Category: News

(This guest post originally appeared at the author’s blog)

JP Morgan continues to like the risk trade. 

They see the economic recovery continuing into 2010 and forecast that many of the trends that have driven equity markets higher in 2009 will continue into 2010.   They see a very strong outlook for corporate earnings and margin growth as the primary driver of equity prices.  In fact, they see profit margins expanding to their recent record highs:

“Equity markets should rise again next year driven by strong earnings growth. Our $80 S&P 500 EPS forecast for 2010 is 27% higher than this year’s $63, implying a much faster rise in earnings than nominal GDP, i.e., an expansion in profit margins. Our forecast suggests that by the end of next year, US profit margins are likely to approach the historic highs reached earlier this decade.”

The primary beneficiaries of this continued growth in the risk trade will be emerging markets.  JP Morgan is the most bullish bank I’ve seen on the street so far this year and forecast a very bold 30% increase in emerging market share prices in 2010:

“EM equities should continue to outperform next year due to stronger growth and inflows. Our 2010 year-end forecast for MSCI EM is 1,300, an upside of 30% from current levels versus an expected 15% return for developed market equities.”

JP Morgan now says the world economy is reaching “cruising speed” and should grow at a healthy 3.5% clip in 2010.  Credit markets should remain healthy and fixed income markets will slowly experience an upward drift in yield.  This will keep trends in the forex market largely intact.  All in all, look for a lot more of the same in 2010….

Read more market commentary at The Pragmatic Capitalist >>

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See Also:

• How To Bet On Emerging Market Banks
• Goldman: Why You Should Go Gaga For Emerging Markets
• Morgan Stanley: Emerging Market Earnings Will Soar 40%

The Commission approved on 9 December, 15 energy projects which will significantly contribute to the economic recovery of the EU, while increasing security of energy supply and substantially reduce CO2 emissions. With this decision, the Commission grants €1 billion to six Carbon Capture and Storage projects and €565 million to nine offshore wind energy projects.

Energy Commissioner Piebalgs said: “With this decision the Commission has laid the foundation for the development of two key sustainable technologies that will be essential in our fight against climate change. This unique decision by the Commission does not only give a push to the economy and employment, but also it supports innovative energy technologies that may create further jobs and growth in the future.”

These award winning innovative energy technology projects will contribute in reaching the binding targets of greenhouse gas emission reduction and renewables by 2020 and beyond.

The decision on these 15 projects is the first step towards the use of almost €4 billion set aside by the EU in May 2009 for energy projects to support economic recovery. The landmark agreement on the European Energy Programme for Recovery in May foresaw Union financial assistance to energy projects in the fields of CCS, offshore wind energy and gas and electricity infrastructure. The procedures for the infrastructure projects are still ongoing. The decision is expected to be taken in February 2010.

The funded projects are described in the MEMO/09/542 , MEMO/09/543

It was just a week ago — yes, last Friday — that gold was plummeting, the dollar was rallying, and everyone was getting nervous about the end of the greate liquidity-filled, de-recession rally.

Then Bernanke spoke earlier this week, convinced the world that money would not be going anywhere, and since then it’s been smooth sailing.

Stocks were up solidly yesterday, and today the party looks set to continue.

Asian shares wre up nearly 1% across the board. Europe was up a little less. Gold is back above the $1135 mark, while US futures are solidly in the green, with several hours before trading. Thank you Ben!

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Bernanke Tips Hand On FED’s MBS Purchases: More Quantitative Easing Straight Ahead
• Goodbye!
• Trading The Dollar/Stocks Correlation Is Complete Bunk

Eco Factor: Concept car designed to be powered by a hybrid engine for low-emissions.

Hyundai has unveiled the 2010 IX-Metro concept car at Design Korea in Songdo Convensia held in Incheon City, Korea. The low-emission car runs on a hybrid engine and produces just 80gm of CO2 for each kilometer the vehicle is driven.

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There’s a great trend to move everything online these days. It’s not exactly clear if this is a good thing in all circumstances, but everyone’s getting on the bandwagon and there’s no reversing it at this point. One problem, a big one, with doing everything in a browser is that the performance and functionality sees a significant dive. On the performance front, there’s been a lot of attention to JavaScript speed in browsers, and on the functionality one, we have the WebGL project which aims to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to browsers. Development is moving fast and the standard has been released in draft form with a finalized version possibly coming in early 2010.

“Even without a draft specification of WebGL in circulation, we’ve seen some promising 3D content using WebGL appear on the web, put together mainly through developer ingenuity and the fact that Firefox, Chromium, and WebKit are open source projects with early support for the technology,” Arun Ranganatha, chairman of the WebGL working group and standards evangelist at Mozilla, wrote. “Today, the WebGL Working Group at Khronos released a provisional public draft of the WebGL specification, and we are very excited for what this means for the web.”

The WebGL standard is under the supervision of the Khronos Group, a consortium of indust… (read more)

A few days ago, the UK’s Met Office (short for Meteorological Office) released a large data subset containing a record of global temperatures. The subset is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned IPCC assessment reports and numerous scientific studies. The data show monthly average temperature values for over 1,500 land stations.

Both Manuel Lima (of Visual Complexity) and Jer Thorp (of blprnt.com) have called for the “data community” to step in and use this opportunity to create meaningful data representations. Accordingly, an open online forum titled “#ClimateData“, has been created where data visualization enthusiasts are invited to participate in a constructive dialogue towards this goal.

In the meantime, some early visualization results have already trickled in.

– Information is Beautiful (of the book The Visual Miscellaneum) has developed a very detailed infographic depicting the different arguments in the ongoing debate between the Global Warming Sceptics versus the Scientific Consensus.

– Flink Labs mapped the temperature readings of more than 200 years on an animated 3D globe.

– Lastly, blprnt has created 12 monthly data representations, visualizing all 1,670,354 released Met Office Climate records.

Is this a worthwhile initiative? Are there more visualizations around? Are you planning to make one? Let us know in the comments below!

Eco Factor: Zero-emission boat powered entirely by electricity.

Island Queen is the brainchild of a Southern California resident Ray Young, who wanted an electric boat and didn’t want to cruise in the ones available on the market. Ray set out to build his own version and after five years he came up with a 21-foot mahogany electric boat that features bamboo interiors.

(more…)

Eco Factor: Solar-powered robot built using a Coleman cooler.

Built by nature loving DIYer Steve Norris, the CoolerBot is a solar-powered telepresence robot that carries an infrared video camera and a Nikon digital SLR camera for nature photography and is powered entirely by the energy harvested by its two solar panels.

(more…)

Yahoo Search isn’t dead and buried just because Microsoft pretty much bought it outright. No, Yahoo can be an innovator even if it’s running Bing and putting a big purple Yahoo sticker on it, or, at least, that’s the official version. And just to show everyone that it’s not out of the picture, it has added tweets to the search results because real-time search is “where it’s at.” But not only is it last to add this functionality, it also looks very much stitched together for the sake of it. What’s more, people are starting to wonder if this entire real-time craze isn’t going a little overboard in the first place.

It’s interesting to point out that Yahoo has been adding tweets to its searches for about a month now but they were confined to the News Shortcut search integrated in the main search engine and relegated to their own “Twitter” tab. Now, tweets will make it into the main search results page but only for select searches, the ones Yahoo deems as trending yet not trending enough to make it to the news section. It should be nice to know how exactly Yahoo determines that, where it draws the line.

“When we launched a Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter content integration earlier this month, we said more was coming. Starting today, you will see recent tweets directly integrated on… (read more)

A new HP Pavilion Entertainment PC has arrived, it delivers an excellent mix of features, performance, and price–so long as you can do without a touchscreen and a variety of external connections. This is not your typical Windows 7 PC but check out the review by David Murphy of the PC World.

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HP Pavilion MS214: Good Performance For It’s Budget Price

PC World

In the past, most budget all-in-one PCs (20 inches or smaller) have come with an Intel Atom processor–a low-powered netbook favorite. So it’s interesting to see HP use a faster 1.5GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU for the MS214 ($600 as of December 8, 2009).The move pays off for the system’s general performance, as its WorldBench 6 score of 59 is among the highest of any all-in-one desktop of this size and price.

Only two other sub 20-inch all-in-ones that have also ditched Atom beat the MS214: The $650, 20-inch MSI Wind Top AE2010 (with a 1.5GHz Athlon X2 dual-core 3250e) scored 60; and Dell’s $944 Studio One 19 (with a 2.5GHz Pentium dual-core E5200) is way out in front with a WorldBench 6 score of 93. But as good as the 19-inch Dell is, $900 will now also get your the 23-inch Acer Aspire Z5610 all-in-one; it scored 101 in WorldBench.

Integrated graphics don’t do much to assist the MS214 with games–it reached a wimpy (and unplayable) 11 frames per second in our Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark (even at a high-quality resolution of 1024 by 768). No surprise there, though, that’s pretty much standard for all-in-ones at this price.

Two gigabytes of DDR2 memory are double what you’d typically find on an all-in-one system of this size (or smaller). So is the system’s included storage capacity of 300GB (where typically we used to see 160GB). Integrated wireless-N connectivity is an excellent touch for those seeking speedy file transfers, as is the system’s included gigabit LAN connectivity. You also get a DVD writer, and you can rip off the MS214’s back panel and upgrade the system’s hard drive and memory should you so desire–a tricky process, but HP does spell it out in the online documentation. It’s rare to see a company outright supporting the direct tweaking of an all-in-one system, given the complexity involved in doing so. For that, I applaud HP.

Although the MS214’s 18.5-inch (1366-by-768 resolution) screen doesn’t do 1080p, the matte panel offers excellent contrasts without any of the unfortunate glare found on glossy-based systems. Picture saturation is as impressive as it is colorful, adding a rich vibrancy to images and movies that does much to make up for a drab exterior.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MS214, however, is that, unlike its TouchSmart brethren, it is not equipped for multitouch. The lack of a touchscreen is a notable omission given that its 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium operating system begs to be touched, and less expensive all-in-one PCs often include at least single-touch functionality. And although the MS214’s included speakers don’t sound that bad given their small, laptop-quality size, the volume itself tends to run a bit lower than what you might otherwise expect to hear (get ready to turn it up to 11).

Instead of mindless bloatware, the collection of preinstalled HP software actually adds a bit of useful functionality. For example, the software dashboard is a great tool for inexperienced users to get a basic, graphics-heavy handle on what exactly their PC is doing in terms of storage capacity, security features, and other important tidbits. A number of MediaSmart programs for viewing movies and pictures are fun additions as well, but they’ll likely frustrate you by forcing you to think about how much better it would be to manipulate your media by jabbing and swiping your finger around the screen. Bummer.

Another way HP shaved cost from MS214 was to cut back on connectivity. Two of the six USB ports will likely be taken up by the generic mouse and keyboard that HP’s shoved in the box alongside the rig. That leaves you with a very low number of single-connection offerings for additional devices, as the system has no alternative connection standard, be it FireWire, eSATA, DisplayPort, or HDMI.

HP’s MS214 is a big, fast (for its price) all-in-one system that’s really rivaled only by the MSI and Dell machines mentioned earlier. So if you’re looking to balance budget and speed, you’ll find lots of appeal in the MS214.

–David Murphy

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Hope you enjoyed this HP Pavilion Entertainment PC review and feel free to share this with friends and families who will benefit from this.

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Childhood years are the best times to learn. Somehow, a person’s comprehension is at its peak during childhood. Parents should take advantage of these learning years to ingrain the values of life in their children.

If you’re a parent, teach them positive habits so that they will know and see the beauty that life has to offer. Make them enthusiastic about life. Instill into their hearts and minds all the wonders and magnificence of being alive by living life to its fullest in a positive way.

There’s a startling difference between children learning through self-discovery, and children learning through self-discovery with proper guidance. The first things that children learn are usually the things that stay with them and mold formative years until they reach adulthood.

Let us suppose you let your children learn through self-discovery. To a certain extent, self-discovery is good since it develops full independence and self-reliance. However, the learning process might be slow. In a sense, it is like a trial and error experience for children. They have to segregate the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, what they like and what they don’t. It is most likely that what they will like are the ones that come easy to them or the ones that they enjoy the most. And the ones that they enjoy the most might not necessarily be the good ones. Without proper guidance, what they like and enjoy the most might actually be hurting them although they are not aware of it. Perhaps later, if they find out that they picked the wrong choices, it may be too late.

With self-discovery through proper guidance, you will be able to leave room for them to develop independence and self-reliance. At the same time, show them what is right and what is wrong. Explain to them why. If possible, cite instances or examples based on true-to-life events to make them more convincing and realistic. The more realistic they are, the more easily the children are convinced. Likewise, try teaching them in a friendly and humorous atmosphere. Children are more attentive and eager to learn when all (both teachers and students) are in an easy mood. You will know and feel their eagerness to learn through the sparkle in their eyes and by the way they answer your questions. You can be sure that what they learn from you is acceptable to them and will stay with them. That is why, as a parent, you must show enthusiasm in life to your children.

There’s a third method of making children learn. That is through proper guidance leaving negligible room for self-discovery. But there are drawbacks. You take away from them the benefits of self-reliance and independence. The guidance you devote to them may be good and well intended, but they must not rely on you on almost everything they do. They become decision-dependent on you. There are instances wherein this type of guidance might be worse than giving no guidance at all.

There are parents who underwent hardships during their childhood, strived, and became successful financially. Although they are financially in the position to guide and assist their children to a better life, they prefer that their children undergo the same difficult experience they underwent during their younger years. Their reason: so that their children will value and experience the same things they went through. This may be applicable to stubborn and rebellious youngsters, but not to disciplined ones. Why must their sons and daughters repeat the same difficulties? There’s no reason to. This is like punishing the innocent. Instead of repeating the experience, they should learn from it. Life is too short to repeat unsavory experiences.

One of the best ways to broaden your children’s knowledge about life is by traveling. The world – its varied people, places, and cultures – has a lot of information to offer. It is perhaps as important as the conventional classroom. If you are financially able, traveling is one of the best educational experiences you can give your children. Look for exhibits or world fairs, and take your children there. Books are the next best things. It’s traveling by reading.

Fill your children with thoughts of self-importance, confidence, and positive attitude so that there will be no room for negative thinking. More importantly, fill their world with laughter, love, and understanding. You‘ll never go wrong.

If you read yesterday’s article you know I am working to get the kinks out of our Backup Exec deployment. My goal is to have a smooth, self sufficient backup server running, that I only need to look at when an alert tells me something is wrong rather than daily. I know daily checks are a good thing, but I would rather stare at a bunch of successes than failures.

One of the errors I was seeing was on our Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. In fact, when you install the agent you get a warning about compatibility problems. Does that mean Backup Exec won’t back up Windows Server 2008 R2? Not in this case.

The error I was seeing was this:

V-79-57344-65225 – A failure occurred accessing the Writer metadata.

V-79-57344-65225 – AOFO: Initialization failure on: "System?State". Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

Snapshot provider error (0xE000FEC9): A failure occurred accessing the Writer metadata.

Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

At first I thought that maybe it was related to the VSS issues I blogged about a few months ago. It wasn’t related at all as the writer status was fine. No the problem is with the 100MB System Reserved partition windows creates when you install it.

To get the error to go away all you have to do is assign that partition a drive letter:

I know! So simple it almost makes you want to puke right? What? Am I the only one? Okay, sorry then. Still, it is pretty awesome how easy it is to fix that.

Know of any other 2008 R2 tricks for backup exec? Hit me up in the comments!

In November...

1) Industrial production spiked 19.2% year over year.

2) Urban fixed asset investment soared 32.1% year over year.

3) Planned investment in new construction exploded upwards by 76.6% year over year.

4) Retails sales grew 15.8% year over year.

Bubble or not, there's still a huge growth engine for the world economy right now. Too many in the U.S. forget this when assessing the state of the world right now. There's a simple math to economic growth in developing nations -- simply transfer the innovations and more efficient technlogy from developed nations and apply it locally. That's instant economic growth, and there's still massive room for this simple tech transfer to happen through trade. Thus even without new innovations/productivity enhancements, there's still a very long way for the world's economy to grow. Want to make money from a developed nation? Facilitate this tech/knowledege transfer process, or create more of it.

See the full Chinese release here.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Financial Post: The Whole World Needs China's One-Child Per Family Policy
• China Unicom Only Sold 100,000 iPhones In 40 Days (AAPL)
• The US-China Trade War Is Here

Julian Sanchez has a fantastic post noting what a difficult job it must be to be in charge of figuring out what to “redact” in government documents that are being released to the public — because redacting certain information may actually reveal a lot more than if that same info had been left readable. As an example of this, Sanchez goes through some of the redactions found in the recently released documents from various service providers in how they comply with law enforcement requests for info. He walks through some of the documents, and actually has his attention called to one redacted passage in a template for requesting info. What caught his eye is that the redacted section was the statutory definition of basic subscriber info that could be requested by law. In other words, there’s nothing secretive at all — and, in fact, he notes that other similar documents include identical information that has not been redacted at all.

If the information had not been redacted, he would have skimmed over it without thinking. But the fact that a government official thought that the statutory definition needed to be redacted, actually called a lot more attention to questioning why that passage had been blacked out. From there, Sanchez does some educated and reasonable speculation, to suggest that government officials may be collecting cell tower info, rather than GPS info, requiring a lower standard to request — because they can easily get enough info from that to determine where a person is, even without the specificity of the GPS info. It’s no secret, of course, that you can triangulate location via tower info, if you have info on multiple towers — but, Sanchez points out that there are likely ways to get pretty close even with single tower info, and that can be requested at a much lower standard by pretending that you’re not trying to pinpoint exact location, and not even asking for the triangulated location info.

It is all speculation, of course, but it’s fascinating that what sent him down this path in the first place was the simple decision by a redactor to redact basic information that is obviously already public. Sanchez surmised that the really salient piece of info is the fact that information can be requested while a call is in progress, rather than after it’s done, which is what is used to determine a more precise location, if the subject is moving (and switching towers):

Now, did this possibility first cross my mind when I looked at these documents? No, not really–but thinking about this stuff breeds paranoia, and so a lot of possibilities cross my mind. The pattern of redactions above make me a good deal more confident that this is probably a popular method of getting moderately detailed location info on the “cheap” in terms of legal process. In the criminal context, anyway–for intel, who knows. They make it explicit in some of these documents that the Justice Department’s legal position is that they can get realtime full-GPS with a mere “relevance” court order, but they go ahead and apply for that kind of tracking under stricter rules because they don’t want to risk suppression. Probably they’re less worried about that when they’re operating under FISA pen/trap orders. But if this is right, they may be pulling a bit of a fast one on judges here. Because a lot of these applications to judges–and certainly the Justice Department’s legal briefs in the cases where courts have been reluctant to approve tracking on such a loose standard–imply that this cell site/sector data, why, it’s so rough and approximate that it vaguely counts as tracking at all. Certainly, at any rate, it’s not so precise as to invade any sort of privacy interest. Except that for a target in steady motion, it begins to seem as though they can probably get a substantially more precise fix.

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Lasse has now published the second part of his HTC HD2 review.

Lasse rightfully finds the HD2 to be a pretty fine device and crowns it “The Best Windows Mobile Phone” at the end of his review.

For part 1, see here.

The Calipers measure the thickness of the skinfolds. The thicker the skinfolds, the greater the amount of fat a person is carrying. Calipers are available for about $12 at most fitness stores where they sell protein etc. How to use the Calipers

1. When taking measurements, do so directly on the skin, not through the clothes.

2. Grasp the caliper in one hand and pull out the fold of skin with its underlying layer of fat with your other hand.

 3. Pull it out in the appropriate direction and continue to hold the skinfold as you apply the caliper.

4. The teeth should be about 1/4” (quarter of an inch) from the fingers of your hand that is holding the skinfold.

5. Do not release the skinfold while taking the readings. 6. You will need measurements from 3 different anatomic locations. Upper body, midsection and thigh. 

 I am giving you these specific examples, for which you don’t need anyone’s help.

1. Pectoral Measure about one inch below the colar bone and two to three inches out from the inside edge of the pectoral muscle. Pull the skinfold in a vertical direction. (women have to make sure to avoid breast tissue)

2. Abdominal Measure about one inch to the left of and one inch down from the belly button. Pull the skinfold in a vertical direction.

3. Suprailiac Measure about halfway between the belly button and the top of the hipbone. Pull the skinfold in a horizontal direction.

4. Quadriceps Measure in the middle of the quadriceps. Pull the skinfold in a vertical direction. If the area is too tight you may need to go up one to two inches. Calculating Body Fat Using Skinfolds :

Women 1. Take skinfold measurements (in millimeters) from 3 different locations and add them together to find the sum of skinfolds.

Example: Pectoral measurement + Abdominal measurement + Quadriceps measurment = Sum of skinfolds 6mm + 8mm + 22mm = 36mm 2.

Take the sum of skinfolds and your age and plug it into the body density equation bellow.

a) 0.0009929 x sum of skinfolds 0.0009929 x 36 = 0.0357444

b) 0.0000023 x (sum of skinfolds x sum of skinfolds) 0.0000023 x (36 x 36) = 0.0029808

c) 0.0001392 x age 0.0001392 x 26 = 0.0036192 d) 1.0994921 – (a + b – c) = body density 1.0994921 – (0.0357444 + 0.0029808 – 0.0036192) = 1.0643861 My Body Density is 1.0643861 and now I have to plug it in body fat equation below to get my body fat percentage.

Bodyfat equation: ([4.570 ÷ body density] – 4.142) x 100 = body fat percentage ([4.570 ÷ 1.0643861] – 4.142) x 100 = 15% of body fat calculated that I have 15% of body fat

Calculating Body Fat using Skinfolds: Guys Chest measurement + abdominal measurement + Quadriceps measurement = Sum of skinfolds Example: 12mm + 16mm + 11mm = 39mm

a) 0.0008267 x sum of skinfolds 0.0008267 x 39 = 0.0322413

b) 0.0000016 x (sum of skinfolds x sum of skinfolds) 0.0000016 x (39 x 39) = 0.0024336

c) 0.0002574 x age 0.0002574 x 33 = 0.0084942

d) 1.10938 – (a + b – c) = body density 1.10938 – (0.0322413 + 0.0024336 – 0.0084942) = 1.0831993 Body density is 1.0831993 and now I plug it into the body fat equation below. Body fat Equation: ([4.570 ÷ body density] – 4.142) x 100 = body fat percentage ([4.570 ÷ 1.0831993] – 4.142) x 100 = 7.6%

 Always pinch on the right side, there are other methods this is just for the beginners who have the free calipers

Homebrew coder Jean-Philippe Prade has released the beta version DS submission, a homebrew remake of the classic Game Boy title “Radar Mission”.
 
 
Download: DS submission beta (http://dl.qj.net/nintendo-ds/media/ds-submission-beta.html)