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Did we just see an Instant Classic at Soldier Field on Monday night? From a fantasy perspective, the answer is a resounding (or a depressing) yes.

The Week 16 fantasy story had a thrilling final scene as the Bears and Vikings tossed around 66 points and 789 yards in an overtime thriller. Did you win or lose your fantasy title on Sidney Rice’s(notes) dramatic touchdown in the final minute of regulation (on fourth down, no less)? Did Robbie Gould’s(notes) miss in overtime decide your match? Was the issue clinched when Adrian Peterson lost a fumble in the extra session? How did Jay Cutler’s(notes) game-winning rainbow to Devin Aromashodu(notes) affect your league? Big plays and major statistical swings were all over the place in this one, especially in the second half.

Let’s hit on the high points and figure out what we learned from all this:

With the Bears: The middle of Cutler’s season was an absolute horror show, but let’s not forget that he played brilliantly in Weeks 2-4 and he was just about letter-perfect against Minnesota here (20-for-35, 273 yards, 4 TDs, 1 pick). Cutler spread the ball around, was decisive, hit some tight windows, and seemed to keep the risky throws at a minimum, at least by his standards (albeit the pick was a force into heavy coverage). The game-winning toss to the sneaky-quick Aromashodu (7-150) was as pretty a throw as you’ll see.

That said, this monster game from Cutler came after most rational fantasy owners wrote him off. Unless you play in a two or three-QB league, Cutler’s explosion here was nothing more than a frustrating footnote to a maddening season. Are you buying or selling Cutler as a 2010 commodity? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Four different players scored the touchdowns for Chicago. Greg Olsen(notes) (3-47) got the first spike but wasn’t a factor after intermission; Desmond Clark(notes) (5-39) shook free on a play-fake at the goal line; and Earl Bennett(notes) (3-35) made a rare visit to the end zone. Matt Forte(notes) slogged out 74 yards on 21 carries, never breaking anything to the second level. Johnny Knox(notes) dinged his ankle in the third quarter and didn’t have a reception, while Devin Hester(notes) (calf) was a game-day scratch. Danieal Manning(notes) set up two of Chicago’s scores with a pair of lengthy kickoff returns.

With the Vikings: You can take a half-full or half-empty approach to Minnesota’s offense here; the Vikes had a bagel at halftime, then exploded for 30 points in the next 30 minutes. Brett Favre(notes) & Company scored on five straight drives in the second half and this probably is the deepest offense in the NFC, even with the suspect play from the offensive tackles.

It took a while for Favre to get his sea legs but there’s nothing wrong with him (26-for-40, 321 yards, 2 TDs). He used everyone he could downfield; nine different Vikings caught passes while no one had more than 58 yards. Favre’s clearly more comfortable spreading the field at the goal line and it showed on the scoring plays. Visanthe Shiancoe(notes) scored his 10th touchdown in the third period, and Rice snagged a score on a beautiful fourth-down fade route in the final seconds of regulation.

Peterson’s night was a mixed bag; it’s hard to complain about 137 total yard and two touchdowns, but he only managed 3.9 yards a carry and there was the critical fumble in overtime, of course. Peterson now has seven fumbles and six lost fumbles, worst among all non-quarterbacks. In fairness to AD, the fumble came on a nasty strip from Chicago’s Hunter Hillenmeyer(notes); to my eyes, that was more of a great defensive play than a gaffe from the ball carrier.

Revisiting the NFC Playoff Picture: Minnesota’s stunning loss was welcome news to the Saints – they’re now locked into the No. 1 seed. The No. 2 seed in conference is up for grabs; four teams have a shot at it (everyone but the Packers). Assuming we don’t see any ties on Sunday, here’s everyone’s path to the No. 2 spot in the NFC:

• If the Eagles beat the Cowboys, they’re the No. 2 seed. Easy, breezy.

• If the Vikings beat the Giants and the Eagles lose, Minnesota is the No. 2 seed.

• If the Cardinals beat the Packers while the Eagles and Vikings both lose, the Cardinals are the No. 2 seed.

• If the Cowboys beat Philly while the Vikings and Cardinals both lose, the Pokes take the No. 2 seed.

We already knew the Eagles and Cowboys would have incentive here, playing for a division title and at least one home game (versus a wild-card spot and a road trip). The Vikings obviously will be out to win, looking to get an off week (also consider they kick off three hours ahead of the Eagles and Cowboys). Things could get a little dicey with the Cardinals; by the time their game starts, they could already know that they have no shot at the No. 2 spot (a Minnesota victory would lock Arizona into 3-4 range). Would the Cardinals expose Kurt Warner(notes) over a full game if there were little at stake? It’s hard to say.

The Packers don’t really have much to play for, they can’t get a home game for the first round, they’re a wild-card team no matter what. And obviously the Saints have a decision on their hands – should they go after the game at Carolina, or play it safe and keep people healthy?

For more on the NFL’s playoff situations, have some interactive fun with Yahoo’s playoff scenario generator. Pick all the games any way you want (ties included!), the generator does the rest.

Eco Factor: Self-powered prosthetic limbs to harvest kinetic energy.

KCF Technologies will be receiving a $2 million grant to develop and commercialize self-powered prosthetic limb technology that will improve the quality of life for amputees and improve their ability to return to active military duty.

(more…)

Digg has had one busy year and, while things are looking up, it still has a lot of work cut out ahead of it. Twitter was a major disruptor and replaced the social news aggregator as a source for many users who found Twitter’s immediacy a much better alternative to Digg. At the same time, Digg introduced quite a few products, mostly aimed at generating revenue, but also at improving the experience for the users. But as 2009 draws to a close, Digg is focusing its attention on the things that make the service what it is, its users and the stories.

From this perspective, it wasn’t a great year for Digg either, at least from the raw numbers, as the top stories of the year got half the diggs popular stories in previous years got. The biggest story of the year was US president Barack Obama’s inauguration getting almost 25,400 diggs.

This was followed by Michael Jackson’s death which captured the attention of the world and got 24,800 diggs, just shy of taking the first spot. At number three is “The Story of Prisoner F95488,” an US student and talented soccer player, immigrated from Ghana, which may have been wrongfully imprisoned.

Perhaps worrying, for Digg, is the fact that the numbers don’t stack up to previous years, for example the top story of 2007 and of all time for that matter, the whole AACS encr… (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Tim Ball

Climate science is a productive pursuit with Nobel Prizes, an Oscar, billions in research funding, massive tax grabs and wealth for exploiters

Climate science is a productive pursuit with Nobel Prizes, an Oscar, billions in research funding, massive tax grabs and wealth for exploiters. Continuation of these activities partly validated the claim the disclosed files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are of small consequence.

As I wrote earlier the scandal at CRU (Climategate) is diverting from the real scandal, which is the claim CO2 is causing warming and climate change. Climategate is the greatest orchestrated fraud in scientific history, but claims about CO2 are the greatest fallacy. Climategate lets those who’ve known what was happening to avoid being ignored as conspiracy theorists.

Everyone incorrectly talks about carbon when they mean CO2, which was the original focus of the claim human industrial activity was causing global warming. Theory assumed CO2 was a greenhouse gas that slowed heat escaping to space. As it increases temperature rises and it would because of increased industrial activity. This became fact immediately and challenging scientists were pushed aside. Mostly by nasty attacks from those who falsified records, rewrote historic records, distorted and misused science and statistics as the leaked CRU emails attest. Now they, their supporters, and all those benefiting, work to perpetuate the massive deception.

Click source to read FULL article by Dr. Tim Ball

Source: canadafreepress.com

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Remember the frenzy stirred by former Toyota attorney and his lawyer, Todd Tracy back in September, when they accused the Japanese carmaker of covering-up roll-over accident evidence and threatened with re-opening several suits against it? Well, forget it.

Todd Tracy, the man who in September said Toyota’s "cover-up of serious safety problems makes a ‘chump’ out of the American taxpayer," had a long few months and a sudden change of heart.

"I did no… (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Kenneth P. Green

Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

Source: calgaryherald.com

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Faire une promo.pour la 147,descendre le prix au plus bas,faire une affiche et se rendre à la fosse des Mariannes dans le Pacifique pour la faire plonger au point le plus profond des océans,volià le buzz proposé par une équipe d’Alfa Romeo Belgique.Mouais…

Le slogan: « on ne pouvait pas descendre plus bas ».Et du coup,il en va du prix de la voiture comme du tableau supportant l’affiche.Si l’équipe qui s’est chargée de la « besogne » a du se prendre apparemment un peu de bon temps,on ne peut pas dire que l’idée soit lumineuse,même si le but,faire parler,est atteint.

A chacun de se faire son opinion…

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Joseph A Olson

We still do not know the back story to today’s greatest headline. The whistleblower and/or hacker who dropped the CRU email pebble may not have even realized the magnitude of the resulting tsunami. We must pray that this act of heroism goes unpunished. By threatening the current annual carbon exchanges of $125 billion, which were expected to rise to a trillion, there are plenty of upset money changers turned scalp hunters in the temple.

The “Blessed” thing about the Hadley hacking is that it has eliminated the eye glazing minutiae of science from the debate. No longer do we have to discuss the correct proxy value for cosmically irradiated isotopes of Beryllium and Chlorine atoms trapped in ice core samples. There are those who claim that this blessed event occurred due to respect for scientific purity.

The real reason for the event may well be the whistleblowers recognition of the underlying threat to humanity. Regardless, the debate has shifted. The layman has a good general knowledge of the concepts of lying, stealing and taxes. We can now discuss what this issue has secretly always been about: the theft of your nation, your assets, your freedom.

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The Armed Forces Foundation (AFF), with the support of Oshkosh Defense announced that the Rumble With a Cause sweepstakes has kicked-off, with entrants getting the chance to win one of two custom-painted Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycles. The two motorcycles have been donated to the AFF for the sweepstakes by Oshkosh Defense.

Through April 15, 2010, donations raised from this sweepstakes campaign will support active and retired members of the US Military and their families.
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Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it’s less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon.

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What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs!

For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening.

LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages.

Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary

Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually.

Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported.

There’s No Push Notifications

This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too.

Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp. I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news and I didn’t want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page.

When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life.

Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. ”

Discuss

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CarMax, a used car retailer from the United States, decided to present this year’s top ten most searched used vehicles on their website, which gets more that 5.5 million visits per month.

This year’s list shows the variety of makes and models our customers are considering when shopping online for a quality used car. Every car in our inventory can be found on carmax.com and it will show the same no-haggle price you’ll see at your local CarMax store, said Ann Yauger, director of car… (read more)

We’ve written in the past how Thomas Edison — who is often held up by patent hoarders as the perfect example of why patents are necessary — didn’t actually invent any of the stuff he’s famous for “inventing.” Instead, he’s most famous for taking the work of others and innovating around it just slightly, to find a good market — but then also patenting the work of others and blocking anyone else from entering the market. I admire his innovative side and his marketing prowess, but find his abuse of patents to be unfortunate. Reader Michael points to a recent story in Wired which highlights how this worked with the incandescent lightbulb.

The story highlights how the incandescent lightbulb was really a function of progressive innovation, with different people adding little bits here and there:

English chemist Humphry Davy connected two wires to a battery in 1809 and inserted a charcoal strip between the other ends of the wires. The strip glowed, making it the first electric lamp.

Inventor Warren De la Rue about 10 years later enclosed a platinum coil in an evacuated tube and passed electric current through it to make it glow.

From there, it details how Joseph Swan built the first real “electric lamp” building on those concepts. Swan did get a patent on his work, but it didn’t actually work all that well. Edison’s revelation was to make a minor tweak to Swan’s work, making the incandescent bulb last much longer. It wasn’t an “invention” at all. It was a minor tweak on top of it, and then a massive promotional campaign. Of course, Edison originally couldn’t do as much with his better lightbulb, because Swan held that patent… so eventually Edison ended up merging with Swan’s company… and took all the credit for the incandescent bulb. And from then on, he used patents to keep everyone else out for as long as possible.

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Did you know that the vast majority of calls carried out on the 3.5 billion GSM connections in the world today are protected by a 21-year old 64-bit encryption algorithm? You should now, given that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, devised in 1988, has been deciphered by German computer engineer Karsten Nohl and published as a torrent for fellow code cracking enthusiasts and less benevolent forces to exploit. Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force — they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password. The GSM Association — which has had a 128-bit A5/3 key available since 2007, but found little takeup from operators — has responded by having a whinge about Mr. Nohl’s intentions and stating that operators could just modify the existing code to re-secure their networks. Right, only a modified 64-bit code is just as vulnerable to cracking as the one that just got cracked. It’s important to note that simply having the code is not in itself enough to eavesdrop on a call, as the cracker would be faced with just a vast stream of digital communications — but Karsten comes back to reassure us that intercepting software is already available in customizable open source varieties. So don’t be like Tiger, keep your truly private conversations off the airwaves, at least for a while.

GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mitsubishi is currently selling both the old and the new Outlander in its domestic market and, although it might sound a bit awkward, the company recently upgraded both ranges with a new entry-level 2.0-liter gasoline engines. The new version of the revised Outlander is called Roadest and also incorporates the EVO front fascia plus a sporty body kit, according to Carscoop, while the old edition just comes as is.

The new 2.0-liter engine develops a maximum power of 148 PS at 6,000 … (read more)

Even if the echoes of the Car Allowance Rabate System have long died out, there are still some who are punching in numbers to see how one of the most successful scrappage programs of 2009 influenced the US auto sector and not only. According to the United Recyclers Group (URG), for instance, CARS did much for the industry overall, but the federal government failed to capitalize on the green advantages of the program.

"Cash For Clunkers (C4C) created some much needed green awa… (read more)

The 2009 Australian Grand Prix was a success from a sporting standpoint, as it set the base to Brawn GP’s domination in the Formula One Championship against big guns like Ferrari and McLaren. However, from a financial point of view, the event at Albert Park caused the taxpayers no less than $40 million (in losses).

If many of you are thinking that this is as bad as it gets, find out that the Aussie fans are in for more. As reported by the media, and confirmed by race organizer’s c… (read more)

Brian Sweeney, Buick-GMC’s new chief has a new purpose in (professional) life: to dramatically reshape the Buick brand image.

That is because the current average age of a Buick sedan buyer is 70, a figure well above the present U.S. average car buyer’s age, which is 52, according to Craig Bierley, the company’s product marketing director. To be clear, "younger" doesn’t mean people in their 20s, says Bierley. Younger, he says, means people in their 40s and 50s.
… (read more)

Eco Factor: Concept low-emission vehicle powered by a hybrid engine.

The Expedition Vehicle Concept or E.V.C by designer Prodan Dragos is a versatile and adaptable vehicle that can be configured to suit the requirements of the user. The concept vehicle can be changed from an enclosed camping vehicle to an open-top cruiser in minutes.

(more…)

We are days away from a final decision on Saab’s future, but sources close to the matter are already hinting that General Motors is going to wind down the business. Unfortunately, killing this iconic brand will actually lead to the anger of millions of fans around the world who have already started an online campaign to save Saab.

Basically, Saab’s fans are claiming that selling the brand rather than killing it is a smarter decision as the Swedish unit already owns the base requir… (read more)