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The Cameo Theater on Colonial near Mills was the venue for an Emotions Dance Company event called Seven Deadly Sins. When I arrived, the first thing I saw in the theater’s plate glass windows was Brian Feldman who sat on a worn and tattered recliner staring at a TV which was showing nothing but static. Brian had a remote control, but for this 30 hour performance he was personifying Sloth so he never had the ambition to change the channel. There was also a Fake Aquarium with animated fish swimming about. I immediately sat on my portable stool and started to sketch. Several times people passed by that I knew so I paused for a moment to say hello. A drummer set up camp right next to me, leaned over and asked “Hey, I love your stool. Any chance I could borrow it?” I was working so I had to say “No”. He began putting out plastic buckets of varying sizes and before I knew it he was banging out a very loud beat. He must have banged on those cans for close to an hour and I found it hard to concentrate. I probably rushed this sketch a bit since I wanted to get inside away from the noise. If Brian noticed the drumming, he never showed any interest, he just stared listlessly at the static screen and ate Cheerios.

Tisse Mallon, who organized the event, came outside and said to me, “Brian is very proud of the Game of Life that is in the foreground. He replaced LIFE with SLOTH”. Feeling a bit slothful myself, I hadn’t even noticed, so I went back and added that detail to the sketch. Inside the theater, there were semi-nude dancers painted to represent the 7 deadly sins. I spent some time trying to figure out which sin each represented. They moved in slow motion constantly gesturing in an abstract sinuous ongoing performance. There were also staged acts throughout the night. This was a fun event and sketch outing.

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You know it’s bad when KFC and Jack In the Box shun meat due to low quality. However, the USDA doesn’t mind that the meat has been declared icky by fast food standards, they’ll buy that meat and serve it to your kids for lunch!

According to a new a USA TODAY investigation, “The government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants.” Awesome. Not that this is a big shock. For years many campaigns have been focused on getting rid of the crap the USDA serves up in school lunches, but money is an issue, and most of these campaigns have had little success at creating any substantial changes. Parents and our government reps need to get on board fast with school lunch reform.

Some scary facts from the USA Today investigation:

• McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco have far more rigorous meat checks for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. The ground beef these place buy are tested five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.
• Jack in the Box has bacteria standards that are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.
• The chicken that the USDA has been feeding our kids comes from meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. These are chickens that KFC and The Campbell Soup Company refuse to serve.
• USA TODAY examined about 150,000 tests on beef purchased by the  for the school lunch program. Some was safe and some not so much. Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), who purchases meat for schools, bought nearly 500,000 pounds of ground beef with unusually high levels of an indicator bacteria known as “generic E. coli.” Meat was also purchased that had more than double the limit set by many fast-food chains for total coliform. Coliform is used to assess whether a beef producer is minimizing fecal contamination in its meat.
• Tests are also lacking. Ground beef bound for schools is tested eight times in large amounts, which is far less testing than most of the major fast food chains do.

This low quality USDA-purchased meat is donated to almost every school district in the country and served to 31 million students a day, a fact that’s especially concerning since kids are more prone to food related illnesses, yet they’re sometimes being served questionable meat. PLUS since the meat is cooked by school staff it’s hard to regulate if it’s being cooked correctly.

It’s not just meat quality though. Even if the schools served 100% safe meat at all times, school lunches are still notoriously bad…

The CDC notes, “One in three children born in the year 2000 will have diabetes, and 30 percent of them are overweight, and the cost of treating diabetes in the United States is estimated at $174 billion each year.” While experts can’t prove that school lunches are at fault, most do agree that the best way to halt the child obesity epidemic is to serve kids healthy foods while engaging them in physical fitness.  However, kids in schools are served commodity foods, like cheese and ground beef, and served lunches with no national standards related to limits on sugar or other ingredients like artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.

Basically school lunches can be legally full of junk (and most are). Poor nutrition can lead to a host of problems related to education (pdf) too, with kids who eat poorly scoring worse on tests, repeating grades, and more.

Organic Consumers Association points out that school food contains plenty of over-processed starches, fats, genetically modified ingredients, meats laced with hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, and milk that has been produced with the use of genetically-modified bovine growth hormone. Even worse schools don’t offset the bad choices with good ones. Almost no fresh fruits and vegetables are offered on most school lunch menus and soda or fizzy juice is now the top drink of kids in school.

It’s seriously insane when fast food is safer than a school lunch. It’s equally insane that’s there’s lazy food standards and junk food served in school. Especially when you consider that everyone knows that fresh fruits and veggies are vital for healthy kids – in fact the USDA says so, yet they’re version of a “healthy” lunch doesn’t support this.

Coming up some ideas about how to help change your local school lunch programs and how to create change on a national level. Really though, I’d pack your kids a lunch if you can. A simple inexpensive packed lunch is way healthier than what the schools are serving up.

*Source

[image via stock.xchng]

Post from: Blisstree

Fast-food meat safer than school lunches

Scotland’s People has now released the new years statutory images containing records from the Statutory Register of Births for 1909, the Statutory Register of Marriages for 1934, and the Statutory Register of Deaths for 1959.

Hyundai announced today that it will expand its Assurance program into 2010 and will add its America’s Best Warranty and 24-hour Roadside Assistance to the mix.

“Hyundai will extend the vehicle return option through 2010, continuing the unique program that permits Hyundai customers to return their new vehicle if they unexpectedly lose their income,” the Korean automaker said in a statement. “The program set a trend in early 2009 for similar consumer guarantees from airlines, retailers and other automakers looking to alleviate the stress of making a significant purchase during a recession”

Hyundai says that its sales increased 6.2 percent through November, helping it improve market share faster than any other automaker in 2009.

Hit the jump for the press release.

Press Release:

HYUNDAI ASSURANCE ENHANCED FOR 2010

EXPANDED PROTECTION INCLUDES AMERICA’S BEST WARRANTYTM, VEHICLE RETURN AND ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE, CREATING THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE CONSUMER SAFETY NET IN THE INDUSTRY

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif., 12/29/2009 – Hyundai Motor America will expand Hyundai Assurance in 2010 to include America’s Best WarrantyTM and 24-hour Roadside Assistance. These programs will join the innovative vehicle return program, initiated in January 2009 to protect consumers in an uncertain economic environment, as complimentary services on every Hyundai model sold in the United States. The suite of protection now offered under Hyundai Assurance provides the most comprehensive safety net in the industry, all at no additional cost to the consumer.

“Hyundai Assurance represents our complete commitment to our customers, with job-loss vehicle return coverage, five years of roadside assistance, and our industry-leading 10-year warranty,” said John Krafcik, president and CEO, Hyundai Motor America. “Assurance shows that we’re doing things a little bit differently at Hyundai, and this is making a difference in our business results. You can expect more of this in 2010, starting with the all-new Tucson and Sonata.”

For 2010, Hyundai Assurance coverage includes:

America’s Best WarrantyTM

The warranty that changed the industry at its inception in 1999 now headlines a suite of protection programs under the Hyundai Assurance umbrella. America’s Best Warranty is highlighted by a fully transferrable five-year, 60,000-mile new vehicle warranty to repair or replace components manufactured or originally installed by Hyundai that are defective in material or factory workmanship, under normal use and maintenance. Additionally, new Hyundai buyers are covered by 10-year, 100,000-mile powertrain coverage which includes repair or replacement of Hyundai-manufactured or installed powertrain components (i.e., selected engine and transmission/transaxle components) under normal use and maintenance. Other coverage includes seven-year, unlimited miles anti-perforation warranty, 12-month, 12,000-mile replacement parts and accessory limited warranty, and eight-year, 80,000-mile federal emission and performance warranty. For full details about America’s Best Warranty, please see: http://www.hyundaiusa.com/warranty.aspx.

Vehicle Return Program

The Hyundai Assurance vehicle return program, the first of its kind for an automaker in the U.S., returns for 2010. The coverage allows consumers to walk away from a financing obligation when certain adverse life events occur, such as involuntary unemployment, providing protection from financial shortfalls that arise from vehicle depreciation (negative equity) up to $7,500.
Hyundai Assurance will remain standard protection on new vehicles financed or leased from a participating Hyundai dealer, and supplements all existing consumer incentives. The program is available to any consumer, regardless of age, health, employment history or financed amount of the vehicle. The program is complimentary for the first 12 months of the financing or lease date for vehicles financed through any lender and financing source.

The Hyundai Assurance vehicle return program is administered by WALKAWAY USA, LLC. For more details, please visit www.HyundaiUSA.com or www.HyundaiAssurance.com.

Roadside Assistance

If for any reason a new Hyundai becomes disabled, owners have a safety net with five years of 24-hour roadside assistance. Roadside assistance offers drivers peace of mind under the following circumstances:

* Towing for inoperable vehicles, including accidents
* Battery jump starts
* Change flat tire
* Lock-out assistance
* Out of gas assistance
* Trip interruption

HYUNDAI MOTOR AMERICA

Hyundai Motor America, headquartered in Fountain Valley, Calif., is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Co. of Korea. Hyundai vehicles are distributed throughout the United States by Hyundai Motor America and are sold and serviced through more than 790 dealerships nationwide.

– By: Kap Shah

The activist hedge fund Trian Fund Management became the largest shareholder of fund management company Legg Mason, after picking up two million shares on Monday.

The New York firm now owns 5.6% of Legg Mason, ahead of Dodge & Cox’s (a mutual fund) 5.5%.

FinAlternatives: Peltz’s Legg buying spree cannot last forever. As part of the deal that put him on the firm’s board, Peltz agreed not to build a stake larger than 9.9% during a standstill period that could run another two years.

Regardless, LM appears in play.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Details On The New Hyperinflation-Beating Farmland Hedge Fund From Optima
• Hedge Fund Manager Jonathan Hoenig Bribes Us With 100 Trillion Zimbabwe Note
• Hedge Fund BlueGold: The So-Called Sovereign Debt Crisis Is A Distraction

Russia’s space program is considering launching a spacecraft in order to blow up an Asteroid.

Apparently, this particular hunk of rock had a 1-in-37 chance of hitting Earth in 2029 – a number both Russia and the U.S. are none too pleased with.

———————————————-

AP: Russia’s space chief said Wednesday his agency will consider sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth.

Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized.

When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37.

Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters.

In October, NASA lowered the odds that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 as earlier thought to a 1-in-250,000 chance after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path. It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or using nuclear weapons to hit it.

Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” Perminov said.

He wouldn’t disclose any details of the project, saying they still need to be worked out. But he said the mission wouldn’t require any nuclear explosions.

Hollywood action films “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon,” have featured space missions scrambling to avoid catastrophic collisions. In both movies space crews use nuclear bombs in an attempt to prevent collisions.

“Calculations show that it’s possible to create a special purpose spacecraft within the time we have, which would help avoid the collision without destroying it (the asteroid) and without detonating any nuclear charges,” Perminov said. “The threat of collision can be averted.”

“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” he added.

Boris Shustov, the director of the Institute of Astronomy under the Russian Academy of Sciences, hailed Perminov’s statement as a signal that officials had come to recognize the danger posed by asteroids.

“Apophis is just a symbolic example, there are many other dangerous objects we know little about,” he said, according to RIA Novosti news agency.

See Also: The 10 Most Expensive Environmental Disasters Of The Decade >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The 10 Most Expensive Environmental Disasters Of The Decade
• The Worst Internet Disasters Of The Decade
• 10 Looming Geopolitical Disasters

As I take on the BlackBerry this week, my counterpart at CrackBerry.com, Kevin Michaluk, is examining webOS. He has plenty to learn, some of which happened as he went hands-on with the Pre and Pixi. Luckily, CrackBerry Kevin is a quick study and is sure to have some good insight on the differences between the two platforms on Friday. Until then, he’s looking to get some help from you in this forum thread, where you can put down some input on issues like form factor, speed, and the app situation.

Don’t forget that every day that you post in that thread, you’re automatically entered for a chance to win a Pre or Pixi in our Smartphone Round Robin Contest!

Clever sleuthing finds a connection between a virus associated with cancer and the mysterious “yuppie flu.”

by Agence France-Presse

LONDON—From foie gras produced without making birds suffer to “sustainable” fish, British retailers and restaurants are fast embracing politically correct food, helped by celebrity-fueled pressure.

Faux (false) gras is the ethical answer to the foodstuff which has been the bane of campaigners for decades for the way it’s produced: force-feeding ducks or geese to create engorged livers that yield the creamy pate.

Waitrose, House of Fraser, and Tesco are among a growing number of major British retailers who are now refusing to stock real foie gras after protest campaigns.

Even Selfridges, one of the main attractions for discerning shoppers on London’s Oxford Street, decided in November to take foie gras off its shelves after a protest fronted by former James Bond actor Roger Moore.

Classic foie gras. “Faux gras” promises to replace this unethical delicacy. Photo courtesy ilmungo via Flickr“It’s torture in a tin,” said Moore, who appeared on pre-Christmas posters urging Selfridges to halt its sale, stating: “Force-feeding birds is not Yule, it’s cruel.”

The foie gras ban has even gained the royal seal of approval after Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, ordered it off menus for royal functions.

Waitrose developed the faux gras version—produced without force-feeding the birds—and calls it an “ethical alternative to traditional foie gras.”

A darker colour than the real thing, faux gras is made from about 50 percent liver from free-range poultry blended with goose or duck fat.

Two years after its launch, Waitrose customers appear to be increasingly happy to substitute faux gras for the real thing at Christmas and New Year.

“Faux gras is still one of our most popular festive foods,” said a Waitrose spokeswoman, who added that sales of the new product surged by almost 60 percent in 2009.

Such is the popularity of the new, more “ethical” version of the product that lawmakers have backed a motion calling for restaurants to adopt the new version and ditch the real foie gras.

“It is only a matter of time before foie gras is relegated to the history books where it belongs,” said Sam Glover of lobby group PETA.

While the day that five-star establishments abandon such foods seems some way off, restaurants in England do seem to be turning towards “green” alternatives.

Acorn House, in the King’s Cross district of London, claims to be the “first truly eco-friendly” restaurant in the capital.

The duck it serves comes from birds raised in a “positive” way, without cages and without antibiotics added to their food; its food deliveries are made in vehicles using biofuel, 80 percent of its waste is recycled, and its roof is a herb garden.

“Acorn House is set to alter the image of the restaurant industry as well as transform the way in which people eat out,” is the bold claim of its co-founder Arthus Potts.

While most restaurants are not adopting such a radical approach, many are trying to adopt a more ethical approach to their food.

French celebrity chef Raymond Blanc, the holder of two Michelin stars at his renowned restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons near Oxford, has embraced a campaign to use fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).

This label guarantees that the fish has been obtained from sustainable stocks.

“By supporting MSC, I am ensuring that, as a chef, I am helping to ensure that fish stocks will be replenished for generations to come,” said Blanc, a well-known face in his adopted country thanks to regular TV appearances.

There are 14 MSC-certified restaurants in Britain and although the number remains relatively low, the non-profit organisation argues that its campaign is putting pressure on other restaurants to change their ways.

The main target of the protesters is Nobu, the global chain of chic Japanese restaurants which have the financial backing of Hollywood star Robert De Niro and a strong following among the rich and famous.

Nobu’s Michelin-starred London branch is refusing to remove bluefin tuna, an endangered species, from its menu.

Supermodel Elle Macpherson, actress Sienna Miller, and comedian Stephen Fry all added their names to a petition protesting against the restaurant’s use of the endangered fish.

The restaurant responded by adding an asterisk next to the dish on its menu, directing diners to a footnote saying: “Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species. Please ask your server for an alternative.”

Related Links:

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Sarkozy wants French carbon tax to take effect in July

Sarkozy scrambles to salvage carbon tax

Britain’s Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can “harness the wisdom” of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies. According to the Guardian, some of the ideas for this site include services that help to identify wasteful government spending or rate the quality of schools and hospitals. It is worth noting, though, that the Conservatives will only give this prize away if they win the 2010 elections.

Sponsor

Clearly, this move is meant to generate some excitement for the Tories in the upcoming elections, especially given that they haven’t been in power since Tony Blair took office in 1997.

A Great Idea or a Waste of Taxpayer Money?

Looking beyond the politics of this proposal, this idea clearly has something going for it. Jeremy Hunt, the U.K.’s shadow culture secretary, told the Guardian that, “there are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by government.”

One could argue, however, as the Liberal Democrat’s spokeswoman Jenny Willott does, that there are already lots of ways for people to collaborate and communicate online and that this is simply a waste of taxpayer money. Willott argues that sites like Facebook already allow voters to communicate with each other and the government. As we pointed out earlier this month, however, Facebook petitions can be manipulated rather easily.

In the U.S., crowdsourced projects like this have generally been funded by non-profits. ProPublica, for example, recently launched a project that allows citizens to track how the stimulus money is being spent.

Image Credit: Flickr user ohadweb

Discuss

He says a big Arctic melt is inevitable and readies us for what comes next.

by David Roberts

I’m technically on vacation, but the wife and kids are watching Chicken Little up in the hotel room right now, so I’m going to sneak in here for a quick post.

Ted Gayer—senior fellow and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution—has an article in Forbes today, ostensibly about coming EPA CO2 regulations, but really about the existence of cost-effective CO2 reductions. He doesn’t believe they exist:

… Krugman oversells the [emission reduction] affordability claim by linking to a widely cited report by McKinsey & Company. The main point of the McKinsey study is provided in their Exhibit B, which illustrates a rather peculiar finding that there are a significant number of pollution abatement options that can be achieved at “negative cost.” This finding violates the basic principles of economics. If firms (or consumers) could reduce emissions at negative cost, then they would do so. To say otherwise is to say that they are willingly or ignorantly passing up profits.

This is, about as bluntly as I’ve ever seen it stated, the core of neoliberal economics and the reason that economics has had a mostly deleterious effect on the policy discussion around energy and climate change.

Consider what follows from Gayer’s premise:

• McKinsey is one of the most respected consulting firms in the world; they make their clients lots of money. Nobody has done more to study efficiency technologies and deployment than McKinsey researchers. Yet their entire body of work, spanning over a decade and thousands of pages, is negated by a “basic principle of economics.” (Why didn’t they think of that?! If only someone at McKinsey had taken Economics 101.)

• Companies like Dow Chemical and BP that have made hundreds of billions of dollars by investing in efficiency are unique, like snowflakes. None of their competitors could make money through similar investments. If they could, they would, but they’re not, so they can’t! QED.

• Carbon intensity—CO2 emissions per unit of GDP—varies widely across states and countries. Again, this is because every state and country is unique like a snowflake. There’s nothing those with high carbon intensity could learn from those with low carbon intensity. Every state and country has the carbon intensity that perfectly rational investment yields, because if there were cost-effective opportunities to lower carbon intensity that hadn’t been exploited, that would be irrational, and people are rational, so there aren’t any. QED.

• The burgeoning field of behavioral economics, which studies the way humans actually behave in the field, is based on a mistake. What’s the point of studying? We already know they behave rationally. That’s a “basic principle of economics.” The rash of recent books showing ostensibly irrational behavior on the part of consumers and business executives—Predictably Irrational, Nudge, Sway, Blind Spots, The Myth of the Rational Market, etc.—is full of mistakes. The behavior they discuss isn’t irrational, because people did it, and people are rational, so the behavior is rational. QED.

• Not only are people rational, but energy markets are too. There are no market barriers or failures that might obscure or discourage profitable efficiency investments. This paper from the folks at Resources for the Future, which reviews “the range of market barriers, market failures, and behavioral failures that have been cited in the energy efficiency context,” is nothing but a parade of errors, each one refuted by “basic principles of economics.”

• All the businesses that prosper by helping others save energy (and thus money) are … chimera, I guess. You can’t help people do things they’re already doing!

I could go on, but I’m on vacation, dammit. Suffice to say, Gayer’s premise that businesses exploit all profitable investments would only be plausible to someone who’s never been in the business world. And sure enough, a glance at his background reveals that he has been working in academia, government, or think tanks his entire professional life—rarefied environments where the “basic principles” of Economics 101 can be sheltered from the complicating exigencies of the real world.

The point is not just to pick on one stupid article. Gayer’s formulation is particularly clownish, but in more subtle forms it is absolutely ubiquitous in climate policy discussions. It is the core reason why reductions in greenhouse gases are always framed as a burden and an expense—after all, if they could be reduced profitably, they already would be, right?

Who you gonna believe, basic economic principles or yer lyin’ eyes?

Related Links:

Economics as pathology, part two

Rationality, welfare, and public policy

Is the ‘climate debt’ discussion helpful?

I usually avoid posting rumors started by analysts, because it seems like most have the batting average of a dizzy, blindfolded toddler. Alas, with CES just days away, everything worth writing about is being kept under tight lock and key; at this point, any big leaks would be like somebody ruining a surprise party by shouting “THERE’S A SURPRISE PARTY IN THERE” as the special guest walks up the driveway.

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry,who at least has some sort of history with Motorola predictions, has a few guesses as to what Motorola will be announcing next week.

Chowdhry claims that Moto will be launching two Android-powered handsets at CES: one for AT&T, and one for Verizon. The AT&T kit will have a physical keyboard, OLED screen, and might be running stock Android rather than the Moto BLUR UI, while the Verizon piece would lack the physical keyboard — or, at least, so says Chowdhry.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Filed under: Car Buying, SUV, Kia

There really isn’t anything wrong with the Kia Borrego. When compared directly to its intended competition, the big, boxy, body-on-frame SUV is both attractive and fully class competitive, as we learned the first time we got any significant time in its driver seat. That said, there’s no doubt that the Borrego’s model launch was an object lesson in horrible timing.

The Borrego was Introduced in late 2008 as a 2009 model, right when the financial meltdown was starting to make some waves and the previous summer’s record-high fuel prices were still emblazoned in our collective memory banks. This being the case, it’s no surprise to learn from The Car Connection that Kia moved fewer than half (at 9,510 through November) of its hoped-for Borrego sales in 2009.

That said, we still didn’t expect the Korean automaker to drop the Borrego entirely for the 2010 model year, which is exactly what’s being reported by the boys over at The Car Connection. Apparently, no decision has yet been made as to whether the Borrego will make a return appearance after 2010 or if the square-jawed SUV will be a one-and-done proposition.

Either way, for the keen bargain hunter, there’s a boatload of cash on the hood of the 2009 model year. Kia is presently offering $3,000 in cash back on all trim levels, plus the availability of numerous other incentives. The rundown: $1,500 for trading in a competitor’s vehicle (everything from the Buick Enclave to the Pontiac Aztek and Jeep Wrangler Unlimited qualifies); $1,500 for owner loyalty, $400 for recent college grads, $500 for military service, and $300 for Great Dane rescue shelter workers. We made that last one up.

[Sources: The Car Connection; Kia]

Report: No 2010 Kia Borrego, model’s future uncertain originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let’s say you’re a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you’re a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you’ve got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method? We think there is. Below you’ll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

Sponsor

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Works With Just About Anything

We’ll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we’ve got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though.

If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work – check out this post, where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could.

In the following 13 steps, we’ll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post.

No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method – but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to “join the conversation” – because they aren’t sure where to find the conversation. Here’s how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn’t a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it’s a good place to start from.

Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow.

Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field

There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you’re looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post. Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order – the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we’re running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity. Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes.. These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity.

So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two.

Add The Feeds to a Reader

We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it’s easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn’t matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it’s the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources.

We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes.

Once you’ve got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it’s time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there’s more that we’re going to do with these blogs. When you’re in the "add feed" screen, you’ll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It’s really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We’re now going to edit an OPML file – but don’t be scared! It’s easy, we promise. Anyone can do it.

Pull Out Your New Tab’s Feeds

This step assumes you’ve using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that’s not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step.

The Top of the OPML File.

Don’t delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don’t you feel smart? That was really easy though!

Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs

Now that you’ve got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You’ll need to create an account, and the service doesn’t allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are all different emails – Gmail considers them the same thing? It’s true, that’s an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that’s how you’ve got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file.

Rank the Blog Posts With Robots!

Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you’ll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they’ve processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it’s been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It’s then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed.

What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs’ own communities of readers. That’s valuable information! It’s a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you’ll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank!

If you’re interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here’s the OPML file we built with the feeds we’ve found so far: Top Education Blogs – Greatest Hits. Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader.

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It looks like Apple is getting ready to replace the aging 8GB iPhone 3G that currently sells for $99 with a newer iPhone 3GS model, if their packaging is to be believed. A user on the German apfetalk discussion forum posted the image above, which is the label on the iPhone 3G 8GB box, and while he did receive a regular iPhone 3G, the box clearly says “iPhone 3GS v2.2 8GB” and has us thinking that Apple is finally ready to have the entire product line fall under the 3GS brand. Heck, the 8GB iPhone 3GS is a year-and-a-half old now, and we all know that Apple is set to release an all new iPhone model this summer, so it all makes sense to us.

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