American manufacturer Ford took advantage of its presence at the 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) and announced yesterday, on the sidelines of the new Ford Focus presentation, the release of an electric version of the car in 2011.
Until then, Ford made yet another announcement, this time confirming it will invest $450 million in its Michigan facilities to make them EV friendly. Ford will spend the money to engineer, produce and launch new electrified vehicles,… (read more)
Courtesy of Anthony Goto
Three groups evicted from houses during ski trips
Three student groups – Trancos Hall, Kappa Kappa Gamma and Kappa Sigma – were evicted from housing in South Lake Tahoe during last weekend’s ski trips when police discovered they had exceeded occupancy.
More than 50 freshmen and staff members from Trancos Hall crammed into a house meant for just 16 people, according to resident Libby Burch ’13. They were evicted Saturday morning.
“It wasn’t because we were loud – we were really careful not to annoy the neighbors,” she said, explaining that residents stayed inside after 10 p.m. on Friday despite the lure of the hot tub. “This neighborhood is just really uppity about that kind of thing.”
Burch said neighbors called the cops the next morning when they saw a suspicious number of students lining up to take a shuttle to the slopes. Trancos resident Alex Hertz ’13 offered a different account: that the police were tipped off about the illegal number of occupants by the driver of the bus that brought the students to Tahoe.
Burch was waiting in line when three police SUVs arrived. One law enforcement officer told the group they had to be out of the house within the hour, but the homeowner gave them until later that afternoon.
Trancos ski trip planner William Greenbaum ’13 defended the decision to overstuff. “There are many reasons ranging from tradition to cost to try to keep the entire group in a single house,” he said. “There is a lot of precedent of stuffing entire dorms into 10-plus person houses.”
Members of sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and fraternity Kappa Sigma were on a joint ski trip that was cut short at 7 a.m. Saturday for similar reasons.
A Greek leader familiar with the situation told The Daily the group was caught because the number of cars in the driveway tipped off neighbors that occupancy exceeded the amount specified in the contract. The Greek leader estimated that both organizations brought around 25 members each.
The group knew not to put up a fight, said another Greek leader, who had heard of Stanford students being evicted from Tahoe houses in years past.
Students said the evictions were not that much of an inconvenience.
“We hit the slopes for the day, then went home Saturday night,” Burch said. “It was kind of nice to come back a day early and work all day Sunday.
“Still, it was traumatic,” she continued. “Who would have thought this would happen?”
“Our dorm is awful at planning stuff, so this is pretty typical,” Hertz added.
Most members of Kappa Sigma and Kappa Kappa Gamma went home shortly following their eviction, Greek leaders said, but a few stayed to ski and find lodging for Saturday night.
Hertz said the weekend’s evictions are unlikely to influence future ski trip planning. “I think that when dorms overbook this badly, it’s so ridiculous that no one could seriously learn from it,” he said.
Greenbaum disagreed. “I think Lake Tahoe, specifically Heavenly Mountain, is getting much more strict about occupancy laws,” he said. “The sheriff department is certainly aware of the problem, and it is no secret when Stanford has its ski trips. So, I think groups will have to be more conscious of this issue in the future.”
Burch suggested that planners be more straightforward with homeowners, instead of waiting for the police to get involved. “People will be a little more wary,” she said. “[Student planners] can just ask, ‘Are you going to evict us?’”
Greek leaders and Burch agreed that a lot of people will still take the risk, mostly because it is a money-saving move.
“The cost of renting a place to accommodate 50-plus people is way too expensive,” Burch said. “We’re college kids – we can’t just throw that kind of money down.”
While the emergence of a start-up from Stanford University may surprise no one, the department from which Lex Machina emerged may: this legal informatics private venture spins off from the Stanford Law School (SLS), marking the first time that a commercial venture has emerged from an American law school.
Lex Machina is the outgrowth of a research project called the Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC), officially launched in December of 2008.
Founded through the interdisciplinary collaboration between SLS’s Program in Law, Science and Technology and the department of computer science, the project was the brainchild of Prof. Mark Lemley, the William H. Neukom Professor in Law and director of the Law, Science and Technology Program.
Lemley, a scholar and researcher of intellectual property (IP) law and policy, envisioned that the program would provide free comprehensive data on intellectual property litigation cases in the United States dating back to Jan. 1, 2000.
While the IPLC was originally intended for use by scholars, policymakers and journalists, it soon became clear that the project had commercial viability and could not be sustainable solely based on donations.
“The idea is that businesses and law firms who want use Lex Machina at work would pay a subscription fee, but we would make the site available for free to academics, judges, government officials, nonprofits and the media,” Lemley said.
Joshua Walker, IPLC executive director and founder of the Stanford Center for Computers and Law (CodeX), and George Gregory, an expert in natural language processing, led the initiative in building the IPLC program and database from scratch. In the Lex Machina venture, Walker will serve as the CEO while Gregory, Lemley and Kenneth Lustig will serve on the board of directors.
“We realized the commercial viability of IPLC two years ago,” Walker said. “We were sitting in Packard Café when [Gregory] suggested that this is a company – it had both private and public value. We took it to the [SLS] Dean [Larry Kramer], who ran it through the appropriate protocols, talking to the Provost [John Etchemendy] and to [Lemley].”
The name Lex Machina derives from the title of a research paper Walker wrote in 2004 and is a play on the Latin term “Deus Ex Machina.”
“Part of what we’ve done in the early stages is build the technology to get to the point where adding new cases is pretty straightforward,” Lemley said.
The majority of Lex Machina will be owned by its team members, which includes engineers who worked on the program and a handful of Stanford students at the graduate and undergraduate levels. But Stanford University and SLS will retain an interest in the venture.
The company also expects to be recruiting new talent soon as the venture tries to “build out new technology and expand into other fields of legal issues,” according to Lemley.
“We want to maintain the fundamental altruistic aim of IPLC,” Walker added. “Part of our condition was that we can spin this off, but we should expand upon and constantly improve the pubic benefits of the IPLC project.”
Though Lex Machina is separate from SLS, the company expects to stay closely involved with Stanford.
“Stanford is the touchstone of all of this,” Walker said. “Aside from the unique Stanford entrepreneurial spirit, it also had a top law school and a top engineering department.”
“This is pretty much the first time that a project between the law school and the computer science department has become a company,” Gregory agreed. “This is a major milestone for Stanford University as well.”
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El Camino Real may be in store for a makeover at the edge of the Stanford campus.
The first leg of a proposed improvement project, which will be brought before Palo Alto’s Planning and Transportation Commission for approval Wednesday evening, is aimed at the intersection of Stanford Avenue and El Camino Real.
According to the El Camino Real Master Schematic Design study commissioned in 2003, the proposed developments aim to shift the aesthetic and functional character of the highway from mere motor vehicle mobility to a more community-based urban thoroughfare. The successes and failures of this pilot project will inform future developments of other stretches of the highway within Palo Alto’s borders.
The draft plans that will be under consideration Wednesday evening seek primarily to provide a more pedestrian and bike-friendly intersection. Installation will include enhanced and textured paving of pedestrian crosswalks, wider sidewalks leading up to the intersection and new corner bulbouts, which are curb extensions.
More aesthetically-inspired amenities include ornamental street lights and new and improved street furniture.
Jeff Bowen ’10, a frequent patron of the intersection’s Starbucks, welcomes the prospect of change. “I don’t cross El Camino on foot too often,” Bowen said, “but I see others suffer through the process all the time. Any attempt to aid pedestrian traffic would be huge.”
The pedestrian-oriented project, however, is not without its detractors.
Roger Pierno, a resident of the surrounding community who drives through the intersection on a daily basis, said that although he favors certain parts of the project, he objects to the elimination of right-turn lanes.
The current plans do, in fact, call for the elimination of right-turn lanes west onto Stanford Ave and south onto El Camino, effectively resulting in increased delays for motorists who frequent these lanes.
But Shahla Yazdy, a transportation engineer and project manager of the development, points out that since 2003, “the goal of the project has been to make El Camino safer for all modes of travel.”
The Master Schematic Design study, which was carried out in conjunction with local communities, found that the combination of high pedestrian traffic and the sharp turn radius of the right-turn lanes made the crossing at Stanford Ave and El Camino particularly unsafe and thus ideal for improvement. The project also has the support of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), who, Yazdy explains, “would not approve a project that would significantly impact drivers on their roads.”
Pierno, who attended the December community meeting on the proposed plans, is also concerned with the rate at which the project is being implemented. “It’s on a fast track,” he said, “And I just don’t think that there has been enough public input.”
The plan first got off the ground financially when it received a $1.3 million grant from California’s Bicycle Transportation Account (BTA) in 2006. But if the final design plans aren’t submitted by February, the monies for the construction of the project will expire.
“It really is a great opportunity,” Yazdy said. “We got lucky with this grant. It would be too bad not to take advantage of this funding.”
Stanford professors featured heavily in last week’s annual conference of the American Economic Association held in Atlanta, Georgia.
The event, which took place from Jan. 3 to Jan. 5, featured presentations from many of the top minds in the field of economics, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and Yale economics Prof. Robert Shiller.
Serving as chair of the conference’s program committee was Robert E. Hall, economics professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, who is also the current president of the AEA.
“The event went very well this year,” Hall said. “We accomplished all we had hoped to. People don’t like Atlanta, but attendance was at an all-time high.”
The highlight of the event was Bernanke’s controversial speech on the causes of the housing bubble. Of central importance to the speech was the so-called Taylor rule, developed by Stanford economics Prof. John Taylor, also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
In the aftermath of the collapse, some argued that the extremely low interest rates set by the Fed throughout the decade led to cheap loans and reckless lending by banks, contributing to the financial crisis. But in his speech, Bernanke argued that insufficient regulation of lenders, not overly accommodating monetary policy, was primarily responsible for the downturn.
“Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders’ risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates,” Bernanke said in his Jan. 3 speech.
The Federal Reserve is the institution that sets interest rates, and Bernanke has served on it, first as a member of the Board of Governors and then as its chairman, for most of the decade. Bernanke’s attempt to downplay the importance of low interest rates to the financial crisis may tie to the issue of the Fed’s responsibility in the development of the crisis.
Many who disagree with Bernanke’s assessment point to the Taylor rule to support their arguments, which Bernanke acknowledged through directly addressing it in his remarks.
The Taylor rule, one of the most significant equations in macroeconomics, indicates what the interest rate should be based on current levels of inflation and GDP. Throughout the decade, the actual rate set by the Fed was significantly lower than the interest rate prescribed by the Taylor rule.
Bernanke dedicated nearly a third of his speech to a justification of this deviation. He used a modified version of the Taylor rule to attempt to demonstrate that interest rate levels were, in fact, appropriate over the past several years. His adjustments focused upon the sensitivity of many data inputs that factor into the rule, according to The Wall Street Journal, and included a shift from using actual inflation measures to forecasts of inflation.
Taylor disagreed with Bernanke’s defense of the Fed’s low rates and his modifications of the rule. “I do not agree with his proposed modification,” Taylor told The Daily. “One issue is: whose forecasts should you use? The Fed’s forecasts of inflation were too low at that time.”
Taylor also indicated worry about the policy implications of Bernanke’s speech going forward. “His speech raises the concern that the Fed will keep rates too low for too long again in the future,” Taylor said. “That would be a mistake because it would lead to another boom-bust cycle.”
Taylor, who authored the textbook used in Economics 1A, has taught at Stanford since the early 1980s, receiving several teaching prizes. He has also been active in politics throughout his career, serving as the undersecretary of the Treasury Department during Pres. George W. Bush’s first term.
Others, though, were more receptive to Bernanke’s arguments.
“I think he [Bernanke] was basically right,” Hall said. “His interpretation of the Taylor rule fits my thinking, but it disagrees somewhat with John Taylor. The question will continue to be debated.”
Another important function of the AEA conference is professional, especially for young scholars. Hundreds of new Ph.D. candidates attend the event every year to network and interview with prospective employers.
“Job listings were down 20 percent this year, but there were still lots of activity in the job market,” Hall said. “Perhaps the most important purpose of the conference is this role of bringing new Ph.D.s and employers together.”
About 15 Stanford graduate students attended the event this year.
“The event is pretty spectacular,” said Bill Komiss Ph.D. ’09. Komiss graduated from Stanford’s economics graduate department last year. He attended the event in 2009 as a new Ph.D. looking for a job, and he returned this year as a recruiter for his new employer, the Center for Naval Analysis.
“It’s a great chance to listen to research that you have been interested in and to become interested in new things,” Komiss said. “The struggle to get a job is a bit jarring. I remember having 17 interviews in a three-day span, spread across five hotels. There was not enough Starbucks coffee in San Francisco to fuel us all.”
Pamon Forouhar '11, pictured with Mika Wang '11 in Berlin, described his time abroad as a life-changing experience. Fresh from their exposure to a new lifestyle, students often find the transition back to the routines of campus life difficult. (Photo courtesy Pamon Forouhar)
Students abroad fall quarter find it tough adjusting to classes, housing, lifestyle at Stanford
January always marks the beginning of the rainy season and a new quarter at Stanford. But for many students returning from a fall quarter abroad, the beginning is not such an easy transition.
“I haven’t heard a word longer than six letters in six months,” said a dazed Justin Hefter ’11, after his first PoliSci 2 lecture of the quarter. Hefter had just recently returned from a six-month “Semester-at-Sea” program.
Cameron Poter ’11, who studied at the Stanford in Madrid program and had abided by the Spanish-only contract unique to the Madrid program, wore a similar, glazed expression.
“I almost liked the classes in Spanish better because it was already understood that I wouldn’t understand anything,” he said.
Alas, the return to the reality of classes is not the only hardship returning students face. For some, relationships and experiences fostered abroad were some of the hardest things to leave.
“I had a lovely 65-year-old señora that I fell in love with,” Poter said. “She cooked like no one’s business AND she really included us in any family outings that she had. I got to know her family really well, too.”
Pamon Forouhar ’11, who studied in Berlin, said that his experience abroad exceeded his expectations.
“Everyone had said that going abroad would change my life and I was very determined to not have that expectation,” he said. “I went in with low expectations and my experience did end up changing my life. I don’t think that’s always true, but for me personally it absolutely changed my life.”
The return to the joys of Stanford housing has also been one of the biggest obstacles to overcome for returning students. Many were left unassigned until the first week of school, while others struggle to fit back into the campus swing of things while living in off-campus housing. For many, the two-day move-in that Stanford Housing allowed before the start of school proved to be a little overwhelming.
“It’s tough moving into a dorm where everyone knows each other, and I feel like everyone’s already used to school and I just came back from the summer,” Poter explained. “I’m not used to my dorm or my classes; I feel a lot more overwhelmed than the typical Stanford student now.”
Katie Gera ’11, who studied in Oxford, communicated a sense of isolation upon returning to campus.
“The worst part has been realizing that life at Stanford went on while we were gone and we didn’t get to be a part of it,” she said. “Also, since now I live in Oak Creek, it’s really strange to not have a home base on campus.”
Lee Dukes, student relations coordinator for Stanford’s Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP), said that many students enjoy their abroad experience to such an extent that they make plans to continue their work after graduation.
“A lot of students that I speak to have enjoyed their time abroad and many of them wish they could go back there and even have a hard time adjusting to being back on campus,” he said. “Some students get motivated to go back there and do so either to do research, work or even do some graduate work.”
Forouhar, for one, agreed.
“It’s much, much harder to be back than I thought. It’s great seeing everyone but I could definitely do another quarter abroad,” he said. “But it’s also made me think of working in Europe after graduation. I would definitely like to take some time off and go back and work.”
But some students don’t wait to graduate. Many enjoy the first quarter abroad so much, they elect to stay and do another quarter abroad. According to Dukes, during the 2008-2009 academic year, 43 students stayed more than one quarter at the same location, 25 students went to two different locations (e.g., one quarter in Madrid and one quarter in Florence) and 63 students did a quarter abroad and then stayed to do an internship in the location.
Although many returning students have expressed their delight at returning to Stanford and seeing all the familiar sights and locations, the transition from an abroad program back to the Stanford bubble can prove to be quite interesting and may even produce reverse culture shock.
“Being immersed in the European lifestyle for three months gave me a new perspective on what it means to be American and what cultural idiosyncrasies differentiate Americans from the rest of the world,” said Robert Toews ’11, who is also a writer for The Daily. “For instance, the more laid-back and relaxed approach Europeans have toward things–taking longer lunches, stopping to chat more often and not being in a rush all the time.”
For those students experiencing reverse culture shock, Dukes offered some advice.
“Stay active in the BOSP program and talk about [your] experiences to students who are thinking about going abroad,” he said.
More than 800 students bought tickets for the ASSU airport shuttle fall quarter, according to numbers released today by the executive office.
ASSU President David Gobaud ’08 M.S. ‘10 said the fall program cost $13,108.86, funded by the Stanford Student Enterprises, and brought in $11,089.87 in ticket revenue, translating to a total loss of $2018.99 and amounting to a loss of $2.37 per each of the 851 students who bought tickets. A total of $7,000 was originally budgeted for the fall program, according to Gobaud.
The program sold 681 tickets at $14 and 170 tickets at $16. The difference between sales and revenue went to eGroups transaction fees, according to Gobaud. The final numbers may change slightly after accounting for about $200 in refunds, Gobaud added.
The average cost per rider came to $16.76 after ticket revenues and the $2.37 per student loss. Last spring, the ASSU spent $6,236 to ferry 114 students to airports, with ticket revenue totaling $1,238.04.
The executives compared the program to similar local options like SuperShuttle, which charges $26 for a ride from Stanford to San Francisco or San Jose airports and offers a Stanford discount.
The ASSU airport shuttle program began in 2007.
Students tend the current community farm on campus, which Briana Swette ‘10 described as a “big garden.” A proposal to establish a two-acre farm is currently under review. (KATHRYN ROETHEL/The Stanford Daily)
Proposal calls for new two-acre farm on the Farm
On Nov. 17, a handful of student farmers gathered in Old Union and quietly began to sow the seeds of a small green revolution. The students discussed a proposal to build a new, bigger farm on campus–a plan that may become a reality if approved by the University Architect and Campus Planning Office.
The proposal, submitted to the provost nearly three months ago by Pamela Matson, Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, called for the establishment of a two-acre farm alongside Campus Drive, at the end of Santa Teresa Street. Students and faculty will use the farm for education, but they also hope to put homegrown produce in Stanford’s dining halls.
Christ Carter, Director of Land Use and Environmental Planning, told The Daily in an e-mail, “The proposal…will be considered along with a number of other potential uses and development in an updated area plan for that part of campus.”
He expects that the Land Use and Real Estate Department will present a recommendation about the project to Provost John Etchemendy within the first half of 2010.
The current community farm on campus is not particularly conducive to student projects or large-scale production with only one-eighth of an acre allocated to undergraduate farming. According to Farm Educator Sarah Wiederkehr, the current space is not large enough and can only accommodate a few dozen student plots.
“[The current community farm is] basically a big garden,” said Briana Swette ‘10, who has helped out there ever since she took a sustainable agriculture class her freshman year.
Swette, one of the leaders of Farmers and Eaters for Equality and Diversity (FEED), said the new farm will have room for a greenhouse, tool shed, tractor and, most importantly, much more cropland for education and production.
Emily Bookstein ‘11 is another aspiring farmer who leads the food and agriculture division of Students for a Sustainable Stanford (SSS).
“I’m really looking forward to the farm as a way to delve into agricultural education,” she said. Bookstein also mentioned that a new farm could help reconnect Stanford students and community members with the means of food production.
For Swette, the visibility of the new farm will help achieve this goal.
“Being able to see this farm is huge,” she said. “Having a farm on campus will help bring farming to the mainstream and it reminds our community that farming is an intellectual livelihood.”
Swette and Bookstein were not alone in their enthusiasm. This quarter, Wiederkehr had to turn 35 students away from EARTHSYS 180: Fundamentals of Sustainable Agriculture, even after opening a second section. Some of the rejected students opted to do independent projects on the farm instead.
Wiederkehr said the maintenance of such student commitment is essential for the success of a new farm.
“In my experience [Stanford students] tend to bite off more than they can chew,” Wiederkehr said. “That could be the biggest hurdle. That and the ground squirrels.”
Still, Matson said that the new farm’s primary goal will be to foster student research, not to provide campus with food. She envisions students developing projects on the new farm to investigate nutrient cycling, hydrology, compost, water holding and farm systems.
“The farm has tremendous potential to be a model farm in terms of ecological practices,” Bookstein said.
As they await the provost’s decision, some students and staff have already moved forward toward farm preparations. Financial planning is underway to raise money for land development, soil conditioning and equipment. They hope to break ground by fall 2010.
Bookstein hopes to spend this summer helping any way she can. She believes that, once underway, the farm will be a valuable and essential asset of the Stanford campus.
“To literally see how food is produced–that is something that will stick with you,” she said. “When Stanford graduates are scattered across the world, they’ll have that little seed of the Stanford Farm to carry with them.”
The first quarter of 2010 could see a higher number of investments by venture capital firms than the fourth quarter of 2009, according to figures from new reports by the National Venture Capital Association and information and data services company ChubbyBrain.
Data from a report relased by the NVCA yesterday shows that the fourth quarter of 2009 saw a growth of $1.7 billion in venture funds over the previous quarter, similar to numbers seen from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009. Data released today by ChubbyBrain shows that following the earlier growth in venture funds, Q2 2009 saw a $1.4 billion increase in VC investments, a trend that could mean big bucks for startups in the first quarter of 2010.
Sponsor
As we reported last week, 2009 was a difficult year for startups and venture capital firms, with venture-backed mergers and acquisitions continuing a downward trend in 2009. Carolynn Duncan, founder and director of the startup incubator Portland Ten, says that the “pressure crunch” of 2009 caused VCs to give prospective startups more than the third degree.
“It was more like the fifth degree,” Duncan told ReadWriteWeb. “It was so intense, even for the companies showing great traction and that had bootstrapped the hell out of their project.”
Duncan believes that as the new year kicks off VCs that raised funds at the end of 2009 will be looking at a new class of startups to invest in. When asked if 2010 would be an easier year to find funding, Duncan was hesitant, but optimistic.
“I don’t think ‘easier’ is the right word, maybe just not as demanding,” she said. “People are just glad its 2010 and not 2009 anymore.”
Photo by Flickr user borman818.
Now that Pandora, a next-generation online music streaming service, has turned its first quarterly profit, the Oakland, Calif.-based company is looking at life beyond the web. And by doing so, Pandora is moving to embody what’s being called the device-agnostic Internet.
“We became profitable for the fourth quarter of 2009, and now we’re shooting for profits for the entire 2010 [period],” Pandora’s chief technology officer, Tom Conrad, told me. The 10-year-old company plans to reach that goal by embedding itself in all sorts of consumer electronics devices that feature an Internet connection. For now Pandora’s ambitions are restricted to within U.S. borders.
In 2009, Pandora’s U.S. audience of registered users reached 43 million and at present nearly 100 different consumer devices other than computers are streaming the service. In December 2009 alone, 3 million new listeners joined Pandora — of which 2.7 million of them activated the service on a device other than a computer, according to the company.
Pandora is a perfect showcase for the so-called device-agnostic Internet, itself the result of three major trends:
Pandora got a big boost at the recently concluded CES trade show, where it showed off the fact that its music offering, which combines radio-styled listening to serendipitous recommendations, is now being embedded in everything from thin LED televisions to Blu-ray players to digital frames. I’m among those who bought a Blu-ray player and subsequently signed up for my Pandora account online. I also listen to Pandora on a Sonos system as well and also on my iPod touch and on my BlackBerry. In other words, I see the value of taking my Pandora everywhere.
As to all the consumer devices that are embedding the service, Conrad said that “the high-volume products are only just hitting the market,” among them devices made by LG, Samsung, Sony, Sanyo, Haier, Divx, Toshiba and Panasonic. But the biggest boost, he said, was going to come from the embedding of Pandora in automobiles. Conrad hinted about such a move to autos back in early December.
Ford, Alpine and Pioneer are three companies that are going to be putting Pandora inside their cars and automobile music systems, respectively. The service will piggy-back on 3G wireless connections on the latest generation of cell phones. While Conrad was candid enough to admit that the automobile ecosystem was going to take a little bit of time, for the company, it’s clearly worth the wait. “Nearly 47 percent of radio listening is in the car,” he noted. (Related from GigaOM Pro, subscription req’d: The App Developer’s Guide to Working with Ford Sync and Forget Syncing, Let’s Put Music in the Cloud.)
As Conrad explained, currently the web accounts for 20 percent of total radio listening, which means that Pandora needs to expand beyond just the browser if it wants to go after “80 percent of the opportunity.” I find it amusing that only a couple of years ago, Pandora was fighting for its life, thanks to the draconian policies of the music industry. Now it is audaciously viewing itself as the future of radio. Terrestrial and satellite radio providers had better watch out. (Related: Pandora Raises $35 million.)
In the meantime, Pandora has benefited handsomely from the iPhone phenomenon. In just 18 months, mobile (and other connected devices) have risen to account for nearly 30 percent of Pandora’s usage. That’s helped the company offer premium services, which has in turn helped it generate revenues and lately, profits.
No wonder Conrad and the rest of the Pandora team are thinking about Pandora playing everywhere.
The guys from Motor Trend love their Cadillac CTS-V. The American sports sedan has 556 hp and 750 Nm of torque, and has already beaten the BMW M5 and the new Jaguar XFR in two previous challenges from Motor Trend. This time, though, they’re trying it against the Mercedes E 63 AMG sports sedan offering.
The Mercedes has 525 hp and 630 Nm of torque, but performance between the two is very close with the Cadillac making it to 100 km/hr in 4.5 seconds and with a top speed of 308 km/hr. The E 63 has a top speed of 300 km/hr but is slightly faster in the sprint to 100 km/hr, completing it in 4.2 seconds.
The E 63 is equipped with some impressive Mercedes/AMG technology, with a 6.2-litre V8 engine and super-fast seven speed paddle shift which has a sports mode option (this might also explain the 40,000 euros more on the price tag). It’s clear the Americans love their Cadillac CTS-V, but this time Mercedes might just have the edge.
The team behind EGG-energy has a statistic they cite often: In Tanzania 80 percent of the population lives within 5 kilometers of a transmission line but only 10 percent has access to electricity. To help solve that “last mile” problem, the team, which hails from MIT and Harvard, decided to create a business model that […]
You ever have a conversation with someone, or perhaps stood in front of a group of people and in the middle of whatever you are talking about, someone gets up and walks out. It hurts a little, and is rather rude. Well, unfollowing people is sort of like that.
Granted, sometimes it is warranted. I mean, I have posted about tools to do mass unfollows to keeps your Twitter stream nice and fresh, but you don’t want people unfollowing you right? I mean, you are not a spam bot, so people should stick around to hear what you have to say right? Double standard much? That is besides the point.
Well, here are two tools that will snitch when someone unfollows you so you know who the jerks are:
Know of any other Twitter tools to give you the goods on those walking out on you? Let us know in the comments!
After several hours of pounding on my keyboard I was able to resurrect the Anxiety Guru forum. Some time ago now a spammer did a real number on it, so I shut it down temporarily. But I think it’s been long enough and it’s now available.
After the “attack” I was a little bummed because the forum was gaining some momentum, but oh well it’s back now and I hope all of you take full advantage of it.
I think forums are a great place to get and give information, so if you have something to say CLICK HERE and get started.
Mercedes motorsport director Norbert Haug hit back at criticism coming from within the Stuttgart based company in recent weeks, insisting that the German manufacturer has taken the best path to the future in terms of Formula One commitments.
Soon after Daimler AG pulled their support from Team McLaren, some of the voices within the company’s board of directors argued that this would have been a great opportunity for Mercedes to quit the sport completely. Instead, Mercedes bought m… (read more)
In the early 1980s MD and I were laboring away in anonymity in our clinics in Little Rock, Arkansas. By that time I had gone through my thin-to fat-to thin again metamorphosis, and I was starting to treat patients for obesity. My own transformation had been fairly striking, a fact not lost on many of my overweight patients, a number of whom were seeking my professional advice on treating their own weight problems. I was still doing a fair amount of general primary care medicine, but more and more of my time was being diverted to helping people lose weight.
When I, myself, had gotten fat, I had tried a few diets that were then being extolled (including the Pritikin diet) and had experienced pretty much the same thing most people did with these diets: I lost a few pounds, drifted from the diet, and regained the lost weight plus a little. I then started thinking seriously about obesity as a medical problem, and in an effort to learn all I could about it, I turned to the medical textbooks on my shelves. Unfortunately, none of them contained any information I found particularly enlightening. The texts went into great detail about the risks associated with obesity and the many diseases that it either caused or made worse, but, other than recommending caloric restriction, none really discussed the treatment. None really discussed (at least not to my satisfaction) what happens metabolically that makes people store excess fat.
I next turned to physiology texts, which didnt help a lot, either. I then grabbed my old medical school biochemistry textbook (I hadnt been out of med school all that long at the time, so it was fairly current) and struck gold. I started tracing out all the pathways for fat storage and noticed that in virtually every one insulin turned up somewhere. Then I started reading about all the pathways involving insulin and realized that excess insulin had to be the agent driving the storage of excess fat. I then went back to the physiology texts, reread them in light of my new found knowledge, and discovered that they reinforced what I had learned from the biochemistry text. I just hadnt realized it, until I had made the insulin connection. (I drew out all the different pathways insulin worked through on piece of paper that we’ve saved, but I can’t lay my hands on it right now. If I find it, I’ll post it.)
This was long before the days of Google and online searches; in fact, it was at least two years before I owned my first computer. So I did what you did in those days: I trekked to the medical library at the med school, ran a search on insulin and obesity through their system, and came up with a handful of papers. The research into this field was quite new and sparse, back then, but I learned about the newly proposed theory of insulin resistance, which answered my question as to why anyone would ever develop excess insulin levels in the first place.
Then I asked myself the big question: If I have too much insulin (I was guessing I did – it wasnt something you measured in those days unless you were in a scientific lab), how do I get it down? There were only two conclusions. Dont eat. Or dont eat carbohydrates. The latter seemed to make a lot more sense over the long run.
I remembered the Atkins diet. I had read his book ten years before, but that was before I went to medical school and was while I was still rail thin. (Why did I read it? Because it was much in the news, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.) I dug out my copy and reread it. Nowhere was insulin mentioned in the original book. He talked about some mysterious fat mobilizing substance (FMS, as he called it), which couldnt be insulin because insulin doesnt mobilize fat – it stores it. The references cited in the back of the Atkins book for FMS listed scientific papers written in German. But by then I was on to insulin, so I didnt bother trying to seek them out.
I decided to design a diet for myself with lowering insulin in mind. What I came up with (with MDs help) was the basis for what ultimately became Protein Power. I lost weight like crazy. Many of my patients noticed my weight loss and started clamoring for me to help them to become thin.
At the time I started treating patients with the low-carb diet, cholesterol was just starting to be demonized. For the first time, people were concerned about their cholesterol levels (and at that time, the upper level for normal for total cholesterol was 220 mg/dl, 20 units higher than it is now) It was the era Taubes discusses in his great paper The Soft Science of Dietary Fat and that Tom Naughton shows in his movie Fat Head. Low-fat diets were the rage. The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure, a book about eating giant oat bran muffins daily and taking sustained-release niacin was in the writing and destined to be a mega bestseller. The fear of fat was settling in on America.
And here I was starting to put patients on low-carb, high-fat diets to help them lose weight.
Back then I had bought into the lipid hypothesis and truly believed excess cholesterol did indeed lead to heart disease. As a consequence, I was a little squeamish about putting people who might actually be at risk for heart disease on the diet. I had read the biochemistry texts, and I knew that insulin stimulated HMG Co-A reductase, the rate limiting enzyme in the cholesterol synthesis pathway; and I also knew that glucagon (insulins counter regulatory hormone) inhibited that same enzyme. So, in theory, lowering insulin and increasing glucagon with diet should work to treat elevated cholesterol. But, knowing those things theoretically didnt really give me a whole lot of solace when it came to taking care of real flesh and blood patients who were entrusting their well being to me. (The picture at the top left of this post is one of the handouts I used in my early practice to demonstrate the many effects of too much insulin.)
Stupidly, when I started on the diet myself, I didnt check my own labs, so I didnt really know what happened to me. The patients that I did put on the diet were typically women who were premenopausal (a group who rarely develop heart disease), so I didnt worry about them. I checked everyones labwork, but no ones was really out of whack lipid-wise at the start of the diet, so I didnt have a lot to go on data-wise. The few who did have minimally elevated cholesterol tended to lower it over the first six weeks (I rechecked everyone at six weeks), so I figured the theoretical underpinnings of the diet were okay. But I was still uneasy.
I had visions of myself in the witness box with a sneering plaintiffs attorney saying to me: So, Dr. Eades, are you telling the members of this jury that you put the deceased – whom you knew to have high cholesterol – on a diet filled with RED MEAT! IS THAT WHAT YOURE TELLING THIS JURY, SIR? YOU, SIR, CAUSED THIS MANS FATAL HEART ATTACK, DID YOU NOT?
But more than being worried about this scenario, I didnt want to do anything harmful to anyone. I knew it would be difficult to live with myself if I thought I had killed someone or caused a heart attack out of pure negligence.
Youve got to remember that at this time there was no one in his/her right mind recommending a low-carb diet. There was Atkins, of course, but he had been totally discredited in the eyes of the medical profession by that time. It wasnt until over 20 years later in 2004 that he and the low-carb diet got even minimally rehabilitated. I was very uneasy to say the least.
Then four patients came into my clinic, one almost right after the other, who changed my life. In my actual practice, Im kind of old school and always refer to my patients as Mr, Miss or Mrs. But for purposes of this post, Im going to refer to them by a bogus first name just to make it easier to keep track.
The first of the four patients well call Angie. She was referred to me by MD, who was working at a different clinic than I at the time. Angie came into see MD for nausea and vague abdominal pains, symptoms that, along with tenderness in her upper right abdomen, led MD to suspect gall bladder disease. Angie was a 32 year old woman who was mildly overweight and had vague abdominal pain, but no other remarkable findings. MD drew blood on her and sent her for a gall bladder ultra sound. The ultra sound came back negative, but her blood work was a doozy. Her total cholesterol was over 300 and her triglycerides were about 1900. MD called me and said Have I ever got the patient for you. This was what I had been waiting for. A patient who was female and pre-menopausal with terrible lipids. I figured I could treat such a patient without any risk of her developing heart disease over the short term, and I planned to recheck lipids way sooner than the normal six weeks. Since her lipids were so out of the ordinary for one so young, I asked MD to repeat them, fasting, have the results sent to me and to send Angie to see me after her repeat labs had come back.
When I got her labs, I knew the first reading wasnt an error. In fact, they were a little worse than when MD checked them the first time.
Total cholesterol: 374 mg/dl (all values in mg/dl)
LDL: ?
HDL: 28
Triglycerides (TG) 2080
(There was no value for LDL because LDL is a calculated number and cant be calculated when the triglycerides are over 400 mg/dl.)
Upon examination I found a pleasant mildly overweight young woman who had no real physical signs except for mild tenderness in the right upper quadrant of her abdomen when I really pushed on it. She had no family history of heart disease and she didnt smoke – both pieces of information that made me feel better about what I was about to do.
(Not only were her lipids a mess, Angies liver enzymes were way abnormal as well. I now know that she had non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder, but we (the medical profession) didnt really recognize that as a common disease back then. Im sure her liver was inflamed to some degree, which explained the mild pain she was experiencing.)
I gave her a fairly rigid version of what became the Protein Power diet. I explained exactly what she should eat and what she shouldnt and sent her on her way with my home phone number and my beeper number (this was before the days of cell phones). I told her to call me if she had even the slightest problem and to return to the office in three weeks for a recheck no matter what. And I gnawed my nails. I had the staff call her after a few days to see if she was doing okay. She reported that she was fine.
I got no emergency calls from her and in three weeks she returned. Her right upper quadrant pain had vanished as had her nausea. She reported that she had never felt better. She had even lost nine pounds (which was a fair amount for her since she wasnt that overweight to begin with). I rechecked her labs and waited anxiously for them to come back from the lab the next day. When they did, I was stunned.
Total cholesterol: 292
LDL: 192
HDL 70
TG: 149
I had hoped for a change for the better, but I hadnt in my wildest dreams expected this kind of change. I kind of figured that her triglycerides and cholesterol would come down slowly over several months, not that they would drop like rocks in only three weeks.
The second of my life-changing patients was a casual friend of mine who came to see me about a week after my experience with Angie. He was a 55 year old guy well call Lynn who worked in advertising. I had gotten to know him when his company created some brochures for our clinic. He came to see me for an insurance physical.
He arrived, we chatted, and then I looked him over. I poked and prodded and listened at all the appropriate places. He seemed fine. He was a thinnish white male who was just starting to develop a little (and I mean little) paunch. I would never have even noticed it had he not been sitting there with his shirt off.
Talk turned to my own weight loss, and he asked me if I could put him on a diet to help him lose his little pot belly. I said Sure, and told him about my meat, cheese, salad and green vegetable diet. I told him that I had lost my weight eating a ton of steak and had continued to do so. He was thrilled because he loved steak and had been avoiding it because of everything he had been reading about red meat and heart disease. I had our nurse draw his blood for the lab part of his physical and sent him on his way.
The next day I was going through all the results from the bloodwork that had been drawn the day before when I came upon his. I nearly dropped my teeth.
Total cholesterol: 312
LDL: ?
HDL: ?
TG: 1515
(There was a note on the lab sheet that said they were unable to determine the HDL because the serum was too lipemic (cloudy with fat)?!?!)
I thought, Whoa!, a 32 year old premenopausal woman is one thing, but a 55 year old male right in the middle of major-heart-disease-risk age is something else. And here I had put this guy with totally disrupted lipids on a red-meat diet, which, according to current medical thinking, would almost guarantee to make the situation worse. I put in an immediate call to his office and was told he had left that morning for vacation for two weeks. (Why he had neglected to even mention this trip when we talked for 30 minutes the day before baffled me completely.) I asked for the number wherever he was. His secretary told me that he was on a Caribbean Island and couldnt be contacted. I told her that if he called in to have him call me immediately.
My fears were somewhat assuaged because I figured, hey, the guy is on vacation, hes not going to diet anyway. Why should I worry?
He called me the day he got back and before I could get a word in told me Hey, your diet works great. I lost five pounds while I was on vacation. As it turned out, he was on a Caribbean Island, but it was a resort of some sort. As part of his deal, all the food was provided. He had chowed down on steak just about every day.
I was mortified. I told him about his labs and told him to get into the clinic the next morning to have his blood rechecked. He came in. Here are his labs taken 15 days after his first ones.
Total cholesterol: 195
LDL: 124
HDL: 26
TG: 201
I was really stunned this time. How could these values change this much in just 15 days?
He wanted to stay on the diet, so I told him to go for it. But I kept an eye on him.
Not long after this experience I had a very nice lady, named Jesse, who was the mother of a friend of mine come to see me. She had had labwork done somewhere else and her cholesterol had come back as 735 mg/dl. Her doctor had put her on a cholesterol-lowering medicine, but she was still distressed because she had a friend who remarked to her, I didnt know you could even be alive with a cholesterol that high. I examined her and found her to be a very mildly overweight 72 year old lady with no signs of anything out of the ordinary. I rechecked her blood.
Total cholesterol: 424
LDL: ?
HDL: ?
TG: 1828
Along with these lipid labs, her fasting blood sugar came back at 154 mg/dl. So, not only did she have major lipid abnormalities, she had blood sugar that was in the diabetic range.
I gave her instructions on the diet and told her to stay on her cholesterol-lowering meds until we checked her again in three weeks.
Three weeks later:
Total cholesterol: 186
LDL: 118
HDL: 27
TG: 201
I was surprised this time, but not stunned. Along with these mega improvements in her lipids, Jesses fasting blood sugar was 90.
I told her she could go ahead and discontinue her cholesterol-lowering medications because her cholesterol was normal. She looked at me kind of funny and said, I stopped them when I started the diet. Thats what I thought you said to do.
The last of my four patients came along about two weeks after Jesse. This woman, well call Betsy, was famous in Little Rock. Actually, she wasnt the famous one – her husband was – but she got plenty of notoriety herself. And just in case youre wondering, it wasnt Hillary.
She came to see me because she had picked up a little excess weight and wanted to get it off. I went through my normal workup and found Betsy to be a moderately overweight woman with no other physical signs of ill health.
Her labs told another story.
Total cholesterol: 416
LDL: ?
HDL: ?
TG: 2992
(Like Jesses and Angies labs, Betsys didnt show HDL because the serum was too lipemic.)
After three weeks on the program, Betsy lost 11 pounds and came through with the following labs:
Total cholesterol: 177
LDL: 122
HDL: 36
TG: 94
By then, I was kind of getting used to these seemingly miraculous lipid improvements, so I was no longer stunned. But it did confirm that I was on the right track.
After my experiences with these four patients, all of whom came to see me over about a three month period, I became convinced that my theorizing about the potent effects of reducing insulin was based in reality. Over the ensuing years, I saw many, many more patients with disturbed lipid metabolism whom I successfully treated with low-carb, high-fat diets, but these four, coming as close together as they did in the early days of my feeling my way along in my low-carb career, gave me the conviction to press on.
I am eternally grateful to them.
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Marcus Brooks entrepreneur and business man sends a clear message to Al Gore regarding his fraudulent global warming scam.
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