Category: News

Karla finds a litter box solution for her two big cats.

She says, “Originally, the litter box was in our spare bedroom, but a visit from my out of town parents prompted me to build/hack a litter box enclosure that could be placed in another part of the house. We have two large kitties (Stardust and Thor), so we needed something with lots of space. I decided to go with the Varde sink cabinet with countertop.

The kitties enter though the cat flap on the side of the cabinet, walk through an “entry” area lined with a litter mat, and do their business in a large tub.

Instead of installing an entire pet door, I bought a replacement flap and secured it with wood screws. I put a border around the flap to conceal some not-so-straight jigsaw work and to make it look a little more like a door. I used industrial strength Velcro to secure the box to a piece of plastic coated particle board, which I then mounted on drawer slides. The box slides out for easy scooping, and because it’s attached with Velcro, it can be detached from the board for thorough cleaning when necessary. I also cut out three rear vents on the back of the cabinet for ventilation. In addition, I installed two mesh trays for storage – one above the box and one above the litter mat. The tray above the box holds a carbon filter for absorbing odors and the one above the litter mat holds a small hand held brush and dustpan for cleaning up litter.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with how this turned out – litter tracking is mostly contained in the cabinet and odor is pretty non-existent. The kitties love their private and spacious litter box too!”

Natural protection for teeth and gums Adults will appreciate this toothpaste, which was developed by Weleda in cooperation with European dentists long before baking soda toothpastes became trendy. The ingredients help reduce tartar build-up, tone gums and leave the teeth gleaming.

For dry and rough skin Intensely hydrates and cares for the skin. Ultra-moisturizing, pure Lanolin and anti-blemish, organic Pansy nourishes and soothes dry and damaged skin. A precious essential oil blend of lavender, rosemary and sweet orange oil refresh the skin and the senses. Apply this whole body cream to your skin anytime, with special attention to extra dry areas, such as the feet, hands and elbows.

Found under: Windows Mobile, Text, Input, Keyboard, T9, Freeware,

Swype which has been introduced in September 2008 has been just released for Windows Mobile phones. Basically Swype is a input software that replaces your keyboard and lets you enter words with just sliding your finger or stylus through the letters. It works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard like you have on the tablet version of Windows and on the iPhone. But instead of tapping letters out you press your finger or stylus on the first letter then without lifting it move it to the remainin

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Mentor’s Thermal Design Software Is The Best. OK, say’s who?

It’s the conclusion from some independent research carried out by Aberdeen Research Group. Last time I showed that Aberdeen had found that Mentor’s customers are almost 3 times faster at completing thermal verification than users of other tools. Let’s take a look at why that is.

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Last minute shoppers, have we got some deals for you! Check out these holiday discounts on some of our favorite modern cat products.

The Refined Feline

Little Lotus Discount
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ModKat

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Hepper Home

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Caboodle

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Litter Robot

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Smart Cat Box

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There's good reason to expect a giant bond unwind in 2010, according to Citi's Tobias Levkovich.

2009 bond fund flows have been massive , and bond allocations appear stretched. Meanwhile, investors' stock allocations are at multi-year lows.

Plus, stock valuations appear reasonable. Foreigners have actually been buying U.S. stocks even though Americans have been bearish overall.

Citi: Equity allocation seems light and may need some adjustment. In view of both mutual funds flows as well as equity and credit market rallies, it appears likely that investors remain underweight stocks and a reallocation seems probable especially in light of poor returns from alternatives, particularly private equity investments. To a great degree, a rebound in hedge fund performance has redeemed concerns that money might continue to leave these investment vehicles and assets under management have climbed back meaningfully with modest inflows.

Why investors could shift into stocks for 2010 >>>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The Internal Memo Vikram Pandit Sent To Everyone At Citi Today (C)
• It's Official: Citi Is Repaying TARP And Will Look Exactly Like It Did Pre-Crisis (C)
• Citi Blasts Moody's Optimism, Says UK's AAA Rating Is Doomed

We’ve been discussing some of the problems book publishers have had in coming to terms with the new age of ebooks — such as by trying to delay the release of ebooks with a “windowing” system. However, there’s another issue that’s coming up as quite important for back catalog authors. Many of them are looking to sign their own ebook deals with other publishers than those who published their physical books, and they note that the old contracts make no mention of electronic or ebook rights — mainly because such things didn’t exist at the time. But the publishers are pushing back and telling authors who seek to sign separate ebook publishing deals that those deals violate their existing agreements while also seeking to amend older agreements to add in ebook rights and royalties.

Unfortunately for the publishers, they may not have much of a legal leg to stand on. As the article notes, there have already been lawsuits on this topic, and Random House repeatedly lost in its attempt to sue ebook publisher Rosetta Books a while ago. The court didn’t find Random House’s argument that the phrase “in book form” in its contracts covered ebooks as well. While that case was eventually settled, that only happened after Random House came out on the losing side in the earlier battles. Random House is among the publishers still claiming that “in book form” means ebooks as well, but it must be relying on the likelihood that some authors won’t bother to look up those earlier rulings (or hire lawyers who are aware of them).

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Although Barack Obama has refrained, at least for now, from delivering triumphant speeches in a naval flight suit, there is nevertheless a strong tone of accomplishment emanating from the United States president and his deputies.

Over the weekend, top White House economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, even pronounced that the recession was now over. Without hedging his bets, Summers declared that thanks to the Obama administration’s wise stewardship, economic stimuli and emergency bailouts, another Great Depression, set up by the prior administration, had been narrowly averted. Summers saw no impediment to the return of sustainable growth. He may as well have delivered these remarks from the deck of an aircraft carrier, in the manner of president George W Bush, who delivered a speech on Iraq from the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming “mission accomplished”.

I hate to shoot down these high-flying expectations, but the economy is not improving. All that has changed is that we are now more indebted to foreign creditors, with even less to show for it.

Read the whole story at Asia Times Online >>

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See Also:

• Obama Administration Can’t Decide Whether The Recession Is Over, But It Wants Banks To Lever Up
• Peter Schiff Gloats About How He’s Whipping Chris Dodd In The Polls
• Obama’s Newfound Populism: All Hat No Cattle

This simple no-knead bread is studded with walnuts and raisins, and has just a hint of cinnamon. We could have this for breakfast or we could just as easily serve it alongside a hearty meal. It’s also a perfect example of the kind of simple, elegant recipes we found in Jim Lahey’s new book, My Bread.

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One of the more interesting new features to make its way into the upcoming Firefox 3.6 is support for the latest W3C File API for HTML and also for the Drag and Drop API from the proposed HTML 5 standard. With these two APIs web developers can create powerful app for file management without resorting to proprietary plugins and technologies for the more advanced functionality. For example, it will allow developers to enable users to upload multiple files, asynchronously, at one time even by just dragging them over the web page.

“Firefox 3.6 now supports much of the W3C File API, which specifies the ability to asynchronously read the selected file into memory, and perform operations on the file data within the web application (for example, to display a thumbnail preview of an image, before it is uploaded, or to look for ID3 tags within an MP3 file, or to look for EXIF data in JPEG files, all on the client side),” Mozilla’s Arun Ranganathan wrote introducing the feature.

Mozilla gets into the technical aspects of the functionality with an overview of the basic features complete with code samples. The most common application for the File API is for upload tools, a no-brainer really, but also more interesting uses can be implemented like the possibility to display… (read more)

Think the economy is being inflated by economic stimulus right now?

Well if that's the case, then get ready for a ride over the next two years.

The majority of Obama's stimulus hasn't even been spent yet. Thus the support won't disappear any time soon, and actually could accelerate. There's still another 70% to go.

Slate: Since it was passed in February 2009, only $237.6 billion (30 percent) of the $787 billion package has entered the economy. The tax cuts and infrastructure spending in the pipeline for 2010 and 2011 will support job creation. On Dec. 9, New Jersey Transit approved a $583 million contract for two construction firms to get cracking on a new commuter rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River.

Read more here.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Get Ready For Epic Stimulus Spending Out Of China In The Final Couple Weeks Of December
• Shocker: Washington DC Got More Stimulus Money Per Capita Than Any State In The Union
• 10 More Amazingly Wasteful Stimulus Projects

We’ll keep bringing you perspectives on the Exxon/XTO deal as we come across them.

We particularly like this from Bill Holland at Platt’s:

While ExxonMobil’s announcement that it’s buying Fort Worth’s XTO Energy for $31 billion and $10 billion in debt is a rousing cheer for US shale producers, the real stimulus has been Russia’s annual bully-thy-neighbor approach to winter gas supplies.

Exxon made no bones Monday it was buying XTO for its expertise in cracking shale gas plays, with plans to export that talent to the nearly 3 million acres of shale leasehold it has in Poland, Hungary, and Germany. CEO Rex Tillerson almost salivated at the prospect of producing gas smack in the middle of a gas-hungry market (same dynamics as Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale and a little town called New York City).

Read the whole thing >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• With XTO Acquired By Exxon, Here Are The Next Players To Get Snapped Up (XTO, XOM, CHK, EOG, DVN, UNG)
• Exxon Finally Wakes Up To Reality (XOM, XTO)
• Exxon: Here’s Why We Just Spent $41 Billlion On Natural Gas (XOM, XTO, UNG)

Nine years after its previously launched version, ECMA International has announced the release of ECMAScript 5, which was approved as a web standard by the ECMA International’s General Assembly at the start of December. This will bring many new features to ECMA-based languages like JScript (Microsoft) and JavaScript (Netscape).

The new version was approved in ECMA’s International General Assembly held on December 3 at Google’s headquarters. 21 out of the 22 members were present, 19 of them voting yes, with two voting no. IBM and Intel voted against adopting this version as a general standard because of various reasons (for IBM, the lack of decimal, while Intel didn’t have enough time to study the intellectual property implications of the standard).

The General Assembly is formed of 22 voting members, mainly companies that have interest and experience in matters related to one or more of ECMA International’s regulated domains of activity: Google, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Konica Minolta, Intel, IBM, Adobe, Yahoo, Xerox, Toshiba, Lexmark, Hitachi, Philips, Sony, Samsung, Pioneer, NVIDIA, AMD, Canon, Fujitsu, Avaya and Ericsson. Other non-voting members of ECMA include Mozilla, Opera, Apple, Novell and many more. The General Assembly also agreed that the standard be submitted to ISO for approval as a general inter… (read more)

Gene amplification confers glyphosate resistance in Amaranthus palmeri
　
The herbicide glyphosate became widely used in the United States and other parts of the world after the commercialization of glyphosate-resistant crops. These crops have constitutive overexpression of a glyphosate-insensitive form of the herbicide target site gene,
5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS).

Increased use of glyphosate over multiple years imposes selective genetic pressure on weed populations. We investigated recently discovered glyphosate- resistant Amaranthus palmeri populations from Georgia, in comparison with normally sensitive populations. EPSPS enzyme activity from resistant and susceptible plants was equally inhibited by glyphosate, which led us to use quantitative PCR to measure relative copy numbers of the EPSPS gene. Genomes of resistant plants contained from5-fold to more than160-foldmore copies of the EPSPS gene than did genomes of susceptible plants.

Quantitative RT-PCR on cDNA revealed that EPSPS expression was positively correlated with genomic EPSPS relative copy number. Immunoblot analyses showed that increasedEPSPS proteinlevel also correlated with EPSPS genomic copy number. EPSPS gene amplification was heritable, correlated with resistance in pseudo-F2 populations, and is proposed to be the molecular basis of glyphosate resistance. FISH revealed that EPSPS genes were present on every chromosome and, therefore, gene amplification was likely not caused by unequal chromosome crossing over. This occurrence of gene amplification as an herbicide resistance
mechanism in a naturally occurring weed population is particularly significant because it could threaten the sustainable use of glyphosate-resistant crop technology.

Todd A. Gaines, Wenli Zhang, Dafu Wang, Bekir Bukun, Stephen T. Chisholm, Dale L. Shaner, Scott J. Nissen,William L. Patzoldt, Patrick J. Tranel, A. Stanley Culpepper, Timothy L. Grey, Theodore M. Webster,William K. Vencill, R. Douglas Sammons, Jiming Jiang, Christopher Preston, Jan E. Leach, and Philip Westra,

Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 2009

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0906649107

We love freshly-baked breakfast rolls in the morning, especially when we’re on vacation and have the luxury of lounging in our bathrobes until noon. The only problem is that yeasted breads take so long to make, and we’re not thrilled about the idea of getting up at dawn to knead dough. Here’s what we do instead!

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The U.S. dollar spikes higher ahead of today’s market open. We’re now approaching a good week and a half of dollar gains with nearly a 4% move since December 4th.

That’s a huge move for any manufacturing company running on 10% margins. It’s also nasty for anyone operating on 50:1 leverage as many currency traders do.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• RBC: Beware A Double Dip, And A Disorderly Collapse Of The US Dollar In The Second Half Of 2010
• The Dollar Bulls Are Multiplying Like Rabbits
• Desmond Lachman: The Dollar Is A Mess, But Here’s Why The World Can’t Ditch It

With one flick of a switch, Russia’s long-standing dominance and near monopoly over Central Asian natural-gas exports officially came to an end on Monday.

The Turkmenistan-China pipeline, which will carry natural gas from eastern Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, went on line on December 14 during an inauguration ceremony attended by regional leaders. It marks the first time in more than a decade that a pipeline has been constructed to pump gas out of the region, and is the biggest effort to date to export Central Asian gas without using Russian routes.

The ceremony in Samandepe, the starting point of the 1,833-kilometer pipeline that originates in Turkmenistan’s gas-rich but previously untapped east, took place just over three years after the China-funded project was agreed upon.

Read the whole story at Asia Times >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• United States Natural Gas Explodes Higher On Exxon Optimism (UNG)
• The IMF Won’t Bail Out Ukraine, As Government Finances Deteriorate Beyond Repair
• Australia: Copper Production To Slow Next Year, Global Shortage Coming