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Up to the Mountain Crystal Bowersox performance on American Idol Top 2 season 9 Tuesday, May 25, 2010 week finale. It was an outstanding performance is Crystal Bowersox is the winner Up to the Mountain will be he first official single.
American idol judges were amaze in her performance.

Randy Jackson said: “Culminating our 9th season, and Simon’s last, this is what it’s about. Amazing singer. This is one of the greatest songs and your greatest moments. That was incredible.”

Ellen DeGeneres said: “We’re always looking for somebody unique. I can’t compare you to any other contemporary artist. You are in a league of your own. You have a beautiful voice. If you’re making an album I’ll buy it. You’re just so good and I’m so happy to witness the rise of your career.”

Kara DioGuardi said: “This was a very important song for you. At times your wall has been up. But you were completely emotionally invested in this song. You really blossomed. Amazing.”
Simon said: “I thought that was by far the best performance and the song of the night. Since this is the final critique I’m going to give I’d like to say that was outstanding.”
Crystal Bowersox said, to Simon Cowell, “You’ve been amazing this season. Thank you for all the critique and criticism. On all your journeys I hope you do well. Good luck.”

Related posts:

1. Lee Dewyze Sings ‘Kiss From a Rose’: Did the Judges like it?
2. Say Goodbye to Aaron Kelly in American Idol Season 9
3. Say ‘Hallelujah’ to Lee Dewyze

Eco Factor: Zero-emission bike powered by solar energy.

Built by Giant, this is the “Stilletto” chopper bike, which gets powered by a brushless hub motor fueled by a 36V battery pack. The bike features a modular solar panel array of 36V generating up to 10W of renewable electric power. The bike hits a top speed of 20mph and the solar panel onboard can be removed and the battery can also be charged conventionally on days with no sun.

Via: Motorbicycling

Japanese label Tomorrowland’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection consists of styles that are familiar and relaxed. It combines business and casual attire that is ideal for various occasions during the warm months. Its perfect from work to vacation, especially if you’re going away for that business trip that’s also in a tropical climate.

Continue reading for more images.

Source: The Fashionisto

It’s tough to keep track of books you want to read or random thoughts about them sometimes, but the BookLover iPhone app makes life just a bit simpler by letting you maintain a virtual bookshelf and saving notes with ease. More »










iPhone – Handhelds – Smartphones – Wallpapers and Themes – X11

The damaged Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is a huge environmental disaster that’s said to be gushing anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into the ocean per day. BP has deployed a reported 2.5 million feet of oil booms in an effort to contain the slick, as well as bringing in over 1,100 vessels to skim it and even burning some of it off the water’s surface. One need only watch the news, however, to realize that some other ideas are needed. BP has received over 10,000 suggestions for dealing with the disaster and is looking into approximately 700. What follows is a look at some – but by no means all – of those products being touted as a solution, and what they would supposedly do to the oil…
Continue Reading Gulf oil spill disaster: a closer look at the clean-up options

Tags: Environment,
Ocean,
Oil,
Pollution

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Last weekend, a brand new Audi A1 that was being driven by a member of Audi’s team crashed while it was cruising up and down a specially-constructed half pipe in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels as part of the buildup to its public launching in late 2010.

This demonstration was supposed to show the car’s skateboard-like handling and fun-to-drive character but instead, the hatch rolled onto its roof. Fortunately, the car was only barely damaged and nobody got hurt. The car was pushed back onto to an upright position and driver and passenger were freed immediately. Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad reported that Audi tried to keep photographers from taking pictures of the car that crashed but a few pictures still leaked out. The crash is ill-timed but it’s unlikely that the A1 would be subjected to that kind of treatment anyway.

[via autoexpress]

Source: Car news, Car reviews, Spy shots

Via Headlines – David Icke Website

Read more: Musing on the Times as Lord Apocalypse Appears.

Although people living in poverty are among the most vulnerable to a warming planet, some of the world’s poor could end up winners in the climate change shuffle. As heat and drought drive crop yields down, basic commodity prices will go up. That will harm some—and help others. “There are really very different effects on poverty depending on which poor people you look at,” says David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University. “Farmers are getting hit with lower yields, but the prices of the things that they’re selling go up enough that they actually become less poor as a result.” The effects could be large enough to lift many agriculture-specialized households in Asia and Latin America out of poverty. And it could happen quite soon. “It’s not implausible that even in the next 20 years, climate change could drive prices up considerably.” These projections differ from most in that Lobell and colleagues consider a range of possible productivity scenarios instead of just the most likely one. As an agricultural ecologist, Lobell compiled plausible yields for six different crops in the year 2030. He used as the worst case scenario not what happens “if things…

Fifteen years ago, I started doing research on the challenges of taking nonprofits to scale. The topic was still under the radar both in the university and out in the field. My focus was growth through replication, and when I presented papers and case studies, nonprofit audiences often dismissed the ideas as “too corporate.” As one audience member said to me: “We are not McDonald’s. You cannot use a cookie cutter to replicate the work we do.” At almost exactly the same time, however, social entrepreneurs began developing new models for expanding organizations through replication in new locations. Their organizations grew to become nationally recognized nonprofits such as Teach for America and Habitat for Humanity, as well as internationally known nongovernmental organizations such as Bangladesh-based BRAC. These organizations have found that scaling is anything but an exercise in cutting cookies, as it requires not only fidelity to core processes and programs, but also constant adjustments to local needs and resources. Today, there may be no idea with greater currency in the social sector than “scaling what works.” In its first year, the Obama administration announced several multimillion- or billion-dollar programs that focus on expanding proven-effective programs to new locations. As…

Earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters are terrible—pain and suffering abounding, lives and homes destroyed. Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant new book documents and explains the other side of disasters: how they often sweep away the barriers that isolate people from each other under normal times, inspiring “the better angels of our nature” that President Abraham Lincoln evoked in our nation’s darkest days. Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell investigates the social consequences of five major disasters: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the gargantuan 1917 explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the devastating 1985 Mexico City quake; Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 deluge of New Orleans. Each case study provides a thick description of what surviving residents themselves understand to be a temporary utopian society naturally arising in the midst of casualties, disorientation, homelessness, and great loss of all kinds. Solnit tells many poignant stories of altruism, courage, and compassionate social action. In 1906 San Francisco, for example, we meet Amelia Hoshouser, a middle-class woman who fed thousands of people in her makeshift “Mizpah Café,” while throughout the city soup kitchens, shelters, and relief projects emerged from collective human spirit as if spontaneously from the ruins. The quake…

Nineteen-year-old Stephen Mensah has a junior high education, but no real home or assets. He had lost any hope of attaining the additional education that he wanted until six months ago, when he became a Fan Milk microfranchisee. Fan Milk is Ghana’s leading producer and distributor of dairy products. Scandinavian investors founded the company in 1960 to produce milk for Ghanaians, many of whom suffered from protein deficiencies. Today, Fan Milk is listed on the Ghana stock exchange and employs some 8,500 microfranchisees, who sell milk, ice cream, yogurt, and popsicles from atop their carts or bicycles throughout Ghana. Fan Milk has sister companies in Nigeria, Togo, and the Ivory Coast, but the business remains most developed in Ghana. Now, almost every morning, Mensah wakes up on a thin mat at the White Park Fan Milk Depot in Accra, Ghana. He cleans his cart and stocks his cooler with the variety of products he thinks will sell best. He then heads into the sun and weaves through crowded streets to deliver dairy products to Accra’s residents. Each week, top sellers earn roughly 80 Ghana cedis ($53) in profit. Partly because Fan Milk requires franchisees to save about 10 percent of…

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has been in existence for more than 40 years, with an impressive track record of policy victories and influential corporate partnerships. In 2009, the organization began a new experiment. Under the leadership of Dave Witzel, a veteran social media strategist, EDF launched a network called the Innovation Exchange, focused on bringing together companies interested in sharing ideas and approaches to creating environmentally sustainable businesses. Since it started, the Innovation Exchange has used networks and social media tools as core elements of its strategy. For example, the organization made its internal strategy documents available to everyone by sharing them on a Google Group, and then solicited public feedback. In one instance, the Innovation Exchange posted a draft version of its elevator pitch on its blog; a university professor picked it up and shared it with her students, who proceeded to edit the statement. The result was a better pitch that the Innovation Exchange now uses.1 The Innovation Exchange’s efforts are at the forefront of a new way of working that is now being tested throughout EDF. At last year’s all-staff retreat, 350 EDF employees—including lawyers, scientists, and economists—participated in two days of intensive social media training and…

Si Kahn’s latest book, Creative Community Organizing, is a reflective collection of stories and songs from Kahn’s long and venerable history as a community organizer. He tells riveting tales from his experiences as an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Arkansas in the 1960s, with the Brookside Strike and other campaigns fighting for the rights of mine workers in Kentucky and mill workers throughout the South in the 1970s and 1980s, and, finally, with Grassroots Leadership, an organization he founded that fights for the abolition of for-profit prisons and an end to immigrant family detention. Kahn’s objective in writing the book is to help interested readers answer a question he often hears: “So do you think I should become an organizer?” By writing the book, he hopes to provide an inspirational, but honest picture of what it means to be an organizer so that idealists can make their own choices about whether this is the path for them. Like any good organizer, Kahn teaches through storytelling. His narrative voice is affable, inspirational, and humorous. The book is strongest when Kahn illustrates some of the complex ethical and strategic challenges organizers face through vivid examples from his own…

Nobody thought it would work. Padma Venkataraman, in New Delhi on business for the United Nations, wanted to do something more than just hand out rupees to the disfigured beggars with leprosy. She wanted to give them microloans to start their own businesses—something no bank or charity had ever attempted. Critics said the “untouchables” in India’s 700 leprosy colonies would not be able to exchange a lifetime of begging for work, let alone be able to repay loans. They also asked who would be willing to do business with leprosy patients in a country where people consider the disease to be a curse. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) deemed leprosy an “eliminated health problem” in 2000 because its prevalence had dropped to less than one case per 10,000, an estimated 12 million people in India are still suffering from the disease. For them, poverty and social stigma block their access to the free drug therapies that can cure leprosy, which is caused by a bacterium and damages skin, nerves, the upper respiratory tract, and eyes. Following rejection by families and coworkers, many people with leprosy band together in colonies centered in five southern Indian states. That’s where Venkataraman, the…

Jehan Ratnatunga, a 26-yearold Australian, thinks the best strategy for underwriting water sanitation projects in the developing world is to launch a nonprofit toilet paper company called Who Gives a Crap. Silly? Perhaps. But the idea proved just intriguing enough to earn Ratnatunga a spot as one of 25 fellows in the first-ever Unreasonable Institute taking place this summer in Boulder, Colo. Some 284 applicants from 46 countries vied for the chance to take part in this new social enterprise incubator. They first had to earn their way—and demonstrate their entrepreneurship chops—by competing for sponsors in a social media marketplace. Ratnatunga’s venture was one of the first to get funded, thanks to 228 sponsors who contributed a total of $6,500 to kick-start his idea. Daniel Epstein, one of four founders of the Unreasonable Institute, says the program is intended to fill two critical gaps facing many young social entrepreneurs: mentoring and access to capital. High-profile mentors who have signed on to help this summer include Bob Pattillo, founder of Gray Ghost Ventures; Dennis Whittle, CEO of GlobalGiving; Kjerstin Erickson, founder of FORGE; and David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World. In August, at the close of the institute,…

As a first-generation immigrant, I’ve always said that it’s difficult to know Americans and not fall in love with them. I know this from personal experience. On my first day at Stanford University in September 1974, my freshman roommate gave her only blanket to a lost, drenched, and freezing foreign student. I still hold a very special place in my heart for her. Fast-forward almost 30 years, and my job as U.S. assistant secretary of state at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) was to bring about many happy introductions between Americans and people from all over the world. Through its prestigious Fulbright scholarships and other programs, ECA has facilitated training and exchanges for more than 300 current or former heads of state, 1,500 cabinet-level ministers, 50 Nobel laureates, and 1 million other community leaders. Although ECA’s annual budget of $520 million seems sizable, it turns into a trickle when divvied up between 165 countries. I decided to stretch our dollars by forming partnerships with the many private corporations that could potentially benefit from ECA’s programs. I thought my strategy was logical. But I quickly learned that just because something is logical doesn’t mean that a government bureaucracy…

On Jan. 12 at 4:30 a.m., James Eberhard was woken by a telephone call from a U.S. State Department representative with the news that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had struck Haiti. “Can we turn up a text relief effort?” asked the representative. Eberhard called his colleagues at the Denver-based company Mobile Accord and its nonprofit division mGive. Eberhard is founder and chairman of both organizations, which work together to create cell phone text donation campaigns for charities. Within hours, Mobile Accord, mGive, and the American Red Cross had raised $170,000 for earthquake victims in Haiti. A flurry of text-giving promotions soon followed during the Super Bowl and Grammy Awards and in a public service announcement by first lady Michelle Obama. Appeals also spiraled through social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. The results shattered records. Within 72 hours of the earthquake, donations from text messaging exceeded $8 million, according to CNN. By March 4, the Red Cross had raised a total of $50 million for victims of the Haiti earthquake, $32.5 million of which came from text giving. The Haiti earthquake marked a tipping point in the evolution of text giving. Cell phones are now ubiquitous in the United States,…

In God’s Economy, Lew Daly has written perhaps the most complete chronicle of the legal and policy foundations of former President George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. Eschewing polarizing diatribe for rigorous historical scholarship, he provides deep insights into the Catholic and Dutch Reformed philosophies that guided the initiative, and puts forth a plausible framework for future faith-based policy. But like the Faith-Based Initiative itself, God’s Economy is driven by a deep faith in the superior efficacy of religious transformative services—and there is simply very little evidence to justify that faith. There are no scientifically valid studies—none whatsoever—showing that faith-based social service providers are more effective than their secular counterparts. That includes the works of conservative scholar Stephen Monsma, which form the empirical foundation for God’s Economy and have been lauded as a validation of the Faith-Based Initiative. It is Daly’s reliance on such ideologically driven research that ultimately bankrupts God’s Economy, which lacks a realistic grasp of how social services actually operate in America’s approximately 19,000 cities and 3,000 counties. It is an analysis conducted by aerial reconnaissance with little verification from facts on the ground, and as such, it is unlikely to have much of an impact on those…

As any comic book reader knows, the citizens of Gotham City have a handy way to call for help. Just power up the Bat-Signal and Batman will swoop to the rescue. It turns out that superheroesin- training are just as ready to answer the help call in communities around the world. A new online game called Evoke, promising “a crash course in changing the world,” had attracted more than 13,500 players from 130 countries soon after it launched in March. Their mission during the 10-week game: Learn about social innovation strategies to solve global crises— and then put their own good ideas into action close to home. Evoke is intended to leverage the enormous popularity of online gaming to engage a broader audience. The game grew out of conversations between African university leaders and the World Bank Institute, said Robert Hawkins, senior education specialist for the institute. Educators in Africa are eager “to prepare their young people to think more creatively about solutions to issues in their own communities,” Hawkins says. That’s challenging in an educational system that “emphasizes rote learning over innovative thinking.” Enter Jane McGonigal, award-winning alternate reality game designer and director of game research at the Institute…

In 1986, former British motorcycle racer Andrea Coleman was managing public relations for American motorcycle race champion Randy Mamola. Mamola wanted to lend his prestige to help fundraise for a children’s cause in Africa. Andrea and her husband, Barry Coleman, formerly a motorcycling correspondent and feature writer for the British Guardian newspaper, joined Mamola in raising funds through motorcycling events. They donated the money they raised to U.K.-based Save the Children, which used the funds to immunize children in Africa. In 1988, Save the Children invited Mamola and the Colemans to witness how the money they had raised was helping a remote community in Somalia. Barry Coleman and Mamola made the visit and noticed that the majority of health workers’ motorcycles had completely broken down, making it impossible to reach people in many rural villages. In some cases, the motorcycles just needed a new fuel filter. For want of simple maintenance and repairs, the two realized, motorcycles stayed grounded and people sickened and died. Soon after, Save the Children and the World Health Organization (WHO) asked Barry Coleman to visit Gambia in West Africa to assess its fleet of 86 health delivery motorcycles. He found that a single Save the…