Now here’s something you’re not likely to see on American TV! In a profane but awesome new German commercial for non-alcoholic beer, Oscar-nominated star Mickey Rourke — accompanied by his teacup pup — screams at hotel bellhops, throws various tantrums, and gets generally crazy at a local bar!
It would seem the rumor-confirmation gods are favoring us this month. Not only have we seen a variety of rumors, but many of them have been supported with very convincing evidence. Continuing the trend, the fine folks over at Engadget have managed to uncover an FCC filing that appears to be showing the second generation of T-Mobile’s MyTouch (or the G1, depending on your opinion), with the addition of a QWERTY slider.
The FCC documents reveal that the device in question is definitely made by HTC, just as the MyTouch and G1, and that it’s supporting WCDMA Band IV, which is T-Mobile’s 3G band. Last week we reported that the MyTouch Slide had shown itself (by name, not face) on RadioShack’s Direct2U system and that it’s rumored to launch around the 17th of May.
I’d like to say that clearing the FCC means that we should see this phone soon, but, last I checked the VZW Nexus One cleared the FCC mid-March and is still nowhere to be seen. Anyone care to take a guess when we’ll see the MyTouch Slide?
Via Engadget
Note: As we were about to post this article, David from TmoNews uncovered the first picture of the MyTouch Slide seen in the wild (see above). He mentioned that from the looks of it, the marketing campaign will be focused around the MyTouch’s personalization features, and that the rumored launch date seems to be May 19.
AS PROMISED, China’s economy ran a current account deficit in the month of March, the first monthly trade deficit since 2004. Strong imports of natural resources and cars were primarily responsible. On a year-over-year basis, imports rose 66% in March, while exports rose 24%.
Barack Obama will be meeting with Hu Jintao this week, and the currency issue will still be on the table. Some revaluation of the renminbi remains both desirable and inevitable. Economists are indicating that the deficit might just be a one-month blip, and they have a point. But as the following chart, from Menzie Chinn, indicates, the broader trend seems clear:
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I think it’s reasonable to be cautiously optimistic about the progress China seems to be making on its internal structural issues.
In its latest acquisition — its first-ever in the UK — Google has bought a small visual search startup called Plink, which makes a mobile app that recognizes works of art. The acquisition appears to be an attempt to add some horsepower to its Google Goggles visual search project. Plink’s two founders — Mark Cummins and James Philbin, both of whom have PhDs from Oxford — say in a blog post announcing the deal that they will no longer be developing their app, but instead will be working on Goggles. A Google Labs experiment that currently runs only on Android devices, Goggles lets users search for landmarks, books, documents and other objects by taking photos with their mobile device.
The Plink purchase is the latest in a string of acquisitions by Google. Last fall, CEO Eric Schmidt said that the search company planned to acquire an average of one small company a month, and that the deals in most cases would be “in lieu of hiring.” As Liz pointed out in a recent post, many of these purchases — or “acqu-hires” — have involved former Googlers, including the founders of Aardvark, AppJet and ReMail.
Plink’s app — which is called PlinkArt, and runs on iPhones and Android devices — allows users to get information about works of art. When a user takes a photo of a painting with their phone, the app recognizes it and pulls up information about it. The Plink founders apparently got Google’s attention when they won $100,000 in an Android developers challenge last year. Google Goggles was released last year, and the company has said it plans to support iPhones and other platforms soon as well as Android. In February, the company showed a prototype version of the app doing text recognition and translation of a German restaurant menu (video embedded below).
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Why Mobile Search Is Still Anybody’s Game
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stefan
[JURIST] US President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) withdrew her candidacy on Friday. Dawn Johnsen, nominated as the OLC’s Assistant Attorney General in January 2009, has faced over a year of objection from Republicans for her criticisms of the interrogation methods approved by the OLC during the Bush administration and her support of abortion rights. In March, the US Senate Judiciary Committee for the second time recommended her to the Senate for confirmation on a strict party-line vote. However, it is unlikely that Johnsen would have been able to obtain the votes necessary for confirmation and overcome a possible filibuster. The White House refrained from appointing Johnsen during the Senate recess last month, which would have avoided the confirmation process. White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that the Senate should put politics aside and bring impartial legal advice back to the OLC.
Johnsen, who previously served as acting head of the OLC under former president Bill Clinton, argued to restore the OLC’s reputation and political independence. Under the Bush administration, OLC lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee produced confidential memos authorizing the use of controversial CIA interrogation techniques that critics have called torture. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said at a February hearing that he was prepared to subpoena the DOJ if it did not turn over missing e-mail records dealing with the so-called “torture memos.” In February, the DOJ overruled the findings of a report concluding that Yoo and Bybee committed professional misconduct. Instead, the DOJ said that they were only guilty of “poor judgment” in writing the memos. Former US attorney general John Ashcroft has defended the advice the DOJ gave the Bush administration on the use of certain interrogation techniques, saying that all guidelines issued by his office were legal.
April is Earth Month, and Earth Day, April 22nd, is rapidly approaching. Check out our Earth Day web page for things you can do to celebrate, participate and then share what you are doing. Activities range from “Pick 5″– choosing five environmental actions you will commit to, to submitting a video clip to join our “It’s My Environment” video project and loads of things in between. Check it out and tell us about your plans.
What are you going to do to celebrate the Earth this April?
Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.
In honor of Lunch Week on The Kitchn, I’ve put together a collection of some of The Kitchn’s most mouthwatering sandwich recipes. I don’t know about you, but I sure could go for a pimento cheese sandwich now, or a Bánh Mì … or a farmer’s sandwich! I can’t decide, they all look so good. Anyway, we hope you’ll find this roundup inspirational and make yourself a delicious sandwich.
Mmmmmmmmm…meat
What is the biggest food story this year? Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden?
Sigh, no.
It looks to be the invention of the sandwich-less sandwich — a.k.a. KFC’s new Double Down, which goes on sale today.
This bacon-and-cheese sandwich comes with two deep-fried chicken breasts in lieu of bread.
Have you tried it yet? I’m very curious to hear your reactions.
Me, I’m holding out for the Chick-fil-a spicy chicken sandwich…
The recent history of a medicine used to treat gout provides another chapter in the book of unintended consequences. We’ll recount some highlights of the tale as spelled out in this morning’s WSJ:
A common gout drug, colchicine, has been around for so long that pre-dated the FDA and until last year, it had never been approved by the agency. As part of a push by the FDA to bring such drugs under its umbrella, a company called URL Pharma commissioned studies to show that colchicine was safe and effective, and last summer the FDA approved the company’s version and gave URL three years of marketing exclusivity for the drug.
Here come the unintended consequences. While the FDA says it hoped there wouldn’t be a significant run-up in the price of colchicine — sold as Colcrys by URL — the retail cost has soared to more than $5 a bill from the previous pennies a tablet. URL Pharma also sued five makers of manufacturers of colchicine, saying they have been illegally marketing their colchicine products since Colcrys’s approval. One of those makers has settled the matter and stopped production. The other four companies are fighting the lawsuit.
URL Pharma says it priced Colcrys in line with other approved, branded drugs used to treat gout pain. It’s also trying to help patients who need financial assistance, including providing a three-months’ supply to low-income patients for $15.
Further, URL Pharma says its trials helped make colchicine safer for everyone, noting there wasn’t even a standard dosage for the medicine until the company went through the FDA approval process.
“We took bad guidance, even guesswork, and made this evidence-based medicine,” URL Pharma CEO Richard Roberts said.
Photo: iStockphoto
Looks like my earlier suspicion of the LG LU2300 being renamed ALOHA, aka LG VS740 as it’s called in Verizon’s system, has come true. Verizon will have an impressive Android lineup this spring/summer with the addition of this, another 2.1 device that also has a 1GHZ Snapdragon and other great features.
This will most likely be a “Google Experience” phone, there are a lot of people that are fans of vanilla Android. This phone is rumored to be release sometime in Q2 which is right around the corner. This device is rumored to feature a 1GHz Snapdragon chipset, 5MP camera and 720p video playback as well as WI-FI b/g/n.
[via phonearena]
Sometimes, a little candidness can be refreshing. We saw some last week from Jefferies Group (JEF), the investment bank, when the company chucked some of its performance-based compensation to the wind, at least for 2009.
Ordinarily, Jefferies, like most companies, sets out performance targets early in the year. The idea is that bonuses get paid out depending how well the company, and executives, make their targets. “In the past, the board has established targets based on measurable performance criteria with specific weighting,” the company said in its proxy, filed April 6. That makes sense: You don’t really want companies painting bull’s eyes around the arrows.
Then the proxy continues:
“However, given the extreme volatility and uncertainty of the financial markets near the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, the Compensation Committee did not believe it could establish meaningful objectives at that time. Accordingly, bonus amounts for Mr. Handler and [Executive Committee Chairman Brian P.] Friedman were not established until the end of 2009 and were not based on specific performance criteria or targets. Instead, the Compensation Committee reviewed our strong year end performance at the end of an extremely difficult year and awarded bonuses to our top two executives based on historical performance in 2009.”
In other words, Jeffries painted bull’s eyes around the arrows, as well-shot as those arrows may have been.
This isn’t just a matter of best-practices for Jefferies shareholders. Because bonuses awarded this way are effectively arbitrary — or at least, made based on perfect hindsight — the payment to Chief Executive Richard Handler didn’t count as performance-based pay for tax purposes. That means it wasn’t tax-deductible, and instead of the $6 million he got before taxes, it actually cost the company north of $8 million. (See the full rules on performance deductibility to get all the nuances.)
We like this approach somewhat better than those companies that change performance goals mid-stream, of course. So points for honesty. But it might have been even more refreshing if the company had concluded that performance is as performance does, and that incentive awards should follow suit.
Image source: respres via Flickr.
Here are the official pics of the new Volkswagen Touran, presented at the Leipzig motor show. The new generation Touran adopts the latest Volkswagen style updates, and looks like a smaller Sharan with conventional rear doors. The first generation of the Touran sold 1.13 million units and it is hoped this new Touran will be equally as successful.
In addition to the style updates, the new Touran has a new fuel and diesel engine range of TSI and TDI models. The 1.2-litre TSI wtih 105 hp debuts and is also available in BlueMotion Technology version with Start&Stop and energy regeneration when braking. The 1.4-litre TSI in both 140 hp and 170 hp versions is available and is equipped with a seven-speed DSG gearbox which also appears on the TSI Ecofuel methane model.
The diesel engine range includes the 1.6 TDI with 90 or 105 hp, with the latter available in BlueMotion. It has a fuel consumption of just 4.6 litres per 100 km and emits 121 g/km of CO2. The common rail 2.0-litre TDI is available in both 140 and 170 hp. The new Touran is designed as a five-seater model with a third row of two seats available on the options list which also includes Park Assist technology.
In all the models the Touran has 39 miniature pockets and storage compartments throughout the cabin, and three model kits are on offer: Trendline, Comfortline and Highline. Trendline includes air conditioning, MP3 player and chrome opaque finishings. The Comfortline has light and rain sensors, anti-high beam rear view mirrors, chrome inserts, comfort front seats and tray tables for the rear seats. The Highline fit-out has Alcantara throughout, front sports seats, automatic air conditioning, 16-inch alloy wheels and roof racks.
Abril es el Mes del Planeta Tierra y el Día del Planeta Tierra, el 22 de abril, se aproxima rápidamente. Visiten nuestra página Web del Día del Planeta Tierra para celebrar, y participar y entonces compartir lo que está haciendo. Las actividades varían desde “Pick5″–donde puede escoger 5 acciones ambientales a las cuales se quiere comprometer, someter un video para unirse a nuestro proyecto de video “Es mi medio ambiente” y cantidad de otras cosas también. Consulte la página y cuéntenos acerca de sus planes.
¿Qué está haciendo para celebrar al Planeta Tierra este abril?
The bottom of the sea is a strange and marvelous frontier, as we were reminded last week by the discovery of the first known animals to live without oxygen. Today a team of British researchers say their undersea robotic explorers have found something new down in the depths of the Caribbean Sea: the deepest hydrothermal vents ever seen.
The black smokers, named for how they spew out an iron sulfide compound that’s black, sit 3.1 miles deep in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean [FoxNews]. They beat out the previous record holders, which were located 2.6 miles below the surface in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As the National Oceanography Centre team sailed across the sea in its research vessel, the James Cook, the scientists deployed their robot explorers down to the inhospitable depths. One, called Autosub6000, mapped the seafloor while another, HyBIS, carried high-resolution cameras to capture these images.
Marine biologist Dr Jon Copley said: “Seeing the world’s deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring.” He added: “Super-heated water was gushing out of their two-storey-high mineral spires, more than three miles beneath the waves” [BBC News]. The heat record held by the vents in the mid-Atlantic is a scorching 867 degrees Fahrenheit, but Copley and the other researchers say they don’t know yet whether this one is hotter. Geologist Bramley Murton reports mats of microbes covering the vents, but the team is conferring with other scientists before they announce exactly what they found. Whatever lives down there, it’s certainly got grit. The pressure at the bottom of the trough, which is 500 times normal atmospheric pressure, would be the equivalent to the weight of a large family car pushing down on every square inch of the creatures that live there, the researchers say [FoxNews].
You can keep up with the voyage of the James Cook on the team’s Web site. They’ll be cruising the Cayman Trough until the 20th of this month.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: Funky Life at an Underwater Hydrothermal Vent (gallery)
DISCOVER: Water at Ocean Vents Isn’t Water—It’s a Gas-Liquid Hybrid
DISCOVER: For Microbes, Hell Isn’t So Bad
DISCOVER: Sweeping the Ocean Floor
80beats: For This Deep-Sea Animal, Oxygen-Free Is the Way To Be
80beats: NASA’s New Underwater Robot Chugs Along Indefinitely on Ocean Power
Image: National Oceanography Centre
Click image to view
Spirit Airline’s ballsy new $20-45 fee for carry-on bags has already caught the attention of the Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and now New York Senator Charles Schumer is rattling his sword.
Last week, LaHood told Elliott.org that this is “absolutely not” the way an airline should be handling fees, and says that Spirit is trying to deceive passengers with super cheap fares up front and hidden fees disclosed in fine print.
You can read the full interview here, but the gist is that LaHood thinks all fees or potential fees should be disclosed before the consumer makes the decision to purchase the ticket. As far as what the DOT plans to do about it, he says, “We have a rule in process [scheduled for release in June], and all the things we’re talking about, they’re being considered. We’re on this. Stay tuned.”
Senator Charles Schumer is taking more immediate measures to counter Spirit’s new fee. The NY Daily News reports that he has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to reverse a recent ruling that allows Spirit to keep the entire carry-on baggage fee tax free. Airlines don’t pay taxes on fees charged for “unnecessary” in-flight items like peanuts and pillows, and currently carry-on bags are also considered unnecessary by the Treasury Department. Schumer has told various media outlets that if the Treasury Department doesn’t reverse the ruling, he’ll introduce legislation to stop carry-on bag fees altogether.
“LaHood on Spirit’s carry-on baggage fees: ‘We’re gonna hold the airline’s feet to the fire on this’” [Elliott.org via USA Today]
“Sen. Schumer demands action over airline’s new $45 fee for carry-on bags” [NY Daily News]
I’ve talked about artificial photosynthesis before and how scientists are trying to recreate how plants turn sunlight and water into hydrogen and oxygen. I’ve talked about using solar energy and algae for this process. And, I’ve talked about using bacteria to create hydrogen.
Now, I want to talk about solar energy plus a virus named M13 that researchers at MIT are using to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This hydrogen could be used to fuel cars.
This process uses direct solar energy (no electricity is created) to stimulate the bacteria. According to MIT, their research team, “…engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules.”
The process is much less energy intensive than the brute force electrolysis of water to create hydrogen fuel. The energy that would be spent will be on creating the devices to split the water and not on the process itself of splitting water.
The photosynthesis that occurs in naturally plants is a twofold process. First, natural pigments capture sunlight and second catalysts aid in splitting water. In the MIT method, solar panels will capture energy and transfer that energy directly to the viruses and other nanoscale structures to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Artificial photosynthesis is an important emerging field right now with many researchers working concurrently on the solution of splitting water using algae, bacteria, or harmless viruses to do the dirty work. More work of course is needed to perfect, scale up and commercialize these processes. But, it’s only a matter of time until this happens on a large scale.
Ryan McBride wrote:
Many people have probably never heard of some of the diseases that venture capitalists and drug company executives are swooning over lately. But regardless of how obscure a rare illness like X-linked hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia is, investments in developing drugs for such diseases are growing in popularity.
In Boston, both venture firms and pharma executives are getting in on the act. Third Rock Ventures has funded or formed three biotech startups in Cambridge, MA over the past two years that are developing drugs for rare genetic disorders (which are in some cases called orphan diseases). One of those companies, Alnara Pharmaceuticals, counts among its founders Christoph Westphal, a Cambridge-based executive who scouts for external business opportunities for London-based drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK).
These companies are ripping a page or two from the battletested playbook at Cambridge-based Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ). The company’s three best-selling treatments are for rare genetic diseases that affect fewer than 10,000 patients each. Still, Genzyme has been profitable because it can command hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for each patient treated with some of its drugs, and for years it has faced very little or no competition in these niche markets.
But the party’s getting more crowded nowadays. New York-based Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), the world’s biggest drug company, inked a deal announced in December to partner with Israel-based Protalix Biotherapeutics to develop and market Protalix’s rival drug to Genzyme’s top seller, imiglucerase (Cerezyme), an enzyme-replacement therapy for patients with Gaucher’s disease. Genzyme’s Gaucher drug brought sales last year of $793 million, way less than Pfizer makes from its top sellers like the heart pill atorvastatin (Lipitor). Despite the smaller markets for rare disease treatments, major pharma companies are investing in them as many of their multi-billion dollar drug franchises face greater competition from generic knockoffs.
“Pharma and bigger biotech players need to …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
By Matt Hawes
Campaign for Liberty is currently holding a “banner bomb” until midnight on April 19 (the 235th anniversary of Lexington and Concord’s “Shot heard ‘round the world’”) to raise funds to place Audit the Fed banners on key sites like Drudge Report, CNN, MSNBC, and others.
The ad campaign will target ten states whose senators are key to passing S. 604.
Click on the graphic below to contribute to the effort and help turn up the heat on Congress to Audit the Fed!
Here is a breakdown to give you an idea of how many ad buys your donation can help achieve:
$18.71 ~ 9,000 views on Drudge Report.
$37.29 ~ 11,000 views on Rasmussen
$61.48 ~ 19,000 views on Human Events
$81.62 ~ (best value) 31,000 views on Drudge Report
$142.55 ~ 70,000 views on Fox News
$237.36 ~ 85,000 views on Rasmussen
AN IMPORTANT thing to understand about journalists is that they’re herd animals. It’s reasonable for us to be this way; we want to cover the important stories, which happen to be the ones everyone is talking about. And we want to participate in the ongoing conversation on the day’s hot topic. But this occasionally leads to little news boomlets—stampedes in which the herding itself becomes the story.
So, last week, the New York Times‘ Floyd Norris wrote on the case for optimism about the American economy. And BusinessWeek examined how markets were demonstrating quite clearly that all is now well with the American economy, and Americans are too pessimistic given the data. Today, Robert Samuelson also declares Americans to be too glum about the prospects for a strong recovery. And here is the latest cover of Newsweek:
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The trigger for the stories is clear. Economic data have been trending upward for a while, but March’s positive employment report was the catalyst for this rush of pieces. And once out there, the “Americans are too pessimistic” meme takes on a life of its own.
On its own, the cheerleading isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Confidence is a key ingredient to recovery, and if Americans are convinced that it’s once again ok to spend and invest, then the confidence boost to the economy may take on a life of its own. But it’s worth pointing out that after meeting on Friday, the NBER recession dating committee declared that it was not prepared to announced an official recession end date. This doesn’t mean that the economy is still in recession; it could simply mean that they have not yet seen enough data to agree upon a date. But it should indicate that America is not that far removed from contraction.
And optimism could be dangerous if it leads the country to underestimate its continued vulnerabilities—to new financial shocks, to new shocks to household budgets (as from rising resource costs), to new deterioration in housing markets, to continued drag from an unemployment problem that remains very serious. At this point in any recovery, complacency is the enemy. All observers want this to be 1983, but it very well might turn out to be 1937.
