Category: News

A congressional hearing will take place regarding quality control practices both at McNeil and parent company Johnson & Johnson, the Chicago Tribune indicates.

After the massive recall of Tylenol and other over-the-counter drugs, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspected the quality control practices being implemented at a Pennsylvania plant run by McNeil Consumer Health Care, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical Johnson & Johnson. FDA declared there is an inadequate training for its employees. Its latest Tylenol recall of 40 products happened April 30 that could have stripped $400 million from the company.

Other defects include substandard equipment, bacterial contamination of materials, and around 46 neglected complaints even before the recall. Good manufacturing practice is missing, said Prabir Basu, Purdue University.

Professor of Pharmacoecomomics Albert Wertheimer at Temple University believes it contributed to the shrinkage in its workforce.”I would suspect it’s a matter of trying to get by with less, but in this case it didn’t work,” he scrutinized.

Other McNeil plants under investigation are based in Lancaster, Pa., and Las Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Related posts:

1. Tylenol Recall 2010 by McNeil Consumer Healthcare
2. McNeil Promises Quality Repair
3. Congress Investigates Johnson & Johnson

When it comes to RPGs, I don’t even need to explain how far up Square Enix is atop the gaming Olympus. It is, however, a bit surprising to find out that someone from the esteemed publisher said

Stephen Conroy, the Australian politician who has been pushing hard to massively filter and censor Australia’s internet has been fighting Google for a while now. After the company made comments about why such censorship was a bad idea, rather than respond to the issues, Conroy came out swinging by attacking the company for its Buzz privacy mishap, and quoting Eric Schmidt out of context. So, of course, with Google’s WiFi data capture admission, Conroy has some new ammo. He’s claiming that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident and that this represents “the largest privacy breach in history across Western democracies.”

While it’s no surprise that Conroy doesn’t like Google and its opposition to his plan to censor the internet, perhaps he should stay away from laughably ridiculous hyperbole. The only data Google collected was what was passed over open WiFi connections in the split seconds that it drove by those access points with its Street View vehicles. These are networks where anyone on those networks could have just as easily have done the same thing — except if someone was really on one of those networks, they could keep recording that data, rather than moving on when the traffic light changed. Furthermore, there’s no evidence that Google ever did anything whatsoever with whatever data it did collect. Making claims about this being some huge privacy breach when there’s no evidence that anyone ever even saw the data seems pretty questionable.

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A Sport Sedan Worthy of 3-Series Association
Trevor Hofmann, Canadian Auto Press

Lexus introduced its first IS as a competitor to BMW’s 3 and Mercedes’ C, and while it was a credible sport sedan its Toyota roots showed through too strongly to pull in many of the upwardly mobile. Lexus made sure that when its second generation IS hit the streets it wouldn’t suffer the same fate by endowing it with the one thing its predecessor lacked, killer styling.

Even in its fourth year of production the IS looks crisp and edgy, and while sales are up significantly from the previous generation, Lexus’ smallest hardly suffers from ubiquity. It just might wear the L-finesse design language better than any other Lexus, well proportioned and assertive in its stance. And with the new F-Sport alloy wheels and modified grille and spoilers it looks ready for the track.

2010 Lexus IS 250 F-Sport

More than just enhancing appearances, the larger diameter 18-inch rims and 225/40R18 all-season performance tires they’re wrapped in add grip. The IS is already an excellent handler, whether in 250 or 350 guise, but the upgraded wheels and tires make a marked improvement amid fast, tight curves. My IS 250 tester tracked with precision and poise when pushed hard, and when driven laid back and relaxed was a comfortable traveling companion, albeit with a slightly firmer ride than it would have had with the stock 16-inch wheel and tire package.

The IS 250 is not only a competent handler, but I must admit that this sedan’s DOHC, 24-valve, 2.5-litre V6 is more engaging than its numbers foretell. Horsepower is a reasonable 204 that comes on at 6,400 rpm, while torque is merely 185 at 4,800 rpm, but something about how this all comes together makes the IS 250 a hoot to drive, and my example didn’t even have the standard six-speed manual, but rather the six-speed automatic with manual mode.

The 250 is the only IS that offers all-wheel drive, and while it delivers greater traction in foul weather it also adds 89 kilos (196 lbs) to the base IS 250’s 1,567-kilogram (3,455-lb) curb weight that, together with driveline drag, is a bane to fuel economy with a comparative estimated rating of 9.8 L/100km in the city and 6.8 on the highway for the similarly optioned automatic transmission-equipped rear-wheel drive version and 10.5 L/100km in the city and 7.6 on the highway for the all-wheel drive model. There’s also an argument for going with an automatic, as the rear-drive car with a manual transmission gets 11.4 L/100km in the city and 7.5 on the highway. Something to consider is the IS 250’s thirst for premium fuel, however, a significant additional cost over regular.

If you’re concerned that the AWD model’s ride height, which is up 15 mm (0.6 inches) over the rear-drive car, slightly increases its centre of gravity, don’t worry as it comes standard 17-inch alloy wheels that no doubt make up for any nominal handling discrepancy.

The upgraded 18-inch rims and exterior add-ons I spoke of a minute ago are new for 2010 and come as part of the F-Sport Package. It also includes adaptive bi-xenon headlamps, rain-sensing wipers, and auto-dimming exterior mirrors with reverse tilt function on the outside, plus premium seats, aluminum sport pedals, a wallet-size smart key card, and stainless steel scuff plates on the inside.

Other new for 2010 features include standard integrated XM satellite radio, USB audio connectivity, and a windshield de-icer. These items get added to standard dual-zone automatic climate control, power locks with proximity sensing keyless entry and pushbutton start, auto up/down on all windows, heated mirrors, variable intermittent wipers, a six-CD/MP3 stereo with auxiliary input, audio controls on the spokes of the leather-wrapped tilt and telescopic steering wheel, cruise control, sport cloth seats, and a rear seat pass-through (hmmm… no 60/40 split rear seatbacks).

The pass-through is handy for a set of skis or two, and the trunk holds a reasonable amount of cargo at 378 litres (13.3 cubic feet). Keep in mind that this is a small car, despite its premium image. It measures only 4,575 mm (180.1 inches) long, 1,800 mm (70.9 inches) wide and rides on a wheelbase of merely 2,730 mm (107.4 inches), so if you need a cargo hold sized more like the Camry you’re moving up from, you might consider something larger like Lexus’ ES 350.

Now that we’re being so practical, safety features include driver and passenger knee airbags and all the expected airbags, standard traction and stability control, plus of course, ABS-enhanced four-wheel discs designed for performance driving. Oh, and I almost forgot. There’s a first-aid kit included too. The standard warranty is 4 years or 80,000 km limited bumper to bumper, and 6 years or 110,000 km for the powertrain, which is better than most in the premium sector.

I know I’m being all pragmatic about a car that’s really designed to spark enthusiasm from the sport sedan crowd, but the reality is you’re going to have to live with it day in and day out, so it’s important to factor in all the variables. And doing so, puts the 2010 Lexus IS 250 in a good light. It’s a great looking car, especially in F-Sport trim, delivers surprising off-the-line performance and handles like a dream. Properly fitted it delivers a nice luxurious experience too, with most of the features premium buyers demand. Add up all the benefits and then factor in a starting price of $34,400, and it starts to make sense. Lexus really got the second generation IS right. It’s a sport sedan worthy of 3 Series association.

In any Resident Evil game, once you whip out the magnum, you’re ready to put serious hurt into your target. Chris Redfield will be keeping one handy in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, as well as other weapons

The annual Doodle 4 Google competition came to a close with a winner being chosen from the more than 33,000 submissions. The winning doodle belongs to Makenzie Melton, a third grader at El Dorado Springs R-2 Schools in El Dorado Springs, Missouri. Her work was entitled “Rainforest Habitat” and will be featured on the Google homepage … (read more)

Luke Timmerman wrote:

When genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter stepped before the cameras last week and claimed that he engineered the first bacterial cell with an entirely synthetic genome, he actually had a lot of help. One of the key players he relied on behind the scenes was a privately held company in Bothell, WA, called Blue Heron Biotechnology.

Venter’s team in San Diego and Maryland went through an elaborate process to “boot up” the bacterial cell by stitching together more than 1,000 stretches of DNA that were each more than 1,000 chemical base units in length. The sequences were designed on a computer, but Venter’s team hired the people at Blue Heron to take care of the next vital step—the job of synthesizing all that data into genes that gave rise to the famous bacterial cell. Blue Heron was singled out for a kudo in the J. Craig Venter Institute’s press release, and got a line in Nicholas Wade’s story in the New York Times. (Blue Heron even got a little publicity from hometown KOMO-TV.)

Beneath the scientific implications and ethical debate, there’s actually an intriguing business story. For Blue Heron, it’s emblematic of its growing capabilities in the emerging field of synthetic biology, and the increasingly powerful things it can enable its customers to do. The company is one of five contract firms around the world that are ushering in an “industrialized” era of molecular biology. The idea is to take a time-consuming, costly process of synthesizing genes in the lab, and automate it into something much cheaper, faster, and more reliable.

While the Seattle-area company doesn’t disclose its revenue, or say whether it is profitable, it currently provides its service to 19 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies and a growing cadre of academic researchers, says John Mulligan, Blue Heron’s founder and chief scientific officer. The company’s business is “sustainable” for the future with its current team of about 35 employees, he says.

“Customers are saying ‘At this price, it doesn’t make sense to do any molecular biology internally anymore,’” Mulligan says. “Several companies have outsourced [DNA synthesis] completely.”

The field has made dramatic strides over the past decade. Mulligan, who previously ran one of the sequencing centers at Stanford University that played a role in the Human Genome Project, left to start Blue Heron in 1999. He got some seed investment in the early days from Leroy Hood and David Galas, a couple of the co-founders of Darwin Molecular, a one-time highflier where Mulligan worked for a time in the mid-90s.

Back in Blue Heron’s founding days, cost was the big barrier preventing the synthesis of DNA sequences in any systematic way. But the price per base pair, or chemical unit of DNA, plummeted about 90 percent over the company’s first nine years. That made it cheap enough for drug companies to order manufactured genes, rather than assign the task of making them to young scientists or skilled technicians in-house.

And the trend has only continued. Two years ago, Blue Heron would synthesize genes for about $1.50 to $2 for each chemical base pair of DNA—now the same genes can be had for 40 cents to $1 per base pair, Mulligan says, depending on their complexity. Some researchers order short genes that are only 200 chemical units long, but Blue Heron can synthesize really complicated genes that can go as long as 200,000 units long, Mulligan says. If a customer wants to slip in a single letter variation here and there, an insertion of an extra letter or a deletion, Blue Heron has shown over time it can deliver the exact sequence the researcher wants, within one to three weeks of turnaround time.

While falling per-unit prices sound bad for Blue Heron’s overall revenue, Mulligan says his company has been able to offset that decline a couple ways. One is …Next Page »

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

This goes some way to explaining why employees at Foxconn may be killing themselves. According to The Telegraph, Foxconn pays 110,000 Yuan ($16,100) to the family of each person who dies. That’s ten years’ salary, on average. More »










Foxconn – Apple – Suicide – China – Shenzhen

Here’s a still from the Deepwater Horizon live feed captured on BP’s site just a couple moments ago.

Hopefully what we’re looking at is gushing mud, not gushing oil. There are no fresh updates on “Top Kill,” — nothing to suggest that last night’s progress had been undermined. At some point today, we’re guessing, we’ll get a more definitive answer.

Join the conversation about this story »

The Telegraph Media Group and Sanuk Games have already released Telegraph Crosswords for the DS in UK and Ireland, which basically gives players 500 crossword puzzles for the price of 500 DSi Points. Today, the collaboration announced

If you don’t want to bang down ten notes for the full-fat Chinatown Wars iPhone app, this free “Lite” version is worth checking out. It provides a good taste of the Nintendo DS game, with the first three missions playable. More »










IPhone – App Store – Smartphones – Handhelds – Nintendo DS

Here’s Dunlop’s first two awesome stunt videos to advertise their SP StreetResponse tires dedicated to city cars.

Called the Dunlop Challenges, the first video is the Loop the Loop” world record done in collaboration with British TV show Fifth Gear, where stuntman Steve Truglia using a specially prepared Toyota Aygo, takes the Japanese car up and around a 12,19 mt high loop.

The second ad uses three Citroen C1’s and the stunt drivers perform extreme all reverse driving manoeuvres: J-turns, jumps, slaloms to demonstrate the manoeuvrability of Dunlops StreetResponse tires.

Hit the the jump for the second video.

Hikari no 4 Senshi: Final Fantasy Gaiden has been out in Japan since late last year, but now that Square Enix has trademarked its Western name, Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light is ready for release

The Challenge

Whilst campaigning I have frequently found myself opting to take the easy route:  preaching to the converted. This is not what I consider campaigning in the true sense. Whilst it may make me feel better, I may feel like I’ve done ‘my bit’, it does not involve changing minds nor does it tackle the apathy and ignorance that are unfortunately all to prevalent in relation to development issues. Put bluntly, it gets us no closer to tackling poverty and climate justice.

This acknowledged, the Liverpool University Oxfam Society thought long and hard about an event that would attract those who would never usually have anything to do with Oxfam and that would demonstrate to them that you don’t have to don a pair of MC Hammer pants, a pair of sandals nor eat lentils to live a more ethical lifestyle.

The Solution

*Drum roll please * A glamorous, cutting-edge, vintage and ethical ball.

We hired The Egg Café in Liverpool and served up a lip-smackingly good veggie three course meal; we provided fairly traded wine; and guests were required to come in their finest vintage, fair trade or charity shop glad rags. The after party, organised in conjunction with two other societies, ACE Africa and Campaign Against Climate Change, was held at MelloMello, a volunteer led community outreach venue and live music was enjoyed through a carbon neutral bicycle powered sound system. 

Our message was simple: ethical living can be fun and easily incorporated into everyday life. A fair and just world for all demands that each and everyone one of us makes life style changes.  The ethical ball demonstrated the ease with which some of these changes, such as buying fair trade where possible and eating less meat, can be made.

 P.S. If you’re feeling inspired and want some tips on how to become more ethical, the following websites are a great place to start:

http://www.ethiscore.org/

http://www.ethical-living.org/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ethical-living

You might remember Imageepoch from games such as Arc Rise Fantasia, Fate/Extra and the Luminous Arc series. The publisher has yet to announce a PS3 game to date, but a job listing indicates that they’re hiring folks

Despite Foxconn allegedly asking all employees to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves, another worker has jumped out of a building window. This came hours after Foxconn’s CEO was boasting to press of the fabulous facilities at the factories. More »










Foxconn – Apple – Suicide – Business – China

Joe Romm of Climate Progress has an important piece today about Obama’s challenge and what his legacy will be based on the ecological disasters that face him (namely, the BP Gulf oil-gusher and catastrophic climate change). And Romm notes that the gusher is the lessor of the two in overall impact to humanity.

First, he asks what can the government do once the damage is done?

But even more unfortunate for Obama is that in spite of BP’s incompetence, nobody really knows how to stop the mile-deep undersea volcano (other than drilling a relief well, which takes many weeks). And nobody knows how to clean it up. Independent experts calculate that BP may be spewing the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez disaster ever few days. As Robert Brulle, a professor of Public Health at Drexel University and 20-year Coast Guard veteran, has noted, “With a spill of this magnitude and complexity, there is no such thing as an effective response.”

And the problem humanity faces is even worse than what is happening in the Gulf if we do not do something about cutting the use of carbon-based energy.

Scientists have been saying the consequences of significantly more volatile weather will create havoc for our would. And as Romm says, the torrential rains in Tennessee in the beginning of May (worse than the hurricane deluge that hit New Orleans during Katrina) are absolutely signs of what is coming.

Our world is already changing. Our choice now is on how much we can keep the changes less catastrophic by doing something about our misuse of carbon-based energy. There really is no more time to waste.

Facebook has unveiled the simplified privacy settings it has been talking about for the past week. The new settings are easier to understand and it’s easier to get an overview of what you share and with whom. The move is likely to settle the increasingly vocal and mostly warranted criticism of Facebook’s practices regarding user pr… (read more)

Regular readers will know that Acer’s been planning ereaders and tablets for some time, but the Dubai-based Shufflegazine saw Acer’s CEO fondling what looks like an ereader (check out the QWERTY keypad)—despite him calling it an Android-powered tablet. More »










Acer – Android – Google – tablet – Google Chrome OS