sold calorically-dense snack foods.

Snack food was available in 41 percent of the stores; the most common forms were candy (33 percent), sweetened beverages (20 percent), and salty snacks (17 percent). These foods were often within arm’s reach of the cash register queue. We observed snack foods in 96 percent of pharmacies, 94 percent of gasoline stations, 22 percent of furniture stores, 16 percent of apparel stores, and 29 to 65 percent of other types of stores. Availability varied somewhat by region but not by the racial or socioeconomic characteristics of nearby census tracts.

Junk food really is everywhere! The researchers noted that people don’t reduce their overall eating patterns to account for snacking and thus the more “eating occasions” a person has, the higher their caloric intake will be. They also observed that FDA regulations allow anyone to sell candy, soda, and salty snacks. But if you want to sell fruits and vegetables? You need a permit. Big Food strikes again.

And yet, even attacking calories consumed (as the First Lady will undoubtedly do) may prove insufficient. There are more and more indications that the industrial chemical soup that surrounds us plays a role as well. There is strong evidence that phthalates, an ingredient in soft plastic toys as well as in personal care products, are a factor in the obesity epidemic, especially in low-income communities.

And now a new study finds that Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) such as certain pesticides as well as chemicals like dioxin and PCBs, when consumed at levels commonly found in food, can cause insulin resistance (which can lead to diabetes, obesity and liver disease). Many kinds of POPs have been banned here and abroad but they can persist for decades in the environment and in our food. We’ll be eating PCBs for a long time to come. It’s the first study that has established this link experimentally. Here’s how they did it:

Adult male rats were fed for 28 days either crude or refined fish oil obtained from farmed Atlantic salmon carcasses.

The
crude fish oil contained the levels of POPs that people are typically
exposed to after eating the fish. The refined fish oil contained no
POPs and was fed to the control rats. The levels of fat in both diets
were the same.

Adult rats exposed to the crude fish oil—which contained the POPs
mixture—put on belly fat and developed insulin resistance and liver
disease. The rats could not regulate fat properly. They had higher
levels of cholesterol and the fatty acids triacylglycerol and
diacylglycerol in their livers.

In contrast, none of these changes were seen in the rats that ate fish oil without the POPs.

Although
blood levels of insulin and sugar were similar among rats with either
diet, the rats exposed to POPs had impaired insulin action. The POPs
also altered the expression of number of genes involved in metabolism,
which could explain the changes in fat and sugar regulation.

Let’s parse this. They fed the rats fish oil “obtained from farmed Atlantic salmon carcasses.” You, too, could perform this experiment on yourself—go to the supermarket and buy Atlantic salmon. Then eat it. Congratulations! You just exposed yourself to Persistant Organic Pollutants! Now, you can argue that people don’t eat just crude fish oil for months at a time—but POPs bioaccumulate in all sorts of foods. And it’s very interesting that both sets of animals displayed similar blood sugar and insulin levels—it was how their bodies responded to the insulin that changed.

Of greatest concern was the evidence that the POP exposure “altered the expression of number of genes involved in metabolism.” Scary stuff—these pollutants are affecting us on a genetic level. And no doubt, some people will respond differently to these pollutants than others based on their genetic makeup.

In fact, I recently ran across a study of the link between pesticides and Parkinson’s disease that demonstrated this affect. According to the study, a particular gene has now been linked to increased risk from developing Parkinson’s after prolonged exposure to organophosphate pesticides. This may seem obscure (and unrelated to the subject of this post) but it has serious implications. There’s nothing in our toxic chemical regulations that would account for increased risk via genetic predispositions in a particular population. What if a chemical is benign to most people but a serious health risk to others—and we have no way of knowing who’s at risk? What do we do then? Under current regulations, the government is unlikely to act.

So, we’re left with an obesity epidemic which has certainly been caused in part by increased caloric intake, but increasingly appears to have been caused in part by our genetic response to all sorts of environmental factors. I’m as curious as anyone to hear the elements of the First Lady’s plan to combat childhood obesity and I expect to hear good ideas about getting junk food out of schools and enlisting parents in the work of establishing good nutrition. But I also hope she’s thinking about how to deal with the chemicals in our food which may be altering our childrens’ genes as well as their weight.

Related Links:

Sugar isn’t food, but schools don’t seem to agree

Supreme Court ruling on elections puts concept of any kind of reform into doubt

Michelle Obama vows to ‘move the ball’ on kids’ diets

“Nothing is worse than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.” I wonder if Wayne D. Puff, who ran a huge Ponzi scheme from 1998 through 2005, ever felt that. Last week in New Jersey he was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $100 million in restitution after his company (New Jersey Affordable Homes) accepted $123 million from investors, attracted to the annual returns of 15-20% from his business of buying, renovating and reselling real estate, using the time-honored tradition of fudging applications, having appraisers pump up values, and flipping properties.

In more “great” news items is news like the kind that is issued by market researcher RealtyTrac, which stated that 2.8 million US properties had foreclosure filings in 2009 in spite of legislative and industry-related delays and loan modifications. The Federal Reserve is scheduled to wind down its MBS purchase program at the end of the first quarter, and tax incentives will expire at the end of April. Many markets still have too many houses for sale and too few buyers, and of course tight underwriting guidelines don’t help the supply & demand issue as appraisers continue to struggle to confirm sales prices. That being said, many markets are seeing stable prices and continued solid interest, especially on the low end.

What do Federal Home Loan Banks do all day besides issue research? They also do a few workshops and many are free. For example,the San Francisco Bank is hosting 2010 WISH and IDEA workshops on the 25^th for loans for the first-time homebuyer matching grant programs. “Both programs can also complement or supplement a myriad of local, state, and federal programs and initiatives.” E-mail [email protected] with questions, or register at www.fhlbsf.com

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) does more than insure deposits and close troubled banks. On January 29^th the FDIC will host a day-long symposium to discuss issues and strategies available to financial institutions for managing their exposures to interest rate risk (IRR). “With a historically steep yield curve and low short-term interest rates, it’s vital for institutions to have robust processes for measuring and mitigating risks posed by potential changes in rates.” Speaking will be Federal Reserve Board of Governors Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian. If you’re around the FDIC’s Arlington, Virginia facility that day, check it out. RSVP to Greg Hernandez in the FDIC Office of Public Affairs at [email protected] or to request an invitation, please contact N. Michelle Rose at [email protected].

How about some common sense legal RESPA information? The Prieston Group is hosting a January 21^st teleconference that will cover RESPA from the point of view a regulatory law firm concentrating on laws and issues pertaining to mortgage brokers and their consumers. “If you have any questions about how to put the new rules into practice, what must be disclosed, or would like to walk through a particular scenario that you’ve encountered send your questions to [email protected] and we will be sure to include them on the teleconference.” Write to Mary Gamble if you’re interested in the class: [email protected]

more news on HUD and FHA, FDIC Bank Shutdowns, First Horizon, Citigroup, BB&T, GMAC, Bank of America, Flagstar, the economy, and joke of the day … <<< CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

Roush Performance announced today that it will offer its Stage 1 and Stage 2 packages for the 2011 Ford Mustang GT in April.

“Using the new Ford 5.0-Liter, V-8 engine, both of these cars will have 412 horsepower and 390 ft.-lb. or torque, all while reaching an estimated 25 highway miles per gallon of fuel economy,” Roush said in a statement. “Also new for the 2011 model year is the standard six-speed transmission, something that Mustang fans have clamored for over the past several years.”

The Stage 1 package will consist of aesthetic changes such as the addition of the OEM-quality ROUSH body kit, while Stage 2 will offer suspension and handling upgrades in addition to appearance upgrades.

“The 2011 ROUSH® Stage 1™ and Stage 2™ Mustangs will represent an incredible value by blending appearance and handling with an amazing base Ford engine package,” said Jack Roush. “I expect that the 2011 Stage 1™ and Stage 2™ ROUSH® Mustangs could come close to matching the performance of some ROUSHcharged™ Mustangs we have offered in prior model years which will make them extremely exciting to drive and at a reasonable starting price point.”

For power upgrades, the Roush 427R engineering team is already working on producing a ROUSHcharger for the 2011 model year. Those packages won’t be offered until late summer.

– By: Omar Rana

By Jennifer Valentino, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

A third of adults online are now using the Web for “quick conversations,” posting updates on sites like Facebook and Twitter at least once a week.

The ranks of these networkers, dubbed “conversationalists” in a report released today by Forrester Research, have grown in the past couple of years. They’re mostly women, and they aren’t only young people — 70 percent of the adults in this category are 30 and older. (The report looked only at people 18 and over, so the youngest users aren’t included.)

Although Twitter might seem to be the most likely outlet for these conversationalists, Forrester’s surveys “indicate that there are actually even more people conversing this way through Facebook.”

Read the rest of this story on the original site

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Filed under: Sedan, Technology, Videos, Audi, Luxury

Audi isn’t the first to add Google to its in-car information offerings. It is, however, the first to add Google Earth and then tie that in to a suite of mobile tools that will make using your navigation system almost as easy and comprehensive as using your home computer.

In the latest incarnation of Audi’s Multimedia Interface (MMI), Google Earth provides a bird’s-eye view of the surroundings. Then you can zoom over the landscape, choose a city to investigate and pull up its Wikipedia page. When you know where you want to go, let your finger do the typing on the touchpad to enter your destination. Follow the jump for a video of the system in action. The new A8 just got a little bit sweeter.

[Source: in2itech]

Continue reading Video: First look at new Audi MMI with Google Earth integration

Video: First look at new Audi MMI with Google Earth integration originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Car Buying, Buick, GM, GMC, Pontiac

When General Motors put Oldsmobile out to pasture, many owners defected from GM brands all-together. In an effort to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself with soon to be displaced Pontiac owners, the General is extending an olive branch in the form of a year of free maintenance.

Automotive News reports that GM is offering four years of free service visits – including oil changes and tire rotations – to specific Buick–GMC dealerships for owners of 1999 and newer Pontiac vehicles. Brian Sweeney, general manager of Buick-GMC, told AN that the plan is to “to keep the relationship with the Buick-GMC dealer.” Customers will be given specific Buick-GMC dealers to utilize for the free service in order to help the dealers develop a relationship with said customer in hopes that they will use that dealership to purchase future products.

A potential problem with the plan is that Pontiac and Buick/GMC models aren’t exactly in the same price range, though (potential) future products like the Buick Excelle and the GMC Granite concept could be priced competitively enough to keep some Pontiac owners in the GM family.

With new service customers on the way, we’re sure the Buick-GMC dealers are excited about this program. Many Buick-GMC dealers used to sell Pontiacs as well, so many of the brand’s former customers won’t even have to go to a new dealer to cash in on the free maintenance.

[Source: Automotive News – Sub. Req. | Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty]

GM wooing current Pontiac owners with free service originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jefferies & Company analyst Katherine Egbert told her clients last night that Redmond is getting ready to launch a phone based on Windows Mobile 7. “Our recent industry checks indicate Microsoft will be debuting its own phone sometime in the next two months,” Egbert said. “We expect the new phone to debut soon, at either the Feb 15-18 Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona Spain, or possibly at CTIA in Las Vegas one month later.”

Egbert says the company is “partnering with a few OEM manufacturers,” similar to what Google has done with the Nexus One, to create a Zune-like phone which will have 720p HD video capabilities, at least a 5MP camera, and that will run Windows Mobile 7. She also notes that Windows Mobile 7 will include “premium mobile services,” including a Zune video store and music subscription and purchasing services. It will have an interface “similar” to the Zune HD UI, “and could include social networking apps like Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter,” she writes. “We don’t have any information about the cost of the Pink phone, nor do we know what service providers might be partnered with Microsoft,” she admitted.

“Revenue from the phone is also very unlikely to be meaningful for many years,” she believes. Her reasoning for the phone is a little odd though. “However, the new phone might explain why Microsoft has allowed WinMo to dwindle to less than 10 percent mobile OS market share. Pink would be the ‘third screen’ (after Windows and Xbox) and [the] final component in Microsoft’s ‘3 screens and a cloud’ strategy.”

If she’s right, Microsoft would be fulfilling the dreams of Zune fans, Windows Mobile fans, and many others who have been waiting for Microsoft to counter Apple’s iPhone with its own software and hardware combination, as opposed to just a new version of its mobile OS. Speculation and rumors about a secretive effort known as Project Pink to develop a Microsoft-branded handset have been around for many, many months.

The tidbits mentioned by the analyst have a strong resemblance to recent rumors about a media edition of Windows Mobile 7 that has “Microsoft Zune Phone Experience,” and supposedly features HD video, a Zune-like music player, and streaming media, as well as Silverlight, Mediaroom, Xbox Live (possibly gameplay), Facebook and Twitter interfaces (similar to Xbox), and Zune Music integration. The media edition doesn’t refer to a single “Zune Phone” though, and the latest rumors say it’s coming in 2011.

Each time rumors about a Zune Phone spring up, Microsoft is quick to knock them down, insisting that it is only interested in the mobile OS business, not competing with hardware manufacturers. Officially, the company insists that releasing its own branded smartphone would be contrary to its strategy of offering just the operating system to a number of partners who then provide various hardware options so that consumers can have a myriad of devices to choose from. Earlier this month, Microsoft Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach bashed Google for its move with the Nexus One, saying that handset makers may fear the company will prioritize its own product over theirs and ditch Android as a result.

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by Tom Philpott

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

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Massive burger recall: what would Meat Wagon be without one? The Obama administration still hasn’t chosen a director of the USDA’s FSIS—the office charged with overseeing the safety of the nation’s meat supply.

Meanwhile, the new year is off to a rollicking start on the E. coli-tainted-beef front. A California company named Huntington Meat Packing has had to recall 864,000 pounds of ground beef last week, after USDA inspectors found it laced with the deadly E. coli 0157 strain.

According to Meat Wagon’s proprietary mathematical models, that’s enough dodgy burger to make 3.56 million Quarter Pounders, or a scary Quarter Pounder for every resident of Chicago (population 2.8 million), with 756,000 extra burgers for folks to have seconds. Wow.

It should be noted that Huntington Meat Packing is a relatively small beef packer in an industry dominated by giants. These days, three companies—Tyson, Cargill, and JBS—slaughter about 75 percent of cows raised in the United States.  With their massive market shares and global-spanning scale, these corporations are masters at churning out profit by doing everything as cheaply as possible; and forcing any smaller company that wants to compete with them to do the same.

When your main incentive is to do things cheaply, as opposed to doing them right, food-safety problems are all but inevitable. Relatively small packers like Huntington are hardly the only ones prone to churning out tainted meat. Last year, a plant owned by Cargill—the globe’s largest agribusiness firm, which packs about a quarter of the beef consumed in the U.S.—had at least two massive recalls (see here and here).

The beef industry’s steady trickle of recalls is surely expensive and embarrassing; but it isn’t doing much to change practices—or else there wouldn’t be that steady trickle of recalls. It must be cheaper to endure recalls than to stop practices that cause them in the first place.

Indeed, the business model of modern beef production hinges on two practices that seem to ensure that the resulting product will be laced with pathogens. Both are related to the feedlot, not the slaughterhouse. The first is feeding corn and corn byproducts to ruminants that evolved to eat grass—a feeding regime that seems to have created E. coli 0157, which is innocuous to cows but potentially deadly to humans. As Michael Pollan wrote a few years ago:

The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)

The second highly questionable practice is to regularly dose cows with antibiotics, which probably explains the rise of antibiotic-resistant salmonella in hamburger meat.

Here’s what I think is going to happen: Rather than change these two practices, the industry and its government overseers will grope for a techno-fix—some sort of post-production sterilization that will (ostensibly) clean up the pathogen messes that start in the feedlot. I’d wager we’ll soon be hearing about irradiation as a “solution” to tainted burger; or perhaps a vaccine.

Such fixes perpetuate the problems they seek to “solve”—and generate new problems that will also need techno-fixes. It should remembered that “pink slime” —the ammonia-treated slurry of defatted slaughterhouse scraps that now ends up as a filler in 70 percent of U.S. hamburgers—itself started as a techno-fix to the pathogen problem. It was supposed to be so full of ammonia that it would sterilize hamburger mixes at 15 percent concentrations. We now know that far from sterilizing ground-beef mixes, pink slime often adds to the pathogen load in the hamburgers it graces.

The poultry industry already uses post-slaughter sterilization to reduce pathogens. Did you know that the U.S. poultry industry subjects the chicken it sells to a chlorine bath? And that Russia has banned imports of U.S. poultry because it disapproves of the process? Russia has also “banned pork from all but six U.S. processing plants for excessive antibiotic residues,” Reuters reports.

Whether the chlorine bath leaves traces on the treated chicken and harms consumers is an open question. One thing seems clear: it doesn’t prevent chicken on the market from containing pathogens. From the CDC Website: “In 2005, Campylobacter was present on 47 percent of raw chicken breasts tested through the FDA-NARMS Retail Food program.”

Despite the recent unpleasantness, the industrial-meat giants look set for a mighty stock market rebound in 2010, reports CBS MarketWatch. In fact, their shares have already been rallying over the past three months:

Tyson Foods shares are up 12 percent, while pork producer Smithfield Food Inc. is up 19 percent. Chicken supplier Sanderson Farms Inc.  is 21 percent higher in the same three-month period.

Speaking of industrial-scale slaughterhouses, Missouri is now in the business of subsidizing them.

ConAgra Foods will receive state tax credits to help create new jobs and investment at the company’s meat and poultry processing plant in Trenton, Mo. The Missouri Department of Economic Development (MDED) said in a news release that it has approved $247,285 in tax credits over a five-year period to add 10 new jobs and $9 million in new investment to expand the Trenton facility.

I’d bet that investing that same $247,285 in slaughterhouses designed for small, pasture-based farmers would create more jobs, and more economic activity, than handing it to ConAgra.

Related Links:

Why you should go see ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

Why are libertarian right wingers defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system?

Industrial farming head just says ‘no’ to call for civility

The Institutional Risk Analyst: Why Big is Bad; Alex Pollock on Sarbanes-Oxley and the Financial Crisis  – Christopher Whalen – In this issue of The IRA, we discuss why Big is Bad when it comes to large banks.  Then we feature a comment by Alex Pollock on “Sarbanes-Oxley in the Light of the Financial Crisis”  
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Massachusetts May Drag Feet On Seating Republican If He Wins To Save The 60th Vote On Medicare – Joe Weisenthal – A clever way of overturning the will of the people. – The Business Insider

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White House credits stimulus with up to 2M jobs – AP Yahoo

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Fed’s Dudley Says Rates May Stay Low for as Long as Two Years – by Joshua Zumbrun –  New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley said short-term interest rates may remain low for at least six months and possibly for as long as two years.  “Short-term rates are going to stay low for a considerable period of time to come,” Dudley said yesterday, according to the transcript of an interview with PBS Television’s Nightly Business Report. – Bloomberg

Obama Bank Fee to Hit 50 of the Biggest U.S. Financial Firms – By Julianna Goldman – Bloomberg  
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Interest Rate Outlook – …  So, what comes next?  …  The fed is now interested in “testing” the strength of this recovery.  How does it do that?  By letting long term interest rates rise to where the market thinks they should be.  Think of it as an experiment.  How will the fed facilitate this experiment? By slowly shutting down its asset-purchase programs. … – Surly Trader

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Fanning Fannie worries – By PAUL THARP – As the White House pushes its plan to yank billions in taxes from financial firms, two of the biggest and dysfunctional companies are getting a free pass.  Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are exempt from the proposed tax, despite having played central roles in the financial crisis. – NY Post 

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Banks, experts eye possible ways around Obama fee – By Dan Wilchins – No sooner does Washington propose a new tax than an army of experts tries to figure out ways to avoid it.  That is already the case with U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed fee on banks, designed to ensure that Wall Street banks pay up to $117 billion to reimburse taxpayers for the financial bailout: Bankers, lawyers and consultants are already considering ways to avoid paying the fee.  “This law could be a real boon for lawyers and consultants like me. There are tremendous opportunities for coming up with new mechanisms to avoid it,” said Bert Ely, a bank consultant in Alexandria, Virginia. – Reuters

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Administration Releases December Loan Modification Report, Update on Conversion Drive – More Than 850,000 Homeowners Now with Median Payment Reductions Exceeding $500; More Than 100,000 Permanent Modifications Approved to Date – Aggressive Administration Campaign Significantly Accelerates Conversion Rate; December Push Doubles Number of Permanent Modifications Over Life of Program – thanks Marty Rosenblatt – US TreasuryPress Release
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The Coming Sovereign Debt Crisis – Nouriel Roubini and Arpitha Bykere – Will investors move out of their ‘’safe haven” markets? – In 2009, downgrades and debt auction failures in countries like the UK, Greece, Ireland and Spain were a stark reminder that unless advanced economies begin to put their fiscal houses in order, investors and rating agencies will likely turn from friends to foes – Forbes

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Fannie, Freddie Cost the Government $291bn in 2009 – DIANA GOLOBAY – HousingWire

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On the ending of QE – When the Fed Stops the Music – John Mauldin’s Thoughts From The Frontline – … This is yet another uncertainty. We simply have no idea, no relevant marker, for what happens when a country goes so cold turkey, coming off a central bank bond-buying binge. And this in the midst of a massive deleveraging and with stock market valuations basically where they were in 1987 – except there was at least large earnings growth then. … – Investor’s Insight

FOX has fueled speculation that it will sign exiting Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien to be its new face of late night after the network registered a domain name for the site ConanOnFox.com this week, E! News claims.

As of Tuesday, the site redirects users to a Twitter page which reads “Conan on FOX.”

FOX and its basic cable sister network have previously declared an interest in hiring the presenter for a late-night program in the wake of his recent fallout with NBC. O’Brien is reportedly brokering a deal that could pay the Boston native between $30-$40 million to leave the network and his post at The Tonight Show, allowing Jay Leno to move back to late night TV after a failed jaunt in primetime. Sources tell TMZ that the funnyguy is determined to look out for members of his Tonight Show team and is working to secure severance deals for his entire staff. Under Conan’s current separation agreement, he would have to wait until September before beginning another show on a competing network.

3G, 4G, VoIP, Google Voice, a crippling growth in data usage—the bottom line is that there have been a lot of changes to the wireless industry recently. Are you one of the masses maxing out your minutes and data?

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Caterham’s boss Ansar Ali has told AutoCar that the company plans on revealing its plans to go electric within six months. Ali said that Caterham is talking to several parties that are interested in working with the company.

“We’re trying to pull together some partners and there a lot who want to be associated with us,” he told the publication. “We want to do this properly and with the right partners, not just stick batteries in the back of a Seven.”

He said that the Caterham team still has to be convinced that an electric powertrain could work in its vehicles and that it would be up to its partners to convince them otherwise. Ali said that Caterham has no plans to produce a road-going electric-car and that any initial electric Caterham vehicle would be a racing car.

“We have no plans to produce an electric Seven,” he said. “We’re looking at motorsport applications but there’s uncertainty as to whether an electric car could handle race conditions.”

– By: Kap Shah

Source: AutoCar

One very common phrase in baking is the direction to “bake until just set.” This phrase tends to mean slightly different things for different baked goods, although you’ll see the same instruction for brownies, cookies, cheesecakes and custards.

For cookies, baking until just set means that the edges of the cookie should be slightly firm or dry to the touch and the top of the cookie should no longer look wet. In other words, it shouldn’t still feel like raw cookie dough if you gently touch it with your finger. This instruction is most often given with chewy cookies, or fudgy and brownie-like chocolate cookies where you want to make sure that the finished cookie is not overdone and the amount of browning around the edge does not necessarily give you a definitive result on how done it is.

For cheesecakes and custards, where the term is used even more frequently, it is a little more difficult to  determine when something is “just set,” although with a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to spot it very easily. Cheesecakes and custards are never cooked until they are firm. Instead, you need to jiggle the pan slightly and see how the batter moves. It will jiggle slightly and evenly over the whole surface, not just at the center. If you’ve ever made jello and seen how it firms up more quickly at the edges than at the center, use that as a reference because that is exactly how cheesecakes and custards set up – from the outside to the center. So, watch to see that the center doesn’t look significantly looser than the rest of the cheesecake when you give the pan a nudge and you’ll have a cheesecake that is done perfectly when you take it out of the oven.

San Francisco-based Boku has raised a sizable round of funding totaling $25 million to build a mobile-payments company that they believe can one day compete against financial institutions, like Mastercard, Visa, and even online providers, like Paypal.

The year-old company has partnered with wireless carriers around the world to let people use their cellphones to pay for online virtual goods from social networks, like Facebook and MySpace. Once a user enters their cellphone number, and verifies the charge via text message, the amount appears on a user’s next bill. Even just a week ago, the idea may have sounded less probable, but since then the Red Cross has collected $22 million for its Haiti relief efforts via text messaging, signaling that consumers are ready to start spending by mobile phone.

Investors in the third round include: DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. In total, the company has raised $38 million. In an interview with mocoNews, Ron Hirson, BOKU’s SVP of product and marketing said the money will go towards global expansion: “Right now with 196 carriers, we reach 1.8 billion potential subscribers, but there are 4 billion people worldwide that have cellphones.” Hirson added that more subscribers make them more appealing to more merchants. In doing that, a lot of money will be spent on adding redundancies and technology to their system similar to a bank’s. “We aren’t spending it on marketing or headcount. We are around 50 people, we won’t double by the end of the year,” he said.

The company was born from acquisition. Last year, it raised $13 million to buy both Paymo and MobillCash. Hirson said they have no plans to acquire more companies, however, “if it makes sense to grow, we will consider it, but so far, we are in a pretty strong position with Paymo and MobileCash.” As part of the financing, the company said it will adopt Paymo as its consumer-facing name, but its corporate name will remain Boku. Some of the smaller startups that Boku competes against are Obopay and Zong, among others.

But the promise of hitting it big, is not so much a race against others. One of the major sticking points for the mobile-payments space in general is the carriers. Right now, merchants must pay carriers a fee in order to use the phone as a payment method. Hirson said the fee can range between 20 and 50 percent of the retail price. After that, Boku also takes a cut (which Hrison says is in the single digits). When a consumer is considering buying virtual goods in an online game, like tokens or new weapons, the fee is not a deal-breaker considering the convenience of paying with a cellphone. But when you consider other spaces, like digital goods (MP3s, videos) or physical goods (for instance, anything on Amazon.com), taking a 50 percent cut makes the business model impossible.

Hrison said it’s their intention to move into more markets, and he sees carriers eventually lowering their rates. “The carriers are definitely coming down, but unevenly globally. Right now, some countries are 10 percent, but others are still getting there. If this proves to be a viable channel, carriers will see it as a way to make more money and will open up to more markets if they lower their fees.”

Based on fees and the general comfort-level of subscribers to buy using the phone, the opportunity is greater outside the U.S. Currently, Boku’s revenues are basically split with a third coming from the U.S., a third from Europe and a third in Asia. “Depending on who you talk to, some of us are surprised as a much is coming from the U.S. It’s interesting to see where it’s coming from.”

Related

• Boku Upgrades Mobile Payments Platform; Adds 12 New Publisher Partners
• Boku Raises $13 Million To Buy Paymo And Mobillcash; Launches Mobile Payment Service

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