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Missile head cooling system, test stands on Valves and Instruments;
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Various test stands on Aerospace hose, valves, and executor;
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Hose tester, Cylinder tester, Impulse tester, Cyclic tester and etc.

The Polytetra GmbH, Mönchengladbach, Germany would like to introduce its special service:

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Paolo Pellegrini, John Paulson’s famous sidekick who helped figure out the great housing bet, has released his first shareholder letter since striking out on his own. Not surprisingly, he’s doing awesome, with a 175% gain since inception. (via Zero Hedge)

And like many managers these days, he hates the dollar, and likes commodities.

All of the above recommends shorting US MBS and the US dollar – we can’t predict which will
go down, or which will go down more, but in combination we believe they will go down a lot.
Buying commodities and commodity-related currency is one way of shorting the US dollar. It is
highly probable that commodities outperform other asset classes in the medium term, as demand
from emerging markets bumps against still-constrained supply.

With China a lead actor in this play, investors like us must either divine Chinese policy or find a
strategy that is relatively invariant to it, at least over time. We attempt the latter. If China uses
dollars to buy US goods, US inflation goes up and MBS go down. If China uses dollars to buy
other currencies, MBS – in dollars – may not do as badly, but the US dollar will collapse.

The critical implementation issues, aside from the choice of instruments and trade execution, are
(1) the respective weights of the two legs of this strategy (short MBS, long commodities) and (2)
leverage/financing – we don’t want to be “stopped-out” of a winning trade on a temporary
reversal. Robust structuring of counterparty trading relationships and individual transactions
contributed significantly to our investment results in the past. High returns imply the possibility
of large temporary reversals, which dealers may exploit to curtail losing positions against poorly
prepared counterparties. We intend to be as diligent and creative as ever in ensuring that we
capture the full benefit of our investment insights through skillful implementation.

PSQR Investor Report September 2009

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• John Paulson Is A Great Trader Because He’s Grumpy And Negative
• Paulson & Co. Hedge Fund Loses Key Manager
• Jim Chanos: China Is Headed For A Huge Crash

	VIDEO: Wet Liberal rants about Top Gear, electric cars and hydrogen This is just good fun.		Mazda2 to be basis of electric vehicle test fleet eZoom-eZoom?
	Report: Revived Toyota MR2 hybrid could challenge Honda CR-Z We like this sort of fight.	Other news: High price for a hybrid: Lexus sets MSRP for LS 600h at $108,800 New Buick Excelle debuts in China, sedan coming to America soon Spy shots: Higher performance MINI diesels spotted testing

AutoblogGreen for 11.29.09 originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re (still!) incredibly sad that we won’t be seeing Gourmet in our mailboxes next year, and we’ve been hard pressed to decide which new magazine will fill the gap. Actually, this shake-up has made us take a fresh look at all of our subscriptions. Which magazines will you be getting next year?

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As if the newsflow from the last few days could get any more surreal, Dow Jones concludes the ticker with this stunner:

Japan Hirano: Expect BOJ Gov, PM To Discuss Quantitative Easing

TOKYO (Dow Jones)–Japan’s top government spokesman said he expects Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa to exchange opinions on the economy and to discuss the possibility of the central bank adopting a policy of quantitative easing, local media reported Monday.

The BOJ head and the prime minister will also talk about whether they share similar views on the economy, Nikkei News cited Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano as saying at a press conference earlier in the day.

Read the whole thing at Zero Hedge >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• With Dollar At 14-Year Low Against Yen, Japan Raises Hints Of Dramatic Intervention
• Japanese Yen On A Tear
• The Dollar Carry-Trade Denialists Are Wrong

As AOL nears its spin off from Time Warner, which will be in a little over a week now, it’s talking more and more about the future. So far, most plans haven’t really been all that groundbreaking and the company has been saying for a while now that it wants to become a content powerhouse reaching into any niche it believes could be profitable. Now CEO Tim Armstrong has detailed some more plans the company has in this segment and it’s a surprising turn for the company though, in hindsight, perhaps not a totally unexpected one. The CEO told the Wall Street Journal that it planned to develop a hybrid system for creating news and content, part machine part human, which would push out content on the topics most likely to be popular at that particular time.

The system is designed to create the content which will bring in the most readers, in turn generating the most advertising money. An algorithm will track breaking news stories and popular topics and will determine which subject is likely to generate the most revenue. It will then present these findings to the company’s editors, which are at about 500 at the moment, but AOL has been on a hiring spree in this front. Then, they will chose the ones they’ll push through to the next step, sending out article requests through a new web site it has set up to any f… (read more)

Gloomy investor Eric Sprott argues that banks remain extremely leveraged — especially Canadian banks! — and that with regulators now looking to make up for the bailout, it’s a particularly bad time to be investing in banks, a la John Paulson. (via PragCap)

Sprott—Don-t-bank-on-Banks –

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Even With Government Backstop, FDIC Unable To Dump Failed Banks
• Forget Meredith Whitney, Paulson Loves American Banks (CBY, BAC)
• Meredith Whitney: "I Haven’t Been This Bearish In A Year" (XLF)

Still believe in the v-shaped recovery idea that was so popular, oh, about 2 months ago?

Wake up. That ship has sailed says Goldman’s Jan Catzius, whose latest report argues that we’re settling into a sub-par recovery.

From housing to labor, there’s just precious little evidence of a vigorous rebound.

See the full argument >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• SocGen: Prepare Yourself For The Worst Case Scenario!
• Goldman: It’s 2004 All Over Again
• Five Reasons A Sell-Off Is Coming

It looks like Twitter may not be getting any paid accounts after all, at least not in the way we’ve been initially expecting, despite the detailed reports from last week. Digital Garage, the company which runs Twitter in Japan, has issued a statement which boils down to ‘it’s a misunderstanding, there won’t be any paid accounts for the foreseeable future’.

After the news of the paid premium content started making rounds, the company wanted to set the record straight denying it had any immediate plans. It was a couple of days after the initial reports and there are still a couple of sketchy details, but here’s what happened. Kenichi Sugi DG Mobile’s, a Digital Garage subsidiary, chief operating officer, gave a presentation at a tech conference where he laid out some of the details of the company’s plans to start using paid subscriptions as a revenue model. The presentation got picked up by various media outlets and spread around the world.

Now Digital Garage is saying that the presentation wasn’t an official announcement from the company, but rather some possible future plans for DG Mobile which don’t directly involve either Twitter or Digital Garage.

“In response to media reports stating that Twitter Japan will be launching a paid-premium accounts service on Tw… (read more)

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

Strategists at Credit Suisse are currently expecting a near-term equity sell-off, but are not yet concerned about the downturn evolving into a larger bear market decline.  Why have they turned a bit more cautious?  A series of psychological, fundamental and technical events:

As we’ve previously noted, sentiment is turning extremely bullish:

(a) Bearish sentiment has hit June 2004 low (Figure 9).When it was this low in 2003 and 2004, markets corrected by 5% (Figure 10), but we would stress that bullish sentiment at that point was a lot higher then than it is now.

Credit spreads have begun to widen in the last few months.  Not surprisingly, investors are beginning to focus on the long-term debt problems around the globe.   In addition, Dubai and the upcoming wave of mortgage resets could prove a reminder that the credit crisis is not quite over yet.

(b) Stress in the credit markets. We have seen the sovereign CDS rise in the past three months especially in Japan (the world’s largest creditor!), whose CDS has doubled (rising from 35bps to 70bps) – a surprise, given that the trigger has been the DPJ tightening fiscal  policy by 1.2% of GDP. We have also seen the credit spreads of lower quality European countries deteriorate (Greece spreads have widened by 100bps over the past three months).

As we recently noted in the Expectation Ratio, it’s likely that the gap between real earnings and expectations has peaked.  Credit Suisse believes upgrades have likely peaked as well:

(c) The rate of earnings upgrades has just peaked, and on the last three occasions this happened (June 04, Sep 05 and May 06), the S&P 500 has traded sideways for a the next three months.

Credit Suisse is concerned that the ECB could begin pulling the liquidity plug:

(d) The ECB will start withdrawing part of the emergency liquidity – with the announced end of the unlimited one-year refinancing operations in December. Greece and Ireland are the main recipients of the funds from ECB refinancing operations, with these funds being equivalent to around 50% and 16% of GDP respectively, according to our European Economics Team.

Although the technicals remain firmly positive in the long-term, we are nearing a critical juncture in the rally.  In addition, the alarming volume trends are reason for CS to be concerned:

(e) Chartist point: 1,121 on the S&P 500 would mean a 50% retracement of the bear market. This point has not been breached. In the last month, volumes have been slightly higher on down-days than on up-days.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Goldman: Here’s How To Play The Big, End-Of-The-Year Surge
• Goldman: It’s 2004 All Over Again
• Why I Am An Optimist

Back in August, we noted that a Dutch court, at the urging of anti-piracy group BREIN (which has a history of questionable tactics), had ordered Mininova to remove all infringing links from its index. Even though the court admitted that Mininova itself was not infringing, it was told to remove any torrents that linked to infringing material. Since there’s simply no way to know whether the torrents link to infringing material, and tests of some filtering solutions proved to not do a very good job, the site has decided to remove all torrents other than those specifically approved by the site. End result? The entertainment industry may have wac’d another mole, as Mininova users simply scatter to other providers. But the industry hasn’t done anything to get people more interested in buying. How many more moles get wac’d before anyone figures this out?

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Some countries are giving out free Internet, others are making it a legal right. But Turkey has its sights set on even higher goals, providing all of its 70 million citizens with an email address and creating its very own search engine to replace the untrustworthy Googles and Bings of the world. The head of Turkey’s communications watchdog said that the project was well underway and that the search engine should be going live as soon as 2010.

The motivation behind the grand project comes from the security concerns of relying on a service operated in a foreign country. Tayfun Acarer, chairman of Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communication Board, wants to eliminate this risk and dependency by building a home-grown search engine. “All internet communication data goes to foreign countries and then it returns. This activity has a security aspect,” Acarer said.

Furthermore, most popular search engines today don’t offer much support for Arabic languages, Acarer claims, making it hard for many people to use them. “I believe that our search engine will be popular in Turkic countries and Muslim countries and I am confident that these countries will trust our search engine,” he added. He obviously hasn’t heard of ImHalal, to name one.

Along with the search engine announcement, he al… (read more)

Spam Visualization [spamvisualization.net] contains a small collection of beautifully stylized data visualizations based on the data retrieved from the Spam Catalog Database.

The available data visualization techniques include a Bubble Size Quantity Grid (sorted by date, size or IP number), a Word Frequency Graph (sorted by count, alphabet or length), a Top Level Pie Chart (the circles show the ratio of the toplevel domain endings in emails and link URLs), some IP Number Glyphs, and a Time Frequency Bar Graph (shows the spam income of the last seven days, with color depending on the amount per hour.).

More visuals are available at Flickr. Thnkx Kim.

Climate-Trade-Immigrant Justice NOW

Westlake Plaza, south end of park, 12 – 5

12noon-1245: Cimate! Justice! Assembly Street Theater
1245-1pm: Jack Chernos, Singer, Songwriter
115-130: WA Fair Trade Coalition
130-2pm: Climate Justice speaker
2-230: People’s Assembly
230-250: Jim Page, Folk Troubadour
250-320: Street Theater
4pm-5pm WA Immigrant Rights Action Coalition

Hear Eric Holt-Gimenez tonight at UW, 7pm!

Eric Holt Gimenez,  Director of Food First, ally in our AGRA Watch campaign, speaking about his new book, co-authored with Raj Patel & Annie Shattuck, “Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice”.

Eric is an incredible speaker – don’t miss this chance to hear him in person!

Gould Hall at University of WA, Seattle
On the corner of NE 40th St and 15th Ave NE
Admission free of charge

Chicken feet – gnarly, repulsive and disturbing – make for the very best stock. Devoid of little else but tendons, bone and cartilage (sound appetizing yet?), chicken feet produce a fine golden broth that’s rich in all those obscure nutrients that make a good stock so nourishing: glucosamine chondroitin, collagen and trace minerals.  Moreover, a chicken stock is an excellent source of calcium without .  Understandably, a stock made from chicken feet gels beautifully just as a good stock should.

Saturday morning, I pulled out a bag of chicken feet and as I peeled the yellow membrane from the feet and hacked away the talons, I couldn’t help but reflect upon my relationship with food.  Dear God, I thought, I was a vegan once!  I used to gag at opening a package of lunch meat, and now I can peel and hack my way through a bag of chicken feet with nary an ill feeling  That is until my 4-year old tapped me on a shoulder with a disembodied claw.  Eeeew! Then there was that time when I accidentally left a bag full of chicken feet fresh from the farmers market in the fridge at the office.

Chicken feet can be difficult to find – that is, until you know where to look.  They don’t come packaged on little Styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic. Ethnic markets – those last bastions of traditional foods – often carry chicken feet, heads and other miscellaneous parts that are forgotten in conventional cooking.  Farmers markets can be another source.  Most importantly, your local farm offering pastured poultry may also have a stash from the latest harvest.  If purchasing your chicken feet at a market, they will usually run you $1 – $2 per pound; however, if you purchase your whole chickens farmer-direct they will often throw the chicken feet in the bag at your request.  These chicken feet came from a local, family-run farm that also specializes in grass-fed lamb.

Preparing Chicken Feet for the Stock Pot

In many cases, the chicken feet will arrive already prepared, more or less; however, if you receive them directly from your local farm you may need to dress the chicken feet yourself.  This is easy.  First, you’ll rub them with salt and scald them briefly in boiling water followed by an icy bath.  This practice enables you to more easily peel the yellow membrane on the foot.  After peeling the yellow membrane from the feet, chop the talons off at the first knuckle.  Some cooks prefer to leave the talon on the foot. In the above picture, you’ll see chicken feet in the three stages of preparation: 1. fresh, 2. peeled and 3. declawed.When blanching the chicken feet, take great care not to blanch the feet too long or you will overcook the feet, fusing the yellow membrane to the foot and activating the gelling process. Moreover, overcooking will also cause the tendons in the feet to contract, making peeling virtually impossible. Be brief.

Once the feet are fully prepared by cleaning, blanching, peeling and talon removal, they’re ready for the stock pot.  A stock prepared from chicken feet, like any stock, is widely variable and can be seasoned based on your personal preference.  Preferring a mild-tasting broth in most recipes, I usually season my broth with vegetable scraps including celery leaves, onion and carrot peelings; however, from time to time, I like to change the flavor of the stock a touch and heat it up with chilies, ginger and other spices.  The stock recipe detailed below is very well-suited to Asian-inspired dishes and perfect for cold and flu season when a nourishing, mineral-rich broth infused with chilies and spice can help clear the sinuses.

Asian-inspired Chicken Foot Stock

Prepared from chicken feet and no other bones or meat, this stock produces a solid gel.  One pound of feet will produce approximately ½ gallon of well-gelled stock.  Its aroma is faintly reminiscent of Top Ramen, no joke.  Even if you prefer to season your stock with a mild combination of onion, celery and carrot or herbs of your choice, follow the same method as outlined below.

More on Stock & Broth

• Beef Stock Recipe
• Benefits of Bone Broth
• Roast Chicken Stock

Ingredients

• 1 lb Chicken Feet, Peeled and Talons Removed
• 1 2-inch Knob of Ginger
• 1 Star Anise
• 3 – 4 Fresh Cayenne (or other) Chili Peppers
• 1 Bulb Garlic, Peeled
• 1 4-inch Stalk of Lemon Grass (optional)

Instructions

1. Add all ingredients to your stock pot.
2. Add water to cover.
3. Simmer for a minimum of 4 hours and up to 12, adding more water as needed or desired.
4. Skim any scum that rises to the top.
5. Strain solids from the broth through a fine mesh sieve or cheesecloth.
6. Bottle and reserve the stock.
7. Serve in Asian-inspired soups and dishes.

Photon etc. will again participate to the Prism Awards for Photonics Innovation at Photonics West 2010 in San Francisco. Photon etc.’s Tunable Laser Source is subscribed under “Other Light Sources” category. A demonstration of this instrument will also be presented at Photon etc.’s booth at the Canadian Pavilion (#4407). Based on supercontinuum source coupled to a non-dispersive bandpass filter, the Tunable Laser Source transmits a narrow linewidth over a very broad spectral range, up to 1300 nm of tuning range. Last year, Photon etc.’s Tunable Top Notch Filter was finalist in Optics Category.

In a world context where the economic crisis is distorting the market and balances and is voiding certainties, everybody is trying by all means to find solutions that allow to absorb the negative effects.
The XVIII World Convention of Italian Chambers of Commerce Abroad, held in Salerno between October 24 to 28, tried to give some guidance to correct the problem.
In the convention, BONO ARTES has played a leading role as it has been rewarded for its vocation for internationalization with the prize “ImpreSAmondiale.”
This event saw the participation of many prominent personalities of the Italian economy, including the Vice-Minister for Foreign Trade Adolfo D’Urso, the new President Augusto Assocamerestero Strianese.
Carlo Lamura, delegate to represent the Ministry of Economic Development, explained the criteria for selection of companies and the reasons that determined to the award of this prestigious award. “A very careful selection appropriate and prudent, performed on over 80 companies, with the help of a technical committee of the Chamber of Commerce of Salerno, the Simest and representatives of institutions and universities specializing in Salerno,” said Lamura.
BONO ARTES has received this award thanks to the degree of innovation achieved in the design and construction of plants for water treatment and exported contribution that has been developed in recent years in the Asian market.
Mr. Pasquale Punzo, CEO of Artes Ingegneria SpA (BONO Artes), said at the delivery of the prize: “This event demonstrates the ability of BONO ARTES to excel in international contexts and to be constantly in search of possible market outlets where you can export the continuous technological improvements of its plants.”

Through 2009, almost all companies have suffered from the global economic crisis.
So have SteelTailor.

At the beginning of the crisis, Philippe Glaude, the president of SteelTailor arranged an important meeting. He told the team:” We will do everything to go through this difficult time together. An enterprise is not made for only one or two years. SteelTailor has to go through all the up and downs to become an outstanding world brand. “

Several important decisions were taken.

Firstly, SteelTailor decided not to lay off staff. With this principle, employees were working harder. This mutual trust between company and the employee is the key to productivity and quality of SteelTailor.

Second, SteelTailor decided to increase investment in promotion and distributor support. During 2009, steelTailor has exhibited on 7 trade shows in different continents. This made SteelTailor gain much confidence and respects from both channel partners and end users.

By the end of November, SteelTailor‘s booking shows already promising figures against year 2008.

“Employee and partners are both our precious resources. It has been a hard year for everybody. But we work harder together to win!” said Philippe.