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White House Juices the Job Count
The White House will now count all jobs funded by stimulus money, not just those that were created or saved. The job market is still hemorrhaging and the administration might be looking to do a little inflation. Or it might honestly be trying to simplify a confusing and highly criticized formula for counting jobs. ProPublica: Part of the problem is that there’s no accepted standard for counting jobs, said Mary Foelster of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “It’s not so much calculating jobs; it’s trying to have evidence that a job was retained,” she said. “What is the client going to point to to say, ‘I was going to lay someone off, but now I’m not?’ ” Read more

The White House will now count all jobs funded by stimulus money, not just those that were created or saved. The job market is still hemorrhaging and the administration might be looking to do a little inflation. Or it might honestly be trying to simplify a confusing and highly criticized formula for counting jobs.

ProPublica:

Part of the problem is that there’s no accepted standard for counting jobs, said Mary Foelster of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

“It’s not so much calculating jobs; it’s trying to have evidence that a job was retained,” she said. “What is the client going to point to to say, ‘I was going to lay someone off, but now I’m not?’?”

Read more

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The ability of FloTHERM to resolve a massive disparity in geometric length scale in a single model is for me its greatest strength. By not having to make simplifying assumptions to ignore either extremely small or truncate extremely large geometric parts and features, simulation accuracy can be better assured. The ‘die in a city’ model in the previous blog resolved a length scale of 1,000,000,000:1. Admittedly not a common type of model (unless you are a deviant simulation masochist) but it does prove a point.  But just how does FloTHERM do it…? (more…)

Quick Fact: Beck again falsely claims FDR, Sunstein were “pushing” to amend Constitution with “Second Bill of Rights”

On his Fox News program, Glenn Beck again falsely claimed that Franklin Roosevelt, in support of a “Second Bill of Rights,” “was pushing for a change to the Constitution.” Beck added that “progressives” like Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Director Cass Sunstein have “been pushing for the Second Bill of Rights since FDR,” and cited this as evidence that such progressives “know” that health care reform is “unconstitutional.”

From the January 11 broadcast of Fox News’ Glenn Beck:

BECK: [Franklin D. Roosevelt] was pushing for a change to the Constitution that included those things. Regulatory czar Cass Sunstein tried to resurrect that failed attempt at creating the ultimate government control in his book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It. Again, the progressives know this is unconstitutional. That’s why they’ve been pushing for the Second Bill of Rights since FDR.

Fact: Sunstein said he (and FDR) “didn’t want to change the text of the Constitution”

Sunstein: “Roosevelt didn’t want to change the text of the Constitution,” but to create “a declaration which isn’t part of our legally binding text.” As Media Matters for America previously 9/8/04]

Sunstein said he shared Roosevelt’s view and was “nervous” about altering the Constitution. Sunstein also stated that Roosevelt’s “view of the Second Bill of Rights, which I share, is that what we should think of this as, is very much like Jefferson’s Declaration. Part of what we’re committed to, part of what defines our self-understandings, but we’re going to keep the judges out of it.” Further, Sunstein commented that “[i]f, if we are excited about judicial protection of individual rights, then we might want the Second Bill of Rights in our Constitution. I, myself, am nervous about that, because I’m nervous about the judges” and that “I’d much prefer that we recover this aspect of our history.”

Detroit is back!

At least that’s the message this week, at the Detroit Auto Show.

GM is re-opening factories and repaying some bailout money. Ford is on a roll, making money and winning awards, and Chrysler is, well, Chrysler.

In Detroit this year, they had it all: dancers, foreign automakers, hybrids, and of course, politicians!

Check out the scene here — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Jim Chanos: We’re Shorting Autos, China, And Commodities But Not Financials
• Detroit’s Unemployment Nears 50%
• GM China Sees Record Sales In 2009

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Daily Random Recipe

INGREDIENTS:

• 7 oz / 200 g can red kidney beans
• 1/2 green pepper
• 1 T vegetable oil
• 1/4 lb / 115 g tomatoes
• 1/4 cup walnuts
• 1/3 cup grated coconut
• 1 t tomato paste
• 1 T water
• 1/3 cup cooked rice
  

METHOD:
Drain and rinse the beans.

Chop the pepper and saute in the heated oil in a saucepan for a minute or two. Skin and chop the tomatoes. Chop the walnuts coarsely.

Add the tomatoes, walnuts, coconut, tomato paste and water to the saucepan and
stir well. Add the beans. Cover pan and leave the mixture to simmer on a very
low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve over the rice.

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[Clarification—1/12/10, 1 pm ET] Nadya Suleman, aka the Octomom, grabbed headlines this time last year when she gave birth to octuplets conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Now, Molecular Biometrics is grabbing venture dollars for technology that could help other IVF users avoid a similar fate.

The Norwood, MA-based firm raised $12.5 million in a Series B round of venture capital to begin sales of its product that identifies the most viable embryos produced in IVF, according to the company. The technology could help doctors reduce the number of embryos they need to transfer to the mother to produce a successful pregnancy—and fewer embryos should mean fewer women wind up carrying triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, or more babies.

Atlas Venture of Waltham, a new investor in Molecular Biometrics, led the new round of financing, and Atlas partner Peter Barrett has joined the company’s board of directors. The round also included backing from Boston-based venture firm Oxford Bioscience Partners and Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE), a Wayne, PA, holding company that invests in life sciences and technology firms. Oxford and Safeguard invested in Molecular Biometrics’s $12 million Series A round, which closed in fall 2008. The company, which earlier raised about $3 million in a seed round, has attracted a total of $27.5 million since it was incorporated in 2005.

Jim Posillico, president and CEO of Molecular Biometrics, said in an interview that the new financing will enable his firm to begin shipping its “ViaMetrics-E” system for sales in the IVF market in Europe next month. The firm will sell the system, which consists of a near-infrared spectroscopy device and single-use test cartridges, through distributors. The firm also plans to use the capital to ramp up an ongoing clinical trial of the product in order to gain the FDA’s permission to sell it in the U.S., hopefully by the first or second quarter of 2011, Posillico said. Molecular Biometrics will also use some of the new funds to produce its products through contract manufactures.

The potential global market for the IVF product—which is one of multiple uses for the firm’s technology—is believed to be hundreds of millions of dollars, said Atlas’s Barrett. “It’s a significant opportunity,” he said, “and all the thought leaders that we talked to said that anything you can provide an increased chance of a pregnancy, people will be willing to pay for it.” [Clarification: This paragraph was changed to clarify the estimated global market for the company’s IVF product, which Barrett says is  hundreds of millions of dollars, not $100 million, as we first quoted him saying.]

Atlas was drawn to Molecular Biometrics’s technology for the reproductive market because it allows doctors to test the nutrient solution in which an embryo is grown before being transferred to the mother, meaning that no cells from the embryo itself are required to gauge whether it is likely to lead to a pregnancy. The system also includes disposable test cartridges, giving the company the potential to receive recurring revenue from sales of the cartridges used in each spectrometry machine it sells (an example of the battle-tested “razor-razorblade” business model).

Another big plus is that the firm could be the first company in years to come out with a new way to test the viability of embryos used in IVF. Posillico explained that fertilization labs typically examine …Next Page »

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Small business owners aren’t optimistic yet, the latest monthly survey by the National Federation of Independent Business found. The NFIB index fell 0.3 points in December to 88. That’s up from the lows of March 2009, but has been below 90 for 15 months. “Optimism has clearly stalled in spite of the improvements in the economy,” the NFIB said.

NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg added, “Continued weak sales and threatening domestic policies from Washington, have left small business owners with little to be optimistic about in the coming year.”

Highlights:

• Jobs: 10% of the owners increased employment (the highest reading of 2009), but 22% reduced employment (seasonally adjusted). Over the next three months, 15% plan to reduce employment (down two points), and 8% plan to create new jobs (up one point), yielding a seasonally adjusted net-negative 2% of owners planning to create new jobs, a one-point improvement from November.

• Credit: Regular borrowers (accessing capital markets at least once a quarter) continued to report difficulties in arranging credit at the highest frequency since 1983. A net 15% reported loans harder to get than in their last attempt, unchanged from November. Although “that is not nearly as severe as the financial distress reported in the pre-1983 period, 24 months of recession have sapped the financial strength of many small firms,” Dunkelberg said. Eight percent of all owners reported that their borrowing needs were not satisfied, down two points from November. The remaining 92% of all owners either obtained the credit they wanted or were not interested in borrowing.  Only 4% of the owners reported finance as their number one business problem (down one point).

• Profits: 54% reported lower earnings compared to the previous three months. Of those, 65% cited weaker sales, 4% each blamed rising labor costs, higher materials costs and higher insurance costs, while 6% blamed lower selling prices. Poor real sales and price cuts are responsible for much of the weakness in profits.

• Prices: 10% of the owners reported raising average selling prices, but 33% reported price reductions yielding a net-negative 22% (seasonally adjusted) of owners who cut prices in December. Plans to raise prices fell one point to a seasonally adjusted net 3% of owners, 35 points below the July 2008 reading. “The weak economy continued to put downward pressure on prices,” said Dunkelberg. “Widespread price cutting contributed to the reports of lower nominal sales.”

• Costs: On the cost side, the percent of owners citing inflation as their number one problem (e.g. costs coming in the “back door” of the business) fell two points to 2%, and only 3% cited the cost of labor.

Regular readers of this blog know that Surfray’s MondoSearch and Ontolica (search for SharePoint) products have a bit of a checkered past. First vendor MondoSoft went bankrupt; it was then sold to SurfRay; then SurfRay went bankrupt; then it was restructured to SurfRay 2009. But I’m happy to report that the Danish company now seems to be doing a lot better.

It’s now owned by a Danish venture capital outfit called Vækstfonden (a "government backed investment fund") with Vækstfonden’s Søren Pallesen as CEO. And even though the company went through several rough patches, it seems the revenue stream for its software remained  solid enough; the company claims its U.S. subsidiary kept turning profits throughout.

While that is promising for future stability, the vendor has remained relatively quiet on other fronts. Unsurprisingly, for some time no new products were coming out.

But it seems that, too, is changing: in the past few months new minor versions of MondoSearch and Ontolica were announced. MondoSearch is still going to need a lot of work before it’ll be up to par with modern offerings, but Ontolica is still a pretty good alternative to SharePoint 2007’s rather basic search functionality. It now also includes search analytics (previously a separate product), something which alone might merit a license — assuming you have sufficient resources to analyze and act upon the potential goldmine of search metrics.

As a company, SurfRay is now expanding beyond the Danish borders. Though it has always maintained a presence in the U.S. (and had a booth at last year’s SharePoint conference), we’ll now see an office here in The Netherlands, as well.

However, the elephant in Ontolica’s room, of course, is SharePoint 2010. Microsoft has finally addressed one of the oddest deficiencies: the lack of wildcard search. That’s always been one of the things Ontolica marketing pivoted on (for a while, you could get the free "Ontolica wildcard search add-on" as a teaser preview for the complete product.) So how’s SurfRay going to keep competitive, in between SharePoint 2010 and FAST for SharePoint 2010? Well, Ontolica 2010 has already been announced, and it offers many of the modern search interface features that SharePoint lacks, without adding all of the complexity of a FAST server.

While we’ll have to see whether Ontolica 2010 will deliver on its promises, SurfRay is certainly positioning the product in exactly the gap Microsoft’s coming line-up is leaving. We’ll be keeping tabs on how that works out, and sharing our findings with our Search & Information Access subscribers.

Industry’s first four-seat Sport Side-by-Side is here, thanks to Polaris, who recently introduced the first Robby Gordon edition, dubbed RANGER RZR 4. With an ability to carry four people, the vehicle is powered by a 800cc High Output Twin EFI engine and weighs just 1,255 lbs/569.3 kg, which means that it is lighter than many two-passenger vehicles.

Polaris saw a market for a multi-passenger Sport vehicle at a significantly lower price than an expensive Sand Car or Rail, said Eric… (read more)