Category: News

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Filed under: Marketing/Advertising, Videos, Hatchback, Citroën

A Citroën commercial without robots or an NRJ radio station soundtrack? We might have thought it impossible, but here it is. Promoting the new C3 hatchbach and its zenith windscreen meant to give you all kinds of panoramic views, the kids take this car on a joyride unlike any you’re likely to see outside of a Top Gear episode.

Follow the jump for more information on the C3 and to see the swingin’ commercial along with a special “making of” video.

[Source: Citroën via YouTube]

Continue reading VIDEO: Citroën C3 Visiodrive advertisement is for swingers

VIDEO: Citroën C3 Visiodrive advertisement is for swingers originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fred Anderson is providing an inside look at COP-15 in Copenhagen to The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) World Climate Change Report. 

Today, Anderson’s Notebook (12/18/09), titled It’s Down to the Final Hours, discusses the encouraging signals from China and what the final day will bring.

To read the full entry, please click here.  

Respected industry thought leader, Joseph Smarr, announced on his blog today that he is leaving Comcast-acquired Plaxo to join Google and help drive the company’s next steps in the social web. Smarr has been a key innovator in the OpenID, Oauth and related technical movements.

Smarr’s work is all about enabling innovation by making it easy for users to move data from site to site.

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While noting Google’s support for specific open web technologies, Smarr also said: “Getting the future of the Social Web right – including identity, privacy, data portability, messaging, real-time data, and a distributed social graph – is just as important, and the industry is at a critical phase where the next few years may well determine the platform we live with for decades to come. “

Smarr was the first non-founding employee of Plaxo, a dynamic contact management service that was once the darling of Silicon Valley, and then became its spammy boogeyman, and was finally acquired by Comcast 18 months ago. Plaxo was co-founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker and was backed by Sequoia Capital, the fund that backed Google and YouTube.

Chris Messina, fellow open-web leader and the self-described evangelist that helped turn Smarr from the dark side of Plaxo’s early days (“champions of the open web can come from all corners,” he told us), said of the move: “Smarr joining Google is a logical next step for him – I think he’s done great work at Plaxo with John McCrea, but advancing the open web has not been able to be his priority since he took on the CTO role there.”

Kaliya Hamlin, who says she introduced Smarr to the Identity community, said of his move to Google: “His spirit and energy to get things done, work across company boundaries and a deep commitment to open standards innovation will be a great asset for Google. One thing that really stands out for me was his innovation with Microsoft on the Portable Contacts API. That idea originated at the Data Sharing Workshop seeking to make progress on what was possible and within six months under his leadership it was complete.”

OpenID leader Scott Kveton said this announcement is just the beginning. “That’s great news,” he told us, “and just the first of more to come I hear. It’s going to be down to Google, Microsoft and Facebook. They are hiring all of the people building the open web. I’ll be curious to see what kind of impact it has.”

Smarr photo by Adactio.

Discuss

We’d love to get an explanation from NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton on the following story. Cotton, of course, is the very, very, very strong defender of copyrights for NBC Universal. He was, of course, the main source for the propaganda “oh no piracy is killing the movie business” segment on 60 Minutes, and as we all know, he’s been quite concerned about the poor, poor (yet, heavily subsidized) corn farmers hurt by “piracy.” He’s come out as a supporter of having ISPs spy on users to block the transmission of copyright works (which should be useful once Comcast takes over). And, finally he’s also been involved in NBC’s attempt to make it more difficult for anyone to watch the Olympics online, even though the evidence showed that the people who watched Olympics content online were more likely to then watch it on TV (ads and all) as well.

So, with all that, you’d have to imagine that if he found out about a company associated with the Olympics copied someone’s blog post without first getting their permission, he’d be pretty upset. But what if that company was NBC Universal? Reader JC points us to the news that NBC Universal’s Olympics website has been caught copying a blog post and then when alerted to it, rather than removing the content, it just removed the writer’s name. It looks like the attention this story has received has resulted in NBC Universal putting her name back on the story, but the story remains on the site. I’m assuming there must be more to this whole situation. According to the link above, the original site, Tourism Vancouver, says this is “an ongoing issue with the NBC Olympic site, and [it] has been battling them for some time over it.” Surely, NBC Universal, as such a strong defender of copyright, wouldn’t be in the business of copying others’ content without permission? Even if it believed it had the right to use her content, removing her name after being alerted to the issue appears really sketchy. Perhaps there’s an explanation that involves helping out those poor corn farmers?

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The Economist reminds us just how quickly America has been able to make debt disappear in the past.

Thanks to inflation.

Economist: Debt-concerned pundits often cite the example of America’s postwar debt as evidence that such high debt levels can be paid down over time. All that’s needed, they say, is the resolve to put the budget on a sounder path. But in fact, that’s not all that’s needed:

[B]etween 1946 and 1955, the debt/GDP ratio was cut almost in half. The average maturity of the debt in 1946 was 9 years, and the average inflation rate over this period was 4.2%. Hence, inflation reduced the 1946 debt/GDP ratio by almost 40% within a decade.

That’s right, one of the principle ways the country addressed its debtload was to inflate it away. Could, and should, something similar be done today?

Problem is, it may not be so easy this time around given that the nation faces the deflationary forces of de-leveraging citizens and corporations.

Read more here >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Bernanke’s Refusal To Raise The Inflation Target Is Idiotic
• Wholesale Inflation Rises More Than Expected Led By Surge In Energy
• Get Ready For A Couple Of Hot Inflation Numbers

 

 

 

No Real Deal, and No Exit

Analysis by Stephen Leahy

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) The roof of our house is on fire but our leaders, our economic system and we ourselves are ignoring the alarms and continuing to add more fuel. There are no exit doors in our house; there is nowhere else to go.

Dangerous climate change is already here.

The two-week climate summit in Copenhagen came to an end with disappointing results and details that are still vague.

A ”Copenhagen Accord” was agreed by the US, China, South Africa and India by Friday night. It was unclear which other countries were willing to support it.

But coral reefs are dying, the Arctic is melting and rising sea levels threaten the homes of millions. And we’re on our way to a planet-transforming four-degree C rise in global average temperatures in as soon as 50 years.

Future generations could face an utterly transformed planet, where large areas will be seven to 14 degrees C warmer, making them uninhabitable. In this world-on-fire, the one to two metre sea level rise by 2100 will leave hundreds of millions homeless, according to the latest science presented at the “4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference” at the University of Oxford in September.

That’s the science-based, slap-in-the-face reality as the Copenhagen climate talks fizzle out here with little progress Friday.

“Our leaders do not get the scale of the problem or the rapidity of the changes. They don’t get that it must be dealt with now,” said Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at Canada’s University of British Columbia and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“Now” means that global carbon emissions peak in five years and begin to decline shortly thereafter to near zero by 2050, according to a report summarising the very latest science by the world’s top climate scientists, including Weaver. Called “The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science”, it was released a week before the talks began here Dec. 7.

“More modest, achievable targets in the short term will get the planet on the right track,” Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been often quoted as saying. Harper’s “modest” target for Canada amounts to a three-percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. The U.S. target is little better.

Based on the scientific evidence, the world’s best and brightest climate scientists conclude that Canada and other industrialised nations must reduce emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 to have any hope of keeping the warming at two degrees C.

“Two degrees C will be a very difficult for modern society to cope with,” said Pål Prestrud, an Arctic researcher and director of Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway.

Even if all emissions were cut off today, global temperatures would decline very slowly – over a period of a thousand years. “If we wait too long, it will be too late to do anything,” Presetrud warned TerraViva here.

No scientist considers stabilising the climate at two degrees warmer to be getting the planet on the right track. The Arctic is already melting at the present 0.8 C of warming. There may be no sea ice in the summer in just 5 to 10 years.

What happens when the cold top of the world that drives the global weather system warms up? Temperature and precipitation patterns in Europe and North America will change, affecting agriculture, forestry and water supplies, the “Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications” report warned in September.

Worse still, a warmer Arctic will emit large volumes of carbon and methane, which are currently stored in the frozen soils called permafrost. Once that process gets underway, runaway global heating may be unstoppable.

At two degrees warmer, the majority of corals will die due to a combination of warmer temperatures and ocean acidification. Coral reefs are the nurseries for much of the fish in the oceans and hundreds of millions of people are dependent on them. Sea level rise will displace many millions more.

Finally, two degrees C of warming is only the global average. What it really means is that temperatures will range from one to four or five degrees hotter depending on the region. It also means at least one metre of sea level rise by 2100. Countries in Africa, small islands states and the least developed countries are calling for a 1.5 C target here.

Humans have enjoyed 10,000 years of climate stability, in which the global average temperature varied less than one degree C – even during the Little Ice Age and Middle Warming Period, says Robert Corell, director of the Global Change Programme at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment in Washington, DC.

Global emissions over the past five years have been above the worst case scenarios of the IPCC, and on a path for a five- to six-degree C rise in temperatures by 2100, Corell told TerraViva.

He also warned that Earth’s natural absorbers of carbon, the oceans and forests, are taking up less carbon every year, meaning concentrations of heat-trapping carbon will increase faster than expected.

All the commitments for reductions made in Copenhagen up to date translate into a 3.8-degree C rise in global temperatures, he said in an interview.

“Canada’s federal government doesn’t have a freakin’ clue what two degrees means,” said Canada’s Weaver with vehemence. Vested corporate interests from one sector are blocking the transformation to a low carbon economy, he said: “Big oil is running things.”

“I am sorry to say,” writes James Hansen, “that most of what politicians are doing on the climate front is greenwashing – their proposals sound good, but they are deceiving you and themselves at the same time.”

One of the most respected climate experts, Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Governments are stating emission goals that they know are lies,” Hansen wrote in the Observer newspaper Nov. 29.

“Are we going to stand up and give global politicians a hard slap in the face, to make them face the truth?” he asked. “It will take lot of us – probably in the streets. Or are we going to let them continue to kid themselves and us, and cheat our children and grandchildren?”

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I wrote this earlier this afternoon, on paper. Anna’s already blogged about the intervention, but here are my thoughts:

I’m sitting in the new youth convergence space, a huge bright white hall near the central station and the Klimafoum called Oskerhalle. A young climate activist from London is standing on the stage with his guitar, doing a sound-check which has turned into a short impromptu concert.

Music is just what I need right now – I’ve just heard the last youth ‘intervention’ or speech of the COP, given by Juan Carlos Soriano, from Peru.  His eloquent, empassionned words were recieved by a crowd of cheering, watching here over video link. But my tears were of anger because they were delivered to a huge empty plenary room, while all of the powerful people who should have been listening and being moved are making the important decisions somewhere else, in a closed room.

Juan Carlos is one of the few young people to have been allowed into the Bella centre today, the last day of the negotiations, but this ‘privilege’, which should have been a right, is hollow – he and the other youth and NGOs and other members of civil society inside are not allowed to witness the real decisions being made.

Filed under: Aftermarket, Sedan, Mercedes-Benz, Luxury

ATT-TEC has been busy this end of the year, and here they are presenting yet another softly tuned German car, this time an E Class sedan. Called “a car of extra class – no doubt!” and “flawless everywhere,” it wears a comprehensive aero kit and 20-inch wheels. Intriguingly, it also sports a round void where the grille emblem once lived, and a matching void in the vents aft the front wheels.

ATT didn’t mention the engine at all, so we figure they left it alone. The remaining mods will run you €10,321 ($14,757 U.S.). A press release after the jump will tell you about a car that could be ticketed for “stiring [sic] the blood of every real man,” and there’s the gallery of high-res photos below to get you even more worked up.

[Source: ATT-TEC]

Continue reading ATT MB E-Class “a pleasant original deluxe-sportster, stiring the blood of every real man”

ATT MB E-Class “a pleasant original deluxe-sportster, stiring the blood of every real man” originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MobilityMinded has published this unboxing video of the LG eXpo on AT&T. While they show the LG eXpo to be about the same size as the HTC Touch Pro 2, the device is clearly much narrower and pocket-friendly.

Read more at MobilityMinded here.

BSSD Staff, Students, & Parents,

It has been a very busy first semester as usual. Looking back through the last few months of StraitTalk articles, as well as my own pictures that I’ve collected from emails sent to me and collected from my travels, I am pleased to be reminded of all the great work being done across our school district. We are very busy, but also very productive. These last few months have seen the BSSD Educational Conference, Elementary/ Jr. High Wrestling and Cheerleading Tournaments, Regional Mix-six Volleyball and High School Wresting, Strategic Planning and AEC Workshop, and many other activities that are happening at the site level.

Not only is this the close of 2009, but this is the closing of the first decade of this new millennia. If you are a student, I encourage you to think about your future. Where do you want to be in another ten years? If you are a parent, I encourage you to continue to support your child by having them attend school on a regular basis ready to learn. If you are a teacher, whether a first year teacher or a twenty year veteran, I encourage you to take time over the next few weeks to think about all of the great things that have happened during your time with BSSD. What projects are worth repeating or developing, and how can you play a role?

I wish everyone a restful and safe winter break. Happy Holidays!

Sincerely,

Jim Hickerson
Superintendent

Here is Obama announcing what is essentaily “a carefully managed collapse” in the form of the Copenhagen Accord.

Media expert Michael Rich, MD, MPH, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, answers your questions about media use. Last week, he discussed negative portrayals of black women in the movies.

Here’s this week’s question:

Q: There is a movie theatre near my home that has afternoon shows for moms, where they put out a changing table in the theater and don’t lower the lights all the way—but then they show very adult movies. What effect does being exposed to these movies have on infants and toddlers, most of whom are not talking yet?
–Skeptical about Screenings, Pacific Palisades, CA

A: Dear Skeptical,

This accommodation for moms certainly seems like a great convenience, but you are right to question its effects on the babies. Because the babies are not yet ready to talk — a stage called “pre-verbal” — it’s tempting to believe that they are not affected by what’s on screen. And it’s true that they probably can’t figure out the images in any meaningful way. So what’s the problem?

The main problem with this kind of arrangement is that babies are exquisitely attuned to their mothers’ feelings. Films geared toward adults often involve fear, violence, and/or sexuality, and if the films are any good, they are probably affecting the moms’ emotions.  Babies will feel those changes in emotions, and they can form associations between mom’s emotional response and whatever is in the environment at that moment. For example, if a dog barks during a scary scene and mom’s adrenalin increases, the child may end up with an almost intangible fear of dogs.

Research shows that anxiety and fear responses tend to be tied to single exposures; in other words, becoming scared of something can happen even if someone’s only seen it once. One study showed that some young adults who saw Jaws as children would not go into the water–not even swimming pools–even years later because they had such a deep fear of sharks.

These sorts of fears are easily formed in a baby’s brain, which creates 700 new synapses, or connections, per second. These synapses are created in response to whatever is going on around the baby. For that reason, parents should put their infants in environments that will build their brains the way they want them to be built. Movies made for adults are likely to have the opposite effect. When moms want to go to the movie theater, their best bet for helping to build their baby’s brain to be strong and healthy is to hire a sitter and head out for some well-deserved fun without their little one.

Enjoy your media and use them wisely,
The Mediatrician

Do you have a question about your child’s media use? Ask it today!

It’s just after 12 o’clock here on the left coast, which means Operation Chokehold should now be in full effect. What that means (if anything at all) is still up in the air — which is why we’re turning to you for a status report.

For the uninitiated: Operation Chokehold is a sort of cyber-protest against AT&T, as conjured up by some dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. For one solid hour between 12 and 1 Pacific, angry iPhone owners are supposed to gobble up as much data as they can in an “attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees.”

The discussion on the merits of this bit of disobedience have already been done into the ground, so we won’t dive into that. The FCC and ATT have already condemned the whole thing, and Fake Steve has back-pedaled a bit to make it clear that the whole thing was intended as a joke. Joke or not, its taken off with a life of its own now – some people are taking this pretty dang seriously.

With all that said, we want to know: has Operation Chokehold affected the quality of your AT&T connectivity? Here in San Jose, CA things seem as good as ever — that is, they’re not all that great, but certainly don’t seem worse than normal. Let us know where you’re at and how the 3G network is acting in your area down in the comments.

[Image via Kakiseni]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Jonathan Wilmot, the Credit Suisse strategist who recently graced us with his presence here on FT Alphaville, has decided against sending out a 2010 tome this year.

Instead, he’s come over all Twitterish.

Here, in 140 characters or less, are previews of the 10 short pieces he’ll be posting on his CS blog over the holidays…

The Great Divide: correlations cluster near one in crises; now it’s not so macro. Re-focus on alpha and country specific trades.

Think 1890s: a deflationary recovery that may feel like a depression. Plus Robots and Virtual Worlds and How To Live Forever.

Read the rest of his predictions at FT Alphaville >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Jonathan Wilmott: The Overleveraged US Consumer Is A Myth

This week we ran a reader poll, asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December.

The poll has now closed and we’re pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community’s Top 10 Web Products of 2009.

Here is the final top 10:

Sponsor

1. Twitter

2. Google Chrome

3. Google Maps

4. Facebook

5. WordPress

6. iPhone platform

7. Google Apps

8. Adobe AIR

9. Hulu

10. TweetDeck

So there you have it, Twitter was the best product of 2009 according to ReadWriteWeb readers! Relatedly, Twitter desktop client TweetDeck made the list at #10.

Google had 3 products in the top 3: Chrome (#2), Maps (#3) and Google Apps (#7). This more than justifies their selection by our editors as Best BigCo of 2009.

Honorable Mentions, #11-25

The following products missed out on the final top 10, but they were all popular picks among our community. Many of them are startup products, so they can be proud to say they’re among the top 25 products of 2009 according to our readers. In alphabetical order:

• Android platform
• Bing
• DropBox (note: DropBox was missing from the original top 100, but we’re including in the top 25 due to the number of comment-votes it received on the original post)
• Evernote
• Facebook iPhone app
• Feedly
• Google Voice
• Open Calais
• Posterous
• Mint
• Spotify
• Tumblr
• Tweetie
• Wolfram Alpha
• Woopra

That’s it, the culmination of our Best Products 2009 series. Hope you all enjoyed it and we look forward to another year of innovation in web technology in 2010!

Discuss

Let’s face it if you’re not so much of a gamer, QJ-reading and regular checkups on the gaming news may not be among your daily to-do list. Perhaps not even monthly. Nintendo understands that little reality

Filed under: Concept Cars, Coupe, Videos, Audi, Electric

The LA Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic, Dan Neil, had a chance to sample the Audi e-tron while the electric R8 (R8e?) was down in So. Cal. for the LA Auto Show, and he’s suitably impressed with the nine-month-old prototype that — unlike your average concept — is actually functional.

Not only does it go, stop and turn, the e-tron has a fully functional climate control system, power windows, MMI system and a host of other gadgets on board, making it a rarity in the world of one-off concepts. Granted, it’s still just an overly-stylized mule (thankfully, the million-spoke wheels were dispatched in favor of the R8 V10’s hoops), but this is less about the driving experience (although Neil raves about the dynamics and power delivery) and more about the world’s largest automakers getting into the electric vehicle game.

Neil’s primary point is that while Tesla and Fisker are laying the foundation for EV proliferation, automakers like Audi, Ford, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen all have electric whips in the works. Neil contends that the standards set by the major OEMs are what’s going to drive EVs into the mainstream and if the e-tron (and the forthcoming electric Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG) are any indication, enthusiasts can have their cake and eat it too. Check out the full write-up and hit the jump for Dan’s video review.

[Source: LA Times]

Continue reading VIDEO: Dan Neil drives the Audi eTron, tells Musk and Fisker to watch out

VIDEO: Dan Neil drives the Audi eTron, tells Musk and Fisker to watch out originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, so apparently I was confused and Monday I was not off orientation, but will be tonight. Man! At this point, I really want to just be alone and not have someone looking over my shoulder, despite how convenient it is at times. I know I will make mistakes and stuff, but I feel like I’m well-prepared for the most part.

I honestly now feel like I have not been having very restful sleep, but I also have not been exercising like normal. Lately, I have no motivation or energy to drag my ass to the gym. That needs to stop!

Yesterday I got my first check from working the night shift and I must say, it was pretty damn sweet. It is about an extra $10,000 a year or $300-400 per check, which totally comes in handy. However, I do not want to get used to this money. I am strictly going to use it to build my savings and pay off my MacBook Pro and some of my car loan.

This year I have not been in the holiday spirit. I didn’t even get a real tree!! But my mother let me borrow this 2-3 foot one and it looks cute in the corner of my living room.

 I suppose I am not in the mood for Christmas because I will be working! What’s the point? That, and I have a lot of bills to pay off, so I’m definitely not in any sort of shopping mood and already told my family not to expect anything from me. Really, I’m not a scrooge; I just want people to be real about life. Who can really afford to go out and purchase hundreds of dollars in gifts right now? I cannot and honestly do not want to. It doesn’t help that I’ve been having some problems with my family lately, either. Way too long of a story that no one would understand unless they’ve experienced it. Let’s just say I will probably be distancing myself from certain people unless they change their ways, which probably will not happen. I cannot be around people who are using drugs and alcohol to pretend that life is all fine and dandy. It makes me sad and depressed, but I am lucky to have other positive people in my life, like Mirza, his family, and my sister. ‘Nuff said!

Yesterday when I came home from the store, I found this little guy hitching a ride on my yogurt:

I think he must have been in my bag from the farm. Gives a whole new meaning to “slow food.”