Eco Factor: Self-sufficient structure generates solar and wind energy.
Coop Himmelb(l)au has unveiled the design for the “Energy Roof” in Italy. The structure is part of the research project, “Walking through the history” of the University of Perugia. The roof is designed to serve as a canopy in the center of Perugia, while producing enough energy to sustain the underground passage and the roof itself.
Since the royal unveiling of HP’s six new Elitebooks and ProBooks last week, the Elitebook 8440w (w standing for workstation) has been making the review rounds, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the chaps at Notebook Review, LAPTOP and Computer Shopper. All were impressed by the Core i7-620M and NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M power that’s been crammed into the 14-inch chassis, but unsurprisingly that causes some warm underside temperatures. Other than that, the 8440w received high praise for its durable gunmetal-build and “exceedingly” comfortable keyboard, but the touchpad was noted as being too small. Actually, the guys over at Notebook Review even go as far to say that the laptop would be “absolutely perfect” if that pad and its buttons weren’t so squished. Now that’s quite a bold statement. All in all, the 8440w seems like a solid and very mobile workstation, but hit up the sources if you’re dying to know more about the $1,650 rig.
Filed under: Laptops
HP EliteBook 8440w lives up to its “workstation” title, says the reviewing masses originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Students and teachers from northwestern Colorado learn from Colorado University Boulder instructors about renewable energy and conservation. This hands-on workshop was open to teams of students from the fifth to eighth grades. Here is a brief …
Eco Factor: Zero-emission car powered by electricity.
Fiat has finally unveiled an all-electric variant of its iconic 500 at the Detroit Auto Show. The zero-emission vehicle was parked alongside the Challenger and Chargers on the Chrysler stand, but the details weren’t revealed.
Mullumbimby
View from McLeods Shoot
Cape Byron
Road between Byron Bay and Murwillumbah (Pacific Highway except the last photo)
Murwillumbah
Eco Factor: Low-emission sports car powered by a hybrid engine.
Toyota, in conjunction with Gazoo Racing development team, has launched the GRMN Sports Hybrid concept car at the 2010 Tokyo Auto Salon. The car is based on the company MR2 platform and combines a conventional gas engine with electric motors for an efficient drive.
He doesn’t believe in touchscreens or tablets, and maybe He is right. It’s all old school buttons and switches for The Dude in the Heavens. [Maneggs]
Eco Factor: Old cellphones to be refurbished to help victims of Haiti earthquake.
According to statistics, there are over 1 billion used cellphones that are sitting around and gathering dust due to the latest advancements in mobile technology. ReCellular has started a program, Phones for Haiti, that can help you do your bit to provide disaster relief for the victims of the recent Haiti earthquake.
“My 4-year old just loves it,” a young mom remarked to me.
Fascination of reading image: sxc.hu
She was describing the LeapFrog Tag Reading System, whereby you download specific books into a pen with a camera on the end. Then as you or your child scans the words in the book, the pen will read to the child. She said her 7-year old enjoys this, too, and can do his 20-minute reading assignment by first listening to the pen read the book, then reading it himself.
Although this doesn’t take the place of someone reading to the child for a family reading session. However, the LeapFrog Tag can occupy the child when mom or dad or grandma are busy. This system also carries audio books one step forward, for the child is learning to recognize words and their sounds as he/she listens. They also can read together.
What else will they think of in our electronic world? These don’t take the place of reading to oneself or being read to by a live person. However, it’s another way to encourage a love of reading in youngsters.
Have you used this system for your youngsters? Are there other electronic reading systems that you’ve found helpful. The young mom I talked with was excited about an electronic method to encourage and aid her children in the love of reading.
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Make sure you didn’t miss this week’s most provocative posts:
-) Google’s check mate on China.
-) How to ditch your bad mortgage.
-) Why China does more for Africa than Bono and all the other charities.
-) Imagine if Richard Branson remade banking with tons of hot tellers?
-) Why trying to invest like Warren Buffett is a fool’s game.
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By Ted Dekker
Eco Factor: Concept airship designed to fly clean on solar energy.
The Aerolabe is a concept airship designed by painter and sculptor Gaspard Schlumberger, who believes that solar energy has the potential to green the airspace dominated by gas-guzzling aircraft. The cigar-shaped airship includes solar panels and wings to make this balloon take to the skies.
January 16, 2010, 12:25 AM EST
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Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) — Billionaire investor William Ackman bought a $950 million stake in Kraft Foods Inc. and urged its Chief Executive Officer Irene Rosenfeld to limit the amount of stock she uses to bid for Cadbury Plc.
Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management LP bought at least 32 million shares in Kraft, or 2 percent of the company, and plans to purchase more, Ackman said in an interview yesterday. Pershing’s stake in Kraft is now the firm’s biggest holding.
Pershing thinks “very highly of Irene Rosenfeld and her business plan,” and believes Kraft’s 11 billion-pound ($17.9 billion) stock-and-cash bid for Cadbury makes “tremendous sense,” Ackman said. Kraft risks diminishing the deal’s merits by issuing too much stock to pay for it, he said, echoing a warning by investor Warren Buffett on Jan. 5.
“The more Kraft stock they issue, the less interesting this deal is,” Ackman said. “Fortunately, the seller also prefers cash.” Ackman said Kraft stock is “extremely undervalued.”
The Pershing stake will be disclosed in a filing with U.K. regulators on Jan. 18, Ackman said. Kraft, based in Northfield, Illinois, has until Jan. 19 to modify its offer for Uxbridge, England-based Cadbury, the maker of Dairy Milk chocolate.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Kraft’s biggest shareholder, said this month that it voted against a plan to issue millions of shares to finance a Cadbury takeover, saying it amounted to a “blank check” to raise the bid.
Kraft advanced 46 cents to $29.58 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading yesterday. The stock has risen 7.8 percent since Berkshire made its statement.
‘Great Confidence’
Ackman’s investment “is a sign of great confidence in our management and our company’s future prospects,” said Michael Mitchell, a Kraft spokesman, in an e-mailed statement.
Ackman said Hershey Co., the Pennsylvania-based chocolate maker that’s controlled by a charitable trust, won’t submit a rival bid because it would imperil its own financial viability.
“I don’t see how the trustees of a charity can put at risk everything that Milton Hershey built to do a leveraged buyout of Cadbury,” he said. Hershey has been weighing a bid and has until Jan. 23 to make a final decision.
Kirk Saville, a Hershey spokesman, declined to comment.
It’s not the first time Ackman has laid a bet on a Cadbury takeover. In early 2007, he bought Cadbury shares on speculation that Kraft would buy the company, he told investors in a letter last year. He sold the stake in the last half of 2008 after concluding that turmoil in the credit markets made a sale less likely, he said in the letter, adding, “we were wrong.”
Current Offer
Kraft’s current offer for Cadbury, of 300 pence of cash and 0.2589 Kraft shares, consists of 61 percent stock and 39 percent cash, based on the closing value of Kraft’s shares yesterday. Kraft is also offering Cadbury shareholders an option to substitute up to 60 pence of shares with cash.
Kraft may be able to increase the cash portion of its offer without further negotiations with its lenders. In addition to a 5.5 billion-pound ($9 billion) bridge loan it’s getting from Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, and seven other banks, it has an agreement to borrow $3 billion (1.84 billion pounds), according to a Dec. 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Rosenfeld was in London last week meeting with major Cadbury shareholders. The U.K. company’s shares have traded at a premium to her offer, which was first disclosed on Sept. 7, as investors bet she will raise the bid or a rival offer will emerge. Cadbury fell 5.5 pence to 793.5 in London trading yesterday, while Kraft’s offer currently values the stock at 771 pence.
A takeover of Cadbury would give Kraft, the maker of Toblerone chocolate and Tang powdered drinks, a faster-growing business and access to emerging markets. The combined company would have about $50 billion in annual sales.
“There were so many investment banks working on the deal that there hasn’t been good research on what the combination would look like,” Ackman said. “We think that’s among the reasons that Kraft is undervalued.”
Lazard Ltd., Centerview Partners, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank are advising Kraft, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and UBS AG are counseling Cadbury. Seven other banks are part of a group of lenders for Kraft’s bid. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. are in discussions about financing a Hershey bid.
–With assistance from Duane Stanford in Atlanta. Editors: Jennifer Sondag, Elizabeth Wollma
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There is a shortage of cement in Ethiopia and Derba Cement is in the process of increasing its production capacity and a new production facility is planned to be completed late 2010.
January 15, 2010
For a soon to become cement factory that is a lot of trucks.
The Age has an article on the impending visit of climate change charlatan, Lord Monckton (actually Viscount, for those who care about obsolete aristocratic titles), citing Tim Lambert – Puzzle me this: climate change theory allows no ice age.
CHRISTOPHER WALTER, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, likes riddles. In 1999 he announced to the world that he had invented a puzzle made up of 209 irregular polygons and said he would pay £1 million to the first person to solve it. It was a brilliant marketing ploy and the mind-bending Eternity puzzle was a best-seller.
Two University of Cambridge mathematicians, with the aid of a custom-made computer program, solved it within months.
Lord Monckton was reportedly forced to sell his 67-bedroom mansion to pay the prizewinners. But six years later he claimed that he had been planning to sell the house anyway and the tale of his financial ruin was simply made up to sell more puzzles.
He has shifted his gaze from puzzles to climate change, and the riddle at the heart of his alternative climate-change theory looks, to the untrained eye, even more mischievous.
The theory relies on some superficially impressive mathematics. Though climate scientists immediately debunked his hypothesis when it was published in 2008, Lord Monckton is still the most prominent intellectual spokesman for the climate-change sceptic movement. …
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that the effect of doubling the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would make the world warmer by about 2.5 to 4 degrees. Most studies measure the change at about 3 degrees. Climate-change action is based on this consensus view.
Lord Monckton’s concept is based on the idea that the calculations have inflated the warming potential of greenhouses gases by about six times.
His theory was published in Forum on Physics and Society, the online newsletter of the American Physical Society.
It was not a peer-reviewed journal, so it was not subject to the normal level of scientific scrutiny that applies to original research, but it was enough to give the claim an initial veneer of credibility.
The argument Lord Monckton mounted has been painstakingly picked apart by several eminent climate-change researchers, but it was an Australian computer scientist, Tim Lambert, who helped collate many of the flaws on his website. ”A lot of the equations used to cover it up were right, but the argument was complete gibberish,” Mr Lambert said.
The hypothesis took the lowest possible range of carbon dioxide’s known warming effect on climate, multiplied it by the lowest possible effect of the various feedbacks that amplify the warming effect, to give a figure well below that shown by any observation.
One of the implications of the hypothesis was that, given what we know about climate, there could not have been ice ages in the past.
”The hypothesis is completely inconsistent with the observations,” said Professor Matthew England, the co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW.
”In science, the world isn’t wrong so the calculations must be wrong.”
The American Physical Society quickly started receiving complaints from its members about the piece, and a lengthy disclaimer was added to the piece saying the society did not endorse Lord Monckton’s findings.
However, the paper is still the core of the argument he will be promoting on his Australia tour.
TruthOut has a look at the nuclear power industry in the US – Meltdown, USA: Nuclear Drive Trumps Safety Risks and High Cost and Part II: Energy Department, NRC Back Nuclear, Ignore Industry’s Dirty Little Secrets.
The pro-nuclear Department of Energy is set to offer this month the first of nearly $20 billion in loan guarantees to a nuclear industry that hasn’t built a plant since the 1970s or raised any money to do so in years. But although the industry is seeking to cash in on global warming concerns with $100 billion in proposed loan guarantees, environmentalists, scientists and federal investigators are warning that lax oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of the nation’s aging 104 nuclear plants has led to near-meltdowns along with other health and safety failings since Three Mile Island – including what some critics say is a flawed federal health study apparently designed to conceal cancer risks near nuclear plants.
All that is joined by the dangers and risks posed by at least 30 tons yearly of radioactive, cancer-causing, nuclear waste produced at each 1,000 megawatt plant; projected costs of $12 billion to $25 billion for any new plants (built largely through taxpayer support); and their ongoing vulnerability to terrorist attacks at sites like Indian Point, 35 miles from New York.
For instance, a meltdown of the two reactors at Indian Point, dubbed “Chernobyl on the Hudson,” could quickly kill nearly 50,000 people with radiation poisoning in a 50-mile radius and cause over 500,000 cancer deaths within six years, according to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other experts.
“Nothing’s changed,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight for the Beyond Nuclear reform group, about nuclear plants. “They’re still dirty, dangerous and expensive.”
Toby Gerhart will take his talents to the NFL in 2010, as he will forego his final season of eligibility to enter the draft
In a long anticipated move, senior running back Toby Gerhart entered the NFL Draft on Friday. Gerhart, who missed all but one game in 2007, had the option of applying for a medical redshirt in order to gain an extra year of eligibility in 2010.
Gerhart, the Doak Walker Award winner and runner up for the Heisman Trophy, will leave school immediately to train for the draft. A two-sport athlete, Gerhart will also not play baseball this season for the Cardinal.
“After careful thought and deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from Stanford University for the winter quarter in order to fully devote my energies towards the pursuit of my dream of playing in the NFL,” he said. “I will forever cherish the camaraderie, friendships, and memories that I forged here at Stanford with all my friends, teammates, and coaches.”
The NFL Combine, the main showcase for scouts before the draft, will begin on February 24th. There, Gerhart will have the opportunity to interview with teams, take an intelligence test, and display both his speed and strength. The draft will be held from April 22-24.
Gerhart rushed for 1,871 yards and 27 touchdowns this year and was a consensus first-team All-American. He went over 100 yards in all but two games, and topped 200 yards in three contests. His final performance was a gutsy, 135-yard outing against Oklahoma in the Sun Bowl, when the Sooners were stacking the box nearly the entire game.
“Toby will be a great pro, and we are all excited for his opportunity at the next level,” said coach Jim Harbaugh
Gerhart had previously stated that he would enter the draft if he received a favorable grade on his NFL evaluation. Either way, there was believed to be only little chance that Gerhart would return for another season; over the past month, his public statements showed a lean toward foregoing his extra year.
Gerhart finishes his Stanford career with his name littered throughout the Cardinal’s record books. He finishes second in school history in both yards on the ground (3,522) and total points (264). His 44 touchdowns are a Stanford record. In 2009, he set the Cardinal single-season rushing record (breaking the one he set in 2008) and the Pac-10 conference’s touchdown mark.
Stanford was 1-11 in Gerhart’s first year on the Farm, but he helped to engineer the turnaround that led the Cardinal, in his senior season, to an 8-5 record and the program’s first bowl appearance since 2001.
“We’ve been through a lot of adversity during my time here,” he said, “but I’m extremely proud to have been part of the class that brought Stanford football back to national prominence.”
