Category: News

Earlier this year, we noted that Cook County (Illinois) sheriff Thomas Dart appeared to be totally unfamiliar with the law when he sued Craigslist for prostitution. As was pretty clear at the time, Craigslist is the service provider and is quite obviously protected by Section 230 immunity. Besides, law enforcement officials who actually care about dealing with prostitution, rather than just generating headlines have figured out that it makes sense to use Craigslist as a tool to help track and combat prostitution.

Even after all of this was clearly explained to Sheriff Dart, he still insisted that his lawsuit made sense. It looks like the court system, however, does not agree. As expected, the case has been dismissed on Section 230 grounds. The decision (pdf) goes through a lengthy discussion on various cases on Section 230, but concludes reasonably:

Sheriff Dart may continue to use Craigslist’s website to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content… But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct.

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Halloween is coming up and if there’s one thing I know it’s that geeks love Halloween. The opportunity to hide behind a mask, to subvert the status quo, and to dress up like sexy nurse/sexy witch/sexy balloon boy is a cause for celebration. That said, we’re offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest.

Here’s how to enter.

Send a link to a picture of yourself or send a file of up to 200KB of you in your best geek Halloween costume to [email protected] with the subject line “COSTUME CONTEST.” You can upload it to any service but please don’t bombard our mailbox with huge image files.

There are a few rules:

* You must be holding something with the word “CrunchGear” written on it. This is proof you didn’t raid some Halloween store’s website.
* The contest will run from today until noon Eastern November 1, 2009
* We will then choose ten runners up and then allow you to choose the winner via a method I will discuss on November 1. We will close the contest on November 10.
* The winner will receive their XBox by November 10, the release date of Modern Warfare 2.

Please have fun and be creative. Here’s some inspiration.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

One area of Web standards where both Mozilla Firefox (version 3.5.3 CRPI: 7.34) and Opera (version 10 CRPI: 6.38) have an edge over Google Chrome (build 3.0.195.25 CRPI: 15.85) is in the field of page-designated font rendering. It’s where the code for the Web page specifies which fonts to use, and even triggers the downloading of those fonts where necessary. Actually, Opera 10 has led the way in scalable Web fonts support although Firefox 3.5 has followed close behind.

The problem here has been with the extremely proprietary nature of the fonts used for the Web. They actually are TrueType and OpenType fonts, the majority of whose licensing prohibits their use for anything other than installation in commercial operating systems on a per-desktop basis. Even though some typographers have created free renderings of their commercial font products (here’s a favorite of mine: Museo Sans by Exljbris), there’s some question as to whether type designers are technically allowed to use the proprietary underpinnings of font technology (mostly contributed by Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple) for use on the Web.

Now, in an effort to resolve this little dilemma, Mozilla is announcing that forthcoming daily builds of version 3.6 (presumably the Beta 2 Preview editions) will support CSS3 @font-face embedding using a font format that is not TrueType or OpenType. It’s being called Web Open Font Format (WOFF), and its purpose is simply to repackage the same spline data that appears in TrueType and OpenType font files, in a format and with licensing that’s tailored exclusively for use on the Web.

Leading the move toward WOFF is Mozilla contributor Jonathan Kew. In a document Kew co-authored for the W3 Consortium, he writes, “A WOFF font file is simply a repackaged version of a sfnt-based font in compressed form. The format also allows font metadata and private-use data to be included separately from the font data. WOFF encoding tools convert an existing sfnt-based font into a WOFF formatted file, and user agents restore the original sfnt-based font data for use with a Web page.” (Here, “sfnt” refers to a specific type of spline geometric data, and is a term based on how early Macintosh systems tagged spline data appearing in OpenType files.)

The metadata will enable foundries to include licensing information which could, for example, restrict a downloaded font’s ability to be used anywhere on the user’s system except on the page that triggered its download. Or, it could enable an open font intended to be used multiple places, to be shared freely.
What WOFF could also enable — as part of a future wave of developments that could be ready for Firefox 3.7 next year — is for Web designers to use the variations that are present in font files, but which HTML and even CSS have never directly covered: Many fonts include hints for how renderers should typeset small caps, and how it handles ligatures — like connecting capital “T” with small “h,” or small “f” with small “t.” Without a mechanism in place for addressing the special capabilities of many fonts, CSS can’t get a handle on them.

So Mozilla engineers proposed an amendment to CSS just last June 29: a new property called font-variant that enables exclusive properties of embedded fonts to be declared outright. In a build of Firefox 3.6 that was altered by Kew for testing this feature, he was able to produce the lavish typographical poster you see here, using a font called Megalopolis by Jack Usine that’s rich with ligatures, using only HTML.

With full font features enabled, diacritical marks, monospaced numerals, and capital letters and descending lower-case characters with sweeping swashes only where applicable (like the beginnings of sentences), would all become addressable by browsers, making them effectively the typographical layout engines that engineers always knew they could be. The result could be a Web where usable text may appear as clearly as on the printed page.

The biggest hurdle the Mozilla engineers may face with this feature is a familiar one: contending with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer trying to implement the same feature, but in a different way. As Mozilla contributor Christopher Blizzard acknowledged in a blog post yesterday, “IE currently tries to download all fonts on the page, whether they are used or not. That makes site-wide stylesheets containing all fonts used on site pages difficult, since IE will always try to download all fonts defined in @font-face rules, wasting lots of server bandwidth.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

 Reaping the benefits: Science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture

Reaping the benefits: Science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture

21 Oct 2009

The Royal Society has published the report of a landmark study examining the contribution of the biological sciences to food crop production.  The study was conducted by a working group chaired by Sir David Baulcombe FRS. The group included experts on agriculture, international development, conservation biology and plant science.

Food security is one of this century’s key global challenges. Producing enough food for the increasing global population must be done in the face of changing consumption patterns, the impacts of climate change and the growing scarcity of water and land. Crop production methods must also sustain the environment, preserve natural resources and support livelihoods of farmers and rural populations around the world. This report discusses the need for a sustainable intensification’ of global agriculture in which yields are increased without adverse environmental impact and without the cultivation of more land.

The report begins by setting out the challenges to food crop production. It then goes on to examine in detail the various technologies that might be used to enhance production, with the conclusion that a diversity of approaches are needed. Due to the scale of the challenge, no technology should be ruled out, and different strategies may need to be employed in different regions and circumstances. Finally, consideration is given to the consequences and complications of food crop innovation.

The recommendations of the report include the following:

• Research Councils UK (RCUK) should develop a cross-council grand challenge’ on global food crop security as a priority. This needs to secure at least £2 billion over 10 years to make a substantial difference.
• RCUK should increase support for ecosystem-based approaches, agronomy and the related sciences that underpin improved crop and soil management.
• Universities should work with funding bodies to reverse the decline in subjects relevant to a sustainable intensification of food crop production, such as agronomy, plant physiology, pathology and general botany, soil science, environmental microbiology, weed science and entomology

Update: Bing has now made the announcments and Google has announced a deal with Twitter too. Google’s Marissa Mayer writes:

…we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Original Article: Microsoft is expected to announce two separate deals today – one with Twitter and one with Facebook. From the sound of it, the deals would be similar in nature, both giving Bing access to index status updates from both social networks.

Kara Swisher at Boomtown says that both deals are confirmed and are expected to be announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 summit. The deals are non-exclusive, however. And you know what that means.

Google has been reported to have been talking with both Twitter and Facebook too, and it would be no surprise to see deals made there as well.

But this is Microsoft’s moment. But what will it mean as far as status updates from both Twitter and Facebook?

"Much of what is posted on Twitter is public by design, while Facebook’s users prefer the closed nature of the service to disperse a wide variety of personal information only to their friends and they want to control it," says Swisher. "Thus, sources said, not all Facebook updates will be included in the real-time feed to be searched by Bing, but only those its users choose to make available to the wider public. Facebook will apparently provide users with a numbers of new tools to do so."

According to Swisher, neither of Microsoft’s deals will bear fruit for several weeks, and that would leave plenty of time for Google to sneak in with its own deals. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

As for the financial details of Microsoft’s deals with Twitter and Facebook, these can only be speculated upon at this point.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Energy Future Holdings has extended the deadline for early offers in its debt exchange, a massive debt restructuring that ran into opposition from bondholders, according to a company statement.

The deadline for early tenders is now 5 p.m. (2100 GMT) Oct 23, New York City time, Energy Future Holdings said on Monday. The original deadline was 5 p.m. (2100 GMT) Oct 19. The deadline for consenting to amendments of bond indentures also moved to Oct 23 from Oct 19.

Energy Future, formerly known as TXU, has been trying to reduce its $43 billion debt load by about $2 billion by offering to exchange outstanding debt for new notes at steep discounts.

Franklin Templeton Investments and other major bondholders holding more than 50 percent of bonds targeted in the debt exchange have formed a group to oppose it, a source close to the deal has said.

Bondholders believe the discounts are too steep now that the bond markets have recovered from a sell-off earlier this year, according to analysts. Debtholders are also opposed to amendments Energy Future is seeking that could make it easier for the company to sell its prized transmission business, Oncor.

Bondholders are being offered between 46.5 cents and 74.5 cents on the dollar if they exchange their debt by the early tender deadline. They will receive slightly less if the bonds are exchanged after that. The offer expires Nov. 3.

Energy Future took on a great deal of debt when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners took it private in the largest leveraged buyout ever in 2007. The company has been burning cash since the market for power worsened and a weak economy hurt demand. (Reporting by Dena Aubin; Editing by Theodore d’Afflisio)

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – AGA Medical Holdings Inc., a maker of devices for heart defects and blood vessel diseases, became the latest IPO to disappoint in its debut, rising only 0.7 percent in its first day of trade.

AGA shares started trading at $14.50 on the Nasdaq, rose as much as 2.4 percent to $14.85 and ended 10 cents higher for the day.

Historically, U.S. IPO stocks have on average risen 10 to 12 percent in their first day, but AGA Medical became the 11th IPO out of 15 since mid-September to have an sub-par first-day, which came on the heels of the IPO pricing below expectations on Tuesday evening.

AGA priced shares at $14.50, below the expected price range of $15 to $16 a share, which it had lowered earlier Tuesday from $19 to $21.

The company, whose largest shareholder is private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe LP, sold 13.75 million shares and raised $199.4 million. As recently as Monday it had estimated it would raise $275 million.

Despite the disappointing pricing, the shares stood their ground in their debut because of company’s profit margins and pipeline of products, an analyst said.

“The market opportunity for their pipeline products is about $6 billion and they are highly profitable,” said Matt Therian, an analyst with Connecticut-based investment firm Renaissance Capital.

The downward pressure during the pricing came partly from uncertainty over how long regulatory approval for new products and for new applications for existing products could take, he said.

Investors may have also balked after AGA’s co-founder Franck Gougeon upped the number of shares he was selling by about 2 million on Tuesday, while AGA itself sold fewer shares, leaving it with less money with which to pay down debt.

“It does not send a vote of confidence when you see pricing pressure and selling shareholders sell more shares,” Therian said.

At the share price of $15.50 that AGA had expected, the company would have realized $96 million from the offering, less than the net proceeds of $154.2 million it had originally estimated.

Welsh Carson, which did not sell any shares in the IPO, still owns 51.7 percent of the company after the IPO.

The move by Gougeon echoes that of the owners of RailAmerica (RA.N), a rail operator that went public last week.

RailAmerica’s owners, private equity funds managed by Fortress Investment Group LLC (FIG.N), also lowered the price range ahead of its IPO, while Fortress sold 1 million more shares than expected. Shares fell 8 percent in their debut.

The last IPO of a company owned by Welsh, Carson — an offering last month by hospital operator Select Medical Holdings Corp (SEM.N) — also priced below range. On Wednesday Select Medical shares were down 3 percent from the IPO price.

AGA’s lead products, Amplatzer devices, treat structural heart defects and made up 55.4 percent of AGA sales in the 2009 first half. AGA warned in its prospectus that it was likely to remain dependent on Amplatzer for the next few years.

The company has other products in development, including vascular grafts.

AGA’s first-half sales totaled $94.4 million, with a net loss of $4.2 million. (Editing by John Wallace and Steve Orlofsky)

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LONDON (Reuters) – The private equity owners of Britain’s biggest bingo company, Gala Coral, are moving closer to agreeing on a debt restructuring deal with the company’s mezzanine lenders, two sources said on Wednesday.

Junior-ranked lenders, led by Intermediate Capital Group Plc (ICP.L) and Park Square, and Gala’s private equity owners, Candover Investments Plc (CDI.L), Cinven Ltd [CINV.UL] and Permira [PERM.UL], are working on a deal that would see the two sides share control of the company, the sources said.

The owners of Gala Coral, which runs more than 150 bingo clubs across Britain as well as 1,600 betting shops, need a deal with lenders because the company is close to breaching the terms of its 2.7 billion pounds ($4.47 billion) of debt.

The deal may see mezzanine lenders and private equity owners take equal representation on the board of directors, one of the sources said.

The proposal will be put to Gala Coral’s current board of directors on Friday before being presented to senior lenders, the source said.

“We want a fully baked deal before looking to get this approved,” the source added.

Candover, Cinven, Gala Coral and Permira could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month the mezzanine lenders proposed taking an equity stake in the company in exchange for “turning off” interest payments on the debt, which carries high interest rates and totals more than 500 million pounds. 

Delaying the interest payments would save the company several hundred million pounds.

If accepted, the deal between owners and lenders would give the mezzanine debt holders much greater say over the running of the company.

The talks come as junior debt holders in Europe look to be more active in defending their investments.

“Mezzanine lenders are being more pushy and coming up with their own solutions rather than accepting senior lenders’ solutions after they were wiped out earlier this year,” a senior leveraged finance banker said. ($1=.6045 Pound) (Reporting by Tom Freke and Tessa Walsh)

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Coca-Cola has launched a social media campaign that will send three bloggers to more than 200 countries over the period of a year.

The campaign called "Expedition 206" is part of the beverage makers Open Happiness marketing effort launched at the beginning of the year.

Coca-Cola has selected nine finalists and is allowing fans to make the final decision by voting for their favorite candidates on the Expedition 206 website through November 6. Fans can vote once each day during the three-week voting period.

Beginning in Madrid on January1, 2010 and ending at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta on December 31, the story of the bloggers travels will be available on the Expedition 206 site, as well as on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and other social networking sites.

Adam Brown,
Digital Communications,
Coca-Cola

"This mash-up of social media — online photo galleries, video clips, blogs, microblogs, social networking — combined with an amazing journey, enthusiastic travelers and a theme of happiness is a great way for us to connect with people around the world," said Adam Brown, director, Office of Digital Communications and Social Media, The Coca-Cola Company.

"The global adoption of social media has given us a way to deliver a year-long reality TV series without the TV."

Fans will be able to interact with the three bloggers via the Expedition 206 website and offer suggestions on where they go, what they do and who they visit in each country. Stops along the way include the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, and the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
 

CHARLOTTE (Reuters) – Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) agreed to sell First Republic private bank to a group of private equity investors.

A consortium of private equity firms, including General Atlantic Partners and Colony Capital, are part of the deal, with First Republic Chairman and Chief Executive James Herbert part of the winning bid, the bank said in a statement on Wednesday.

First Republic’s current management would continue to run the bank, according to the statement. The sale is expected to close in the second quarter of 2010.

At the end of third-quarter, First Republic reported $19 billion in total assets, $16 billion in deposits and $15 billion in client assets under management in its wealth division.

A Bank of America spokesman was not immediately available for comment. (Reporting by Joe Rauch, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

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Rob Hyndman points us to a column in Toronto’s Globe & Mail by Barrie McKenna that is basically all of the recording industry’s talking points on copyright, without even a nod to the views of the other side. It appears that most of the info is (surprise, surprise) based on a recording industry lawyer. It starts with a nice little moral panic about how file sharing sites are rushing to base themselves in Canada due to the country’s supposedly lax copyright laws. Of course, that’s ridiculous. Canada has very strong copyright laws already. What they don’t have is a DMCA. That’s what the industry wants. McKenna tries to bolster his claim that Canada has weak copyright laws with the following:

Earlier this year, the Obama administration put Canada on its blacklist of shame – a “priority watch list” of intellectual property laggards, joining the likes of China, Russia and Venezuela.

Sounds nice, but incredibly misleading. The “blacklist of shame” that McKenna mentions, but does not explain, is actually the US Trade Rep’s special “301 Report.” Mention it to just about any policy maker (excluding those pushing for protectionist policies for a specific industry, of course), and you get an eye roll. It’s not so much “the Obama administration” but industries with wishlists attempting to restrain trade in foreign countries by putting forth scary stories about what’s happening in those countries. The USTR basically takes those industry-submitted reports and wraps them up into the 301 report. It’s a joke. Most of the complaints in the report concern countries that actually are in perfect compliance with international treaties — but which the industry still wants to go further.

Of course, given that McKenna’s source is an industry lawyer, perhaps it’s not surprising that such info wasn’t shared. But, the next claims go from the just uninformed to the unbelievable:

Canada, which has repeatedly promised but so far failed to deliver on copyright reform, isn’t just out of step with the United States, but with much of the Western world.

This is simply untrue. Canada’s copyright law is actually quite in line with most of the Western world, no matter what the entertainment industry suggests (and, you might think that McKenna would ask someone other than the person representing the industry that benefits from this). Furthermore, the line that Canada has “so far failed to deliver on copyright reform” is either blatantly misleading or simply ignorant of rather recent history. Canadian politicians have tried to push forth copyright reform, but due to a massive public outcry from people who actually understand how things like the DMCA cause all sorts of problems — especially concerning free speech and consumer rights — those politicians were forced to back down.

That’s called informed democracy in action.

Oh, McKenna also claims that the last time the Canadian government tried copyright reform was in 2007. According to his bio, McKenna is based in DC, not Canada, but even down here in the States plenty of us were aware that Jim Prentice introduced copyright reform in 2008.

So, McKenna makes it out like Canada has no strong copyright laws (false), that it’s laws are different from most of the western world (false) and that it hasn’t tried to add more draconian copyright laws (false again). From there, he comes up with this bizarre justification for more draconian copyright law:

The world has gone digital. And there’s now an explosion of legitimate download sites in the U.S. and Europe, including ground-breaking music sites Pandora.com and Lala.com. But you can’t use them in Canada.

These and other businesses are choosing to bypass the market entirely, in part because of licensing problems.

And the creative industries that produce music, software and the like – industries that contribute significantly more to the economy than BitTorrent sites – may also shun Canada if nothing is done.

Actually, you have Canadian record labels like Nettwerk, that are doing quite well, even as its CEO has declared that copyright is obsolete and should be done away with entirely within a decade. And the reason that those services can’t be used in Canada isn’t because the law is too lax, but because the laws are too strict, in terms of figuring out special licensing setups in each country. It’s such a pain to get them licensed in a single country that the services have been forced — against their will in many cases — to block access in other countries like Canada.

Meanwhile, it’s telling to note some of the things that McKenna conveniently left out. Like how about the private copying levy system up in Canada, which has made blank media ridiculously expensive, and which is supposed to be paying for all that “piracy.” We don’t have that in the US at all. Or what about the weak fair use/fair dealing laws in Canada? What about an understanding of the value of the public domain or the value of fan promotions? What about new business models that have shown that copyright isn’t necessary to make money in the industry? What about the studies that have shown that file sharers tend to buy more music? All of that seems relevant… but when your only source is a representative of the industry looking to get laws passed in its own interest, is it any wonder they get left out?

Barrie McKenna got taken for a ride here by the recording industry. His writeup included multiple factual errors, significant errors of omission, and a gross misunderstanding of what’s actually happening in the music industry these days.

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The paper reviewed here is ‘Relationships between 24-hour blood pressures, subcortical ischemic lesions and cognitive impairment’ by Kim and colleageus and freely available here.

In the introduction, the authors give a very interesting overview of the relationship between blood pressure and subcortical lesions. In particular they focus on the nocturnal blood pressure as there is typically a diurnal cycle with a drop in blood pressure during the night – the so-called dipping phenomenon (and hyperdipping depending on the magnitude of the drop). They discuss some of the evidence of risk associations with non-dipping. They also discuss subcortical vascular mild cognitive impairment (SvMCI).

In the study, the researchers compared 24-hour BP values in controls, people with Subcortical Vascular Dementia (SVaD) and people with SvMCI. People with SVaD and SvMCI were recruited from a memory clinic in Seoul, Korea while the controls were recruited from a cardiology centre again in Seoul. I wasn’t clear on how SvMCI was diagnosed and thought it might have been a complex judgement. There are details given in the paper and the authors do acknowledge the difficulties in attributing cognitive impairment to a subcortical vascular cause but they state that other causes have been excluded. Nevertheless the MRI scans in themselves would not be suitable for detecting amyloid plaques that would be present in an AD (although they have looked specifically for other markers of AD pathology on the MRI). Blood pressures were obtained using ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and a 3 Tesla MRI scanner was used for the MRI scans and they use a specific protocol to assess the images for vascular lesions. Cardiovascular risk factors were identified in the participants. The Seoul neuropsychological screening battery was used and a breakdown of this screening instrument is given in the paper. They also state that the

There were a number of exclusion criteria although this didn’t affect the final numbers too much (89 included with SVaD or SvMCI initially and 79 after exclusion). On looking through the methodology and results, I noticed that there were a large number of comparisons being used and the researchers were also using the Tukey’s test – which is used in a post-hoc analysis. The researchers described their main findings as an increased systolic blood pressure variability in the SVaD group compared to the SvMCI group as well as an ‘disruption’ of the nocturnal BP rhythm in the SVaD and SvMCI groups. The researchers themselves note that this is not a prospective study and that the SvMCI diagnosis was made in the ‘absence’ of established criteria for SvMCI. While these were potentially interesting findings, I noted the post-hoc analysis and would be interested to see a larger replication study, prospective in design and using these results to inform the primary outcome measures in the next study.

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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

You have to love the game that Apple plays. The company never puts anything on sale and all its products generally stay at their MSRP until new models are available to replace them. Well, because of yesterday’s new products, today is lucky day. (if you’re in the market for a new Mac, that is)

Head over to the refurbished section in the Apple Store for some nice bargains. Yeah, these are all refurbs, but they do save you a bit of coin. You can snag a 2.13GHz MacBook for $749, a MacBook Air for $1,099, an aluminum MacBook for $899, or a 24-inch iMac for $1,099. Plus there are a whole lot more deals. I say go for it.

Childhood Obesity Prevention in Texas summarizes the information gathered at a workshop held February 5-6, 2009, in Austin, Texas. At this workshop, committee members met with Texas lawmakers, public officials, and community leaders to exchange ideas and to view first-hand strategies that are being implemented effectively at the state and local levels to prevent and reverse childhood obesity.

Texas leaders at the workshop expressed the strong belief that the state’s economic vitality and security depend on the health of its population. Accordingly, the state is no longer simply describing the personal, community, and financial costs of its obesity crisis; it is taking proactive steps to address the problem through strategic initiatives. An overarching strategy is to address obesity by targeting the state’s youth, in whom it may be possible to instill healthy behaviors and lifestyles to last a lifetime. A guiding principle of these efforts is that they should be evidence based, community specific, sustainable, cost-effective, and supported by effective partnerships. Moreover, the goal is for the responsibility to be broadly shared by individuals, families, communities, and the public and private sectors.

As the public health threat of childhood obesity has become clear, the issue has become the focus of local, state, and national initiatives. Many of these efforts are centered on the community environment in recognition of the role of environmental factors in individual behaviors related to food and physical activity. In many communities, for example, fresh produce is not available or affordable, streets and parks are not amenable to exercise, and policies and economic choices make fast food cheaper and more convenient than healthier alternatives.

Community efforts to combat obesity vary in scope and scale; overall, however, they remain fragmented, and little is known about their effectiveness. At the local level, communities are struggling to determine which obesity prevention programs to initiate and how to evaluate their impact.

In this context, the Institute of Medicine held two workshops to inform current work on obesity prevention in children through input from individuals who are actively engaged in community- and policy-based obesity prevention programs. Community perspectives were elicited on the challenges involved in undertaking policy and programmatic interventions aimed at preventing childhood obesity, and on approaches to program implementation and evaluation that have shown promise. Highlights of the workshop presentations and discussions are presented in this volume.

In October 1995, the Department of Defense launched a Fast Track initiative to attract new firms and encourage commercialization of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funded technologies throughout the department. The goal of the Fast Track initiative is to help close the funding gap that can occur between Phase I and II of the SBIR program. The Fast Track initiative seeks to address the gap by providing expedited review and essentially continuous funding from Phase I to Phase II, as long as applying firms can demonstrate that they have obtained third-party financing for their technology. Another program initiative, Phase II Enhancement, was launched in 1999 to concentrate SBIR funds on those R&D projects most likely to result in viable new products that the Department of Defense and others will buy.

The current volume evaluates the two SBIR Program initiatives–Fast Track and Phase II Enhancement–and finds that both programs are effective. Ninety percent of Fast Track and 95 percent of Phase II Enhancement reported satisfaction with their decision. This book identifies the successes and remaining shortcomings of the programs, providing recommendations to address these issues.

What is that bear doing to that poor outlet and WHAT is that iPod cable doing to that poor bear?! This is the Kawaii Bear iPod Charger, straight from our friends in Japan.

They apparently cost 1980 Yen each ($21.75) although it’s not exactly clear where or how they’re sold, which is probably a good thing.

[via Craziest Gadgets]