Category: News

As it is, there were already a lot of expectations for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Amy Hennig is proud to say that even with all the acclaim and the a…

Volkswagen is taking great strides in making the roads safer and remove the dangerous fun from driving by developing fully autonomous vehicles. I had a chance to talk to Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, director of the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) about the future of the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) at Stanford University and how the technology developed there is being integrated into Volkswagen Group vehicles. You may be able to buy a real-life K.I.T.T before you know it. It probably won’t be a Pontiac though.

You may recall that Volkswagen was the first team to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 by having a fully autonomous Volkswagen Touareg SUV (his name was Stanley, btw) drive 132 miles through the Mojave Desert. Then for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a VW Passat Wagon took second place behind Tartan Racing team from Carnegie Mellon University in a 60 mile urban course. But those two challenges are nothing compared to what’s on tap for next year: Pikes Peak in an autonomous Audi TT-S.

CrunchGear: How about we start with an overview of the project.

The VAIL is an initiative that we started here from our electronics research lab in Palo Alto to initialize automotive center at Stanford. We got the smartest people from all over the world in one place. We already had experience with the DARPA Grand Challenge race success. We won the desert race with the autonomous driving cars together with the Stanford racing team. Then we repeated the success in the Urban Challenge in 2007.

So we thought how can we bring each competence together, create a platform for a convenient automotive industry and Silicon Valley partners to look into the future and find some solutions for the mobility, safety and environmentally-friendly problems, which we have to face together.

The Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory funded a building, which will be dedicated and opened tomorrow (10/24/2009). We’ll fund the research projects with $750,000 per year for the next five years.

CrunchGear: How is Stanford involved in the project?

We expect first that we collaborate with the Stanford genius together on the solutions that we create for the future. We divided the VAIL topics into three major themes

One is how do we want to drive autonomously in the urban environment. We have so many problems that we have to solve like direction recognition, lane warning, lane detection, but all these obstacles have to be observed by camera systems in the urban environment, which is one of the biggest challenges.

What we would like to create for all of these three topics, and I’ll come back to the 2nd and 3rd, is initiatives. The vision for urban driving is to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles autonomously and that involves traffic jams and obstacles. What can we do to provide to our drivers with? They want to text while driving and we have to make that safe.

We already established systems in our current models like blind spot detections, adaptive cruse control but what’s the future for that? Can we already allow them to press the auto button to start texting? So that’s the vision. Drive along the highway and allow the driver to do something other than driving.

The second vision is up to the limits together with the driving dynamics department at Stanford. If you come to a critical situation, you generally have to take the control over from the driver.

Let me explain it to you this way: If you brake your car without control, you will definitely hit the obstetrical in front of you. Can you imagine that we can try to find the emergency parts for the driver and turn the car into a different path to avoid any impact any with the obstacle? It would be a smart system that acts within the limit’s range of the car that would find an emergency solution. The driver would never be able to do this because there is too much information within the milliseconds.

The idea for up to the limits is to look at the best drivers to give us super examples how to react in critical situations. So we looked at a German rally driver that drives up Pike’s Peak. It’s a really critic race, but it’s a challenge for us to try to understand what makes this rally driver so special and get this knowledge into the car.

We built a next generation autonomous car that’s able to drive like a rally drive and drift into the curves. It drives even in extreme situations. We think we can actually drive up hill to Pike’s Peak next year. That’s the second project.

The third one is with multitasking. We actually sponsored a project seen in the NYT on what people are really able to multitask or are they not really able to focus on one task and fulfill that. It’s really an interesting study. But for us it’s really interesting because we would like understand what the perfect interface between humans and machines. Do you believe in your car? Do you believe that if you press the autopilot button that the car would actually do what you would expect. Or do you have blue screens like we experience everyday – I don’t want to blame Windows – but with our operating systems. We have to prepare the highest reliability for systems. But what do you expect in these relationships between the car and the driver in the future.

These three founding purposes are the main intentions at VAIL.

CrunchGear: What type of testing has the Pike’s Peak vehicle seen so far?

We actually tested that at Salt Flats to have the open area available to be able drive up to the limits without any risks. It sounds crazy but we needed the smartest people actually at Stanford to prepare to the algorithms because you have to control systems again in the in-stable mode and the few years ago we thought it was impossible. But we did test already and we created a movie to show that’s possible and we think we can go one step farther and do this crazy race.

Again I told you that it’s rally style driving. It’s really incredible; up to the limits.

CrunchGear: One of the reason they use Pikes’s Peak is because of the environmental conditions. How does the altitude affect the vehicle?

We have the best system actually to use for that in the Audi TT-S and it’s working perfect. We tried it already at Pike’s Peak in slow mode to figure out what type of problems we might have in that environment.

CrunchGear: What else has changed in the Audi TT-S

If you saw our Junior VW Passat Wagon urban environment, we had many roadblocks to avoid and accidents with any person in that car. We don’t need the rack on the roof anymore. We don’t need big sizes for that at all. It looks almost like a stock car. You would only see three antennas on top of the roof. That’s all. We fit the computer in the trunk. We really want to show off that we’re coming closer to an actual product. It’s not too far away.

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In Q3, Uncle Sam was the green IT king maker. Read the, “Green IT Q3 Wrap-up.”

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2009Oct24: People around the world incorporate the number 350 at iconic places. The event is organized by 350.org, an organization that argues for the need to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from the current level of 387 ppm to under 350 ppm, the level scientists, including Jim Hansen and David Suzuki, have identified as the safe upper limit for CO2 in the atmosphere (350.org).

Reference: 350.org http://www.350.org/mission

Read Andrew Revkin’s article about the 350.org in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/science/earth/25threefifty.html

Image Description: a) 350 in the Maldives. B) 350 in the Dominican Republic. c) 350 in Mongolia. Image Credit: 350.org. Images are located at a) http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/4022797142/in/set-72157622455212282/ b) http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/4035746047/in/set-72157622455212282/ c) http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/4039832300/in/set-72157622455212282/ Image Permission: These images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Just because her highness greedy for cake, doesn’t mean she’ll want your money too. Good news Fat Princess fans – Titan Studios has announced that the…

News outlets covering Capitol Hill report that, with pressure from Democratic leaders, the public option now appears more likely to be in final health care reform legislation.

The Wall Street Journal: “House Democratic leaders signaled flexibility Friday on how a proposed government-run health insurance plan would operate in the private market, in an overture to centrist lawmakers who want to limit the government’s impact on the market. … For months, senior House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, have pushed proposals that would give a government plan big leverage in the marketplace. They would tie payments to doctors and hospitals to the low rates paid by Medicare, the government health program for the elderly. … But the speaker and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D., S.C.) suggested they were open to other ideas, including a proposal that would require the government plan to negotiate payment rates directly with health providers” (Hitt, 10/24).

The Los Angeles Times reports that Pelosi “said that states might be able to ‘opt out’ of any nationwide government insurance plan, a compromise that she suggested could unify congressional Democrats and enable President Obama to sign a healthcare overhaul bill later this year.”

“Pelosi remains a leading champion of the ‘public option,’ which would establish a federal health insurance program that would give consumers who don’t get coverage through their employer an alternative to plans offered by commercial insurers. But she told reporters at the Capitol that she did not ‘think there’s much problem’ with the opt-out alternative, which had sparked interest among moderate Democrats in the Senate. … A group of Senate Democrats is also trying to build support for such a plan in the healthcare bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is planning to bring up for a vote next month” (Levey and Oliphant, 10/24).

Politico: “During an end-of-the-week press conference, Pelosi told reporters, ‘Part of the decision is not just about votes…We have a very strong Democratic majority here. Part of it is the end-game of conference. I think it’s really important to note this…The atmosphere has changed.’ The ‘atmosphere’ she’s referring to is that in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to be giving some ground on a public option – which was long thought to be dead in the Upper Chamber. Now that the Senate is giving optional government-sponsored coverage a serious look, Pelosi seems to be open to their suggestions. … ‘So this is about the endgame now…There’s no philosophical difference between a robust public option and negotiated rates. It’s just a difference in money. It’s just a difference in money. And money is important’” (O’Connor, 10/24).

The Hill: “Hopes are running higher than ever for supporters of creating a government-run public option as part of healthcare reform. The question is not settled and the healthcare reform project itself is far from guaranteed to succeed but liberals see mounting evidence that their position is going to prevail. Supporters of the public option perceive a tide turning their way –and sweeping up previously reluctant Democrats. ‘I think people are sensing an inevitability that it’s going to be in the bill,’ said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). ‘There is momentum working here’” (Young, 10/24).

The Associated Press reports: “… it’s no longer a debate about whether there will be a health care bill. The questions are when, how — and who can compromise. Democratic leaders expect their members, looking ahead to next year’s elections, to vote for a health care bill despite any misgivings. But the vote-counters have no real way of knowing until each chamber produces a bill. That’s why negotiators have slogged through months of hearings, hundreds of amendments and meetings with members that require interminable listening, waiting, reassuring, cajoling and answering questions from the recalcitrant”  (Kellman, 10/24).

The New York Times: “Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped up the pressure on House Democrats on Friday to support her preferred version of legislation that would require the federal government to sell health insurance in competition with private insurers. Her action came amid indications that Ms. Pelosi had not locked down the votes for the proposal, the most contentious element in a bill that would provide health insurance to more than 35 million people, at cost of nearly $900 billion over 10 years.”

“Other provisions of the bill, including enhanced Medicare benefits, could take the total cost over $1 trillion, Democrats said. But they promised to offset the cost and avoid any increase in federal budget deficits” (Pear and Herszenhorn, 10/23).

In a separate story, The Associated Press: “Some moderate Democrats have expressed reluctance to support a bill as high as $1 trillion. Last month, Obama said in a nationally televised address before a joint session of Congress that he preferred a package with a price tag of around $900 billion. Obama also said he would not sign a bill that raised deficits, and the CBO estimates the emerging House bill meets that objective. Officials said the measure would reduce deficits by at least $50 billion over 10 years and perhaps as much as $120 billion.”

“‘The bill will be paid for over 10 years. It will reduce costs but also will not add a dime to the deficit’ in future years, (Pelosi) said at a news conference” (Espo, 10/24).

Roll Call reported that, breaking his current pattern, President Obama did not use his weekly address to talk about health reform, but Republican Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Nebraska, did: “Johanns painted a dire prospect for a broad spectrum of the population if Democratic-backed legislation passes. … ‘To the recent college graduate burdened with student loans: You’ll be forced to buy health insurance the government mandates, and if you refuse, you’ll be hit with a penalty,’ Johanns said. ‘To our seniors who wish to receive care in the comfort of their homes: Funding for hospice care and home health care services would be cut,’ he said … Johanns added that although Obama promised negotiations on C-SPAN, ‘a 1,500-page bill, full of carve-outs and backroom deals, is currently being brokered behind closed doors.’  (Koffler, 10/24).

 

Short Version
The Fonera 2.0n router essentially gives you free WiFi anywhere in the world for a one-time fee of $100. It may or may not work, but it’s worth a try.

Review
If there’s one thing I hate about travel it’s paying for WiFi. WiFi, like air and a nice piece of sausage, is the birthright of every traveler from Spain to Texas yet free WiFi is almost impossible to find. Thankfully, FON and their new Fonera 2.0n router offer a way to get a free connection while giving something back to the community at large, namely free WiFi.

For those not sufficiently well-versed in FON, it’s kind of like Boingo for Communards. You buy a router and you automatically gain access to FON routers around the world – up to 700,000 in all. You can see a map of access points on the Fon website.

The device itself costs $99 and is a small four-port router with one Internet input. It runs at 801.11n speeds and can act as a 3G-to-WiFi converter with the right hardware. You can also connect a hard drive to create a NAS server.

When you’ve connected your router you log in type in a WPA key printed on the side of the device. You then can add all of your information including your YouTube, Facebook, and Picasa logins. Why? Because the router can take over your image and video uploads after you’ve completed them, offloading some of the upload time to the router itself. Want to download torrents? The Fonera box will do it for you while you sleep and it will save the downloads to the attached hard drive.

The coolest thing, however, is how it shares your WiFi. You have complete control over how much bandwidth you want to share and you even even share in the revenue generated by the share. When you turn on the router it starts two access points, a public one and a locked private one. The public one displays a pay wall for users, the same pay wall that you will use to gain free access when you’re travelling.

Bottom Line
The Fonera 2.0n is a compact little device and the mission – if not the actual implementation – is fresh and exciting. For about $100 you essentially have free WiFi all over the world. The service is only as good as its coverage, however, which makes this a sort of hippy-dippy free love stab at web access – noble but doomed to be popular with only a certain subset of the population. If you’re in an area with lots of students and other idealists, look for FON routers to be plentiful and useful. Wall Street? Probably not.

Regardless, it’s not expensive, there are plenty of great built-in features, and even if the FON dream fails you can still say that you’re supplying WiFi in the mode of “From each according to his DSL connection, to each according to his needs.”

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The Prime Minister has warned of the need for “steady and clear policies” to help the economy recover and said it would be “suicidal” to cut off the funding and investment for young people, families and businesses.

Speaking on the 80th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash, Gordon Brown said the battle to stop the current downturn becoming a second great depression is being won.

• Listen to the podcast

In his latest podcast, the PM also looked ahead to this week’s European Council meeting in Brussels, where European Union leaders will discuss jobs and support for businesses.

The PM said:

“What matters is what Europe does. We need a plan to further mobilise our resources in support of businesses and jobs, including an ambitious European Union target on apprenticeships for the future.”

The podcasts, which are available on our iTunes channel and YouTube, are recorded at Downing Street or around the world when the Prime Minister is travelling.

Speeches and transcripts: Prime Minister’s podcast

For those who just can’t put the controller down until they’ve secured the platinum, Trophies for the PS3 version of Assassin’s Creed 2 have now been …

We know many of you are close to dying and holding your breath for the awesome Nokia flagship device, the Maemo-packing N900. It was probably a big tease when we told you guys it was going to hit U.S. distribution centers on September 27, but for some untold reason sales planned for October have been delayed and it will go on sale in November. In just days T-Mobile will be making its Even More and Even More Plus plans available, and the N900 will totally support the network’s 3G, and several of our readers are waiting to jump on this handset/carrier combo. Just be prepared to fork over somewhere in the neighborhood of $650 – $700 for the device itself and you’ll be good to go. You’ve waited this long, what’s another week or two?

Read

Come join me on 5 Fun Love-Boosting Seminar Sunday nights in NYC!

The first POST DATE RECAP SEMINAR is tomorow evening –   Oct. 25th – at 5pm here in NYC!

Come join me – bring friends – and I will help you to jackhammer drill down, down, down and discover what your mischeivous subconscious is up to, choosing those Prince Harmings and Princess Harmings of your now forever past!

Stop blaming your past for bad relationships — and started blaming your present.

What are you thinking and doing NOW – which is giving the results you are having NOW?

If you keep thinking and doing the same ol’ things, you will keep having the same ol’ results in love!

I’m calling these series of 5 Sunday Evenings: POST-DATE RECAP SEMINAR SERIES – because I want you to bring me your Love Questions – and I’ll give you my Love-Boosting Answers!

In my Oprah.com-recommended book PRINCE HARMING SYNDROME I put forth that YOU MUST BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO DATE – and offer Princess Charming School tips for seduction – which I will ALSO be sharing this Sunday – and all future Sundays in this series.

This Sunday Oct. 25th I will be having 2 amazing Princess Charming School Professors coming to offer their empowering seduction tips.

Donna Sonkin, holistic health counselor extraordinaire, who will give techniques for feeling beautiful from the inside out – whom you can find out more about here: http://www.getthinforthecamera.com/

Alisa Vitti, founder of Laughing Sage Wellness, who will give techniques for feeling sexy and sensual from the inside out – whom you can find out more about here: http://www.laughingsagewellness.com/events_speaker.shtml

I’m offering a special discount rate if you sign up BEFORE tomorrow night for this series!

SIGN UP BEFORE OCT. 25 – Get all 5 Sunday seminars for $50.00, per paypal – write me, I’ll send you a super-easy paypal invoice

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INDIVIDUAL SEMINAR FEE:  $18.00 per seminar via super-easy paypal, $20.00 per seminar at the door

I’d love to have you join in on these fun and love-empowering seminars! Simply write to me at [email protected]. Put POST DATE RECAP SEMINARS in the subject box – then in your email let me know if you’re interested in the whole package or singular seminars!

THE DATE DETAILS:

10/25: Press and VIP Guests who purchase before Oct. 25th!
11/1, 11/8, 11/15, 11/22: Open to everyone!

INCLUDES:

5 pm: Love Potion# 9 1/2 Cocktails
5:30 pm: Seminar begins
6:15 pm: Dating Q’s + Love Boosting A’s

ADDRESS:

Kellari Parea Bistro, 36 East 20th St. NYC

ATTENTION PROCRASTINATORS:

If you sign up BEFORE tomorrow to come tomorrow night, you get a FREEBIE seminar amongst VIP MEDIA PEEPS – so hurry up and sign up, dammit!

For more about how to break the Prince Harming or Princess Harming curse of your past, check out PRINCE HARMING SYNDROME by clicking this line you are reading NOW!

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Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything.

Era of the Silicon Valley success story – two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it – is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.

DOA

The first sad truth is that most consumer electronics cannot be made in “expensive” countries like the US or the Euro zone. During a visit to the Suunto watch factory in Finland, for example, I learned that while many of the watches are made near Helsinki a large percentage of them are made overseas and drop shipped from Asia. The company just couldn’t make anything in bulk without resorting to off-shoring. This means you either invest in an expensive small run of hardware overseas, something the Asian manufacturers do not do particularly well, or invest in a massive run of inexpensive hardware in Asia that you risk having to recycle if your company goes belly-up.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make it big anymore. Take TiVo, for example. It sprung out of obscurity a decade ago and filled a niche in the living room that has yet to be challenged by any manufacturer. Unfortunately, when someone – probably Samsung, LG, or Apple – figures out how to take over the DVR market, TiVo is toast. The same is true of Palm who, to all intents and purposes, is now a small company. The big guys are eating their lunch thanks to Android and it will take some fancy footwork to survive. The small guys are, sadly, always at the precipice of failure.

Other companies like Neuros and Slingbox simply sell a wrapper for their software. Sometimes this works but sadly it also leads to retrenchment when companies like Slacker pull out of the hardware business due to lack of interest and cost. Then there are success stories like like FyreTV [NSFW] which will do well because they focus on porn. Not everyone can focus on porn.

When in doubt, do this.

The second problem facing small CE companies is marketing. Micro-companies like Zeo and FitBit get a huge initial boost thanks to online media but then disappear once the news cycle has moved on, leaving the companies with amazing technology in the dark. This is an era of constant marketing, a situation that forces companies like Apple and Sony to put their message in front of consomers almost constantly in multiple media.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen companies receiving 8,000-10,000 pageviews with one good launch, more if its an interesting product. That initial boost translates into a percentage of good sales – those are good eyeballs, not just random traffic – but it rarely turns into repeat or continuing business.

That said, here are some of the best practices I’ve seen from small to medium CE companies who know how to do it right. This may not apply to you and yours, but it’s something to think about when you get excited about a product (Gizmondo anyone?) only to find it has crashed and burned.

1. Tell multiple stories. When you start out you have one story: Why your product is good. Prepare multiple stories for the next few years including ideas tagged to pressing issues of the month or year. Do you have a fitness gadget? Work on a story about post-holiday stress and weight gain. Have a DVR? Put yourself in the Super Bowl frenzy with blogger outreach and giveaways. That first boost is nice but if you’re a small company it’s the next four boosts that will push you through the rest of the year.

2. Price yourself competitively if not suicidally. Even if it’s suicidal, price yourself at just above the average price in your market. Aiming at rich, cosseted professionals is nice but the sharper Image model of doing business is over. Consumers want more for their money (even if they often get considerably less) so while $999 might seem like a nice number for a NAS or a piece of audio gear the consumer is more accustomed to $499.

3. Be quiet. Hide your light under a bushel. Patent your idea and don’t launch until the product is completely ready. I’ve seen too many companies splattered with the vaporware monicker because they failed to deliver on time or at all. Once you’re done, support your product forcefully and quietly. If someone has a problem, address it quickly. Send out new hardware before putting someone through tech support hell.

4. Change your trade dress regularly. This fickle market thinks anything that looks the same as it did last year is old. Why do iPods change every few months? People want to think they’re buying the new hotness, not the old and busted. If you can’t change your trade dress, change your website.

5. Slow and steady wins the race. None of the greats made it overnight and it’s harder than ever to truly make it. If you’re a small CE manufacturer, Godspeed. It’s a tough race so don’t sprint it.

For a great look at this topic, read The Song of the Powersquid, our 6-part story on the creation of a CE product.

2009Oct24: European Space Agency’s ATSR (Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer) World Fire Atlas uses satellite data to map fires burning across the world. “More than 50 million hectares of forest are burnt annually, and these fires have a significant impact on global atmospheric pollution, with biomass burning contributing to the global budgets of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide.” – European Space Agency (European Space Agency).

Reference: European Space Agency http://dup.esrin.esa.int/ionia/wfa/index.asp

Image Description: see case description. Image Location: European Space Agency http://dup.esrin.esa.int/ionia/wfa/index.asp Image Permission: This work is copyrighted and unlicensed. However, it is believed that the use of this work to illustrate the subject in question, Where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information, on Interlinked Challenges, hosted on servers in the United States by Michigan State University, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.

The methods for keeping your data safe from prying eyes vary from user to user. Some prefer simply hiding the files from everyone else (if they don’t know where it is, they can’t peek in), but accidental finding has been known to happen, especially if the perpetrator knows how to make hidden data visible (and this is not quite rocket science), so this is not foolproof.

Encryption, on the other hand, may be a more suitable choice for some of you, because it ciphers up the data in a proprietary container, making the effort of de-scrambling the information too much, even for the most patient wrong-doer. Even if encrypting sensitive files’ weakest spot is that they can be deleted, moved or copied, this method stands among the most efficient ways to secure data.

LockFiler is a data-encryption tool designed to protect your files using the Dynamic Linkage Data Encryption System, which specifies a one-way symmetrical encryption algorithm. To put it in short, the D.L.D.E.S. concept actually applies the encryption key to create the encryption process itself rather than apply the key to encrypt data.

This may be one of the reasons the application does not come cheap. The current price is of €29, quite an amount if you think that there are free solutions on the market possessing file-encryption capabilities, as wel… (read more)

The podcast reviewed here is the October 2009 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry podcast which is freely available here. I’m not sure if it was the browser i’m using (e.g. the performance of browser specific plug-ins) but the narrator’s voice appeared to me to be fast paced and clipped. A study – the TADS study is discussed. This is a 36-week trial comparing placebo, fluoxetine, CBT or a combination in the treatment of depression in adolescents. The results are complex and discussed in the context of previous trials in this area. There is also a look at the interaction between cluster B traits and suicide. There was a discussion of a curious finding in emotional processing with antidepressants – the researchers in one study found that changes in emotional processing were manifest before changes in mood in response to antidepressant medication. There is also a discussion of binge drinking in middle-aged and older adults. There is a lot of material covered in this podcast, sometimes complex and I found myself listening to parts of it again to gain a better understanding of the material. I found the material to be very informative.

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You can follow ‘The Amazing World of Psychiatry’ Twitter by clicking on this link

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You can listen to this post on Odiogo by clicking on this link (there may be a small delay between publishing of the blog article and the availability of the podcast).

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If you have any comments, you can leave them below or alternatively e-mail [email protected]

Disclaimer

The comments made here represent the opinions of the author and do not represent the profession or any body/organisation. The comments made here are not meant as a source of medical advice and those seeking medical advice are advised to consult with their own doctor. The author is not responsible for the contents of any external sites that are linked to in this blog

(NaturalNews) With the swine flu pandemic upon us, the FDA is warning people to beware of swine flu scams on the internet. NaturalNews is joining in the warnings today, urging people to beware of scams that cost big money but simply don’t work to prevent H1N1 swine flu.

For example, both the FDA and CDC are pushing a collection of swine flu vaccines that have never been subjected to any scientific testing to determine whether they actually work. These vaccines are, in technical terms, a “hoax.” Lacking any scientific evidence of efficacy, they are a scam that should be avoided by all health consumers.

You can learn more about the lack of efficacy for the swine flu vaccines here: http://www.naturalnews.com/027239_vaccines_flu_vaccine_.html

Besides the vaccine efficacy scam, there’s also the vaccine safety scam that people may fall for. Vaccines can contain thimerosal, a substance made with mercury, an extremely toxic heavy metal. Swine flu vaccines are also made with adjuvants such as squalene — an inflammatory chemical suspected of causing brain swelling in some patients who receive the vaccine.

None of the FDA-approved swine flu vaccines has been long-term tested for safety, and many of the substances used in the vaccine are extremely dangerous to inject into the human body.

Beware the Tamiflu counterfeit scam
Alongside the swine flu vaccine scam is another common scam being pushed by drug companies: The Tamiflu scam. Tamiflu, an anti-viral prescription drug, has already been linked to the death of children in Japan. It is well known to cause wild hallucinations in many children who take it. And yet, at the same time, its ability to actually halt swine flu infections is doubtful.

Because Tamiflu is synthesized to mimic shikimic acid found in the Chinese Medicine herb Star Anise, it is a counterfeit medicine. The real medicine is made by Mother Nature. Pharmaceutical companies pirated the molecules from nature (biopiracy) in order to manufacture their own counterfeit medicine in a lab. Beware of counterfeit medicines promoted on the internet through mainstream media stories or CDC propaganda.

There are many other examples where Big Pharma has pirated molecules from nature, then patented them to make their own counterfeit drugs. Statin drugs, for example, are counterfeits that attempt to mimic the natural lovastatin molecules found in red yeast rice.

Watch out for the idea scam
The worst scam being pushed on the internet isn’t a product, it’s an idea: The idea that only vaccines and prescription drugs can protect you from the swine flu and that nutrients like vitamin D are useless. Con artists at the FDA, CDC and drug companies are fronting this scam in order to convince consumers that only vaccines and prescription drugs work, but in reality there is a whole universe of herbal medicine, nutritional supplements, immune-boosting products and even anti-viral foods that can help protect you from influenza infections.

Garlic, for example, has potent anti-viral properties, as do many medicinal mushrooms. Herbs such as astragalus, lemon balm and oregano are highly anti-viral, and unlike vaccines, they don’t require being injected with toxic chemicals. Herbs, foods and dietary supplements are naturally more compatible with the human body because they’re made from the foods and medicines our bodies evolved with.

Beware of fake swine flu medicines such as vaccines or prescription chemicals that are manufactured in pharmaceutical laboratories. These aren’t real medicine; they’re fake, man-made medicine made with chemicals. Real medicine comes from Mother Nature in the form of living plants. NaturalNews urges consumers to avoid being fooled by drug companies into thinking that synthetic chemicals equate to “real” medicine.

This flu season, be a smart consumer. Get your flu medicines from real sources — from real plants made by nature — not from fabricated, counterfeit sources such as pharmaceutical factories. Avoid the scams and hoaxes being pushed by the FDA, the FTC, the CDC and drug companies. Don’t become a victim to the profiteering of the pharmaceutical companies that are acting like quacks to exploit the swine flu pandemic for their own profit.

If you want real medicine, buy Dr. Andrew Weil’s Immune Support formula. Or better yet, buy Super Viragon from Baseline Nutritionals (www.BaselineNutritionals.com)