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When Consumer Reports tells us that something ain’t right, we generally listen. They give us unbiased opinions on everything from flashlights to automobiles, and their results are pretty darn accurate. They just recently conducted a test on the new 2010 Lexus GX 460 SUV (basically a rebadged Toyota 4-Runner), and didn’t just give it a poor rating, but a flat-out DON’T BUY recommendation based on the following:

“When pushed to its limits on a handling course on CR’s test track, the rear of the GX CR purchased slid out until the vehicle was almost sideways before the electronic stability control system was able to regain control,” reads a press release. The magazine said it: “believes that in real-world driving, that situation could lead to a rollover accident, which could cause serious injury or death.”

If you watch the video you’ll see that the tester was able to induce one hell of a non-intentional drift, which is something you don’t want to happen God forbid you need to initiate an emergency maneuver. For this reason alone we wholeheartedly agree with their findings.

Without knowing it, we all probably have a ploughman’s lunch pretty regularly. It’s basically a deconstructed cheese sandwich: a hunk of cheese, a knob of rustic bread, sometimes some greens, sometimes some meat, a tangy pickle of sorts or some kind chutney-like condiment, and an apple. And a beer on the side. Imagine a kid’s lunchbox, and it’d probably contain a lot of the same components. Well, except for the beverage.

Here, four variations on a classic English ploughman’s lunch.

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Actress Rachel Weisz is putting on her pillbox hat to play former First Lady Jackie Kennedy in Jackie, an adeptly-titled biopic directed by her fiance Darren Aronofsky, which follows the events of the days following President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Found under: Windows Mobile, Windows Media Center, Remote control, Internet,

If you are looking for simple functional and easy to use remote control for windows media center here is one app for windows mobile phones. This software uses VMC Controller to connect to Windows Media Center and lets you control basic functions along with displaying media info.It can be used for menu navigation playpause nextprevious volume control playback position seek and tv channel updown. The developer is looking for testers to trial it on their handsets providing feedback an

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Sales of Columbia foreclosed homes in coastal areas have been surging, raising hopes that the Columbia housing market is getting back some of the strength it lost over the past two years.

Cash buyers have been snapping up coastal homes as their prices plunged to levels very attractive to investors. For instance, in the Hilton Head area, house sales spiked by 64 percent as the median sales price tumbled by 25 percent to $215,000. Members of the South Carolina Realtors trade association said that the behavior of home prices varied by neighborhoods. As prices continue to plunge in coastal areas, prices are rising in central neighborhoods.

Nick Kremydas, executive director of the realtor association, said that the median sales price in Columbia rose by 2.3 percent to $131,000 in February, slowing down sales by 2.5 percent compared to February last year. Buyers and investors shifted to the coastal where bargains can be found.

In contrast, sales of homes in rural areas such as Orangeburg plunged by 60 percent.

Sales of Columbia foreclosed homes followed the upward trend in sales of foreclosed homes for sale in South Carolina in February. House sales statewide rose by 12.5 percent during the month. Sales prices also generally held up, with the sales price median holding steady statewide at $134,000.

According to members of the realtor association, one of the major drivers of house sales in February was the federal tax credit scheme expansion. The tax credits given to move-up buyers spurred existing homeowners to consider the possibility of selling their homes and taking advantage of opportunities in buying bigger but cheaper homes.

To help spur more house sales and to help distressed homeowners keep their homes, state legislators have passed a law reforming the South Carolina unemployment agency. The new legislation provides additional powers to the Security Commission, such as the authority to prosecute fraud cases, limit employment benefits for employees terminated for gross misconduct and conduct periodic audits of agency finances. The new law also requires the agency to provide updates to lawmakers and the governor about the unemployment trust fund.

The state of South Carolina has borrowed over $800 million from the federal government since 2008 to help pay benefits to over 250,000 unemployed people throughout the state.

According to state officials, the new law will spur employment opportunities expected to help distressed homeowners and cut down further surges in number of Columbia foreclosed homes.

Find more foreclosure listings in Columbia, SC:

• Home Auctions in Columbia
• Foreclosure Investing in Columbia

I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be an independent filmmaker. This week, even Sony—yes, Sony—showed off a prototype “entry level 35mm” camcorder. In other words, their $100,000+ CineAltas could price compete with RED…or even lower? More »

Another day, another exoneration for climate scientists.  Here’s the Guardian’s headline on the findings of the inquiry panel, which was led by Lord Oxburgh, the former chair of the House of Lords science and technology select committee:

Scientists cleared of malpractice in UEA’s hacked emails inquiry

Researchers ‘dedicated if slightly disorganised’, but basic science was fair, finds inquiry commissioned by university

Scientists who are “slightly disorganised”?  Off with their heads!  (see “Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists“)

Last month, the House of Commons exonerated Phil Jones:  Based on their inquiry and evidence, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason … to challenge the scientific consensus … that ‘global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”

This is a busy day for me, so I’ll just repost BigCityLib on the latest exoneration:

Story about Lord Oxburgh’s inquiry into CRU practices here. Some excerpts:

The scientists at the centre of the row over the hacked climate emails have been cleared of any deliberate malpractice by the second of three inquiries into their conduct.…

The report concluded: “We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.”

… The panel was not tasked specifically with looking at the way CRU handled access to its data and Freedom of Information requests from members of the public but it commented that there were “a host of important unresolved questions” arising from the application of FoI to academic research. “We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it,” the report said. It did criticised the government’s policy of charging for access to data. “This is unfortunate and seems inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere in government.”

So, this puts Oxburgh’s panel at odds with the Parliamentary Inquiry, which seems to want the data handed out willy-nilly. Furthermore, a number of climate scientists have noted and expanded upon the issue raised in this last couple of (bolded) sentences, including James Annan:

Let me introduce you to the NERC policy on Intellectual Property. Short version: “Who owns the intellectual property? We do.” The UK Ministry of Defence (who run UK Met Office and therefore the Hadley Centre) is orders of magnitude worse in its defensive and bean-counting approach to the supply of, well, just about anything that they have and anyone else wants. The bottom line is (or certainly was, when I worked there) that NERC employees are under pressure to sell anything that can be sold. And if someone asks for something, that means it must surely be worth something, right? Of course this is an attitude that the scientists – who know that they can’t really get any significant price for their work – have always implacably opposed, but we don’t really count for much when the politicians are demanding budget cuts and percentage returns on investment.

There were some complaints about CRU’s statistical practices:

The panel did raise doubts about the statistical input into scientific papers authored by researchers at CRU. “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” it concluded.

…which the University of East Anglia responds to as follows:

The Report points out where things might have been done better. One is to engage more with professional statisticians in the analysis of data. Another, related, point is that more efficacious statistical techniques might have been employed in some instances (although it was pointed out that different methods may not have produced different results). Specialists in many areas of research acquire and develop the statistical skills pertinent to their own particular data analysis requirements. However, we do see the sense in engaging more fully with the wider statistics community to ensure that the most effective and up-to-date statistical techniques are adopted and will now consider further how best to achieve this.

But otherwise, a clean bill of health….  [T]he usual suspects … are, at this very moment (taking into account the Penn State investigation of Mann), batting 0-for-3.

The entire report can be read here.

Related Posts:

• The rise of anti-science cyber bullying; Morano says climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged.”
• Glenn Beck:  “There aren’t enough knives” for ‘dishonored’ climate scientists to kill themselves

The 47-nation/three international-governance-body Washington Nuclear Security Summit has concluded. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) just yawns:

“The summit’s purported accomplishment is a nonbinding communique that largely restates current policy and makes no meaningful progress in dealing with nuclear terrorism threats or the ticking clock represented by Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a prominent critic of Obama’s nuclear policies.

“Prominent” is not the same as “sensible,” or even “alert.” Yes, it’s true. The summit did not cause the Iranian government to renounce its illicit uranium enrichment. Nor did it convince the North Koreans to relinquish their stockpile of nuclear weapons. But there’s just no way that Kyl’s criticism holds water, and it calls into question whether he actually understands what just happened over the last two days.

As I wrote yesterday, we now enter a period of two years’ worth of implementation on nuclear security, and that will determine the ultimate success of the conference. But nothing here “restates current policy” for 46 nations on the planet. Here’s Laura Holgate, a National Security Council senior aide, explaining to the press yesterday what the communique will yield:

We would expect to see consolidation of stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and reduction in the use of highly enriched uranium. Action on the communiqué would increase the number of countries signing up to some of the key international treaties that you’ve been hearing about on nuclear security/nuclear terrorism, as well as add to those countries who are cooperating under mechanisms like the global initiatives to combat nuclear terrorism, building capacity for nuclear security among law enforcement, industry and technical personnel.

The communiqué also calls for the International Atomic Energy Agency to receive the financial and expert support that it needs to develop nuclear security guidelines and to provide advice for its member states on how to implement them.

None of this consensus existed before the summit. Certainly no concerted action outside what the U.S. and the Russians agreed to do under the Nunn-Lugar nuclear-security initiative took place to any meaningful degree. Kyl is entitled to be skeptical that any of this is meaningful. He’s not entitled to say the nuclear-security landscape is unchanged from Sunday.

Similarly, to say that the summit represents “no meaningful progress in dealing with nuclear terrorism threats” is to ignore the fact that Chile and Canada and Mexico just agreed to swap out their highly-enriched uranium stocks and the U.S. and Russia just agreed to destroy enough plutonium for 17,000 nuclear bombs and Ukraine will eliminate all its highly-enriched uranium, to say nothing of other “house gifts” for elimination of weapons-grade material. Nor does it describe the commitment made to strengthen, with real verifiable financial investment, legal, regulatory and export mechanisms to monitor the movement of nuclear material and lock down what nuclear material exists. “To the extent that countries maintain nuclear materials — whether in their civil or military sector — the solution to making sure that terrorists don’t get it is straightforward,” Gary Samore of the NSC explained yesterday. “It’s just a question of putting the resources in place — the programs in place in order to ensure that it’s well protected and accounted for.” That actually removes the threat of nuclear terrorism, since if terrorists can’t get the nuclear material, there can’t be any nuclear terrorism. Again: while implementation is the key, the nuclear-security world is different and much better this morning than it was on Sunday.

Finally: What about Iran? The Obama administration believes it’s gotten Chinese President Hu Jintao’s acquiescence to pushing a sanctions resolution through the United Nations Security Council after a meeting between Obama and Hu at the summit. Again, we’ll see. But a consequence of the summit, clearly, is diplomatic isolation of proliferant countries or violators of the nuclear-security rules of the road. In a matter of weeks, that isolation will be marshaled at the U.N., first in a sanctions resolution targeting the Iranian regime’s financial interests and then in a May conference to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If Kyl would prefer the U.S. simply wave its fist at Iran and fail to rally international support for confronting its enrichment activities, we saw the result of that approach over the past seven years: thousands of spinning Iranian centrifuges. And hundreds of tons of unsecured nuclear material that terrorists could attempt to steal.

Lost star Matthew Fox sat down for a chat with the May issue of Playboy and it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to recent tabloid rumors which claimed Fox had bedded a twentysomething stripper unbeknownest to his wife of almost two decades.

In February, exotic dancer Stefani Talbott told In Touch Weekly that she met the father of two in the summer of 2009 when she was working at Stars Cabaret in Fox’s native Oregon. Talbott claimed she had unprotected sex with the 43-year-old hunk at his rented home.

At the time, Fox’s publicist, Danica Smith, dismissed Talbott’s allegations as the ramblings of “some stripper’s attempt for financial gain.” Matthew is emphatic that he would never be unfaithful to his wife Magherita, because she is “the love of my life.”

“The story is not true, and I’m not going to comment on it. (My wife) Margherita and I have been best friends and best lovers. She’s the love of my life. We have managed to both be intensely independent and maintain that strength in our relationship. I am a man, and I am an appreciator of women. At the same time, Margherita is the shit. I can honestly say we’re good together. We’ve been together for 23 years, so let’s leave it at that.”

Learn about a new study that shows Hepatitis C doubles the risk of kidney cancer.

Hepatitis C Tied to Higher Kidney Cancer Risk

The virus’ influence may extend beyond the liver, researchers say

FRIDAY, April 9 (HealthDay News) — People infected with the hepatitis C virus are at much higher risk of developing kidney cancer, new research suggests.

A study of more than 67,000 patients enrolled in the Henry Ford Health System from 1997-2008 found that 0.6 percent of patients with hepatitis C developed kidney cancer.

Continue reading this entire article:
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/637823.html

Results of the PROVE3 trial found that drug regimens using telaprevir were more effective against Hepatitis C than regimens without telaprevir in both treatment naïve patients and previous treatment non-responders.

Mid-stage trial notes efficacy in investigational hepatitis C treatment

By Alaric DeArment

CORK, Ireland (Apr. 9) Patients with chronic genotype 1 hepatitis C fared better when given an investigational drug developed by Johnson & Johnson division Tibotec and Vertex Pharmaceuticals than when given the standard therapy, after they had failed previous treatments, according to results of a mid-stage trial published Thursday.

The results of the 453-patient, phase 2 “PROVE3” trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that regimens based on the drug telaprevir worked better than other drugs at keeping the virus undetectable in the bloodstream.

Continue reading this entire article:
http://drugstorenews.com/story.aspx?id=136035&menuid=345

The increase in number of Colorado Springs foreclosed homes in March did not push down house prices, based on sales data from the Pikes Peak Association of Realtors and local home building associations.

The sales price median for single-family houses increased by 2.6 percent to $189,900 in March this year from the median price in March 2009. It was the fifth consecutive month that the median sales price increased from March 2009.

In El Paso County, where Colorado Springs is the administrative seat, foreclosure postings reached 470, a jump of 22.34 percent from 365 filings in January and up by 25 percent from 376 filings in February, according to a report from the El Paso County Public Trustee.

In the first three months this year, foreclosure postings in El Paso County totaled to 1,211 filings, a decrease from the 1,292 foreclosures filed in the first three months last year. Total annual foreclosures throughout the ten-year period from 1992 never exceeded 1,211 filings.

Just like other housing markets, the increase in home sales in the area was driven by the lower prices of Colorado Springs foreclosed homes and other types of homes, lower mortgage rates and the federal tax credits.

According to analysts, investors consider Colorado Springs as a good investment target because of its strong recovery prospects. The city was even cited as one of the best cities to live in the U.S. in 2006 and in 2009. The economically strong image, however, of Colorado Springs was a bit tainted when the recession forced city officials to cut municipal services like fire and police services and recreational services.

Another factor indicating faster economic recovery in the area is the increase in number of home building permits issued in March in El Paso County. Based on figures from the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department, there were 150 permits issued for the construction of single-family houses in March and the overall total issued for the first three months of this year reached 411.

According to the Housing and Building Association of Colorado Springs, despite strong competition from lower-priced foreclosed homes for sale in Colorado, demand for new homes had an uptick because of the availability of federal tax credits.

Home building is among the major indicators closely watched by economists and analysts. The surge in home construction in the area means that the local housing market is already able to absorb Colorado Springs foreclosed homes.

Find more foreclosure listings in Colorado Springs, CO:

• Home Auctions in Colorado Springs
• Foreclosure Investing in Colorado Springs

[JURIST] The Nebraska Legislature voted 44-5 on Tuesday to approve the Abortion Pain Prevention Act prohibiting an abortion at or past 20 weeks. The law is based on medical evidence that allegedly indicates a fetus can feel pain following that point and goes beyond the previous state law that prohibited abortions at approximately 24 weeks based on the fetus’s ability to live outside the womb. The legislation allows a patient or the father of a fetus to sue a doctor for actual damages when the act is violated. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman signed the legislation the same day along with another bill approved Monday that would require health care professionals to determine if a woman seeking the abortion had been pressured into the procedure and would also require them to assess the woman for additional risk factors that could lead to mental or physical complications.
The Abortion Pain Prevention Act makes Nebraska the first state to prohibit an abortion based on the idea that a fetus can feel pain as early as 20 weeks. The Nebraska laws join recent anti-abortion laws passed in Oklahoma, which prohibit abortions performed because of the gender of the fetus, protect medical employees who refuse to participate in procedures such as abortion based on religious beliefs, and regulate the use of RU-486, or mifepristone, a chemical used in abortion procedures. Advocacy groups have criticized the Oklahoma laws and promised to challenge them in court.

Citing “surprisingly strong US demand,” Apple has delayed the international launch of the iPad by one month (preorders/pricing postponed to May). Huh, is a pile of 500,000 iPads really more than Apple expected to sell by this point? More »

Found under: Windows Phone 7, Multitasking, Demo, Apps,

Here is a story by Mark Arteaga who shows how Windows Phone 7 stands on multitasking especially in the wake of Apples iPhone 4.0 OS. He is talking about the PauseResumeSuspend functionality of the new OS by Microsoft and is giving examples of basic apps developed by him to demonstrate multitasking. Read more

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The old Pentastar is really trying to live up to its logo. Chrysler announced yesterday that it’ll team with NASA to develop and share technology. No, don’t expect a MOPAR space shuttle or a Charger with solid rocket boosters. The moribund automaker will use NASA batteries and composite materials for future hybrids and electric cars. It’s not the first time the two groups have worked together. Chrysler built Redstone rockets for the Mercury space program in 1961 and boosters for the first two Apollo moon missions.

And no, do not expect a Dodge Challenger NASA Edition. Definitely not.

Source: Wired

Ryan McBride wrote:

Third Rock Ventures, a Boston venture firm focused on life sciences investments, has filed papers with the SEC to raise a second fund. The proposed amount of the new fund is $400 million, yet the paperwork indicates that none of those funds had been raised as of the April 9 filing. Still, this is good news for early-stage biotech startups, which have been the sweet spot for Third Rock’s maiden fund of $378 million, closed in 2007.

Bell peppers are one of our all-time favorite vegetables. They can be hollowed out and filled with rice stuffing. They can be cut into strips and dipped in dressing for a quick afternoon snack. Or they can be diced and used in any stir-fry, frittata, or pasta sauce. This method works well for prepping any bell pepper for any dish you want, but it’s certainly not the only way! How do you slice your peppers?

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