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A look at App Zapper’s impressive filtering options.

Kicking off Ivy League conference play, better known as the 14-game tournament, the Harvard Crimson men’s basketball team put together an emphatic 76-47 win over the Dartmouth Big Green on Saturday (Jan. 9).

The Big Green, who saw head coach Jerry Dunn tender his resignation the day before in a rare midseason departure, fought with the Crimson early on, and actually held a 12-11 lead through the first seven minutes.

But after Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker called a 30-second timeout to settle his team down, the Crimson put together a 13-3 run in a five-and-a-half-minute span to go up by nine points. The Big Green never challenged again.

“We came out with good pressure defensively from the beginning. We just turned the ball over and went for steals and didn’t get them,” said sophomore guard Oliver McNally, who had four assists and a steal in 15 minutes of play. “Once we took [a few] stupid mistakes out, we started to settle down and build our lead.”

Sophomore forward Keith Wright, who led all scorers with a career-high 22 points, went 11 for 16 from the floor. He also pulled down six rebounds and blocked three shots.

“The coaches really allow me to feel comfortable,” said Wright. “I worked a lot on my mid-range jumper this summer, and it’s all paying off.”

Harvard co-captain Jeremy Lin ’10, the Crimson’s leading scorer, was held to just 11 points on the day, but he made up for his low scoring output by dishing out five assists and recording six steals. At one point in the second half, Lin had four steals in a minute and a half, one of them capped by a thunderous dunk that brought the 1,500 fans at Lavietes Pavilion to their feet.

“It’s a nice opportunity to win a conference game when our best player [Lin] doesn’t have an absolutely tremendous offensive day,” said Amaker. “I think that says a lot for our bench and our balance.”

Freshman guard Christian Webster, who shot five for six from the field, added 12 points for the Crimson. As a team, Harvard shot a healthy 55 percent.

“We have a lot of weapons that offensively allow us to be a dangerous team,” said Amaker.

Providing a defensive spark off the bench was freshman forward Kyle Casey, who, after coming off career highs in scoring and rebounding with 27 and eight against Santa Clara, had an outstanding defensive effort, with four blocks.

“You can’t key in on one person with our team,” said Amaker. “It’s a nice feeling for us to have — that we have other options that can pick up the slack.”

The win was Harvard’s fifth in a row and gave the Crimson a record of 12-3 (1-0 Ivy League), as the team continues the best start in its 99-year history.

“A lot of us are really banged up, but we have that motivation, that drive to get a banner up,” said Wright. “We’re working really hard.”

The Crimson now take a two-week break before embarking on a three-game road trip against Dartmouth (Jan. 23), Columbia (Jan. 29), and Cornell (Jan. 30).

Graceful motion

Crimson guard Jeremy Lin ’10 pulls off an acrobatic layup.

It’s loose!

Keith Wright ’12 lets out a howl as he watches a loose ball go out of bounds.

Not enough Dee-fence

Crimson guard Dee Giger ’13 drives past a Dartmouth defender. Giger tallied eight points off the bench in 19 minutes for Harvard.

Holding on tight

Freshman forward Kyle Casey ’13 protects the ball from a Dartmouth defender.

No-look pass

Christian Webster ’13 gets off a pass by the seat of his pants. His defender didn’t get the memo.

Locked in

Crimson head coach Tommy Amaker intently follows his team.

Jeremy Lin … for the win!

Karen Lin of Boston (no relation to Jeremy) jokes with Crimson guard Jeremy Lin ’10 during a postgame autograph session. Karen holds a sign with the point guard’s number (4), combined with the letters FTW, signifying both “for the win” and “for Taiwan,” the home of Jeremy’s parents.

Photo slideshow: Harvard Men’s Basketball vs. Dartmouth

Photos by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Take heart, business travelers of America! Soon you’ll be able to add “slow and spotty internet connection” to your list of gripes with Amtrak’s high(er) speed Acela line. While I’m sure Hulu will help numb the pain of rail commuting, be warned that it may only be free for a limited time. Also, be annoyed that JetBlue had free Wi-Fi in a plane more than two years before Amtrak could get its act together for a ground-based service. [Wired]

Prepare the foot soldiers from the Internet Nerd Rage army for this one. Apparently if you buy a subsidized Google Nexus One and “cancel your wireless plan prior to 120 days of continuous wireless service,” you’ll be charged the difference between what you paid for the device and its full retail price of $529. So at its current subsidized price of $179, you’d pay a $350 early termination fee. That fee is paid to Google, by the way, “and is in addition to any early termination fees that may be charged by your chosen carrier.”

People are upset, naturally, as the point of a wireless provider’s early termination fee is to make up for the lost revenue from subsidizing a particular handset’s selling price, and being hit with two fees seems a bit out of line. As handsets get more and more expensive, though, we start to see people (for instance) buying a $600 phone for $99, canceling the contract right away, paying a $175 early termination fee, and then selling the phone on eBay for a tidy profit.

In light of such activity, we’ve seen Verizon raise its early termination fee on “advanced devices” to $350. This is likely the same rationale behind Google’s early termination fee, except that in the end you’d pay out more than the retail price of the phone.

Here’s a snippet of the legal mumbo-jumbo from the Nexus One’s terms of sale:

You agree to pay Google an equipment subsidy recovery fee (the “Equipment Recovery Fee”) equal to the difference between the full price of the Nexus handheld device without service plan and the price you paid for the Nexus handheld device if you cancel your wireless plan prior to 120 days of continuous wireless service. For example, if the full price of the Nexus handheld device without service plan was $529 USD and the price you paid for the Nexus handheld device was $179 USD with a service plan, the Equipment Recovery Fee you pay will be $350 USD in the event you cancel within the first 120 days of carrier service. The Equipment Recovery Fee is equal to the line item in your confirmation email setting forth the discount on the full priced Nexus handheld device related to your carrier service plan activation. You authorize Google to charge the Equipment Recovery Fee directly to your credit card, or other payment method used to purchase the Nexus handheld device, upon cancellation of your wireless plan. You will not be charged the Equipment Recovery Fee if you return your Nexus handheld device to Google within the 14 day Return Policy period as set forth below.

You agree that the Equipment Recovery Fee is not a penalty but is for liquidated damages Google will incur as a result of such cancellation. These damages may include, but are not limited to, loss of compensation and administrative costs associated with such cancellation or changing of wireless service provider(s), market changes, and changes in ownership. Please note that the Equipment Recovery Fee is imposed by Google and not your chosen carrier and is in addition to any early termination fees that may be charged by your chosen carrier in connection with termination of your wireless plan prior to fulfillment of your chosen carrier’s service agreement term.

[via Phandroid]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

One interesting piece of news that’s been making the rounds of tech blogs and has now reached the more mainstream publications is Google’s decision to stop hosting AP content on Google News. People noticed that, as early as December 24, new AP stories, which show up on Google News through a licensing agreement, were conspicuo… (read more)

Well, as it turns out, CES really wipes one out. So we may have missed that there were some new apps over the weekend, but through the magic of the internet we’re still going to bring it all back to you. With all sorts of hot new games in play, not to mention PreCentral’s sweet new webOS App Gallery, there’s plenty of awesome app action awaiting you in the obligatory list form after the break.

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Fresh pomegranate season may have ended, but it’s still possible to cook with these fruits in their dried, spice form. Dried pomegranate seeds, also known as anardana, are a fairly new ingredient for us, but here are some of the things we have learned.

Read Full Post

A story in this morning’s WSJ cracks open what one government official calls a “secure system to protect these birds”: Secretive farms, classified as part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” where hens lay the hundreds of thousands of eggs needed to make swine-flu vaccine.

The article put us in mind of another big job for chickens seeking a career in public health: serving as a sentinel bird . It’s a job that requires some sacrifice, as this WSJ story suggested back in 2003:

Braving a burst of clucks and beating wings, a woman in a white Tyvek jumpsuit grabs a red-brown hen by the feet and holds it upside down until the flapping stops. Then she flips the bird over, tucks it between her knees, and pricks the hen’s comb with a tiny lancet, dabbing drops of blood onto a strip of filter paper to be tested for West Nile virus.

Sentinel birds got a lot of ink a few years back, when more than a dozen states established flocks as early warning systems for West Nile virus. See page 12 of these CDC gudelines for tips on setting up a sentinel flock.

Sentinel work isn’t limited to chickens; as Slate noted in 2006, flocks of ducks can serve as an early-warning system for the arrival of strains of bird flu.

Photo: Associated Press

David Rosenberg is back on housing, and has an interesting non-Case Shiller chart to show you:

Home prices: There remains a glut of at least two years supply on the market
when the ‘shadow’ foreclosed housing inventory data are included in the
calculation and home prices on average have 10-15% downside before fully mean
reverting with respect to residential rents and wage income.  This is the canary in
the coalmine when it comes to wealth, confidence, spending — and writedowns
(the market is expecting write-ups this year) in the banking sector.  The big surprise
will be the renewed turndown in the closely-watched Case-Shiller (CS) index of
home prices, which in the past two months has slowed to an average gain of
+0.25% after 1%+ advances in July-August, which gave beta-hungry investors
more reason to add risk to their portfolios.  But the CS series is a three-month
average and for all we know, the renewed price declines we expect to see may
already be occurring now.  Note that two home price series are already back in
decline for two straight months — LoanPerformance and Radar Logic.  This is key
for any sector that remotely touches the housing industry from the homebuilders,
to the financials, to the consumer discretionary group.  

Don’t miss: David Rosenberg’s key themes for 2010 — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Rosenberg’s Themes For 2010: The Consumer Is Still Toast, Housing Is Down, And Everyone Is Delinquent On Everything
• Case-Shiller: Housing Recovery Still Weak, October Decline Of 7.3% Slightly Worse Than Forecast
• Housing: Stable In The First Half Of 2010… Then Off A Cliff

The Harvard China Student Internship Program (HCSIP), launched in 2008 by the Harvard China Fund, is a collaborative effort involving Harvard’s Office of Career Services and Office of International Programs. Together with Chinese corporations and U.S. companies in China, the program creates transformational experiences for Harvard College students as they prepare for a lifelong engagement with China.

The HCSIP is open to all Harvard College students, and applications are due by Jan. 29. For more information, visit the Harvard China Fund Web site.

With demand gaining on supply, FoMoCo Americas President Mark Fields said yesterday that the company will ramp up production of its full-sized SUV’s. This time last year, Ford had halted SUV production so that they could move assembly to a different plant, and sales of the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator rose 45% and 60%, respectively.

With a 60 day supply being the industry standard, the Expedition last month fell to a 31-day supply and the Navigator to a staggeringly low, 24-day supply.

Fields also said that Mercury is in fact slated receive a compact car based on the ‘12 Ford Focus ha twas unveiled yesterday, but that Lincoln will be receiving the bulk of the new products from this point forward as far as the two brands are concerned.

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)

Miep Gies, the office secretary who hid Anne Frank and her family from Nazi occupers and saved the teenager’s diary, has died, The Anne Frank Museum said Tuesday. She was 100.

Gies and other helpers provided food, books and good cheer while The Franks hid from the Nazis in a tiny attic apartment in Amsterdam for two years during the Second World War.

Rest peacefully, Ms. Gies. Thanks for your bravery……

What caused the Great Recession, anyway? Two years after it began, we don’t know. (Heck, 80 years after the Great Depression, we haven’t decided why it started, or lasted so long, or ended.) So Slate’s Jacob Weisberg went digging for answers. Just about everybody agrees that Alan Greenspan is at fault, somehow. After that, everything is up for debate.

Conservative economists–ever worried about inflation–tend to fault
Greenspan for keeping interest rates too low between 2003 and 2005 as
the real estate and credit bubbles inflated. This is the view, for
instance, of Stanford economist and former Reagan adviser John Taylor,
who argues that the Fed’s easy money policies spurred a frenzy of
irresponsible borrowing on the part of banks and consumers alike.

Liberal
analysts, by contrast, are more likely to focus on the way Greenspan’s
aversion to regulation transformed pell-mell innovation in financial
products and excessive bank leverage into lethal phenomena. The pithiest explanation I’ve seen comes from New York Times
columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, who noted in one interview:
“Regulation didn’t keep up with the system.” In this view, the
emergence of an unsupervised market in more and more exotic
derivatives–credit-default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt
obligations (CDOs), CDSs on CDOs (the esoteric instruments
that wrecked AIG)–allowed heedless financial institutions to put the
whole financial system at risk. “Financial innovation + inadequate
regulation = recipe for disaster is also the favored explanation of
Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, who downplays low interest rates
as a cause (perhaps because he supported them at the time) and attributes the crisis to regulatory failure.

A
bit farther down on the list are various contributing factors, which
didn’t fundamentally cause the crisis but either enabled it or made it
worse than it otherwise might have been. These include: global savings imbalances,
which put upward pressure on U.S. asset prices and downward pressure on
interest rates during the bubble years; conflicts of interest and
massive misjudgments on the part of credit rating agencies
Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s about the risks of mortgage-backed
securities; the lack of transparency about the risks borne by banks,
which used off-balance-sheet entities known as SIVs to hide what they
were doing; excessive reliance on mathematical models like the VAR and the dread Gaussian copula function,
which led to the underpricing of unpredictable forms of risk; a flawed
model of executive compensation and implicit too-big-to-fail guarantees
that encouraged traders and executives at financial firms to take on
excessive risk; and the non-confidence-inspiring quality of former
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s initial responses to the crisis.

Last year, National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch wrote a killer essay on
this very topic that came to an exotic, and fascinating, conclusion.
Here‘s the quick summary: Financial innovation produced a vast network
of
complicated asset-backed securities traded among what insiders call
“shadow banks,”
or unregulated banks. Shadow banks looking to park cash where it would
hold value and earn interest created a
short-term securities market — much like a checking account. But
unlike a regular FDIC-insured checking accounts, these deposits would
not be guaranteed by the
government. So investors borrowing from
this shadow depository system had to put up collateral. And they chose
…
their asset backed securities.

Why is that dangerous? Because in the shadow banking industry, these
deposits, backed by sub-prime mortgages instead of the FDIC, acted as
money. Banks relied on it for transactions. “Subprime morgage debt had
entered the money supply.” But then the
housing bubble burst. Depositors dumped their assets to raise cash and
tried to withdraw their money, raiding the shadow depository market,
and the
money supply crashed.

And here’s Rauch in his own words:

In the so-called Quiet Period, 1934 through 2007, systemic bank runs
seemed to become relics of an unmourned past. Why? Because for about
four decades, banks’ activities were restricted to heavily regulated
ventures that were more or less guaranteed a profit — and, even more
important, because federal deposit insurance, which began in 1934,
assured depositors that their savings were safe.

Financial innovation, however, could be delayed but not denied.
Around the walled garden grew a forest of new competitors and products.
Money-market funds and other investment vehicles took deposits without
offering federal guarantees. In a process known as securitization,
investment banks converted predictable streams of income, everything
from mortgage payments to health club dues, into securities that
investors bought eagerly. Derivatives — securities based on other
securities–arose to spread risk and hedge against volatility. In time,
shadow banking, as the new institutions and instruments were
collectively called, rivaled and even eclipsed old-fashioned commercial
banks.

The firms and major financial players making all these trades needed
to park cash where it would hold its value and earn some interest, yet
be accessible on demand. In other words, they needed the equivalent of
checking and savings accounts, the “demand deposits” that banks
traditionally provide and that form the backbone of the money supply.
But no insured depository could begin to cope with the trillions of
dollars involved. And so shadow banking developed what amounted to its
own depository system, a short-term securities market called the “sale
and repurchase,” or “repo,” market. It is immense. Gorton figures its
size at perhaps $12 trillion, but he says no one knows for sure.

“It’s important to see that this is a banking system,” Gorton says. But it is like a 19th-century
banking system, because repo “deposits” are uninsured. Unable to rely
on a federal guarantee, depositors who park their holdings there
require that the borrower put up something of value as collateral.

Treasury bonds, because they are safe and liquid, are the ideal form
of collateral, but there were nowhere near enough of them to meet the
demand. So asset-backed securities — those packages of safe-looking
income from mortgages, auto loans, and all the rest — were pressed
into service as collateral. In time, the better grades of subprime
mortgage-backed securities were mixed into the blend, and they, too,
won acceptance as collateral.

All of these asset-backed securities were sorted and re-sorted,
combined and recombined, sold and resold, until, as Gorton writes,
“looking through to the underlying mortgages and modeling the different
levels of structure was not possible.” Users could not independently
assess the value of mortgage-backed collateral any more than your
grocer can independently assess the solvency of your bank before
accepting your check.

You can see, perhaps, where this leads. Repo is a form of money
because it acts as a store of value and financial actors rely on it to
conduct transactions. But instead of being backed by a federal
guarantee, it was backed by, among other things, subprime mortgages. In
this way, without anyone paying much notice, subprime mortgage debt entered the money supply. As
in the 19th century, the economy had become dependent upon a form of
bank-issued money that was not federally guaranteed and that was not as
stable as it appeared. Unlike in the 19th century, however, no one
understood how vulnerable the system was to a panic.

Calamity then struck, as it had before. First, the unexpected
decline in housing prices tanked the subprime market. Repo depositors
knew that most collateral was sound, but they had no way to know if
their own holdings were safe; so in 2007 they began what amounted to a
run on the repo system, effectively withdrawing their money. To raise
cash, repo depositories dumped assets, further depressing collateral
values and starting a tailspin.

In September of last year, when the failure of Lehman Brothers, the
mighty investment bank, convinced investors that no one was safe, the
crisis turned into a meltdown. As the repo market “virtually
disappeared” (in Gorton’s phrase), the money supply crashed and the
economy began to suffocate.

Wolin-Levin Celebrating 60th Year in Business

Bob Levin, president of property management firm Wolin-Levin Inc., was recently honored for his decades of service in the property management business by receiving the annual Outstanding Leadership Award and the new Property Manager of the Year Award presented by Condo Lifestyles magazine at its 2009 State of the Industry Seminar.

Approximately 100 people attended the luncheon and award ceremony, held Dec. 10 at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Presentations were made focusing on the financial and legal issues facing community associations and property management organizations in the Chicago area.

Levin has been a key figure in the industry for more than 30 years. He worked for a Fortune 50 company and a management-consulting firm before joining family owned Wolin-Levin Inc. in 1978.

Under his leadership the company has expanded greatly and now has approximately 20,000 managed units in more than 200 properties throughout Chicagoland – with a focus primarily on high-rise condo buildings in Chicago within a mile of Lake Michigan.

Levin was chosen for the honor because he and his company “have been a fixture in Chicago condominiums since the beginning of the condo boom,” explained Michael C. Davids, editor and publisher of Condo Lifestyles, when presenting the award.

“And because of the length and reach of Bob’s involvement in condominiums, he has had a unique and significant impact on improving professionalism and the level of education of so many others in this field.”

Levin is a Certified Property Manager (CPM®) and licensed real estate broker in the state of Illinois.

After joining the company his father founded 60 years ago, he was instrumental in developing Wolin-Levin’s presence in the condominium and cooperative management segment.

Wolin-Levin has set itself apart from other property management companies by using cutting-edge technology to facilitate communication between property managers and community residents, maintaining transparency through building-specific record keeping, and using green initiatives to save clients money while increasing building efficiencies.

Wolin-Levin concentrates on Chicago residential property management.

National company FirstService Residential Management, a division of FirstService Corp., acquired a majority interest in Wolin-Levin in 2004. The corporation manages more than 1 million units nationally, with Wolin-Levin serving as its Chicago affiliate.

Wolin-Levin is able to leverage and offer significant benefits to its clients through the buying power and competitive national contracts FirstService provides.

After MySQL founder, Monty Widenius, started an aggressive campaign against Oracle’s bid to buy Sun, the community has shown considerable support and anted up the pace with a new pro-MySQL campaign: the HelpMySQL.org website. The site is entitled “Save MySQL” and was launched on December 28, quickly catching the eye of many developers, p… (read more)

Meet Roxxxy, the world’s first butt-ugly sex robot! At the 2010 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last weekend, Doug Hines, owner and designer for TrueCompanion, unveiled a prototype of the world’s first girlfriend sex robot — complete with artificial intelligence and skin and equipped to carry a conversation….

“She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,” Hines, who has been developing the doll for nearly 20 years, told AFP this week. “She’s a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person.”

That’s impressive, Doug, but why does she look like a Hunts Point sex peddler?

The Roxxxy is 5 feet, 7 inches tall, 120lbs, and “has a full C cup and is ready for action” (Hint, Hint). The doll features “girlfriend personalities,” including Frigid Farrah, Wild Wendy, Mature Martha, and more. Users can also built custom profiles online and even swap them with friends. Roxxxy goes on sale next week for for $7,000 – $9,000, plus a subscription fee.

For more information on how you can purchase a Roxxxy of your own, visit TrueCompanion.com…..