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The Merkur Safety Razor has a chrome finish. Its double edge design provides a very close shave. Its handle is shaped like a barber pole. Chorme Plated with Bar. The safety razor has a straight edge especially great for an extra close shave.

View Merkur Model 38 Hd Classic “Barber Pole” Long Safety Razor Details

The Office of Technology Management (OTM) at the University of Illinois in Chicago is seeking applicants for the position of Assistant Director, Business Development.    The successful candidate is responsible for the management and execution of the business development activities of the Office of Technology Management (OTM) at UIC. The Assistant Director, Business Development and Technology Management will be responsible for conceptualizing, implementing and executing the business development strategy of the OTM as well as advancing the overall goals of the OTM. Other duties include:

Duties:

1. Create, facilitate, implement and lead external business development initiatives to advance University of Illinois at Chicago’s intellectual property and maximize its financial results in both the short and long term.

2. Create and implement an external business development strategy to increase the OTM’s exposure to potential licensees.

3. Utilizing the Salesforce.com customer relationship management platform, create performance measurements for the business development strategy, create transaction summaries on all external business development activities and provide post-transaction reviews for all processes related to the external business development activities.

4. Keep all stakeholders regularly informed on status of pending external business development transactions and developing corporate relationships.

5. Create strategic relationships with other Universities to explore opportunities to bundle like technologies and go to market with complete business solutions.

6. Assist Director in the management of the unit. Develop, administer and evaluate major programs or projects.

7. Supervise Technology Management team.

8. Serve on OTM leadership team to ensure operating activities are within University policy.

9. Participate in conferences and seminars conducted by the University, Unit, or professional organizations specific to furthering the OTM’s external business development initiatives.

10. Participate in team project, with all other members of the OTM staff, regarding strategic planning and preparation of the Unit’s annual operating plan and budget.

11. Develop an annual Professional Development plan.

12. Act on behalf of the Director of OTM in her absence.

13. Serve on University, campus, and other committees/teams as assigned.

Qualifications:

Minimum qualifications include a Bachelor’s degree in a related field and five years’ relevant professional experience in business, academic, or government in business development and/or operational management; Master’s degree or professional degree (professional experience and accomplishments may be considered in lieu of the advanced degree requirement) preferred. Other required qualifications include:  proven ability to exercise independent judgment and discretion to make sound decisions; strong organizational and prioritization skills with the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously; demonstrated keen business intuition, results orientation, and interest in advancing business development activities for university technologies; outstanding teamwork and influence-management skills with the ability to successfully work with others at all levels; effective leadership skills with the demeanor, business maturity, intellect and integrity required to establish immediate credibility and establish results; exemplary skills and acumen to assume roles of greater responsibility over time; and proficient computer skills (e.g., PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc.).

This is a full-time 12-month Academic Professional, benefits eligible position.   For full consideration, candidates must apply to and submit a letter of application, resume, and names/addresses/phone numbers of three professional references by May 12, 2010 at https://uajobs.hr.uillinois.edu/.

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Via Prison Planet.com » Sci Tech

Jeff Poor
Newsbusters
April 29, 2010

If you try to sweep your problems under the rug, they’ll go away, right? Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal and best known for his “hockey stick graph” hopes so.

On Fox News Channel’s April 28 broadcast of “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” Elmer Beauregard of Minnesotans for Global Warming appeared to explain the reasoning behind a video that drew the ire Mann. The video mocked the Penn State professor’s alleged attempt to cover up data from tree rings that would indicate there was no global warming.

“Well, I don’t know if you remember, but last fall, Obama was pushing the no cap-and-trade to go through the Senate because he wanted to have something to bring to Copenhagen,” Beauregard said. “And just then Climategate broke and the mainstream press really wasn’t covering it, so the coalition got together and we tried to think of a way to kind of bring this into the forefront of the American public. And I said I could make a funny YouTube video. And so, I did it to the tune of ‘Draggin’ the Line’ by Tommy James and The Shondells and put it up on YouTube and it went viral. And then Rush [Limbaugh] played it on his show and it went supernova.”

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeff-poor/2010/04/28/hide-decline-global-warming-video-creator-says-mann-backlash-effort-clean#ixzz0mVDtn8hj

I blogged yesterday about the disaster in Greece, and its rapid spread to other European countries.  Today the fish-eye is turning on countries outside of the PIIGS, including Japan, Britain . . . and us.  According to the Financial Times, “The Fund has calculated that almost all advanced economies need to tighten fiscal policy significantly in the coming decade in order to stabilise debt at 60 per cent of national income by 2030 and the tightening needed in the US, Japan and the UK is just as bad as that required in Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.”

So perhaps naturally, I’ve been thinking more about the parallels to the Great Depression that I talked about yesterday.  Arguably, the Great Depression was the first global financial crisis, infecting the developed world along with the developing.  So it’s interesting–and frightening–to observe the similarities between that crisis and this one.

• Excessive international capital flows trigger an initial financial crisis  For a number of reasons, there was a whole lot of gold flowing into New York from abroad in the 1920s.  That money turned into, among other things, margin loans and credit to fuel the Florida real estate boom.  (Yes, there was a previous iteration of the current disaster).  All that leverage eventually collapsed, turning a busted bubble into an international disaster.
• A second panic emerges more than a year after the initial trigger.  By late 1930, people believed they had turned the corner.  Things were bad, of course, but people had lived through panics before, and after the initial shock, they expected to start rebuilding.
• Fiscal crises on the periphery turn into banking crises  Creditanstalt, the Austrian bank that ultimately is thought to have triggered our second bank panic when it failed, went down after acquiring a failed bank whose liabilities turned out to be more than Creditanstalt could handle.  But this wasn’t just a banking problem–it was a fiscal problem.  Austria had a mix of fiscal problems, many of them stemming from the credit contraction, and could not afford, politically or financially, to bail out a major bank.
• Excessively tight monetary policy plays a central role  There is a direct correlation between how long a country stayed on its gold standard, and how deeply it suffered during the Great Depression.   Defending your currency meant high interest rates that crushed recovery.
• Bad monetary policy has international effects  In the thirties, the mechanism was international gold flows; now, it is the euro.

I’m not sure how much to make of this.  If you look hard enough, you can always find similarities in situations.  But they are striking enough to make me wonder if they aren’t part of some broad template for international banking crises.  Not that I’m exactly the first person to suggest this, but the mess in Greece, and the resulting contagion, makes it seem more plausible.

Dan Coats appears to have broken through in Indiana’s GOP primary for that state’s US Senate race. A poll out this morning from the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics has Coats in front outside the margin of error. Here’s the breakdown:

Dan Coats               36%

John Hostettler    24%

Marlin Stutzman  18%

Undecided              13%

Don Bates, Jr.         6%

Richard Behney     4%

The poll was conducted by SurveyUSA via recorded message delivered by random telephone calls (refered to as a ‘robo-poll’). There were 407 Hoosiers questioned who said they were likely to vote in the Republican primary. Calls were conducted from April 22nd-27th. The margin of error in the poll is plus/minus 5%.

The primary is Tuesday, May 4th.

UPDATE: The most surprising single piece of data in the poll was Coats strong standing among likely voters who “identify with the Tea Party movement”. In that group…Coats got 30%…Stutzman 23%…Hostettler 21%…Undecided 11%…Bates 9% and Behney 4%.

Why is that surprising? Coats did not win a single straw poll at any of the debates sponsored by Tea Party groups. Organizers have repeatedly told me that of the five Republican candidates…the Tea Party favorites are Stutzman, Behney and Bates.

In fact, Behney is a Tea Party organizer himself. Stutzman has courted the Tea Party vote and has won four Tea Party debate straw polls. The one candidate who has seemed to struggle for support among Tea Party activists is Coats.

Yet, this polls suggests Coats may have mended fences with Tea Partiers on issues such as Coats’ voting for a semi-automatic weapons ban while a Senator in the 1990’s…and Coats work as a DC lobbyist.

Tea Partiers may have grown pragmatic here in the waning days of the primary campaign…getting behind Coats because of his base of support among the regulars of the Indiana Republican Party. But if that’s true…it’s the first time this reporter has heard it.

Aviary has been building a name for itself and, unlike some if not many companies out there, it’s mostly due to the quality of its products. Its online image editors are remarkably potent and the company has been pushing a steady stream of updates and new features. One of the lesser known apps, though, has nothing to do with image … (read more)

In a distinct break from terse messages sent from his iPad, Steve Jobs has posted a 1,700 word missive on his Apple’s website. Broken into six sections, the essay explains Apple’s stance on Flash in detail.

Jobs attacks Flash for being closed, crash-prone, and battery draining, while defending Apple for supporting open standards and trying to create the best user experience for mobile devices. All that may be true, or not, but what this really about is control.

Countering complaints against iPhone OS being a walled garden of an operating system and development platform, Jobs argues that Flash is “100% proprietary” because development is controlled by Adobe. In contrast, Apple fosters “open standards” like HTML5 and technologies like WebKit, even though iPhone OS itself is admittedly proprietary.

Jobs then attempts to counter the argument that a device without Flash denies users the “full web” experience. He notes that H.264 is an alternative format that makes video available from a long list of sites that does not include Hulu. As for the lack of Flash games on Apple devices, Jobs admits that’s true, but argues there are more “games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.” That may be true, but all those games require an iPhone OS device, locking out tens of millions of people with nothing better to do than play Farmville at work.

Turning to “reliability, security, and performance,” Jobs slams Flash for security and reiterates that “Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.” He then points out that, despite promising a mobile version of Flash, Adobe has repeatedly failed to deliver. Jobs notes that “We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?” Ouch.

That leads into complaints about battery life, the example being ten hours of iPad video with H.264 versus five hours with Flash. Regarding the Flash interface, Jobs complains that Flash is designed for mouse input, not touch. Since most Flash websites would have to be redesigned to incorporate touch input, “why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?” Ouch, again.

Finally, there is “the most important reason.” Cross-platform apps result in the “lowest common denominator set of features.” Taking a another dig at Adobe for needing 10 years to develop a fully Cocoa version of Creative Suite, Jobs declares that Apple wants developers to use the best native tools to create the best user experience in applications. That way “everyone wins,” well, except for Adobe.

Really, it’s about control. Couching it in terms of the user experience is fine, and true, in my opinion. However, as is made clear repeatedly in the essay, Apple is determined to remain in complete control of the development of its mobile devices, from the hardware to the operating system to the application development process. The question then becomes whether Apple will be able to do so.

With the statement by Google that Flash will be included as part of Android, and Microsoft signaling that Flash will be a part of Windows Phone 7, though not the first version, it’s essentially Apple against the rest of the world. Apple may indeed succeed in “leaving the past behind” with Flash and ushering in the era of HTML5. However, should market pressures ultimately force Apple to allow Flash, it will be because the lack of Flash has hurt the viability of iPhone OS. The “past” may yet catch up with Apple, but that has yet to stop Steve Jobs and company from looking towards the future.

Modified image courtesy of Flickr user plasticbag

Facing South’s report last week on a protest last week by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity — which targeted the Center for Responsible lending, a champion of financial reform, as a symbol of “Wall Street corruption” — has made quite a splash.

A quick recap: Last week, 20 some members of AfP descended on the offices of the Center in Durham, NC, saying the consumer non-profit was tied to Wall Street scandals. How so? Several years ago, the Center received a $15 million gift from John Paulson, a hedge fund tycoon now implicated in the Goldman Sachs inquiry. The Center also used to employ Eric Stein, who now works in Obama’s Treasury Department.

That’s all the protesters needed to know: They demanded that the Wall Street reform bill in Congress be stopped, a full Congressional investigation be launched, and that Stein be fired (or, to make it rhyme, “Stein Must Resign!”).

I talked with several of the AfP protesters (you can see the video here); none I interviewed knew where Paulson’s $15 million went. But the Center said it was no mystery: It launched the Institute for Foreclosure Legal Assistance, which gives training to legal clinics about how to help families facing foreclosure. It isn’t even based at the Center; it’s run by the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

And the Americans for Prosperity members definitely didn’t mention that their own organization is one of several business-funded groups that have much closer ties to Wall Street and financial interests than consumer groups like the Center.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC took our report one step further — and used our video from the AfP rally in North Carolina — to look at another front group, the Consumer Rights League. Despite its innocuous name, and an acronym identical to the Center for Responsible Lending, the Consumer Rights League was created and funded by banking interests to oppose reform.

Check out Maddow’s report here:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Consumer Rights League has its own ties to the controversy: As Facing South reported and Maddow mentioned, the founder of the League is Michael Flynn — currently an editor at BigGovernment.com, a conservative website that has led the charge against the Center and Stein.

Teasing out these connections among the myriad front groups opposed to Wall Street reform was the focus of another excellent follow-up piece in The Independent Weekly, an award-winning paper based in Durham, NC.

Lisa Sorg and Samiha Khanna of the Indy pulled together this useful chart of the ties between these organizations, which together are designed to give the appearance of widespread opposition to policies like cracking down on Wall Street (click on the chart for a bigger version):

If anything, the Indy’s chart may
understate the close web of relationships between these groups. For
example: The
John Locke Foundation, a conservative policy group in North Carolina,
has a more direct tie to Americans for Prosperity, aside from their
common
benefactor Art Pope. This became clear at last week’s AfP rally,
which was led by North Carolina conservative activist Chad Adams. AfP-NC
recently hired Adams to help raise
money, although he’s

still listed as the director of the Locke Foundation’s Center for
Local Innovation
and as a Locke employee.

Adams has another connection that’s
relevant to the Wall Street reform debate: Last year, he ran — and narrowly
lost — to be chairman of the N.C. Republican Party, basing his
campaign among Tea Party
groups
and other GOP insurgents.

Yesterday, Republicans relented on a five-day filibuster that aimed to stop movement of the Wall Street reform bill. But AfP is staying resolute: It just released a broadside via podcast — apparently by Phil Kerpen, an AfP leader and Fox News contributor who’s also targeted the Center and Stein — calling it a “very, very bad bill” and encouraging the GOP to once again vote to end debate.

There have been a lot of complaints that No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise is stricken with sluggish loading times and freezing. Marvelous Entertainment has heard the call and promises a patch coming next month.
 
 
 
 

About as fast as the online store started selling the much anticipation DROID Incredible by HTC, Verizon sold out of internal inventory posting a note that new stock will be in May 4th 2010. If you were one of the pre-orders you should be in luck, otherwise head into the store to get one!

[Via Boy Genius Report]

from guardian, 29 April 2010: “Mervyn King is warning that the victor in next week’s election will be forced into austerity measures that will keep the party out of power for a generation, according to the US economist David Hale. “I saw the governor of the Bank of England [Mervyn King] last week when I was in London and he told me whoever wins this election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be,” Hale said in an interview on Australian TV reported by Reuters…” more

A new paper on arXiv shows an interesting approach to visualizing time in systems with circadian or other rhythms. I haven’t figured out if it’s useful for oscillatory dynamic systems more generally, but it makes some neat visuals:

The method makes it possible to see changes in behavior in time series with waaay to many oscillations to explore on a normal 2D time-value plot:

Read more on arXiv.

Orange UK revenue grew 2.3 percent this Q1 to €1.82 billion, though, following confirmation of its merger with T-Mobile UK, parent France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) is now disregarding it in its business reporting.

Too bad. The parent saw less income in every region except Rest Of World, as it reported 5.5 percent lower EBITDA of €3.76 billion on 2.7 percent smaller income of €10.9 billion.

The group says European regulatory measures forcing telcos to reduce call termination fees wiped €270 million of its quarterly income, and will hit it by “about €1 billion” over the whole year.

Data revenue in its native France jumped 24.1 percent from the previous year, nearly a third of network income. And Orange TV customers there jumped 34 percent to 2.9 million – France is a world leader for IPTV take-up, and Orange is ahead of the pack in France. Orange TV clocked up 2.7 million pay-per-view buys during the quarter – that’s 53 percent up from Q1 2009.

It’s now committing 12 percent of its income to capital expenditure, notably fitting out France with a fibre optic network.

Release | Slides | Webcast

Green:Net, the only conference dedicated to exploring how information technology — software, computing and the web — can fight climate change, will be coming to you live today from the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. The show kicks off at 8:30 a.m. PT runs all day. For live-blogging of each session, head over to our sister site, Earth2Tech. Enjoy!

Image courtesy of huangjiahui’s photostream

Iced-tea maker AriZona is experiencing some collateral damage in the immigration debate over a new law in the state of Arizona. Since the law passed, making it a crime for illegal immigrants to be in the state and requires police to check citizens for evidence of legal status, opponents have called for a boycott of the state. On Tuesday, a comic writer named Travis Nichols suggested—jokingly, we think—that consumers should also boycott AriZona iced tea because it’s "the drink of fascists." For whatever reason, others took Nichols up on the idea, even though the brand, now owned by Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons, is based in New York. Responding to the bone-headed criticism, Don Vultaggio, founder and chairman of AriZona Beverages, set the record straight on the company’s Web site: "We are very proud to be an American company with roots in New York," he wrote. No word yet if JCPenney brand Arizona Jeans is caught up in the debate as well. The company wisely changed the name to AZ Jeans a while back.

—Posted by Todd Wasserman

Concentrated Solar Set to Shine

A California-based startup, Amonix, has received $129 million in venture-capital investments to further its commercialization of concentrated photovoltaic technology. The company’s product combines powerful lenses, a tracking system, and solar cells for large, highly efficient solar-power installations. The funding could give the company, and the emerging field of concentrated photovoltaics, the boost it needs for widespread utility-scale deployments.

“We’ve looked at 100 solar companies in the last 18 months, and Amonix is the one that stood out to us as having breakout potential,” says Ben Kortlang, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led the recent investment.

Amonix recently launched its newest solar concentrator, which converts one fourth of the sunlight that falls on it into AC electricity. That’s compared with the approximately 18 percent system efficiency–including inverters that convert solar’s DC power to useable AC power–of the most efficient photovoltaic systems that don’t use special optics or track the sun.

To collect sunlight as efficiently as possible, Amonix starts with a massive 23.5-meter-by-15-meter array. The array is covered with thin, plastic Fresnel lenses, each measuring 350 square centimeters, that focus sunlight to an area that’s .7 square centimeters. The sunlight, concentrated to 500 times its normal intensity, hits an ultra-efficient multi-junction solar cell that converts 39 percent of the light into electricity. The cell, made by Spectrolab, is the most efficient in the world, demonstrating more than 41 percent efficiency in lab tests. To further enhance performance, Amonix uses a tracking system that keeps the lenses pointed within .8 degrees of the angle of the sun throughout the day.

Russia’s Putin voices fears for polar bears

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, better known in the West for his tough-guy image, expressed concern Thursday for the fate of Arctic polar bears threatened by climate change.

“The polar bear is under threat. Their population is currently only 25,000 individuals,” Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying after a recent trip to an island in the Arctic Ocean.

Although Putin is better known in the West for pushing a muscular foreign policy and tightening control over the Russian political system, he has occasionally shown compassion for wildlife and nature.

His press service and the Russian Geographical Society said that Putin went to the Arctic to visit Russia’s most northerly border post and take part in a Russian scientific expedition.

“The reduction in the surface of the ice sheet, the melting of the ice, all this adds to the complications in the conditions of life” of the polar bears, he said.

He helped scientists put a tracking collar on a 230-kilo (506-pound) polar bear as part of an observation programme,

Last year he condemned the hunting of baby whitecoat seals, saying it was a “bloody business”

The big question: How much CO2 can the Earth hold?

The Dutch used to discover new worlds across unexplored seas. Now, they are beginning to trace the edges of a new undiscovered country, and it is right beneath their shores.

The Netherlands, a country that chose to build many of its cities below sea level, is famous for its pragmatic, long-term planning. So it should be no surprise that, when it comes to efforts to store carbon dioxide underground for a millennium or more, Holland has been leading the way, planning for years to turn declining natural gas fields off their shores into storage sites.

Initial estimates of the fields were promising. It seemed 40 years of emissions from eight large coal-fired power plants could be stored. Then scientists looked closer, probing each site’s geology, to disturbing results.

Some fields were too small or perforated by drills to store CO2, they found. Others were stubborn, their rocks likely to resist the injection of the gas.

Soon enough, the Dutch had to cut their storage estimate in half.

It is a disappointing result that should be kept in mind as estimates of CO2 storage potential, which mostly exist on countrywide or regional levels, are refined and localized, said Filip Neele, a research geologist here at the geosciences branch of TNO, the Dutch national lab of applied sciences.

In some cases, Neele would not be surprised to see storage estimates fall by up to 95 percent compared with the original projection. Though even then, he added, the capacity would be still large thanks to the vast size of the available storage formations.

“This is likely to be true for any large-scale inventory of storage capacity,” Neele said. “If you look at a country scale and try to assess the storage potential, you’re very likely to grossly overestimate the storage potential.”

Welcome to the new terra incognita. As politicians and businesses push forward with carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as their “bridge” to renewable energy, geologists are scrambling to properly estimate how much CO2 can be stored in deep, water-flush rock formations — called saline aquifers — that have long been ignored by, well, pretty much everyone. They are blank spaces below the map and are only beginning to be better understood.

House panel approves $84B research, innovation bill

The House Science and Technology Committee last night approved, 29-8, an $84 billion research and education bill that reauthorizes an innovative energy technology research program at the Energy Department.

The committee approved the bill (H.R. 5116) with a substitute amendment that would keep key science agencies on a path to doubling their budgets from 2007 appropriated levels after hours of debate on nearly 60 amendments.

“Honestly, this bill is a big deal and is important,” said Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.). “It’s a big deal and important for our country and for this committee’s stature in the Congress. It’s a big deal and an important step in leading our innovation agenda.”

In addition to authorizing big boosts in funding for DOE’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Standards and Technology over the next five years, the legislation would authorize $3.15 billion in spending at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, through fiscal 2015. That funding level, laid out in a manager’s amendment offered by Gordon, is a 7 percent decrease from the funding level passed out of subcommittee last month.

The funding cut in the manager’s amendment — 10 percent of the original bill’s authorization level — was a move to earn the support of Republicans who have lamented such big spending increases during an economic downturn. But the effort did not appease all concerns.

Most Americans still breathing dirty air — Lung Association

More than half of the U.S. population lives in areas whose air is often unhealthy, the American Lung Association said in a report released today.

The group’s annual State of the Air report found that while air quality in many regions of the country has improved, about 58 percent of Americans — about 175 million people — still live in areas with dangerous levels of soot or smog.

Compared with last year’s report, the study found that fewer Americans live in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution. The 2009 assessment showed that about 186 million people lived in areas with unhealthy air (Greenwire, April 29, 2009).

The report looks at levels of ozone and particle pollution from monitoring sites across the country between 2006 and 2008. Those are the most current quality-assured data available nationwide for the analysis, according to the study.

The association credits the improvements in part to reductions in emissions from coal-fired power plants and the transition to cleaner diesel fuels and engines.

“State of the Air 2010 proves with hard data that cleaning up air pollution produces healthier air,” said Mary Partridge, American Lung Association national board chairwoman.

Still, said Janice Nolen, the association’s assistant vice president of national policy and advocacy, “one thing to keep in mind is, this is not clean air.” She said that while the country has made improvements, “we are not where we need to be.”

World needs clean energy revolution: UN chief

Rich and poor nations need a “clean energy revolution” in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said here Wednesday.

“We cannot achieve the (poverty-reduction) Millennium Development Goals without providing access to affordable modern energy,” he said as he opened a day-long energy conference.

Noting that 1.6 billion people around the world lack access to electricity while two to three billion still rely on traditional energy sources such as firewood, peat or dung, the UN boss said access to energy must be expanded “in the cleanest, most efficient way possible.”

Ban spoke as he launched a report by his advisory group on energy and climate change that calls for “universal access to modern energy services” by 2030 and stresses the need to cut energy intensity by 40 percent also by 2030.

Energy intensity is measured by the quantity of energy per unit of economic activity or output.

“The aim of providing universal access should be to create improved conditions for economic take-off, contribute to attaining (the development goals by the 2015 target) and enable the poorest of the poor to escape poverty,” the report said.

It added that curbing global energy intensity would require developed and developing countries to strenghthen their capacity to implement effective policies, market-based mechanisms, investment tools and regulations with respect to energy use.

GE’s leader issues an energy warning

While the rest of the world invests in renewable, nuclear and cleaner energy sources, the U.S. continues to fall further behind, General Electric’s chairman and CEO said Wednesday in Houston.

In an interview before the company’s annual meeting, Jeffrey Immelt said the situation eventually could put the nation at a competitive disadvantage.

“We just seem to be stalled,” he said.

Over the next five years, China will have installed five times more than the U.S. in power capacity, Europe is moving aggressively into offshore wind power, and Asia is focusing on solar energy, he said.

Only two of about 50 nuclear plants under construction globally are in the U.S., he said. “It’s just not enough.”

Immelt called for a comprehensive government effort to put standards into place so businesses can invest in technologies that have a solid future.

“Some leadership in Washington would be helpful,” he said, emphasizing that he’s not focused on any one technology.

If the United States doesn’t do it, GE will have to go overseas. “We have to go where the action is,” he said.

GE recently announced it would invest about $200  million in European offshore wind projects, especially in the United Kingdom and Norway. The investment will create about 2,000 jobs.

A Fiat resolveu ser criativa em sua campanha de marketing para o Novo Uno, que está prestes a ser lançado no mercado nacional e já está interagindo com o público alvo do veículo (pessoas mais jovens) utilizando duas coisas que estão se tornando uma febre na internet. Entenda-se: O Twitter e o Formspring.

Acredito que o Twitter dispensa maiores explicações sobre como funciona. E o Formspring é uma página onde os usuários podem deixar perguntas para a empresa e elas serão publicadas no dia do lançamento do Novo Uno, e essa página foi entitulada “a maior entrevista coletiva do mundo”.

Se quiser tirar alguma dúvida a respeito do Novo Uno, basta acessar o formulário de perguntas do Formspring, ou então seguí-los no Twitter acessando @novofiatuno.

Via | Blogauto

Normally, I wouldn’t say that having dinner with a famous person merits any commentary.  Honestly, if I had to eat a meal with the Beckhams, I would probably take it to my grave and never tell a soul.

But some celebrities are transcendent enough that when you hear someone met, dined with, or even saw them, you feel a wave of jealousy creep over your body.  That’s how many of us feel about Bill Murray, who has been a constant in cinematic comedy for the past 30 years.  He hasn’t gotten cheap, he hasn’t sold out, and he’s always been really really funny.  And cool.

How cool? Well, here he is at SXSW with RZA and GZA from Wu-Tang, taking over the bar and serving the drinks himself:

Not doing it for you? Fine. Here’s a story about him getting pulled over (drunk) in a golf cart in Stockholm and refusing a breathalyzer.

Sold?  Thought so.  Anyway, this reporter from New York Magazine had the pleasure, honor, and privilege of sitting down by the man we know by many names:  Carl Spackler, Peter Venkman, Steve Zissou, ummm…Bob.

Here is her story.  May her song never die.

Related posts:

1. Alcohol Test Fail
2. The $52,000 Golf Cart
3. Golf Ball Launcher Turns You Into Tiger Woods (Sort Of)

We’re happy to announce the DROID Incredible by HTC is finally available to purchase for Verizon Wireless! If you haven’t caught all the leaks, specs, videos and phone photos we’ve posted of the HTC Incredible… here’s your chance. Better yet go to a store and check out the latest in Android hardware and software collaboration atop HTC’s SENSE user interface which brings your social life to your home screen.