Looks like Apple is going to be doing a Black Friday special as well. It’s not confirmed yet, but it’s not too much of a stretch to think they’ll run with this.
Here’s what we’re seeing:
The sale is only good on the 27th; some stores will open at 6:00am.
Friday, November 14, was the 2nd day of seminar at Visualizar’09. See our previous post about its Kick-Off. Xavier Alonso presented data404, a collection of sources of public information. In the following talk, Jan-Christoph Zoels discussed on how data visualization can influence public behavior towards more sustainable attitudes. Jan presented several visualizations developed by Experientia within the context of the c_life project, which was the winner of the low2no design competition. He explained the importance of visualization in the process and in the final interface design of the project. Continuing the discussion, Paolo Viterbo and Valentina Barsotti presented a particular approach to engage people by collecting urban information in real-time and returning it to the public after placing it within the environmental context. According to them, data should be part of the environment and, linked to a specific goal, it should be presented simultaneous to harmful practices in order to produce change. Back to legislation, Javier Candeira presented a way of dealing with Copyright and Public Data based on evidence-based policies.
In the afternoon, Kerr Mitchell presented the work of the Sunlight Foundation and its Labs. He presented the Capitolwords project (which has been already featured on this blog)
and the a mashup with the Layar project, which had been already cited by José Alonso on the first day of Visualizar. Layar is an Android mobile phone application that allows users to visualize contextualized data (in this case, public spending) by using the camera of their mobile phones.
The highly anticipated talks of Aaron Koblin and Ben Cervery closed the day. Aaron presented some of his well known projects, such as the Flight Patterns and the New York Talk Exchange, which demonstrate his unique ability to retry interesting questions out of long existing data sets. He also displayed recent projects related to sound, such as the well known House of Cards and Bicycle Built for Two Thousand.
At Ben Cerveny‘s talk, titled “The Dance of the Variables”, some key concepts around information visualization where exposed. He explained how information tend to result from finding patterns on exponentially growing data sets and while dealing with this complexity, one cannot avoid discussing concepts such as emergence and entropy. Some of these patterns are identified through recent Stamen´s projects. The exercise of visualizing information consists in applying physical qualities to a data set, transforming it in a “self-contained system that can work as a metaphor of reality“.
The video stream of these seminars should be available soon, at Medialab Prado Visualizar webpage.
This post was written by Larissa Pschetz and Miguel Cardoso.
There’s not a lot to say about this pitcher. You’re looking at it, right? That’s what it is. It costs $22.
[via BoingBoing]
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The problem with creating a category for toys on CrunchGear is that almost everything we review is a toy – it’s fun, cool, and great to play with for at least a day or two until our attention is inevitably drawn to something else. That said, here are some gift ideas for the toy lover in your life.
Stylophone Beatbox: $25.50 (100Milligrams.com)
I’m sorry I’m going to thrust this upon you but this is a really cool way to make music. Seriously. You slide the little stylus all over the pad to create different beats and the resulting cacophony can even sound somewhat professional. If the kids don’t want to learn violin, this is the next best thing.
Ghostbusters Action Figures: $19.99 (ThinkGeek.com)
These make for a great stocking stuffer and they’ll make the kids aware of films from the era before computer-generated video.
Sega Genesis Portable: $69.99 (InnexInc.com)
Kids asking for a console? Don’t give them the satisfaction. Make them earn it. But don’t be completely cruel. Give them something like the Sega Genesis Portable Handheld. It includes great games like Sonic & Knuckles and will make them hunger for the New Super Mario Brothers even more.
Product Page (available for purchase at Buy.com) | CrunchGear Review
Jakks Pacific EyeClops Night Vison 2.0 Binoculars: $69.99 (Jakks.com)
One of my favorite toys of the season. This amazing night vision kit makes it fun to run around in the dark – especially for the kid wearing the night vision goggles. Recreate your favorite scenes from G-Force and Silence of the Lambs.
Zippity from Leapfrog: $69.99 (Leapfrog.com)
Kids too young for games? Give them this massive joystick/footpad combination and let them lead Winnie the Pooh, Diego, and other characters down the primrose path to fun.
Homemade Ball and Cage: Free (GVSU.edu)
Trust me: the kids will think you’re a freak but when they’re thirty or so they’ll pull this out and think of you.
It’s quite common for various trademark holders to go through the UDRP domain dispute process to get back domains held by cybersquatters. Still, it’s quite impressive to hear that FreeCreditReport.com was able to get 1,017 separate domain names in a single dispute (found via Slashdot) apparently by using some sort of software that identified all the domains. The company that held the domain names argued, in part, that the term “free credit report” should be seen as generic, not a specific trademark, but the arbitration board simply said that since the USPTO had granted FreeCreditReport.com with a trademark, that the trademark was solid — and thus most domain names that included those words could be turned over.
This does raise some questions however — since we’ve seen plenty of other cases where domains that included trademarked terms, but which would not be confusing to users (such as “trademarknamesucks.com”), have been allowed to be used by the original registrant, rather than handed over to the trademark holder. It’s unclear, in this case, if some of those domains were like that — or if they were all pure squatter domains. Still, it’s quite an impressive haul by FCR.
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Nextstop, a user-generated travel site, is releasing an API for its location-specific short-form recommendations. The self-funded company, founded by former Google product managers, only launched in June and has attracted low hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, however it has ambitious plans to be a global (read: not hubbed around a few cities like Yelp) and comprehensive resource of recommended places and activities.
For now Nextstop is just a web site, and an English-language one at that, but the API enables things like automated Twitter queries (built in-house as an example) where you can ask @nextstopbot what’s good and near to an address. The six-person Nextstop team, said co-founder Carl Sjogreen (best known as product manager of Google Calendar), has put much focus into laying the groundwork to scale to be “a Wikipedia of all the great places in the world,” spending much of its time working on things like a reputation system to give good users more contribution powers.
The race to build a database of the world’s coolest locations may be moving faster than San Francisco-based Nextstop, though, with companies like Foursquare — which also just released an API — using the real-time and personal nature of mobile, as well as social gaming, to incentivize user contributions. Others working on location databases include Mozilla, uLocate and Geodelic. Though it seems folks like Twitter and Facebook could easily propel themselves past the competition with their highly social user bases.
The New Oxford English Dictionary has announced that 2009’s Word of the Year is unfriend. While it is perhaps not used as broadly as the newly-verbed friend, the latter is already in the dictionary, so they can’t very well call it new. The best they can do is run with unfriend, which implies and extends the other. A worthy choice, I think, with “currency and potential longevity,” as Oxford’s Senior Lexicographer puts it. It set me thinking, though: how prescient have Word of the Year choices been? Have they infallibly documented the rise of tech in mainstream language and culture? —or are they a dusty collection of buzzwords, a history of folly and haste? And really, which of those is the truer depiction of the world of technology?
I examined Oxford’s Word of the Year lists going back as far as their blog documents them, and consulted a few other word-tracking sources. Unsurprisingly, the popularity and continued pertinence of new words have been as unpredictable as the technologies they describe. Still, the world from a dictionary’s perspective makes for a unique retrospective.
Take hypermiling, for instance. 2008’s word, relevant and rich at the time, seems positively archaic now; as electrics and more efficient hybrids populate our roads more and more, the idea of hypermiling seems to be no longer a cool technique employed by savvy drivers, but a weird fuel-based cult obsessed with aging technology. It brings to mind a sentimental geek zealously maintaining a Windows 3.1 box. Webster’s 2008 word, more farsighted to be sure, was oversharing, certainly a symptom of the personal-broadcasting era that we’ve all observed. Hypermiling was chosen for its immediacy, which does not correlate well with longevity.
Yet podcasting, chosen in 2005, is going stronger than ever. A blog or website these days is incomplete without a podcast, though some question the practicality of adding yet another modality to the increasingly multi-tiered stream of information assaulting every webgoer. Still, no one would dispute that it is a meaningful and useful term, and one not likely to be replaced any time soon. Runners-up that year included rootkit, a surprisingly technical entry that has stayed with us, and lifehack, which, while being an interesting blog, is a pretentious failure as a word.
2007 was a bit of a misfire for Oxford; although it was a big year for Apple and Facebook, their tech nominations were red herrings like bacn, an abortive attempt to brand “desired spam,” and cloudware, which at the time was (if you’ll forgive the expression) too hazy a concept to really get much traction among casual users. Locavore hasn’t gained much ground in the popularity contest, probably because people who use it tend to be selling it. It’s still a good app, though. Unfriend would have been a real win here, since the new politics of online relationships were being written by users at large. Cloud has remained but I think perhaps the term which may best have represented 2007 was iTouch. This common misnomer evokes both the rapid expansion of personal media devices and widespread mystification at its terminology and function. Unfortunately, those who use the word are by definition nearly incapable of propagating it as a meme.
The ‘97-’98-’99 series of WAP, to Google, and blogger have an almost causal connection, as if each must have necessarily followed the other. While WAP was never a term laypeople used, and Wi-Fi would have been a better choice, its import was clear. Increasingly secure, convenient, and popular, the internet began getting personal in 1997, and that wave gathered energy with Googling over the next year, finally crashing on the shores of the collective idiom as blogging. Laptop plus coffee shop plus being able to explore the internet efficiently was a sort of tech trifecta, and blogs started sprouting like weeds (sorry about that).
But back to this year’s words. Unfriend is, I think, one for the ages. But the others are groaners: intexticated? Funemployed? Sexting maybe, but we can’t nominate every clever portmanteau. If that were the case, half the words in the dictionary would be creations of my own (I have a talent for them). Better to collect them in a little bundle, as they’ve done with what I called the infernal bird-based jargon of Twitter: Tweeps, Tweetup, Twitt, Twitterati, Twitterature, Twitterverse/sphere, Retweet, Twibe, Sweeple, Tweepish, Tweetaholic, Twittermob, and Twitterhea (Twitterhead?).
These word clusters provide an interesting cross-section of the culture around a certain word (the other one they note is Obama) and its emergent phenomena — Twitterati is a good example of this, and a good word to keep around. The others I consign to the pit.
The level to which this invented jargon, or even something like the more practical unfriend, is actually used is unclear. I’m sure we’ve all seen freemium, and it has worth, but will it end up as widely used as paywall? It’s impossible to say, given the malleability of both new words and the people who use them. The environment for creating words is becoming more democratic, for better or for worse. Personally, I find my new words in old books, but even this cursory look at the new word market shows that those terms we may dismiss as fleeting or overly specific may be the most signal of the era.
Lastly, as many of you readers are specialists in tech, feel free to submit some of your more interesting or useful terms. For example, I like tentacular but rarely get to use it. Not really jargon, or a word even, but when it works, it works. Let’s populate this post with submissions for next year’s list; maybe someone from Oxford will find something they like.
[image: first recorded tweet; chemheritage’s Flickr]
China Unicom is continuing to trumpet the iPhone’s prospects in China — despite widespread conviction that it’s too expensive there. As Stacey recently noted, Daniel Amir, director and senior research analyst of semiconductors at Lazard Capital Markets, has cited China Unicom officials as saying they’d sold some 30,000 iPhones in the country since its launch there on Oct. 30.
And the company’s chairman, Chang Xiaobing, says he expects the device to become the best-selling smartphone in the country, Bloomberg is reporting. So should we buy all this iPhone love from China Unicom?
“We’re very confident about the market position of the iPhone,” Bloomberg quotes Chang as saying. The report also quotes IDC analyst Aloysius Choong, who said that “Unicom must lower its prices if it wants to access the mass market for the iPhone.”
That last fact is likely to be true. In China, a 32GB iPhone 3GS sold at launch for 6,999 yuan ($1,024) without a service contract; add that in and over two years a Chinese subscriber will pay some $3,000. Android phones, on the other hand, are likely to cost less in China given that Dell and other players providing them aren’t smartphone titans, and Android phones could play into pre-existing preferences for open source platforms that exist there.
China Unicom’s Chang is also denying that users will choose iPhones sold on the gray market, according to Bloomberg. Sales of gray market phones “won’t be very significant,” he claims, even though we just reported on iSuppli’s numbers showing that gray market phones are moving briskly in China.
Come on now. These pronouncements from China Unicom sound like little more than PR spin. There are many valid questions to be asked about the iPhone’s future in China. After all, the device will probably be hindered from using certain kinds of technology (it will get Wi-Fi, but only following a battle involving China’s government), there won’t be the same freedom to choose applications as there is elsewhere, and it’s very expensive relative to Chinese salaries. Only a few short weeks after the iPhone’s Chinese launch, it’s just too early to read the tea leaves.
So we’re in agreement: this kid is crazy, right? He’s ranting about losing in Modern Warfare 2, then proceeds to freak out. I damn near started chanting “EC DUB! EC DUB!” when he attempted to reverse fireman’s carry the wall. That makes no sense, no. Warning: he uses salty language to describe his displeasure with the game.
Last week, we wrote about the ridiculous situation, whereby the MPAA had an entire muni-WiFi network shut down because one person using that system had downloaded a single film. The story ended up getting a fair amount of press, and it looks like the MPAA and Sony Pictures in particular, quickly realized that this was really, really bad publicity for the company. After the company got bombarded by complaints, Sony Pictures contacted the town and asked them to turn the WiFi back on, while also claiming it could help the town set up tools to block such things in the future. Of course, as Broadband Reports notes in the above link: “Of course if the MPAA and Sony had approached the network owners like human beings in the first place — instead of engaging in the kind of scorched earth tactics they’ve employed for several years now — they probably wouldn’t have gotten the bad press to begin with.” But, acting like human beings in the first place isn’t the sort of thing the industry does well.
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The paper reviewed here is ‘The Role of Genetics in Delirium in the Elderly Patient’ by van Munster, Rooij and Korevaar. In the abstract van Munster and colleagues write that
‘Two important gaps in daily practice with delirium are the pathophysiological obscurity and the low recognition rates. Genetics offers the possibility to contribute knowledge to both of these gaps with its unique and diverse techniques‘
The authors give an overview of delirium in the introduction before going on to consider the syndrome of delirium. They consider the difficulties of diagnosis given the relatively short window of time which may be available to make the diagnosis as well as a number of other practical issues. The authors consider briefly and in turn several hypotheses about the aetiology of delirium including the dysregulation of dopamine or acetylcholine, the stress response and the immune response particularly the response involving cytokines. The authors then go on to consider the genotype and phenotype of delirium.
The authors hypothesise that if genetic risk factors are present, the precipitants for an episode can be ‘milder’. They also suggest that the study of the genetics of delirium is comparatively more difficult than with other diseases as the average age of onset of delirium may be causally related to the relative dearth of twin studies in this area. They then look at the methodology of genetic studies including the gene-wide association studies and look at some of the advantages comparing them with invasive procedures.
They use the broad categories describe above to suggest some suitable candidate genes which are listed in table 1. These can be compared with the genetic studies that have already been carried out and which are described in a later section. A number of the studies examining APOE4 associations for instance have not produced such interesting findings. The authors conclude with some suggestions of how future studies can facilitate a better understanding of the role of genetic factors in delirium including cohort studies.
I was persuaded by a number of the arguments particularly the suggested model combining precipitants with the genetic risk factors. While there is no explicitly stated methodology for the construction of the paper the authors have used a systematic approach towards the article which identifies a list of candidate genes as well as justifying an investigation into the genetics of delirium as well as highlighting potential difficulties of such an approach. This is a young field and articles such as this provide a useful overview.
References
van Munster B C, de Rooij S E and Korevaar J C. The role of genetics in delerium in the elderly patient. Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord. 2009. 28. 187-195.
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The homebrew coders from the ScummVM Team has finally release version 1.0.0of their classic multi-platform point-and-click adventure games emula…
Hey, you! I know you. You’re the one that gets all hot around the collar over shots of unreleased iPhone accessories, aren’t you? Boy, oh boy – are you gonna love this..
The Harrier jumpjet is one of the most famous aircraft in the world. Ideal for carrier take off and landings, the jumpjet has been part of the US military arsenal for many years. The problem is that it isn’t very fast. Now the next generation of jumpjet is entering testing to see if it measures up.
The new Harrier, known as the F-35B, combines stealth and supersonic speed. Currently there is only one other aircraft in the world that does this: the F-22 Raptor. The problem with the Raptor is it requires a standard runway to take-off and land, and is also extremely expensive ($361 Million per aircraft). The new Harrier, on the other hand, is both cheap (comparatively so, at $83 million each) and doesn’t require a full-length runway to operate. Assuming the F-35B passes testing, the U.S. is expected to invest in a large number of the new aircraft.
The big news from the retail sales report was that sales rose again and even more than expected–1.4%, which was a full half point more than the consensus forecast.
The core retail spending–the stuff that tends to give a steadier picture and not fluctuate around a lot–rose for the third straight month. And if you compared the core sales in October 2009 to October last year, it was the first year-over-year increase in 8 months. In fact, the three-month gain ending in October was the strongest since June 2008.
This string of gains means that consumer spending is on track to post another gain in the fourth quarter of the year. From mid 2007 to mid 2009, we had measly growth or outright declines in consumer spending so this is a welcome sign of the beginnings of recovery.
One last thing worth noting in this retail sales report is the fact that consumer spending on motor vehicles posted a big increase. The report last month showed a decline in sales as the Cash-for-Clunkers program ended. Some critics argued that the perceived recovery of the economy was only a temporary blip due to people shifting their car purchases forward and sales now would be lower for an extended period. These data suggest that didn’t happen. They confirm what the private industry sales data already documented. The sales of motor vehicles in October are up to an annual rate that actually exceeds the rate in the eight months before cash-for-clunkers began.
The President’s focus is on recovery and getting people back to work. Turning the economy around is the necessary first step for job creation. This report suggests the recovery effort may be picking up steam.
Austan Goolsbee is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers
I haven’t played through all of Super Mario Galaxy, but what I did play was pretty forgiving. Compare that to the punishing, yet rewarding, difficulty curve of the original games or newer games like Demon’s Souls — it’s like comparing a sprint to a ramble. However, Miyamoto has stated in a recent interview that Mario Galaxy 2 will be “really challenging,” which is encouraging. They need to remember that their company has its roots in games that were hard as coffin nails.
On the other hand, Miyamoto also said that Wii Music was getting an enhanced version. I don’t know what to tell you there, Shigeru. The game is a joke, and all of Nintendo is humoring you. Don’t push it. Just make more Mega Man 9 type games and make sure the next Zelda has time travel in it.
[via 1UP and CVG; image from College Humor]
In the past, we’ve discussed how some guy named Tim Langdell seems to think that because he once had a game that had the word “edge” in the title and got a trademark for it (even though he hasn’t released a game in about fifteen years) that he can go after anyone who uses the word edge in a video game title. EA is even working on getting Langdell’s trademark dumped. In the meantime, he just keeps going with it, threatening plenty of folks. It appears that some game developers are getting sick of this and have decided to fight back. William Jackson alerts us to the news that game developers are now purposely adding the word “edge” to their game titles in solidarity with those threatened by Langdell. I wonder if that will get the message across?
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by JALE ÖZGENTÜRK, BANDIRMA, Balıkesir – Referans, Monday, November 16, 2009
EnerjiSA, a joint venture of Turkey’s Sabancı Group and Austria’s Verbund, is speeding up the building process on its natural-gas combined-cycle plant in Bandırma.
The foundation for the facility was laid Oct. 22 last year in the industrialized town in the northwestern city of Balıkesir.
Güler Sabancı, the chairwoman of Sabancı Holding, and Ahmet Dördüncü, the chief executive officer of the group, both went to Bandırma to examine the power plant last week and have decided to start generation two days earlier than planned.
In response to Sabancı’s question about the launch date of electricity generation, EnerjiSA Project Manager Veli Balat first said electricity generation would start Aug. 1, 2010. Dördüncü asked for it to be ready July 30, a request Balat promised to fulfill. The change will yield an additional 4 million euros in turnover for EnerjiSA.
If the Bandırma Natural-Gas Combined-Cycle Plant, which will cost 660 million euros, begins to operate on time, it will bring self-confidence to the company by allowing EnerjiSA to “prove its maturity,” Sabancı said.
With the launch of the Bandırma plant in 2010, Dördüncü added, Sabancı Holding will become a major actor in the natural-gas sector.
The only plant of its kind in Turkey, the Bandırma facility will reap 700 million euros in turnover by generating 920 megawatts of electricity annually. The daily turnover of the plant will be nearly 2 million euros.
EnerjiSA has invested a total of 660 million euros in the power-plant project, including 500 million euros for machine and equipment, said Selahattin Hakman, the energy group chairman at Sabancı Holding. This investment budget includes road and infrastructure studies as well as land and credit costs.
Cheaper electricity generation
While other natural-gas combined-cycle plants have efficiency rates of at most 52.5 percent when converting 100 units of natural gas into electricity, this ratio will reach 59 percent or even 61 percent at the Bandırma facility. As a result, EnerjiSA will be able to generate electricity 10 percent more cheaply than other power plants in Turkey.
The electricity generated at the Bandırma plant will supply 2.5 percent of Turkey’s overall electricity needs.
Planning to reach 5,000 megawatts of electricity-generation capacity by 2015, EnerjiSA aims to have a 10 percent share in the market. Currently generating 450 megawatts of electricity, EnerjiSA has seven hydroelectric power-plant projects in the works.
The group, which has a thermal-power investment in Tufanbeyli and a wind-energy investment in Çanakkale, will reach 2,000 megawatts of electricity production by the end of 2012, a figure that will rise to 5,000 megawatts in 2015.
EnerjiSA is a fifty-fifty percent joint venture of Sabancı and Verbund, one of the leading companies in Europe and Austria’s largest generator of electricity. The weight of energy in Sabancı Holding will climb from 15 percent to 20 percent with these investments.
The firm, which won the tender for Başkent Dağıtım, an electricity-distribution firm, has 3 million subscribers. Sabancı Holding aims to add 3 million more subscribers with some new tenders in the upcoming period.
According to Hakman, the firm is interested in the tender for the distributor Uludağ Dağıtım, which distributes electricity to the cities of Bursa, Bilecik and Çanakkale.
Though Sabancı Holding aims to become an energy leader and the group is also interested in nuclear energy, it did not offer a bid on Turkey’s first nuclear power-plant tender. “Some changes may take place in nuclear energy laws. Then we may reevaluate the conditions,” said Hakman.
A hydroelectric power plant used for cooling purposes will also be constructed at the natural-gas power plant in Bandırma. Some 10,000 residences will benefit from this innovative hydroelectric facility.
Noting that Turkey’s decision to participate in the Kyoto Protocol was a correct one, Sabancı added: “However, the position we are in is not proper. We are positioned among the developed countries. Turkey has to go to Copenhagen on Dec. 10 well-prepared to negotiate on the protocol.”
Hurriyet Daily News
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So you’ve taken the plunge and bought (or are going to buy) a sweet new personal media player. iPod, Zune, Walkman or other, they’re all capable of holding all your favorite music. But what’s the point if it sounds like garbage on that chintzy pair of included earbuds? Every pair of white headphones you see represents someone who cares more about the look than the sound. Is that you? Didn’t think so.
Now, you don’t have to drop a ton of money to get great sound, but if you’re game, then there are vast and beautiful sonic realms just waiting for you to visit. I’ve had my eyes opened in the last few years as I’ve become… well, I wouldn’t call myself an audiophile, but I’m certainly enjoying my music more than ever these days. Here are a few pairs we’ve liked, from surround-sound to in-ear, and from budget to luxury.
Sleek Audio SA6: $249
My new “reference” pair of headphones, this excellent in-ear pair not only sounds great, but is customizable with different tips which change the sound. Sure, you can EQ your songs and albums individually, but being able to blow up the bass or extend the treble in the hardware is fun and can really bring new life to your music. Aside from that aspect, the SA6es, I felt, added power to almost every song I played. I’m not sure how, but there you have it. It’s a lot of money for a pair of headphones, but if you (or a loved one) spend a lot of time using the ones you’ve got, it may just be worth the investment.
If you’re not sure, Sleek is just now starting to ship a cheaper ($80) customizable pair, though we haven’t had a chance to put them through their paces yet.
Radius Atomic Bass: $35
Looking for a good pair of in-ears to replace those stock headphones, but don’t want to spend a bundle? Peter loved the Atomic Bass in-ears from Radius, which completely block out external sound and have a great low end. For subway riding, jogging, or editing video in a crowded cafe, these are a good bet. For $40 you’re not going to get crystal-clear quality, but you’re going to be getting a lot more than with those tinny things that came with the Walkman.
Logitech G35 7.1 Surround-Sound headphones: $120
Know someone who enjoys playing games or watching movies on your computer? A good pair of surround-sound headphones can be a game-changer. Most modern games support surround sound, and the G35s use Dolby’s virtual surround technology to make even plain stereo sound bigger. I found that with movies and shows it could be hit or miss, but whether they were providing “true” surround sound or not, there was always power and detail. For games I soon came to find them indispensable. As a bonus, they’re closed-type headphones, meaning they’re great for college dorm rooms where speakers or open headphones (like the similarly good Megalodons) can disturb roommates.
Altec Lansing Backbeat 903: $99
Wireless headphones used to be big chunky affairs with huge IR or RF bases. These Altec Lansings, however, pair via Bluetooth and in addition to sounding good, have integrated phone control buttons and a microphone. If your (or a loved one’s) phone has a weird headphone jack (likely), these are a great alternative. And of course they’re a good option for jogging or going to the gym with, since there’s 100% less cord to worry about.
JBL Roxy reference 430: $70
Teens are hard to please when it comes to fashion, much less on audio quality, so these JBL Roxy on-ears came as somewhat of a surprise. All the young ladies who saw them pronounced them cute, and the sound was impressive both to our seasoned reviewer and the teens who gave them a try. There are two color choices that both look ridiculous to me, so they must be cute.
The Prime Minister has said that international terrorism remains the biggest source of threat to the UK’s national security but that more has been done to disable Al Qaeda over the past year than in any year since 2001.
The comments were made as the Prime Minister gave his annual foreign policy speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on Monday night, where he discussed the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as Britain’s role in the world, climate change and the challenge of nuclear proliferation.
On Afghanistan, Gordon Brown said:
“We are in Afghanistan because we judge that if the Taleban regained power, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would once more have an environment in which they could freely operate. We are there because action in Afghanistan is not an alternative to action in Pakistan, but an inseparable support to it.”
The PM has offered London as the venue for an international conference on Afghanistan early next year. The international community is expected to meet to discuss plans for future support for Afghanistan, following the inauguration of President Karzai this week.
In his speech, the PM said:
“I want that conference to chart a comprehensive political framework within which the military strategy can be accomplished… It should identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control and if at all possible, we should set a timetable for transfering districts to Afghan control starting in 2010.”
On Britain’s overall foreign policy direction, the PM said he believes Britain can play a key part in changing the world. He said British foreign policy must be both “patriotic and internationalist”, and has the potential to help build a new “global order”.
“To do so we must have confidence in our distinctive strengths: our values, our alliances; because with conviction in our values and confidence in our alliances, Britain can lead the way in the construction of a new global order.”
Foreign Secretary David Miliband delivered a speech on Afghanistan at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly the following morning. Read his speech
Previous story: Britain will not walk away from Afghanistan
