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One element of Japanese cuisine is that it celebrates the seasons. Japanese dishes feature what is fresh and seasonal, and are cooked in such a way that is appropriate for the seasonal weather. During the winter, hearty soups such as oden are commonly found, as are hot pot meals such as sukiyaki.

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What’s cooking this weekend, folks? I confess I am not cooking much, as I am in the middle of a semi-spontaneous painting project in the kitchen. But I still have recipes on the brain; we had so many good ones this week! Here’s a look back at some of the week’s events and recipes, and do tell us what you’re cooking and eating too!

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Filed under: GM, Saab, Earnings/Financials

According to a press release quoted in Dow Jones Newswires, Stefan Lofven, head of Swedish trade union IF Metall, the board of Saab has voted today to liquidate the company. Simultaneously, General Motors has announced that it has hired AlixPartners to supervise the “orderly wind-down” of the marque.

Interestingly, none of this means that Saab is dead, although certainly neither of these things can be seen as reason for optimism. According to its own statement about AlixPartners (available after the jump), GM continues to evaluate bids for Saab, presumably those from Spyker Cars and Genii Capital/Bernie Ecclestone – if not others as well. To this, Lofven is quoted as remarking that “It is irresponsible of GM in this situation to act in two directions, both towards a sale and towards a wind-down.” Irresponsible or no, that appears to be exactly what GM is doing. More as it happens…

[Sources: Dow Jones Newswires via The Wall Street Journal, General Motors | Image: Joe Raedle/Getty]

Continue reading BREAKING: Saab board reportedly votes to liquidate company, but GM still weighing bids

BREAKING: Saab board reportedly votes to liquidate company, but GM still weighing bids originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Chrysler, Design/Style

Chrysler has carefully picked its words, saying that the 300 S6 and 300 S8 are all-new models that build on the rear-wheel-drive sedan’s roots. Don’t fret, the cosmetic updates are welcome; there’s a new blacked-out grille this year and 20-inch alloys to fill out those classic bold wheelarches. The S6 and S8, while blatantly ripping off Audi nomenclature (do we smell a lawsuit?), denotes whether the car’s packing a six- or eight-cylinder powerplant.

Interiors have been updated as well, and the words that Chrysler chose to describe them make them sound like Xanadu on wheels. In the pictures, however, the changes appear to include more heavily bolstered seats with embroidered logos and leather and cloth surfaces. The dashboard and other surfaces don’t seem to be much different than what we’ve criticized in the past, though it could be the same design (which is fine) just rendered in improved materials.

Other vehicles are also coming in for a refreshing in 2010. The continually dead/not-dead PT Cruiser gets a Couture Edition with a dressed up interior and two-tone paint. The Town & Country Walter P. Chrysler Signature Series also looks to get much-needed interior attention, though we’ll only be convinced of its quality after running our mitts over the nicely-photographed wares.

[Source: Chrysler]

Continue reading Chrysler reveals slew of special edition models for 2010

Chrysler reveals slew of special edition models for 2010 originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Motorsports, Truck, Volkswagen, Off-Road

The 2010 Dakar Rally, which is no longer run in Africa due to terrorism threats, kicked off from its designated starting point in Argentina on January 1st. Eventually, the competitors will end up back in Buenos Aires on January 17th, but not before traversing 5,600 miles of some of the toughest terrain on the planet.

This year, Volkswagen will be having a rather large presence at the Rally with four race-prepped Touareg SUVs taking part in the event along with 35 Amarok pickups that are acting as support vehicles. In the process, we imagine that the drivers will have plenty of opportunity to put the ridiculously named truck’s electronic differential lock, Off-Road ABS, Hill Descent Assist, ESP Plus system and Hill Hold Assist to the test.

Volkswagen would like you to know that the Amarok will be available starting this September in the UK, but has given numerous indications that it won’t be coming Stateside. Anyway, hit the jump for the press release and check out the high-res image gallery below of the truck gettin’ its rally on.

[Source: Volkswagen]

Continue reading Volkswagen Amarok puts on official duds for Dakar Rally

Volkswagen Amarok puts on official duds for Dakar Rally originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MIT economist Jonathan Gruber has become the go-to economist for fans of the health care reform wending its way through congress.  He regularly produces analyses showing how great reform is going to be for people buying insurance in the individual market, and has been a vocal advocate for the excise tax.  His prominence made him a natural lead-in for Ron Brownstein’s recent piece on the health care bill for Atlantic Politics:

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won’t succeed unless it “bends the curve” in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.

“I’m sort of a known skeptic on this stuff,” Gruber told me. “My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.”

He shows up in the work of the left-half of the health care commentariat so often that if I tried to round up representative cites, this piece would be published sometime next month, and you’d die of old age before you made your way through it.

But he probably wouldn’t have been cited with quite the same authority–particularly by mainstream media–if he’d been more upfront about the fact that he’s being paid almost $300,000 by the Obama Administration for “special studies and analysis” of the health care bills, as a blogger on Firedoglake revealed last night.  Ben Smith has the rundown; apparently most of the health care beat reporters were as unaware of the relationship as I was.

I certainly would not have written about him the same way, even though I am sure that what Gruber is saying comports with what he believes.  My guess is that like me, most journalists would have treated him as an employee of the administration, with all the constraints that implies, rather than passing along his pronouncements as the thoughts of an independent academic.  Christina Romer is a very, very fine economist.  But her statements about administration policy are treated differently from statements by, say, her colleague Brad De Long.

Given how influential Professor Gruber’s work has been during the health care debate, that’s rather a large problem.

Gruber’s explanation that “he disclosed this to reporters whenever they asked” is not very compelling.  I don’t see how anyone even tangentially connected to policy work could fail to realize that this was a material conflict of interest that should have been disclosed, and reporters cannot take up all their interview time going through all the sources who might have been paying or otherwise influencing their interviewee. 

The standard is even higher for people who are taking public funds, and not only Professor Gruber, but the administration had a responsibility to disclose the relationship.  Yet a post on the OMB blog signed by Peter Orszag cited Brownstein’s Gruber quotes without mentioning the relationship. 

To be clear, I’m sure that Jonathan Gruber is in favor of passing this health care bill, and thinks it will do a lot of genuine good.  I don’t think that funding automatically discredits the message; his work should stand on its own merits.  But journalists and academics are granted a presumption of independence that is not given to most other professions, and that gives them a special duty to make it clear whenever there is a relationship that people might reasonably think has affected their views.  Lefties were rightly furious when journalists turned out to have been taking money from the Bush administration, and I’m glad to see that at least some of them are holding Obama to the same standard.

I’ve talked several times in the past about hyrail (or the Hydrogen Hi-Speed Rail Super Highway “H2RSH” as some are now calling it) by Interstate Traveler. In my past conversations with hyrail’s creator Justin Sutton, he indicated that the first hydrogen high-speed rail system may actually begin somewhere in Indonesia, where the need and political acceptance is the most accommodating right now.

And sure, enough, in three days from now, Bandung Institute of Technology transportation experts will start a 3-month feasibility study concerning the Interstate Traveler H2RSH project. If the feasibility study passes both technically and financially, the $3 billion hyrail project will begin building as early as 2012.

The Hydrogen Hi-Speed Rail Super Highway will cover approximately 221 miles from Cirebon, West Java, to Soekarno-Hatta Airport in Tangerang, Banten. The cutting edge hydrogen transportation project has even made the news inside Indonesia as can be seen on this Youtube video (this isn’t a “clean” video as there is other news on this clip as well).

According to the Jakarta Post, up to 15 firms now may be financially backing this project, “The 15 firms which could become involved include Aon Risk Service Inc, Aqua-PhyD Inc, Aruna Solutions, Asian Energy Limited, Tricap Group, Copernicus International, eCompass Group, Fidelity National Financial, Global Green Management, McGladry & Pullen, Modular Integrated Technologies, Obermeyer Planen+Beraten, Pembinaan Aktif Gemilang, The Interstate Traveller Company, and Tum Geotechnical Research.”

If the feasibility study passes, this will not only encourage the building of hyrail in West Java, but may encourage business and government in Michigan and Florida to do the same, since both of these states have already expressed a keen interest in this project.

In the style of the best Russian hackers, Samsung Mobile basically modded its own “Moment” handset and inserted a mobile DTV chip into it along with some circuitry and an Android app to control it.  The resulting concoction is being served at CES with mixed reviews.

The news was broken by Samsung Mobile US on their twitter account accompanied by a press release and quickly followed by a hands-on video from Engadget.

An excerpt from the press release:

[Samsung] Moment was selected because of its 3.2-inch AMOLED display screen, which delivers crisp colors, bright pictures outdoors, and wide viewing angles.

Unfortunately no launch details for a Mobile DTV version of the Android handset have been announced, but Samsung did confirmed that is rolling a “Consumer Showcase ” of the device, involving Sprint customers in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore markets during the first quarter of 2010.

So what do you think? will this eliminate the need of an Android version of the Sling Player? chime in at the comments section!

Via Phanrdoid, Engadget

Hace tiempo que no hablamos de Pandora, genial servicio de radio personalizada online, desde que restringió su uso a los Estados Unidos. No sólo sobrevive sino que ha participado en una particular integración: un dispositivo Pioneer para acceder a Pandora desde el coche, detectando la configuración del iPhone. La idea es que el control sea similar al que se tiene de la radio en el automóvil, pero con el sistema de recomendaciones de Pandora.

El cacharrito costará 1200 dólares, por lo que sólo tiene sentido económico para los usuarios americanos que pagan por la radio por satélite, como explican en PaidContent. Aunque por aquí no creo que lo vayamos a ver, creo que este tipo de integración de Pandora en el coche muestra dos cosas: que las radiofórmulas van a sufrir con la llegada de internet al automóvil y la tendencia basada en controlar el hardware – interfaz con el usuario para apalancarse en el negocio del contenido. En todo caso, apuesta de poco recorrido, lo razonable es que a medio plazo “pinchemos” el móvil en el coche y tengamos acceso a multitud de servicios y no estar atados a un único proveedor.

Wade Roush wrote:

“Netflix for designer dresses” is the elevator pitch that everyone uses to describe Rent the Runway, the New York City startup that launched in November with Series A funding from Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures. The company buys dresses from top fashion designers, then lets customers reserve them online for a four- or eight-day rental period. When the time comes, Rent the Runway ships out the dresses (in two sizes, just in case) along with a handy pre-paid return shipping package. They even handle the dry cleaning.

But the Netflix comparison isn’t quite accurate. Netflix customers don’t have to pay for each individual DVD rental. The beauty of the model is that you just pay your $9 to $24 per month, and then you watch as many DVDs as you want, limited only by the number of discs your plan allows you to rent simultaneously.

But Rent the Runway members have to rent each dress separately. Or they used to, anyway. Starting today, Rent the Runway is offering its own subscription-based pricing option: for $350, members can now rent as many dresses as they can wear in the course of a single month (with a limit of four dresses out at once). For $900, they’ll get unlimited rentals through January, February, and March.

As before, members can still rent individual dresses, at prices ranging from $50 to $200—the more haute the couture, the higher the one-time-rental cost. But Jennifer Fleiss, Rent the Runway’s co-founder and president, says customers were demanding a more economical way to rent lots of dresses in succession. “We’re seeing a lot of our really loyal customers renting a few times in one month, so they’re spending a lot of money,” Fleiss says. “We’re trying to find a way to enable that in a more cost-effective way.”

Put another way, Rent the Runway is trying to make the decision to reserve a dress as hassle-free as possible. Just as Netflix members don’t have to worry about whether to add a new DVD to their queue, subscription members at Rent the Runway can pick out as many dresses as they want without worrying about the incremental cost. They also don’t have to worry about whether the dress they’re reserving is a $75 Diane von Furstenberg or a $200 Herve Leger—they’re all covered under the flat subscription fee.

“This is our first bold step to really try to change user behavior,” says Fleiss. “Our belief is that you should rent anything that’s not a basic. For your basic black dress, you should absolutely buy that. But for anything that’s seasonal or just once or twice, you should rent—the job interview, the date next week, the meet-the-parents dinner, the special night out. There is no occasion too small to have fun and pick out a special dress.”

But there are several other reasons behind the subscription program—reasons that relate as much to logistics and finances as they do to marketing, and that reveal a lot about Rent the Runway’s business model.

First off, there’s the seasonal nature of the fashion business. January, February, and March are traditionally the slowest months of the year for clothing retailers and design studios, so any program that boosts business during those months will help to smooth out Rent the Runway’s revenue stream, Fleiss says. (The startup will probably continue the subscription plan past the end of March, but may tweak the pricing and other details, she says. For example, during the high season—meaning the Halloween-through-New Year’s holiday rush—Rent the Runway might need to charge more for subscriptions to avoid losing money.)

Second, there’s the inventory issue. It’s been two months since the company’s November 9 launch, which has given Fleiss and her co-founder Jennifer Hyman time to learn that the biggest constraint in their business model is the supply of dresses. Rent the Runway has only 1,000 dresses in its warehouse, and 750 of them were out on rental on New Year’s Eve, Fleiss says.

“It was crazy,” she says. “It’s a great problem to have that there is so much demand. But we do have a wait list to join the site, and it’s mostly because of …Next Page »

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Perhaps you’ve seen these trees with the beautiful fan-shaped leaves in your neighborhood or in a local park. The female members of these trees produce an edible nut; unfortunately, the fruit enclosing the nut smells really bad. Their fragrance deters most people from trying them, much like the durian fruit.

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Google is one of the biggest web companies in the world, if not the biggest, but, surprisingly it’s also one of the more open. It’s not without its flaws but it looks like it’s trying and has certainly done a lot more than its competitors. So, its latest hire of open web advocate Chris Messina shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. He will bolst… (read more)

A new calculus developed at the Harvard Kennedy School provides a more precise method of comparing poverty levels and changes over time, and between countries. The method is outlined in a new Harvard Kennedy School working paper, “On the Measurement of Poverty Dynamics,” co-authored by Daniel A. Hojman and Felipe Kast.

Using commonly available poverty statistics, the authors established a framework for integrating metrics measuring the flow of people in and out of poverty with those who remain entrenched. In their analysis, the authors concluded that the “war on poverty” saw significant gains in the United States in the 1990s compared with the 1980s.

“Both decades exhibit similar inflows into poverty, but the 1990s have considerably more outflows,” the authors wrote. “This is in line with findings of the impact of welfare reform. Interestingly, a number of social mobility measures deliver the opposite ordering. If we hold the view that the conditions that shape the evolution of poverty were significantly improved by the reform … this suggests that our method provides a more accurate account of poverty dynamics than existing measures.”

Hojman and Kast also ranked both the United States and Germany behind the United Kingdom in aggregate poverty dynamics during the 1990s, although they ranked the United States first in terms of “social mobility,” the ability of those citizens in poverty to move themselves out of it.

“We view these axioms as a natural benchmark that allows for a parsimonious characterization of a ranking over distributions of streams of welfare attributes, and facilitates comparisons with those singled out by social mobility,” the authors concluded. “At the same time, principles that highlight other dimensions of income dynamics,” for instance “the income growth rate of poor individuals rather than changes in deprivation levels, can offer important insights. Analyzing the robustness of the rankings produced by our measures as we vary the underlying static deprivation scale also deserves more attention. Expanding the set of applications is an important step for future research.”

Hojman, an assistant professor of public policy, teaches microeconomics at the Kennedy School. His main research areas are theoretical and applied microeconomics and political economy. Kast is on faculty at the Universidad Católica de Chile, and currently is a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development.

You can read the working paper here: http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?PubId=6882.

Yesterday, I noted the Bloomberg story reporting that the New York Federal Reserve appears to have prevented AIG from fully disclosing the magnitude of its bailout that would go to pay bank swap counterparties. Washington has taken notice. The top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus has sent a letter (.pdf) to committee chair Barney Frank demanding an inquiry. This scandal could have all sorts of repercussions in Washington.

First, here’s part of what Bachus wrote, after outlining the concern:

For all these reasons, our Committee has a duty to convene a Full Committee hearing in order to determine the facts surrounding AIG’s bailout. There is no more urgent business before the Committee and this hearing should be given the highest priority.

Given that the House is finished (for now) with financial regulation, I kind of agree with Bachus. And what might such an inquiry find out?*

First, and foremost, that the Fed hates transparency. Of course, that’s no surprise to anyone who follows the central bank. But this might fuel the fire for Rep. Ron Paul’s quest to reform the Fed. Republicans are — rightly I think — very angry that this kind of information was withheld from Congress when distributing taxpayer money to bailout a firm. I don’t think it’s particularly outlandish that Washington wants to understand how taxpayer dollars are spent. And, to me, it seems highly unethical to urge a firm to purposely withhold that information when they were planning on disclosing it — which is what it appears the NY Fed did.

From a people perspective, this finding could also matter. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke hasn’t been re-confirmed yet. While it has been largely expected that he would be, this news might make that confirmation process a little more difficult. Republicans will certainly question him about the NY Fed’s decision to withhold that information. If it causes a several Democrats to also doubt Bernanke’s ability to lead a reasonably transparent Federal Reserve, then the pendulum could sway away from re-confirmation.

It also reaches into the Treasury, with Geithner in the spotlight. He was the President of the New York Fed during the AIG negotiations. That means the buck stopped with him. We’re already hearing calls for his firing following yesterday’s news, and they may grow louder. President Obama advertised Geithner as a Treasury Secretary that didn’t cater to big Wall Street banks. This news paints quite a different picture.

Finally, the scandal could effect financial regulation. Republicans probably wouldn’t have been on board anyway, but you might see some stricter controls over the Federal Reserve added in now. There was already an amendment requiring a Fed audit, but some more ambitious language could now find its way into the bill’s final version if enough Democrats are also outraged with the NY Fed’s actions.

* Note: Turns out Barney Frank also finds the situation “troubling” and supports a hearing. This should be fun to watch.

This inspiring Primal Blueprint Fitness Video was sent in by reader Tom Greenwald. Let Tom know what you think in the comment board.

The Fitness Video contest has ended, but there are still ways to win prizes and be part of the Primal community here at Mark’s Daily Apple. Enter your best recipes (current theme: Primal Snacks) to be included in the Primal Blueprint Reader-Created Cookbook Contest, and submit your New Year’s Resolutions video by Jan. 15. In both cases you have a chance to win hundreds of dollars in Primal gear and be featured on MDA. Grok on!

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SeatGeek was definitely one of the finalists of the most recent TechCrunch50 conference that I thought were most interesting from a business model perspective. Apparently, I’m not the only one, as the New York-based startup has just closed a Series A round of funding led by a group of four entrepreneurs/angel investors.

The fledgling company, which bills itself as a ‘Farecast for sports and concert tickets’, had earlier raised $20k in seed financing from DreamIt Ventures, and has now secured in between $500k-$1 million more (no exact amount could be given due to some contingencies built into the financing).

SeatGeek aims to predict pricing evolution of sports and event tickets sold on the secondary market, much like Farecast (now Bing Travel) forecasts the price of airline tickets. It attempts to do so using a bot that crawls hundreds of secondary market websites on a daily basis in combination with automated algorithms that take into account a very broad set of relevant factors, like for instance the predicted weather of a Saturday baseball game.

This morning, SeatGeek launched a completely new version of its website, featuring interactive seating charts for ticket listings of some 5,000 events. These charts, built in partnership with SeatQuest, allow for ticket listings to be overlayed on the seating chart as dots, so that the user can see where they’d be sitting instantly. For sports events, SeatGeek goes beyond just indicating that with heat maps, coloring dots to represent how good a deal each ticket is based on its algorithms (example).

In addition to the seating charts, the startup is launching an e-mail alert system that lets users sign up for notifications when SeatGeek’s forecast recommendation changes to a “Buy” and when tickets below a certain price become available.

When SeatGeek launched at TC50, it boasted price forecasts for about 1,200 events, and thanks to an expansion into listings for the NFL, NBA and just about every major concert (NHL is up next), the startup now has forecasts for about 5,000 events. SeatGeek claims to have maintained a 82% forecast accuracy rate for all new events, which uses a database of historical ticket prices that has grown to over 11 million sales in the past few months.

SeatGeek says the extra capital will primarily used for hiring – the team had already doubled in size since TechCrunch50, from four to eight. As mentioned above, the money comes from four NYC angel investors, namely Sunil Hirani (founder of Creditex, an online derivatives market that was acquired for $625M in 2008), Mark Wachen (founder of Optimost, an enterprise multivariate testing app acquired for $52M three years ago), Arie Abecassis (former President of MindFire) and Allen Levinson (former MD of Moody’s KMV).

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Over the past nine years, solar plastic maker Konarka has been creeping toward commercialization, raising close to $200 million in private equity and government grants. When will it teeter over that brink of pilot production and move into full-scale commercialization? Well, for now some more funding: According to SEC documents, this week Konarka raised yet […]