The Autoliv steering plant in El Nadhour, Tunisia, caught fire on December 26 due to some poor welding work done during the Christmas vacation. Fortunately, there were no human injuries, but the factory management was forced to quickly move production to other facilities before automakers go back to work.
Though the manufacturing machines were destroyed by the fire, Autoliv got lucky as all critical tools were salvaged and saved with the help of the employees. Most of these tools … (read more)
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Diabetes Response Service: Daily monitoring with live operators to prevent diabetes complications such as severe hypoglycemia, seizures, brittle diabetes and diabetic coma when you are alone. |
Their statement on their homepage The mortality rate for hypoglycemic patients is 22%. seems a bit naive which concerns me.
The Ferrari and Maserati brands will be showcased at Chrysler Groups‘s stand at the upcoming Detroit Auto Show, where they will stand fender to fender with Jeep and Dodge, as reported by The Detroit Auto News.
The two Italian supercar makers are part of the Fiat Group which has established a partnership with the Chrysler Group LLC, so this PR move only comes natural.
According to the same source, Chrysler has put so much trust in this automotive family displa… (read more)
I have used a lot of dried cranberries while baking but am picky about the fresh ones. So far I have tried only one recipe using fresh cranberries. It is this cranberry bars recipe from the Joy of Baking website. Although it did come out well and tasted good, somehow I did not develop a liking for this beautiful red fruit. I think part of the reason is my quirky food likings. I usually don’t like sweet and sour or sweet and spicy together. A dish has to be either fully sweet or fully spicy. So its obvious that I do not like the combination of tart cranberries and sweet in baked goods. Anyhow I decided to give it a shot once again this cranberry season.
Lately I have been seeing a lot of Indianized cranberry recipes. Cranberry rice, cranberry pickle, cranberry dal, etc. just to mention a few. So I decided to try at least that if at all not baking with cranberries. Recently I also got hooked to the Taste of Home website. I have got a baking book published by that magazine and am a fan for those recipes. I have had a 100% success rate with those recipes. I don’t know what stopped me from visiting their website all these days. A couple of days back I borrowed a Taste of Home Cookies book from the library. It has 623 recipes and I was so tempted to get one for myself. That’s when I decided to check out their website to see if they have free recipes online and I was overjoyed to find the same. I looked for some cranberry recipes in there and bookmarked this cranberry muffins recipe. It was a simple straight forward recipe and the egg substitution was easy too. I decided to use flax seed meal as the egg substitute like I used for the vegan cranberry quick bread recipe and it turned out great.
For the past couple of months I have been incorporating a lot of whole grains and whole grain flours while baking. So I decided to used plain all purpose flour this time. Partly the reason being, my phobia for cranberries. Since I was not sure if I would like cranberries I didn’t want to use whole wheat flour and mess it up further. Surprisingly these cranberry muffins did not fail me. It tasted pretty good with mild sweetness, occasional tartness from the cranberries here and there and a nice crunch from the pecans. I would definitely try this recipe again but would increase the quantity of sugar a little bit.
Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.
Yield: A dozen cranberry muffins.
1. Preheat the oven at 375F/190C. Grease or line a muffin tin with paper liners.
2. In a large bowl mix together the dry ingredients and keep it aside.
3. In a blender/food processor blend together the flax seed powder and water until its nice and frothy.
4. Measure orange juice in a liquid measuring mug, add water until you reach 1 cup measure in the mug. To this also add the flax seed mixture, orange zest and stir together well.
5. Pour the liquid ingredients to the flour mixture and mix until just moistened. Fold in the cranberries too. Do not overmix.
6. Spoon in the batter in the greased muffin tins. Bake for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
7. Move the muffin tin to a cooling rack and let it cool for just 5 minutes. Then remove the muffins from the pan and cool it completely on a wire rack.
1. The quantity of sugar mentioned in the original recipe was 3/4th cup and I used the same, but felt that the muffins could have been a little more sweet. So you can increase the quantity to 1 cup.
2. I always prefer freshly squeezed orange juice in baking recipes. I have found out in my experience that the store bought orange juice is slightly bitter and the bitterness reflects in the baked goods too.
3. If you wish to use frozen cranberries, do not thaw it. Use it directly from the freezer otherwise the berries will start bleeding turning the batter red.
Larry’s List: Irish Atheist Edition
Ireland’s atheists are battling a blasphemy law while it’s turning into the year of gay China. And you won’t believe what you’ve been eating. These stories and more on today’s list. On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies. Newer links are on top. Annals of Irish jurisprudence, Blasphemy division, cont. The Minister for Justice is proposing to amend his new blasphemy law by providing, as a defence, that a person accused of blasphemy can “prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value” in the blasphemous matter. The joy of dirt GRUB, filth, grime, muck, gunk, slag, grit, grunge, smut, dross, dust, sludge, squalor. Insulted, hounded and despised, dirt these days has nowhere to hide. OBAMA DOUBLE CROSSED PROGRESSIVES ON HEALTHCARE Are you feeling like a chump yet? If you’re a good progressive, and you wanted single-payer health care for all, or, second best, Medicare for All Who Want It, or third best, a robust public option, or fourth best, a paltry public option, now you’ve got nothing, nada, zippo. BERNANKE: REWARDING A CATASTROPHE The Senate Banking Committee overwhelmingly voted to approve Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke for another 4-year term. 15 Horrifying Reasons to Never Let Anyone You Love Near a McDonald’s One of AlterNet’s most popular articles of the year: Erectile dysfunction, the truth behind the “special sauce,” and a burger from 1996. Keep reading if you dare. Irish atheists challenge blasphemy law An atheist group in the Irish Republic has defied a new blasphemy law by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations on its website. Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef You’re not going to believe what millions of Americans have been eating the last few years (Thanks, Bush! Thanks meat industry lobbyists!). Year of Gay China As the year 2009 comes to a close, it does so having been a monumental year for China’s LGBT community.
Ireland’s atheists are battling a blasphemy law while it’s turning into the year of gay China. And you won’t believe what you’ve been eating. These stories and more on today’s list.
On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.
Newer links are on top.
Annals of Irish jurisprudence, Blasphemy division, cont.
The Minister for Justice is proposing to amend his new blasphemy law by providing, as a defence, that a person accused of blasphemy can “prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value” in the blasphemous matter.
The joy of dirt
GRUB, filth, grime, muck, gunk, slag, grit, grunge, smut, dross, dust, sludge, squalor. Insulted, hounded and despised, dirt these days has nowhere to hide.
OBAMA DOUBLE CROSSED PROGRESSIVES ON HEALTHCARE
Are you feeling like a chump yet? If you’re a good progressive, and you wanted single-payer health care for all, or, second best, Medicare for All Who Want It, or third best, a robust public option, or fourth best, a paltry public option, now you’ve got nothing, nada, zippo.
BERNANKE: REWARDING A CATASTROPHE
The Senate Banking Committee overwhelmingly voted to approve Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke for another 4-year term.
15 Horrifying Reasons to Never Let Anyone You Love Near a McDonald’s
One of AlterNet’s most popular articles of the year: Erectile dysfunction, the truth behind the “special sauce,” and a burger from 1996. Keep reading if you dare.
Irish atheists challenge blasphemy law
An atheist group in the Irish Republic has defied a new blasphemy law by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations on its website.
Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef
You’re not going to believe what millions of Americans have been eating the last few years (Thanks, Bush! Thanks meat industry lobbyists!).
Year of Gay China
As the year 2009 comes to a close, it does so having been a monumental year for China’s LGBT community.
The Pictures of War You Aren’t Supposed to See
The state and the press work hard to keep the reality of war hidden. We rarely see images that capture the evil of war, what it does to young minds and bodies.
By Chris Hedges
The state and the press work hard to keep the reality of war hidden. We rarely see images that capture the evil of war, what it does to young minds and bodies.
Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has a post on potential Iraqi oil production – Iraq Could Delay Peak Oil a Decade.
With the emphasis on the could.
I have been associated with the view that the stagnation of oil supply growth from late 2004 on was likely to be the onset of a “bumpy plateau” of oil production – that oil production would not go too much higher, although it wouldn’t decline quickly either. You can see articulation of this point of view, for example, at old Oil Drum pieces like Why Peak Oil is Probably About Now, and Hubbert Theory says Peak is Probably Slow Squeeze.
Generally, events of the past few years have been reasonably kind to this point of view. The major producers (eg Russia and Saudi Arabia) seemed to have more-or-less reached production plateaus. Overall global production bumped up a little in late 2007 and early 2008 in response to the very high prices, but not much. Similarly it fell in 2009 in response to the great recession, but not much. Bumps on the bumpy plateau, it has seemed to me (and this would be even more true if you looked at the data ex-biofuels). Now production is going up again. Here’s what the latest data for global liquid fuel production looks like (with the monthly price on the right axis):
However, I think it’s important to note that a potential game-changer has developed recently that could render that point of view obsolete (which is a kinder, gentler way of saying “wrong” :-). A couple of years ago, Iraqi oil production was declining and it didn’t seem too likely the country would stabilize any time soon to allow that to change. However, the post-surge stabilization of Iraq has now allowed Iraqi oil production to start creeping up, and in 2009 the Iraqi oil ministry has announced large numbers of contracts with major oil companies to bring production up from the current 2.5mbd or so to 12 mbd over the course of the next 6-7 years. It is also announcing a series of projects to increase the physical export capacity of the country in line with these oil production projects.
It seems to me that the possibility that Iraq may actually succeed in doing this should be taken seriously. If it did succeed, that would act to delay the final plateau of oil production by a decade (ballpark), make that plateau be at a higher level (95-100mbd ballpark), and significantly moderate oil prices in the meantime, with even some possibility of causing a serious breakdown of OPEC discipline and a period of significantly lower prices akin to the 1980s-1990s lull (though probably not as long or as deep a lull as that). If that were to occur, it would likely have profound consequences for alternative energy projects, biofuel companies, and automobile fuel efficiency. A period of lower oil prices will put adaptation projects on hold for the duration.
At the same time, even in this scenario, there’s a real chance of another oil price shock before the main rise in Iraqi oil production arrives.
At this stage, it seems too soon to say the Iraqis definitely will succeed. But the scenario that they might seems worth serious consideration. In this post, I’d like to take a first look at the situation, including:
* Status of Iraqi oil reserves
* History of Iraqi oil production
* Shape of the announced oil production plans
* Character of the architect of the Iraqi plans, oil minister Hussain al-Shahristani
* Indications of the improving stability of Iraq.
* Implications and conclusions.
Tom Engelhardt: An American World of War: What to Watch for in 2010
Let’s pause a moment as the New Year begins and take stock of ourselves as what we truly are: the preeminent war-making machine on planet Earth. Let’s consider just what the American way of war might have in store for us in 2010.
Robert Kuttner: New Year’s Resolution: Clean House
Thus far at the Obama White House, it’s only progressives who get thrown under the proverbial bus. If Obama is truly to signal a change of course and mean it, one constructive sign would be replacements for Summers and Geithner.
Susan Madrak: You Still Want To Gut Social Security? Bring. It. On.
You find the darndest things on Craigslist, don’t you? Looks like the The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is putting together another scare piece (remember “I.O.U.S.A.”?)…
Plan To Transfer Guantanamo Detainees To Yemen Faces Criticism
WASHINGTON — Some Democratic lawmakers who support closing Guantanamo Bay say the U.S. should reconsider whether to repatriate suspected terrorists from Yemen, given the al-Qaida…
Fox closes out decade by pushing debunked falsehoods
Fox News and its website The Fox Nation closed out 2009 by advancing debunked attacks on President Obama. Specifically, Fox News hosted Ann Coulter, who repeatedly made the false claim that Obama attended “madrassas” as a child, while The Fox Nation continued to promote Andrew Breitbart’s story that “ACORN CEO Visited Obama White House Week Before Scandal Broke” days after it was reported that the “Bertha Lewis” who visited the White House was not, in fact, the Bertha Lewis who is the CEO of ACORN.
Coulter: Obama “attended madrassas.” On the December 28 edition of The O’Reilly Factor and the December 30 edition of Glenn Beck, Coulter
Fox Nation continued to promote the story through January 3.
I’m back from a week’s vacation and my return is not a moment too soon. Although CES doesn’t officially begin until Wednesday, the early press releases are already flying off the shelves, even if shipping products aren’t. Freescale kicks today off with news of their smartbook reference design that we’ll soon see. Don’t be too judgmental about the look of this tablet powered by smartphone guts — reference designs are meant to inspire original equipment manufacturers. I’ll admit however, that it reminds me of my first UMPC — only thinner, lighter and with more battery life, all things being equal.
This design offers a small 7″ touchscreen display with 1024 x 600 resolution and weighs a modest 376 grams, which is roughly double the weight of my iPhone. That’s definitely something I could carry all day. Freescale’s i.MX515 ARM processor – built on the Cortex-A8 core architecture — powers the tablet, which also offers OpenVG & OpenGL/ES graphics cores and HD video decoder hardware. Other internals include 512 MB of RAM, between 4 and 64 GB of internal storage, optional 3G modem, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, USB 2.0 and mini USB ports, a speaker, microphone, 3-axis acceleromter, light sensor and 3 megapixel camera capable of VGA recording at 30 fps. There’s also a slick-looking keyboard concept that docks to the tablet itself — looks like a nice solution while stationary, but offers a grab-and-go function when you want to travel lighter.
Freescale’s energy-efficient ARM processor is paired with a 1900 mAh battery, so this could be an all-day type of unit depending on usage patterns. The CPU also means you won’t see a traditional desktop operating system, so I’d expect some form of Linux to be on board. Freescale says that interested parties could out actual products based on this reference by the middle of 2010. Even better is the potential pricing — $200 or less, but that’s only likely in quantities of scale if and when the smartbook category takes off. We’ve got Freescale on our radar for CES, so stay tuned for some hands on impressions and pics of their offerings.
GOP AGs Escalate Constitutional Battle Against Health Bill
The group of Republican attorneys general threatening a constitutional challenge of the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” in the Senate health bill yesterday wrote a letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi outlining their complaints. 13 AGs, several of whom are running for governor, signed the letter.
Cashing In: Ex-Officers Double As Paid Military ‘Mentors’ And Contractor Consultants
Under a newly revealed arrangement that makes the famous “revolving door” seem quaint, retired military officers are simultaneously drawing paychecks both from the government and from private sector businesses gunning for Pentagon contracts, according to a USA Today investigation.
Nice video on the “climategate” “scandal” – Climate Change — Those hacked e-mails. I love the Alex Jones clips.
Calabasas silver spoon Rob Kardashian has confessed that he cheated on former Cheetah Girl and 3LW singer Adrienne Bailon, leading to the couple’s split last March. She blesses the guy with panty pics and this is the thanks she gets?! Rob — the younger brother of socialites Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe –dropped the bomb on Sunday night’s episode of E!’s reality docusoap, Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
Adrienne’s devotion to her career and Rob’s hectic school schedule have also been cited as mitigating factors causing the breakup. Adrienne created quite a stir in November 2008, when nude photographs she snapped for Rob were splashed on the Internet. Despite rumors of a leak, the singer claimed innocence, insisting that the photographs were taken from a laptop stolen while she was coming off a flight at New York’s JFK Airport.
Rob, 22, did not provide any details on who he was unfaithful with, although he was romantically-linked to adult film star Lisa Ann (of Nailin’ Paylin fame) as recently as November. Adrienne, for her part, has moved on. The 26-year-old New York native is currently dating an unidentified man, who she was seen texting throughout last night’s show.
2009 notched the second largest issuance of municipal debt ever, but at the same time was an all-time low for municipal bond insurance.
One excuse is that aren’t many bond insurers left.
Yet at the same time, buyers didn’t seem too concerned about this lack of insurance either.
Bond Buyer: Just a year after financial crisis cast a cautionary pall over the market, municipalities closed out 2009 having floated $409.13 billion in debt, according to Thomson Reuters.
That represented an increase of 5% in volume over 2008. It was shy of the all-time record set in 2007 by about $20 billion.
…
Another “new normal” in municipal bonds was the volume of debt that came to market wrapped in insurance. According to Thomson Reuters, 8.6% of munis in 2009 were insured. That was the lowest penetration rate since Thomson started keeping track in 1982.
The financial crisis eroded many bond insurers’ capital cushions, forcing many of them out of the business. Only two companies, both run by Assured Guaranty Ltd., are writing new busines
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Twitter apparently isn’t just for "microblogging" anymore. Co-founder Biz Stone would now describe it as an "information network." So there you have it: the activity you engage in on Twitter is now "information networking." Thankfully, everyone’s already calling it "tweeting" instead.
I can understand Twitter’s ambition to become an all-encompassing framework for "what’s happening right now," and changing Twitter’s "what are you doing?" prompt to "what’s happening?" made perfect sense in that respect. And by now almost every vendor in our Collaboration & Community Software evaluation research has added some sort of "microblogging" service. So, of course, Twitter would like to emphasize they’re on to something bigger than that.
This is nothing new, of course. Over the past decade, we’ve had web content management and document management vendors rebrand themselves enterprise content management (then back to web content management, and now on to enterprise web content management). Or search vendors become business intelligence and information access. Blog software gets re-labeled web content management. Forum software morphs into social CRM. Wikis get rebranded as "collaborative platforms." All of this reflects what vendors want you to think of them — it’s wishful thinking on their part, and doesn’t necessarily correlate with the actual product, or how their customers are currently using it.
We try to stick to nomenclature that we think our customers will find clearest. As you can imagine, sometimes our way to classify a tool isn’t in synch with how a vendor or an open source project aspires to be perceived. We call a spade a spade, even if we’re repeatedly told it’s not. Because it’s a "garden organizer," ideally suited for landscaping; or it’s a "multifunctional implement," because you can do a lot more things with it than just dig holes. But whether a spade is a bloody shovel is debatable enough, so there really is no need for additional confusion.
And "information networking"? That’s not going to help describe what Twitter is (or what it wants to become). Information networking is something you do — like gardening — and Twitter is a tool you might use — like a spade. Don’t pretend the spade in itself is going to provide you with beautiful landscaping.
So, sorry Mr. Stone. Even though this particular microblog service is getting bigger and bigger — I’m going to stick with the "microblogging" label for now.
Brown Will Not Seek Re-Election
Rep. Henry Brown (R-SC) has told associates he will his announce his retirement Monday, Politico reports.
“Brown survived a closer-than-expected re-election in 2008 and was already facing a primary challenge from Carroll Campbell III, the son of the former GOP governor and congressman.”
“In addition to Campbell, another renowned South Carolina political name may enter the race. Paul Thurmond, son of the iconic former senator and a Charleston attorney and county council member, was urged to challenge Brown in the primary.”
A few weeks back, we noted how some were freaking out over the fact that patent applications were down, without bothering to look behind the numbers at why. Instead, they jumped to the conclusion that innovation in the US was dropping. johnjac points us to an article where folks at Cisco suggests that it might just be tech companies realizing that patenting everything is a waste of time and money. In fact, the story states that Cisco recently changed its patent strategy from trying to patent everything to trying to focus on things that it believes is really innovative, rather than everything it can possibly get a patent on.
I can already hear the usual crowd of patent holders in our comments. They hate Cisco and pretty much any big company. They’ll interpret this statement as meaning that Cisco has become less inventive and is more focused on “stealing” inventions. Of course, what’s amusing is that they’ll never present any evidence for those accusations (though, I’m sure they’ll accuse me of being on the take for Cisco even though we’ve never done any business with Cisco in any way whatsoever).
That said, I do find some of the comments from Cisco odd and somewhat unsupportable:
“The arms race approach doesn’t pay off,” he says. “It doesn’t do you a lot of good to have a lot of patents.”Why? The patent landscape has changed dramatically. Patents often land companies in court as they fight over who invented the idea first. Lawsuits still might involve competitors, but increasingly Cisco finds it is battling what Chandler calls “non-practicing entities.” These are companies that exist only to acquire patents and then seek to extract money from big companies for infringing on them. The more patents you hold, the more likely one of these companies will sue you.
The first part is true. Lots of companies find themselves being sued by non-practicing entities, but it’s not because of the number of patents they hold. The NPEs (patent trolls, patent hoarders, whatever you want to call them) aren’t suing those who have the most patents. They’re suing whoever has (1) products on the market and (2) a large bank account. Cisco could have no patents at all, and it would still be getting sued just as much by NPEs. So, frankly, I don’t buy the claim that the more patents you have, the more likely you are to get sued. Instead, my guess, is that Cisco has realized that getting patents (especially in such large numbers) is an expensive process, for little benefit. It may help in some lawsuits against competitors (when Cisco can threaten to counter sue over other patents), but you only need so many patents for that. So, it looks like Cisco is building up a stable of defensive patents, and has realized that you don’t need the largest number. That’s a good thing, but the claim that more patents makes you more of a target just doesn’t make sense.
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US Is Increasing Its Hegemony As the "Global War Gladiator" Under Obama
What to watch for in 2010 from the country that spends more on war than the next 25 combined.
What to watch for in 2010 from the country that spends more on war than the next 25 combined.
CA Politicians Are Relying on County Parties to Funnel Money, Avoid Campaign Limits
By using county parties as middlemen both Democrat and Republican donors can contribute far more money than the law typically allows.
By using county parties as middlemen both Democrat and Republican donors can contribute far more money than the law typically allows.
Reclaiming Legal Abortion as a Fundamental Right
It’s time to demand that the promise of Roe becomes a reality for women whose choices are already limited by poverty, joblessness and marginalization.
It's time to demand that the promise of Roe becomes a reality for women whose choices are already limited by poverty, joblessness and marginalization.
US More Vulnerable on Afghanistan as It Leans Harder on NATO Allies for Support
Democracy and domestic priorities will be the casualties in the US, Canada and Europe if the US-NATO military expansion into Afghanistan holds sway.
Democracy and domestic priorities will be the casualties in the US, Canada and Europe if the US-NATO military expansion into Afghanistan holds sway.
We talked a lot about kitchen gifts both homemade and extravagant before the holidays, and now we’re curious: What was the best kitchen gift you gave or received this year? Is there anything new in your kitchen that you’re itching to use?
