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The final three contestants of the Biggest Loser 2010 on the May 25th show came down to Ashley Johnston of Knoxville, Tennessee, Michael Venrella of Chicago, Illinois and Daris George of Ardmore, Oklahoma.

George was voted in to the final three by voters over the other option, Koli Palu, 20, of Rohnert Park, Calif., who won the $100,000 prize for biggest percent weight loss of all season.

But who is crowned to be the Biggest Loser? It’s no other than Michael Ventrella who lost 264 pounds with a 50.19% weight-loss percentage. That’s a big loss, but not as big as the grand prize he won which is $250,000!

The 30-year-old from Chicago was crowned The Biggest Loser’s ninth-season champion during last night’s live finale broadcast of the NBC reality weight-loss series.

Ashley Johnston, a 27-year-old manager/esthetician from Knoxville, TN finished as the runner-up. Daris George, a 25-year-old salesman/deliveryman from Ardmore, OK, finished third.

The Biggest Loser does amazing work on these contestants for helping them lose weight without compromising their health. Let’s just hope that the contestants maintain their body shapes and weight.

Related posts:

1. Biggest Loser Season Finale Results
2. The Biggest Loser Make Over Week
3. Michael Lynche Escapes Elimination: American Idol

Morgan Stanley is calling for investors to overweight emerging markets equities, perhaps emboldened by a contrarian streak after the investor exodus from the BRICs. It’s their first change to Asia/Global Emerging Markets (GEM) asset allocation since June 2009:

Morgan Stanley:

• Raise our equities overweight to 6% from 4%. This returns our equities OW to where it was during the 300 April-May 2009 period.
• Reduce underweight in EM local currency debt from 4% to 3% (proxy GBI-EM).
• Reduce cash from 5% (neutral) to 2% (underweight).

Here it is, their new allocation weightings. Their cash weighting is now almost non-existent:

Here’s the most interesting chart from their piece. It basically shows how despite the global concerns which have emerged recently, strong earnings results have lead to rapidly increasing 2010 earnings per share (EPS) growth forecasts for the full year. The underlying earnings fundamentals have become far stronger in the last two months despite the gloom out of Europe and concerns regarding China tightening.

As a result, forward price to earnings ratios (PE) have fallen to historically low levels.

Our caveat though will be that emerging markets stocks are one giant cyclical play, thus PE’s based on a single year’s forecast can change quite quickly if the global economy doesn’t deliver as expected.

Yet still, even on a more stable price to book value (PB) valuation metric, emerging markets don’t look expensive.

And keep in mind that while developed world is facing growth challenges, esp. Europe and Japan, emerging markets are still powering ahead. BRICs are leading the way:

(Via Morgan Stanley, Asia/GEMs Strategy, Jonathan Garner, 26 May 2010)

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

One of Vancouver, BC’s big biotech success stories, QLT, was clobbered by Genentech a few years ago in the market for treating age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness among elderly people. But during its heyday, QLT spawned a few cool R&D projects, and now some of them are being packaged into a new spinoff, Valocor Therapeutics.

Valocor emerged from stealth mode yesterday with a technology license from QLT for dermatology drug candidates, plus an undisclosed amount of seed financing from the Working Opportunity Fund managed by GrowthWorks Capital. Valocor is led by a quartet of founders, including Julia Levy, one of the driving forces behind QLT’s light-activated verteporfin (Visudyne), a drug for macular degeneration.

The idea at Valocor is to take some of what QLT learned about light-activated drugs, and apply it to the skin. The lead program will explore whether the company can develop a light-activated lotion that destroys the glands that produce excess skin oil that clogs up pores and causes acne. If this technique can clear up pimples, without damaging the underlying skin tissue, Valocor expects it could tap into a huge potential market that’s currently underserved. Roche’s isotretinoin (Accutane) is an effective oral pill for severe acne, but has long been controversial because of its link to birth defects. If Valocor’s treatment can offer a similar effect in a safer product, it could have a viable new option for 5 million people in the U.S. who seek medical treatment for acne each year.

“There’s a huge need because of the lack of innovation in dermatology,” says Valocor CEO Dan Wattier. “Big Pharma basically walked away from dermatology 25 years ago. And these are big markets.”

Dan Wattier

The story of how Valocor set sight on those markets can be traced back about five years. QLT was riding high then on sales of Visudyne, and was looking for new applications of light-activated drugs that could be effective in localized organs, like for urology or dermatology. Then in July 2006, Genentech won FDA approval for a new treatment, ranibizumab (Lucentis), that blew away eye disease specialists and made the QLT product look obsolete. Predictably, QLT’s sales and market share plummeted, forcing it to unload some of its R&D projects and secondary products, Wattier says. (If you want to see QLT’s pain, check out these annual financial trends.)

One of those projects that got shelved during the cost-cutting effort was a drug called lemuteporfin. There were reasons to put it on the back burner. It had failed to show an advantage over placebo in a trial of patients with enlarged prostate.

But the R&D guys saw another use for it, as a light-activated acne treatment. And it made some sense from a marketing standpoint. Acne is currently treated with over-the-counter lotions for a lot of people. Dermatologists often use ultraviolet light to zap the microscopic sebaceous glands that produce too much skin oil. Sometimes they prescribe oral antibiotics to kill bacteria that congregate around the hair follicles and clogged-up pores, Wattier says. But both of those treatments are only temporary, and in the case of antibiotics, over-use can lead to bacterial resistance. Roche’s Accutane, as mentioned above, can be extremely effective, but risky.

Here’s how Valocor plans to tackle this problem. The company has developed an alcohol-based lotion that gets prepared at the doctor’s office. It’s inactive until it comes into contact with a certain wavelength of light, Wattier says. The drug gets absorbed just a couple of millimeters into the skin, where the sebaceous glands are, and the light is focused there, but not deep enough to go below the epidermal layers or into the bloodstream, Wattier says. The goal is to essentially destroy the sebaceous glands, stopping them from secreting excess oils. Since this drug doesn’t go into the blood like Accutane, it shouldn’t …Next Page »

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

More than just a heart rate monitor, the lightweight Suunto T3 helps you train with confidence by providing real-time information on the aerobic benefit of each workout. Runners, bikers, kayakers, and other sports enthusiasts will appreciate the Suunto T3’s combination of robust technology and versatile style.

What if you could glance at your wrist and see the total aerobic benefit of your workout in real-time? You’d know how much harder to push and for how long. Based on your personal fitness profile, the Suunto T3 delivers essential feedback on your aerobic activities, including heart rate, calories burned, and zone training information. You can also add real-time speed and distance data by combining the Suunto T3 with optional Suunto PODs (available separately). To ensure your workout data is accurate, the Suunto T3 is digitally coded for interference-free transmission.

By monitoring your Training Effect (TE), the T3 takes the guesswork out of effective training. Using data from your personal fitness profile, the watch analyzes your physiological progress and translates the data into a simple, one-to-five TE scale. For example, if you want to improve your aerobic fitness at a moderate tempo, you should exercise until your TE meter reads between 3.0 and 3.9, two to four times per week. To improve your aerobic condition more rapidly, but without the risk of over-training, you should push yourself harder once or twice per week, so your TE meter reads 4.0 to 4.9, with a few recovery sessions in the TE 1.0 to 2.0 range.

View Suunto T3 Heart Rate Monitor and Fitness Trainer Watch (Black with Orange Strap) details

Who is Dancing with the Stars 2010 winner? Lets find out, this year the Dancing with the stars, give the audience all the entertainment this season is the shows most successful season this year. The wife of the CEO of the network Leslie Moonves said that although she did not make it, she picked Nicole Scherzinger to be the DWTS (Dancing With The Stars) winner.This season winner finally being announce and the show ending will be tonight.

Celebrity contestant Nicole Scherzinger of Pussycat Dolls and Derek Hough were consistently at the top of the leaderboard throughout the season. Watch the Season Finale of Dancing With The Stars.

Related posts:

1. Who Won Dancing With the Stars 2010?
2. Nicole Scherzinger won ‘Dancing With The Stars’
3. Top Three Unleashed: Dancing With The Stars Results Night

American rapper Trina has recently spoken out on the ordeal she suffered when her naked photos stored in her phone circulated the web. Her phone was stolen months ago.

Hiphop artist Trina became very upset after finding out her that her private photos were leaked. According to her some jealous people want to disturb her and want ruin to popularity but some people thinks that these photos are planned program to become famous. The culprit uploaded some of her naked pictures in several websites and even tried to ask money.

She was furious about what happened. “You stole my phone, leaked pictures of me and then tried to extort money from me, and that was just taking it too far. I turned it over to the authorities and let them deal with it. I didn’t even want to be a part of it until you tell me that you have a suspect and were ready to prosecute. Actually, it was my lawyer that handled things. He went to all of the websites and sent out cease-and-desist letters. So I let the attorneys and authorities take care of everything and I just stayed out of it,” she said.

Some of the photos were already taken out of the web.

Related posts:

1. Watch Megan Fox leaked photos
2. Miss USA 2010 Scandal Pictures!
3. Tess Taylor Leaked Nude Photos With A Bong!

Size matters in auto company survival, Renault and Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn told an audience in Detroit on Tuesday.

To cope with the escalating costs and scope of a global industry, successful automakers must complete a trifecta–be able to compete in every technology, every market and every segment, Ghosn said during a luncheon speech at the Detroit Economic Club

“No 3 million-unit carmaker can make it,” Ghosn said, explaining why his Renault-Nissan alliance forged an alliance with Germany’s Daimler AG.

Competency in one or two of the three skills is not enough, and only very large companies can afford all three, he said.

Technology is getting more expensive. Automakers must simultaneously develop gasoline, diesel, hybrid and electric vehicle technology because they can’t predict which technologies will prevail, Ghosn said.

“You also must be in every market–and it’s not just Japan, Europe and the United States anymore but also Brazil, Russia, China and India. And you better be in Indonesia, too,” he said.

“And you can’t be viable as a niche player, so you need to be in the upper, lower, 4-by-4 and crossover segments.”

‘Technologies are expensive’

France-based Renault and Japan’s Nissan do not consolidate their financial results and in some ways remain separate companies, but they cooperate on platforms and powertrains and some manufacturing. Through a holding company, Renault owns about 42 percent of Nissan.

That type of alliance is more flexible than a conventional merger, Ghosn said. He also cited the new alliance with Daimler–initially to cooperate on developing a replacement small platform for Daimler’s Smart division–as a better way to cooperate.

“Technologies are expensive and you need a partner because nobody can afford to do it all alone.” Ghosn said.

Major players … someday

He predicted that as the Chinese auto market develops, domestic Chinese automakers eventually will emerge as major players.

“Right now, there is not one global Chinese automaker,” he said. “Not one has the scope of a company like Renault-Nissan or Volkswagen.”

But soon, a Chinese automaker–or perhaps an Indian company–will “buy something nobody else wants” and become a worldwide force, Ghosn predicted. “It could happen much faster than everybody expects.”

Much like the Koreans did in recent years, emerging-market automaker powerhouses can develop by constantly “benchmarking and copying best practices,” he said. “Nothing is ever unchanging in our industry.”

For more

Source: Car news, reviews and auto show stories

Following the incident in yesterdays round four of the Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo, after which the race was cancelled, a unanimous decision has been taken by all teams today to cancel the remainder of the weekends racing.

The driver of car number 22, Giorgio Bartocci, was taken to hospital following an accident at the start of the first race of the weekend. He remains in intensive care in hospital in Brno, where his condition is currently stable.

Rounds four, five and six of the Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo are therefore officially cancelled.

That day in the evening his wife and her sister came to the hospital to see him…after two days he was transported to brno airport and flew back to rome…he was stabilized…he and his family were happy with the medical care, they even said that it was better than in italy…

Concrete USB drives weigh as much as they hold
Lamp poster (poster lamp?) adds a surrealist bent to your bedroom
Super Mario Bro. Crossover gets Ryu from Ninja Gaiden
mTouch: An affordable multi-touch web table
SNES HD emulator for iPad looks sick – even the iPhone controller

The Citroen DS3 gets four stars in Autocar’s ‘90 second’ verdict, mostly compared to the Mini Cooper S and Fiat 500 as its main competitors. The entry level engine model is a respectable 1.4-litre 94 hp, while the top of the range is the 1.6 turbo with 154 hp. The big plus for the DS3 is that it’s got more rear passenger and boot room than either of its nominated rivals – the Fiat 500 on the boot front is particularly cosy. The DS3 is also said to be easier to drive with better steering feel and comfort than the Mini. While in some ways you could see the car as just a ‘tarted up’ version of the Citroen C3, it does have more performance and more style and personality which justify its higher cost than the C3.

Yesterday I wrote about how to obtain your Magicjack password by doing a memory dump in Windows. Well what good is that information if you don’t know how to use it? I’ll tell you, it isn’t any good at all! So in the post, I will tell you how to setup a softphone in Windows so you can make inbound and outbound calls using your Magicjack number without having to use the USB dongle! Not to mention, you can set this up on multiple computers!

Once again I want to re-iterate that this violates Magicjack’s TOS. This article is purely for informational purposes, and I accept no liability if you get your Magicjack account pulled because you want to screw the man!

With that little bit of legal mumbo jumbo out of the way, lets get together the stuff you will need:

• Magicjack username and password
• XLite softphone
• MJMD5

No, I didn’t mention this in the last post, but you can’t simply use your Magicjack username and password by itself to make inbound and outbound calls. The reason being is the way Magicjack does authentication. Now correct me if I am wrong, but what I gather is Magicjack takes your password and combines it with the proxy for your city and creates an MD5 hash. It then uses that hash to authenticate with the proxy. If you don’t have that hash, you cannot authenticate, and thus cannot make calls. That is where MJMD5 comes in.

1. Go ahead and download MJMD5 and run it.
2. Enter 5070 for both the listening and the forwarding port.
3. Enter your local proxy (proxy01.<yourcity>.talk4free.com)
4. Enter your Majicjack password
5. Save your settings
6. Click Start

With that running, download and install Xlite’s free softphone on the same computer and enter the following:

1. Display Name: Whatever you want
2. Username: Magicjack Username (E<yourphonenumber>01)
3. Password: Your Magicjack password
4. Authorization user name: Magicjack Username (E<yourphonenumber>01)
5. Domain: 127.0.0.1:5070
6. Check Register with domain to receive incoming calls
7. Select the domain radio button
8. Click Apply then OK

That is it! Now you can make inbound and outbound calls without your Magicjack USB dongle in Windows. You can also set this up on as many computers as you want!

Check back tomorrow where I show you how to do the same thing in Linux!

<< Part One

The standard element maker Ganter has enlarged its “locking plungers” product range with an innovative product.

The indexing pin of the GN 514 locking plunger is moved by means of a spring-operated cardioid curve. By simply pressing the operating button, this cardioid mechanism causes the indexing pin to extend and retract (PUSH-PUSH locking mechanism). This function is similar to that used in a ballpoint pen.

Please note that the indexing pin cannot absorb axial forces and that it retracts virtually by spring action alone. The indexing pin must therefore remain free and easy to move. The indexing pin is made of nitrided and burnished steel. The mat black knob is made of plastic (polyamide PA).

Instead of the lock nut, the unit can also be fitted using the distance bushings GN 609 (steel) or GN 609.5 (high-grade steel), allowing the threaded length of the indexing plunger to match the thickness of the application in hand. The distance bushings are available in steel or high-grade steel design versions.

Find out more in the internet at www.ganter-griff.com.

The new Guillotine Control System “PROCUT” from TRM can be installed in Paper Cutting Machines and Guillotine Shears.

PROCUT controls the backgauge by entering the cut distance by using its own screen and keyboard. Users can save in memory up to 100 programs and each program can have up to 1000 cuts.

With many features as label optimization, manual adjustment knob, air control, automatic push out function, fine control of backgauge acceleration and speed by using a servo motor, PROCUT is the most complete and cost effective guillotine controller.

PROCUT is a complete system which makes the installation quick and simple.

The grinding of products, whose dusts are potentially explosive, places particularly high demands on the technology used and the design of a grinding plant with regard to safety. The most frequently used variant is a complete grinding system which is pressure shock resistant up to 10 bar(g). However, this usually means considerable costs for peripheral equipment.

With the new ATEX-compliant plant concept CUM Compact, the installation of a more efficient grinding plant for many products is considerably easier: With this newly developed plant concept explosion protection valves or explosion suppression equipment, explosion-decoupling devices, ventilators and even dust filter systems are no longer required in the classical sense.

The resulting advantages of this are obvious: the integration of the grinding system in existing production systems is possible without any problems thanks to the minimal space required; any cleaning required after changing the product can be carried out quickly due to the compact construction; also, considerably lower investment and maintenance costs are further arguments for this new grinding system.

The well-proven CONDUX Universal Mill is the basis machine in this new grinding system. The grinding of the products within this machine is mainly by impact- and shearing action. By simply selecting different grinding tools, this machine can be used either as a blast mill, pin-disc mill or wing-beater mill, enabling it to process a large variety of products and produce various final finenesses!

The pin disc mill execution, which is without a screen, processes the feed product in one single run. The final size can be determined by the peripheral speed and the arrangement of pins on the discs.

In the blast- or wing-beater mills, the rotating tools principally work against a fixed rotor, which determines the final size and which can be executed either as a screen track, grooved grinding track or screen/grinding track and which even further increases the variety of combinations possible! A repeated mechanical stress of the product within the mill is thus made possible.

Article Tags: Editorial

$6 million study is used to lobby for cap-and-tax

With public faith in the global-warming myth on the wane, leftist zealots are desperate to spin a new tale – and they’re spending your tax money to do it. Three years ago, Congress appropriated $5,856,600 for the National Academy of Sciences to complete a climate-change study. This bureaucratic attempt to cook the books, which was completed last week, may be too late to save this dying religion.

The academy now offers the taxpayer-funded research for download in three separate sections for $44 each. The first volume presents the case that human activities are warming the planet and that this “poses significant risks.” A second report urges that a cap-and-trade taxing system be implemented to reduce so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The final section of the study explores strategies on adapting to the “reality” of climate change, meaning purported “extreme weather events like heavy precipitation and heat waves.”

None of the big-government recommendations are worth the 1,089 pages of presumably recycled paper on which they are to be printed if planetary warming is actually a phenomenon beyond human control, so the first volume is of primary interest. “Advancing the Science of Climate Change” asserts that the Earth’s temperature has risen over the past 100 years and that human activities have resulted in sharp increases in carbon dioxide. The coincidence of these facts on their own, of course, proves nothing. The Earth has been as warm or warmer in past periods, such as the medieval and Roman warm periods, long before the internal combustion engine and coal plants were around to take the heat for a particularly sweltering summer day.

Source: washingtontimes.com

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Article Tags: Alan Siddons, Hans Schreuder, Martin Hertzberg

Introduction

We’ve been told that the earth’s surface is quite a bit warmer than calculations predict. Theory has it that heat-trapping “greenhouse gases” account for a 33° Celsius disparity. But it turns out that our airless moon is also quite a bit warmer than predicted. Might something be wrong with the prediction method itself, then? It’s a natural question to ask, so let’s look into it.

The Theory

Climate science’s method of deriving a surface temperature from incoming radiant energy (whose intensity is measured in watts per square meter) is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann formula [1], which in turn refers to a theoretical surface known as a blackbody – something that absorbs and emits all of the radiance it’s exposed to. Since by definition a blackbody cannot emit less than 100% of what it absorbs, this fictional entity has no option of drawing heat into itself, for that would compromise its temperature response and thus its thermal emission. Its 100% thermal emission effectively means that a blackbody is a twodimensional surface with no depth.

Source: ilovemycarbondioxide.com

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Japanese watch purveyors Seahope have come up trumps with a Transformers clock which I’m hoping can actually transform into a watch. More »










Transformers – Business – Transformers and Inductors – Electronics and Electrical – Michael Bay

The most obvious obstacles for the widespread adoption of fuel cell technology are cost and performance. Although they promise benefits over internal combustion engines and batteries in terms of environmental impact, they are still fairly limited in use for these reasons. One of the most expensive elements used in most fuel cells is platinum, but now researchers have created a unique core and shell nanoparticle that uses far less platinum, yet performs more efficiently and lasts longer than commercially available pure-platinum catalysts at the cathode end of fuel cell reactions. ..
Continue Reading Pure platinum alternative promises breakthrough in fuel cell technology

Tags: Fuel Cell,
Nanoparticles,
Nanotechnology,
Platinum

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Citi’s latest Fun with Flows report highlights how fund redemptions have now spread from China and India into Brazil and Russia funds. All four BRICs nations recorded equity fund outflows for the week ending May 12th.

Citi’s Elaine Chu:

Although net outflows from all China funds last week were as big as the amount recorded in late January after the first RRR hike, new money taken in by A50 ETFs continued for the ninth week. In other BRIC markets, redemptions from India funds rose to the largest in 17 months, outflows from Russia funds were recorded for the first time since mid February, and Brazil fund outflows were the biggest of all, close to US$1bn in the last five weeks.

Asia ex-Japan fund outflows hit $1.3 billion. As shown below, recent de-risking has finally hit Asia.

This has been a huge reversal in fund flows as shown by the chart below. China went from average net inflows, to a sharp net outflow.

(Via Citi, Fun with flows, Elaine Chu, 17 May 2010)

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