Por exemplo aqui nos Açores o concelho de Lagoa tem cerca de 14200 habitantes, mas a vila tem 8900.
Pill poppers of the world, rise up and unite (and then sink back onto the sofa, unsure of why you just got up.) Elecom, the company who brought you these bricky earphones are now into drugs. Lucky, lucky, us.
Mr. & Mrs. Simpson-Wentz sure love to trick the paps, don’t they!
Pete and Ashlee weren’t fooling anyone when they donned scary masks and braved gusty winds and sub-zero temps in the Big Apple on Tuesday.
The Scandinavian electric vehicle constructor Think is set tot take over the world. They have announced for some time now that they were considering building a manufacturing plant in the US, but until now the location was uncertain.
Now it’s official, Think will build its factory in Elkhart County, Indiana. The company will invest $43.5 million in buildings and equipment, as they expect to build their first cars in early 2011. The plant is supposed to have a capacity of 20,000 veh… (read more)
Harry Potter star Emma Watson joins her younger brother Alex in a new Burberry campaign promoting the brand’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection.
Watson, 19, and baby bro Alex model in the latest ads for the posh fashion label, shot by legendary photog Mario Testino.
Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey says the new photos and collection “celebrate our heritage and our timeless Burberry icons.”
“The energy of the images and the dynamic cast reflect the different attitudes and expressions of the Burberry guy and girl.”
American rock band The Romantics was confirmed for the 2010 NAIAS by the show organizers, being scheduled to play at the annual Charity Preview gala event on January 15, 2010. As we said in a previous report, the money raised at the event will benefit 12 children charities from the Detroit area.
Entertainment for Charity Preview is great because it provides value for a ticket that does so much good for so many in our tri-county area. But to have The Romantics here to play for the… (read more)
Last year our readers sent us quite a few of their own ingenious ideas for organizing their kitchens. We love getting photos and good ideas from our readers! Here is a look back at some of the great storage and organization solutions you sent us last year, from a wall-mounted magnetic spice board to a pot rack made of IKEA parts.
Here’s the latest US vs. Japan overlay from financial planner and chartmaster Doug Short (dshort.com).
Our current rebound is sharper than anything Japan ever saw, though if history repeats and we really are on their path, then you’d expect a return to deflation and a return of the bear very soon.
This is Bernanke’s nightmare, and he spends all day trying to make sure it doesn’t come true.
Find more market charts at Dshort.com — >
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Turning a middle-field team into a front-runner inside the Formula One championship is not picnic for anyone. Well, maybe Ross Brawn proved us differently in the past 2 years, but the overall unwritten rule is that it normally takes a lot longer than that to get the job done and turn a poor team into a championship contender.
However, if that team’s name is Renault and has a history of winning championships in F1, the job seems a lot easier. And that’s exactly how new team boss Er… (read more)
The last month of 2009 proved to be the highest-selling of the year, with the American division of the German carmaker selling 20,889 vehicles States side, only 0.2 percent more than in December 2008. From the beginning of the year, Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA) sold 190,604 vehicles, 15.3 percent fewer than in 2008, while smart USA sold 14,595 units in 2009.
"The strong finish to a year marked by challenges on every front, underscores the customer confidence in the Mercedes-Ben… (read more)
Spider-Man has hit a roadblock. Production on the fourth film in the hit box office franchise has been stalled over a script issue. Spider-Man 4 had been set to start in February, but it has been put on hold.
“We will not start until we have it (script) right. The feeling is we are not going to rush it to make the date,” a source tells the Daily Variety.
Executives at Paramount Studios have refused to alter the May 2011 release date – but insiders insist that will have to change.
“I think making May is a real question. We will not start until we have it right. The feeling is we are not going to rush it to make the date.”
Facebook is huge, nobody doubts that at this point, at over 350 million users, there aren’t that many sites which can compete with it. But a statistic that is maybe just as important as the number of unique visitors, perhaps even more so for certain audiences, is page views and here Facebook is even more of a contender. Because of the nature of the site it tends to get a lot more page views than its competitors. The actual number may surprise even the biggest optimists, as the social network gets about 260 billion page views, with a ‘b’, every month.
The number, surprisingly, comes from Google through its “ad planner” tool which estimates a number of metrics for most of the sites on the web. These aren’t exact measurements and they may not be the most accurate of numbers, but even with a huge room for error, the fact is that Facebook is so far ahead of everyone else that accuracy doesn’t really matter all that much.
With 260 billion page views every month, it’s the biggest site on the web at this point, likely followed by Google. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t provide any estimates for the page view numbers google.com is getting. It does provide them for yahoo.com though, which is the runner up in the Google-made top, and it gets about 70 billion. At number three Microsoft’… (read more)
Hey — are you in love with the PSP 3000 but can’t stand the fact that a pink one doesn’t exist? Well, your life just got a lot better. Playstation Japan’s just officially outed the handheld in “Spring Blossom Pink” for a March 2010 launch. Other than its new, more girlish figure, this PSP 3000 is exactly the same as every one on the market, but you know, looks sure are important. Sadly, this beauty’s only been announced for Japan so far, but we’ll keep our eyes open for other availability. This one’s going to run ¥16,800 (that’s about $183). There’s one more looker after the break.
Continue reading Pink PSP 3000 official in Japan for March, get ready girls!
Pink PSP 3000 official in Japan for March, get ready girls! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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D-Link just dropped a bunch of new 802.11n gear here at CES — a couple of new routers and the intriguing Rush accelerator pictured above, which is basically a powerful 4×4 access point. It’s switchable between 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and it can do up to 600Mbs over 802.11n. As for the routers, there’s the new D-Link Touch, which sports a three-inch touchscreen for configuration and simultaneous dual-band 2.4 and 5GHz support for up to 450MBps transfers, and the Pocket, which is designed as a quick’n’dirty travel router. Sadly we don’t have prices for any of this stuff, but we’ll find out more closer to the middle of the year when it all goes on sale. Pics in the gallery, PR after the break.
Gallery: D-Link 802.11n devices
Gallery: D-Link 802.11n gear hands-on
Continue reading D-Link announces Touch and Pocket 802.11n routers, Rush wireless accelerator
D-Link announces Touch and Pocket 802.11n routers, Rush wireless accelerator originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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TreeHugger reports that the noughties were the hottest decade since record keeping began – And Thus Ends the Hottest Decade on Record . . ..
Yup, the aughts or naughts or naughties or whatever you want to call them have been confirmed to be the hottest decade in recorded history–a full 0.2 degrees C warmer than the nineties. And now, as Joe Romm puts it, “the hottest decade begins.” So were do we stand?
Yes, barring a spate of supervolcano eruptions or some sort of galactic alien cooling beam directed at earth, the ’10s are almost certainly going to be even hotter than the ’00s. The trend, unfortunately, is continuing interrupted (the ’90s were previously the hottest on record, with temps 0.14 degrees C warmer than the ’80s) thanks in part to the near complete lack of carbon emissions reductions by the world’s biggest polluters. Here’s looking at you, USA and China.
It is a shame that we’re ending this decade, in which awareness of climate change rose to an all time high, mired in global discord on how to mitigate the threat, without a binding agreement from Copenhagen, still stuck battling big coal and oil funded climate change skeptics who’d rather protect their interests in the status quo than help forge solutions to an incoming worldwide disaster, and without any meaningful legislation in the US addressing global warming.
The Australian notes that last year was Australia’s second hottest (while remaining mired in the politics of global warming) – Labor seizes on temperature figures as evidence of global warming.
AUSTRALIA had the second warmest year on record last year, the Bureau of Meterology confirmed today in a finding the Rudd government has seized on as fresh evidence of climate change.
The BOM said 2009 “will be remembered for extreme bushfires, dust-storms, lingering rainfall deficiencies, areas of flooding and record-breaking heatwaves”.
Extreme heatwaves across southern Australia during late January/early February set a new Melbourne maximum temperature record of 46.4C, new State maximum temperature records for Victoria (48.8C at Hopetoun) and Tasmania (42.2C at Scamander), and contributing to the Black Saturday bushfires.
Victoria, South Australia and NSW also recorded their warmest July-December periods on record.
Environment Minister Peter Garrett said today the finding that Australia’s annual mean temperature for 2009 was 0.9C above the 1961-90 average exposed Tony Abbott’s false climate change claim that global warming has stopped.
George Monbiot at the Guardian says “Obama’s attempt to put China in the frame for failure had its origins in the absence of American campaign finance reform” – If you want to know who’s to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate.
The last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha, in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation assured delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancún, never to re-emerge. After eight years of dithering, nothing has been agreed.
When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out “in Mexico one year from now”. Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch: the place where failed negotiations go to die?
De Boer might pretend that this is just a temporary hitch, but he knows what happens when talks lose momentum. A year ago I asked him what he feared most. This is what he said. “The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second WTO … Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet, and I am afraid that if we don’t then the process will begin to slip, and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic.”
We can live without a new trade agreement; we can’t live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.
Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.
A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places which can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was 4C. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.
Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production “is very likely to decrease above about 3C”. The panel uses the phrase “very likely” to mean a probability of above 90%. Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of 3C or more by the end of the century.
Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century – probably less than a metre – is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was about 1.3C higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun.
A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today’s. Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won’t have a country any more.
The Business Spectator has some notes on options for global warming mitigation policy in Australia – Is that hot enough?.
In the past week alone, South Korea has announced it will launch a pilot emissions trading scheme this year, European nations have announced plans for a $30 billion renewable energy grid to link wind, solar and hydro, wave and tidal energy sources, and India has announced that its Planning Commission is to map a path to a low carbon economy. In other measures, high emission vehicles have been banned from the centres of Berlin and Hanover, and soon from the centres of 40 other German cities, and 11 US state governors have agreed on plans to introduce a low carbon fuel standard.
Australia does not seem to be in a position to follow such initiatives. The ETS that is about to be resubmitted to parliament faces the same opposition as it did pre-Christmas and the problems surrounding the renewable energy target – which have brought the renewable energy industry to a halt – are yet to be resolved.
But as we discussed in December, Australia has another weapon in its arsenal.
A report released by the government just before Christmas highlights exactly what could be done. The first review of the country’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in a decade, undertaken by Dr Allan Hawke, recommended the government introduce a ‘greenhouse trigger’ in the absence of an ETS.
A local wire agency report suggests that the government rejects this approach. But that’s not quite the case. It only says he sees no need for regulation because it intends to introduce an ETS. What’s left unstated is what the government would do if the ETS is not passed into law.
Dr Hawke has a suggestion: “In light of the current uncertainty about the CPRS, and the urgency in starting to tackle Australia’s carbon trajectory, the review recommends that the government implement an interim greenhouse trigger to be introduced as soon as possible by way of Regulation and to sunset upon commencement of the CPRS.
“A trigger threshold of at most 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions is recommended on the basis of prior research and previous proposals, noting that previous triggers considered by both major parties have recommended thresholds of 500,000 tonnes.
“It is intended that the trigger would capture a wide range of actions, including projects that would have a large amount of emissions released during construction, and those that would result in a large amount of emissions released during any period of operation.“
Industry bodies will be mortified. Expect them to be contacting their local (coalition) member sometime soon. An ETS, particularly one with such generous concessions to industry, is infinitely preferable to business.
Meanwhile, the argument that a carbon tax as opposed to an ETS could somehow avoid those pesky lobbyists and industry carve outs does not get much truck going by the experience of the French.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, with an eye for a possible headline of ‘Sarko saves the planet’ had decided to introduce a carbon tax in France to supplement the EU ETS. But the country’s Constitutional Court would not have a bar of it, and rejected it on the basis that there were too many exemptions. All the major emitters had been exempted from the tax, and only people heating their own homes or driving their own cars would have had to pay the tax.
Next stop, carbon tariffs?
With more news channels being watched by more people than ever before, there has never been a better time to catch reporters flubbing the news live. Here’s a round-up of all the bloopers you missed from last year:
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Luke Timmerman wrote:
Ensemble Discovery has found a second Big Pharma partner to support its R&D engine. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech is announcing today it has secured a partnership with Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, to develop a new class of drugs that combine some of the more desirable traits of conventional small molecule drugs and bigger protein therapies.
Terms of this deal aren’t being released, but Ensemble CEO Mike Taylor tells me they are “similar” to the template his company established back in April when it formed an alliance with Bristol-Myers Squibb. That deal called for Bristol to pay $5 million upfront, another $7.5 million for research expenses over the next two years, and milestone payments worth as much as $29.5 million based on the success of each individual molecule in development. Pfizer, like Bristol, has also agreed to pay the salaries of a “substantial” number of Ensemble’s 30 or so employees, Taylor says.
Both of those Big Pharma giants are paying for the right to develop a new class of therapies that Ensemble likes to call “Ensemblins.” These are synthetic mid-sized molecules that can be made into convenient oral pills, like classic small-molecule chemical drugs. But Ensemble hopes to gain an advantage by engineering its treatments to have precise targeting capability that’s commonly found in large-molecule protein drugs like antibodies, which are injected. The company was founded in 2004 based on research by David Liu at Harvard University, and it has received $32 million in venture capital from Flagship Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, Harris & Harris Group, CMEA Ventures, and Boston University.
But venture capital doesn’t last forever, so winning support from Bristol and Pfizer over the past year certainly solidifies the financial future of a little company like Ensemble, with a promising technology that still hasn’t yet entered clinical trials. The Pfizer deal means that Ensemble now has enough cash to operate “well into 2011,” Taylor says.
Mike Taylor
“Even though money can be hard to come by, we wanted to be strategic and selective in picking our deals,” Taylor says. “We really sought out companies that were committed to working with us to develop this therapeutic space.”
Naturally, that begged the question of why Ensemble thinks Pfizer would be committed. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) says it historically spends $7 billion a year on R&D, and maintains 250 partnerships across industry and academia. Plus, it did just complete a $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth in October, creating an even bigger pharmaceutical colossus.
Taylor says he’s not worried about Ensemble getting lost in the shuffle, partly because of personal relationships his company has with Pfizer. Taylor himself has longstanding ties inside the company, since he was a senior vice president of Pfizer’s global R&D division, responsible for the research portfolio, before he left to become Ensemble’s CEO in July 2007. Ensemble’s chief scientific officer, Nick Terrent, worked for Pfizer in the 1980s, and has his name on the patent for the hit Pfizer drug sildenafil (Viagra). Tony Wood, the global head of chemistry at Pfizer today, is a “champion” of the Ensemble approach within Pfizer, Taylor says.
“Despite the distractions they had to deal with, they maintained a diligent focus on getting this deal done,” Taylor says. “It reflects on the value they place on our platform.”
In a statement, Pfizer’s Wood added: “The Ensemble technology platform will give us access to an area of chemical space not currently well-represented in our file that holds the potential to be of utility in addressing novel target types.”
While Ensemble hopes to create a broad portfolio of new compounds for its partners, it is also spending some of its energy on developing a pipeline of its own internal products. The company has set its sights on an oral pill that blocks an inflammatory protein called TNF. Lots of companies have tried to do this, and none have succeeded, but the target itself has been a gold mine for Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, and Abbott Laboratories, who all hit TNF with injectable protein drugs that treat autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis. Ensemble hasn’t picked a lead drug candidate for blocking TNF, although it hopes to do that in 2010, Taylor says.
As we discussed last week, when selecting a dividend growth stock there is really only one factor that is important – sustainability. As dividend growth investors we are looking for stocks can continue to raise their dividends indefinitely into the future. One metric that provides an indication of a dividend’s sustainability is its payout ratio.
The traditional dividend payout is expressed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing annual dividend per share by annual earnings per share (EPS). This tells the investor what percentage of earning the company is paying out as a dividend. At first blush this may seem to make a lot of sense, but it suffers from two potential problems in that 1.) earnings does not always equal cash and 2.) there is no indication of the quality of earnings.
I consider Free Cash Flow payout a better ratio. Free Cash Flow is Operating Cash Flow less normal capital expenditures (normally the first line in the investing section of the GAAP cash flow statement). The formula for Free Cash Flow Payout is simply Annual Dividend Per Share divided by Free Cash Flow Per Share. I like to see a percentage of 70% or less.
Taking a look at my stock database, I found the following eight dividend stocks with a free cash flow of 50% or less and rated 4 or 5 stars:
The ability of a stock to sustain its dividend separates dividend growth stocks from stocks that simply pay a dividend. The latter is quite common, while the former helps define The Best Dividend Stocks in the World.
Full Disclosure: Long PG, EMR, ABT, JNJ, NUE, UTX. See a list of all my income holdings here.
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Council discusses carbon credits
The Kingston Whig-Standard The report concluded that the Poker Run has a negative impact on the environment and that if the city allows it to continue it must consider carbon offsets. … |
