Keep Being Awesome!!!

Sony: We Will Not Have The PS3 Turned Into A Sex Den (SNE)

nick — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:05:16 +0000

A smart move by Sony (SNE) — the company has just changed its Terms Of Use for the PS3, and gave itself free reign to eavesdrop on and censor its users at will. Already generating controversy : ^{link »}

SCEA reserves the right to monitor and record any online activity and communication throughout PSN and you give SCEA your express consent to monitor and record your activities. SCEA reserves the right to remove any content and communication from PSN at SCEA’s sole discretion without further notice to you. Any data collected in this way, including the content of your communications, the time and location of your activities, your Online ID and IP address and other related information may be used by us to enforce this Agreement or protect the interests of SCEA, its users, or licensors. ^{link »}

Don’t think so, because Sony won’t allow the creation of adult-themed animations or avatars? Well that hasn’t stopped sex from creeping into Google’s Lively , a service expressly designed to be PG . If the exact same thing happened online via a PS3, the PR would be frightful for Sony. Parents have a (rightful) expectation that kids at game consoles require less oversight than those at an Internet terminal. And unlike Lively, people actually use and pay attention to the PS3. ^{link »}

tags: Posted via web from Keep Being Awesome!!!

Microsoft Throwing Xbox 360 Tupperware Parties To Hook Women

nick — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:52:15 +0000

We’ve seen social gatherings of women to sell products — so-called “tupperware parties” — for everything from sex toys to botox . But this might be the strangest one yet: Is Microsoft (MSFT) using tupperware parties to sell the Xbox 360? ^{link »}

That’s what a report in Ft Myers, FL-based news-press.com (a Gannett (GCI) property) suggests. ^{link »}

On a recent Saturday, about 1,000 women across the country moonlighted as marketers for Microsoft’s newest Xbox services. ^{link »}

“We’ve sold 20 million consoles to date globally since we launched three years ago,” says Heather Snavely, Microsoft’s director of interactive entertainment business global platforms. “In order to get to the next 20 million, we need to get a new audience of women and teens. We’re going after them in ways that are different than ways we’ve done before.” ^{link »}

Up till now we’ve been seeing Microsoft and Sony in an increasingly bitter struggle for the hearts and wallets of so-called “hardcore gamers” (think socially awkward males aged 17-25). Meanwhile, Nintendo (NTDOY) has reinvented the wheel with its Wii, crushing both of its competitors in sales by discovering a new, and much larger, market in games that appeal to casual gamers and women with its pick-up-and-play simplicity. ^{link »}

And what do women get for becoming Microsoft’s ad-hoc sales force, and where does Microsoft find them? ^{link »}

They got an Xbox party pack of freebies that included microwaveable popcorn, Xbox trivia game “Scene It? Box Office Smash,” an Xbox universal media remote control, a three-month subscription to Xbox Live, and 1,600 Xbox Live points (used for game, movie and TV show purchases). ^{link »}

Xbox found women including Maldonado and Chicago-area resident Danielle Jamil through a service called House Party, which sets up home parties for marketers. House Party has a database of 100,000 names of people who have provided a profile of personal information and who want to be “brand advocates.” The advocates host a preplanned party to show off the marketer’s brand to their friends. ^{link »}

Read: The whole shebang isn’t costing Microsoft very much at all. ^{link »}

tags: Posted via web from Keep Being Awesome!!!

Clueless: Where Are They Now? – Celebuzz

nick — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:48:16 +0000

via celebuzz.com

Posted via web from Keep Being Awesome!!!

Screech Spills 'Saved by the Bell' Secrets — Popeater

nick — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:47:17 +0000

Screech Spills ‘Saved by the Bell’ Secrets ^{link »}

Dustin Diamond writes about his time starring on ‘ Saved by the Bell ‘ as dork Screech in his new memoir ‘ Behind the Bell ‘ — and airs his co-stars’ dirty secrets, Usmagazine.com reports. Sex and drugs were par for the course during the filming of ‘Bell,’ Diamond says. He also claims that he “could smell a certain ‘smoke,’” on set and adds that he believes Mark-Paul Gosselaar — who played Zack Morris — was on steroids. “He suddenly exploded with manliness, loading 25 pounds of muscle on his once-scrawny frame in, oh, about a month,” Diamond tells Us. But he has plenty to say about his other co-stars — Tiffani Thiessen (Kelly), Mario Lopez (Slater) and Elizabeth Berkley (Jessie.) “If Kelly was interested in Slater one week, then backstage there was a lot going between them in Mario’s room. Then, if Jessie kisses Zack, then you know Elizabeth Berkley is going in Mark-Paul’s room,” Diamond describes of sexual relations between the actors. ^{link »}

Posted Thursday 24 September 01:51 PM By: PopEater Staff ^{link »}

tags: Posted via web from Keep Being Awesome!!!

The Associated Press: Critics slam Leno, viewers tune in by the millions

nick — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:09:13 +0000

Critics slam Leno, viewers tune in by the millions

By DAVID BAUDER (AP) – 4 days ago

NEW YORK — The critics savaged Jay Leno’s prime-time experiment. Viewers gave it the biggest audience for an entertainment show since the “American Idol” finale in May. What’s next is anybody’s guess.

An estimated 18.4 million viewers sampled the first night of “The Jay Leno Show” Monday, Nielsen Media Research said. But the most hyped debut of the fall season had the added advantage of being piggybacked onto one of the country’s biggest stories. Leno interviewed Kanye West about why he had interrupted Taylor Swift the night before on the MTV Video Music Awards.

The challenge will be holding on to viewers. Leno’s variety show will air five nights a week at 10 p.m., a grand experiment for network television to see if NBC can build a profitable business competing with dramas on its network rivals.

“It’s great to launch this innovative new show with such strong initial sampling, but we realize this is just one night and that we’re going to build our business in this time period with ratings that will level out over time,” said Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment. “Our focus is on developing a consistent comedy viewing habit at 10 p.m. over the long haul.”

NBC executives had other reasons to be cautious in their reaction. When Conan O’Brien debuted on the “Tonight” show last spring, NBC described him as the new king of late-night after one week of ratings, only to be embarrassed when O’Brien subsequently slipped behind David Letterman.

It’s tough to gauge how much impact West’s appearance had on the ratings. The show peaked in viewership during its second quarter-hour, during Jerry Seinfeld’s appearance, Nielsen said. Only two other shows have drawn a larger prime-time audience since the summer months, NFL games that aired this past week, Nielsen said.

During his last season hosting “The Tonight Show,” Leno averaged 5.2 million viewers to claim the No.1 spot in late-night. But critics — never big fans of Leno — were harsh in their assessment of his new endeavor, finding it not much different from what he had been doing at 11:30 p.m. for 17 years.

Robert Bianco of USA Today slammed it as a “cut-rate, snooze-inducing rehashed bore.”

The Associated Press’ Frazier Moore identified “the biggest difference between Leno’s new show and his old one: With his fade-out at 11 p.m., the local news began.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Mary McNamara called the show “a strange, shallow puddle of comedy.”

“This is the future of television?” she wrote. “This wasn’t even a good rendition of television past.”

“The future of `The Jay Leno Show’ is likely to look almost exactly like `The Tonight Show’ past,” complained Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times. “So much ink has been devoted to describing how Mr. Leno’s new show would depart from his old one that it was startling to see how little difference there was.”

Leno found some love on social media sites. One fan wrote on Facebook: “Kanye West may still be the worst musician and person of all time, but the new `Jay Leno Show’ was awesome.”

Another fan on Twitter conceded that the new Leno was a rehash of the “Tonight” show. “What’s wrong with that?” the person wrote. “I love it!”

One viewer tweeted, however, that he wished West had taken Leno’s microphone instead of Swift’s.

The biggest problem for Leno was that the show wasn’t really funny, wrote St. Petersburg Times columnist Eric Deggans. “Who knew that might be the biggest challenge for a guy once known as the King of Late Night Comedy?” he said.

NBC is owned by General Electric.

On the Net:

http://www.nbc.com

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

via google.com

He had Hugh Grant booked the week of the Divine Brown scandal and Kanye booked the day after his debacle. This makes him the luckiest man in television.

Posted via web from nick1899

Greatest Human Being, R.I.P. – Norman Borlaud – NYTimes.com

nick — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:42:56 +0000

Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, was celebrated for performing “miracles” by President Bartlet and an African leader in “The West Wing” (see the video clip below). He was described as history’s “greatest human being” by Penn and Teller (in their program featuring Dr. Borlaug and some of his opponents, like Greenpeace). Since his death on Saturday night at the age of 95, tributes from world leaders have been flowing. ^{link »}

I wrote about Dr. Borlaug, who was crediting with saving hundreds of millions of lives, in a post last year about environmentalists’ role in exacerbating food shortages (and pressuring the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to reduce support for Dr. Borlaug’s agricultural research). In a lecture given on the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize , Dr. Borlaug told an audience in Oslo in 2000: I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot. It took some 10,000 years to expand food production to the current level of about 5 billion tons per year. By 2025, we will have to nearly double current production again. This cannot be done unless farmers across the world have access to current high-yielding crop-production methods as well as new biotechnological breakthroughs that can increase the yields, dependability, and nutritional quality of our basic food crops. ^{link »}

Dr. Borlaug wrote an introduction to “The Frankenfood Myth,” a 2004 book by Greg Conko, who has posted a tribute to Dr. Borlaug at the OpenMarket blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mr. Conko reviews Dr. Borlaug’s achievements and concludes, “Never was so much owed by so many to a single man.” ^{link »}

At Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Ronald Bailey has written about a rap song honoring Dr. Borlaug and also posted a tribute contrasting Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 predictions of mass starvation (”The battle to feed all of humanity is over”) with the progress that Dr. Borlaug helped achieve: In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich’s dire predictions in 1968, India’s population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug’s success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia. ^{link »}

tags: sep 09, tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com, annotations

tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/greatest- · Original page

'Reading Rainbow' Reaches Its Final Chapter : NPR

nick — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:55:12 +0000

Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children’s show in PBS history – outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. ^{link »}

The show, which started in 1983, was hosted by actor LeVar Burton. (If you don’t know Burton from Reading Rainbow , he’s also famous for his role as Kunta Kinte in Roots , or as the chrome-visored Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. ) ^{link »}

Each episode of Reading Rainbow had the same basic elements: There was a featured children’s book that inspired an adventure with Burton. Then, at the end of every show, kids gave their own book reviews, always prefaced by Burton’s trademark line: “But you don’t have to take my word for it …” ^{link »}

The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one – not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights. ^{link »}

Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading – like phonics and spelling. ^{link »}

Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read – but that’s not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do. ^{link »}

” Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read,” Grant says. “You know, the love of reading – [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.” ^{link »}

Linda Simensky, vice president for children’s programming at PBS, says that when Reading Rainbow was developed in the early 1980s, it was an era when the question was: “How do we get kids to read books?” ^{link »}

Since then, she explains, research has shown that teaching the mechanics of reading should be the network’s priority. ^{link »}

Research has directed programming toward phonics and reading fundamentals as the front line of the literacy fight. Reading Rainbow occupied a more luxurious space – the show operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books. ^{link »}

tags: sep 09, npr.org, annotations, public television

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112 · Original page

Increase Firefox 3.* Performance by Optimizing the SQLite Databases

nick — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:36:38 +0000

Clipped for Mac, page has Linux and Windows

clipped from webupd8.blogspot.com

Since version 3.0, Firefox changed the way it saves your bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords and so on – it now uses SQLite databases. This has some advantages but also disadvantages because over time, the databases are growing in size and become fragmented and this affects the time Firefox needs to start. But the SQLite databases can be optimized which improves the Firefox startup time and from my experience, also improves the awasomebar performance which becomes much more responsive and faster!

-For Mac OSX:

Close Firefox and run the following command:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/for f in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f ‘VACUUM;’; done

Scientists discover mechanism to make existing antibiotics more effective at lower doses

nick — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:00:15 +0000

Scientists discover mechanism to make existing antibiotics more effective at lower doses

tags: medicine, science
- A new study published in the September 11, 2009 issue of Science by researchers at the NYU School of Medicine reveals a conceptually novel mechanism that plays an important role in making human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus anthracis resistant to numerous antibiotics. The study led by Evgeny A. Nudler, PhD, The Julie Wilson Anderson Professor of Biochemistry at NYU Langone Medical Center, provides evidence that Nitric Oxide, or NO, is able to alleviate the oxidative stress in bacteria caused by many antibiotics and also helps to neutralize many antibacterial compounds. Eliminating this NO-mediated bacterial defense renders existing antibiotics more potent at lower, less toxic, doses. With infectious diseases the major cause of death worldwide, the study paves the way for new ways of combating bacteria that have become antibiotic resistant.
- A new study published in the September 11, 2009 issue of Science by researchers at the NYU School of Medicine reveals a conceptually novel mechanism that plays an important role in making human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus anthracis resistant to numerous antibiotics. The study led by Evgeny A. Nudler, PhD, The Julie Wilson Anderson Professor of Biochemistry at NYU Langone Medical Center, provides evidence that Nitric Oxide, or NO, is able to alleviate the oxidative stress in bacteria caused by many antibiotics and also helps to neutralize many antibacterial compounds. Eliminating this NO-mediated bacterial defense renders existing antibiotics more potent at lower, less toxic, doses. With infectious diseases the major cause of death worldwide, the study paves the way for new ways of combating bacteria that have become antibiotic resistant.
- NO is a small molecule composed of one atom of oxygen and one of nitrogen. It was known as a toxic gas and air pollutant until 1987, when it was first shown to play a physiological role in mammals, for which a Nobel Prize was later awarded. NO has since been found to take part in an extraordinary range of activities including learning and memory, blood pressure regulation, penile erection, digestion and the fighting of infection and cancer. A few years ago, the Nudler’s group from NYU demonstrated that bacteria mobilize NO to defend against the oxidative stress. The new study from the same group supports the radical idea that many antibiotics cause the oxidative stress in bacteria, often resulting in their death, whereas NO counters this effect. This work suggests scientists could use commercially available inhibitors of NO-synthase, an enzyme producing NO in bacteria and humans, to make antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA and ANTHRAX more sensitive to available drugs during acute infection.

New research discovers worker bees in 'reproductive class war' with queen

nick — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:41:59 +0000

Bee colonies are well known for high levels of cooperation, but new research published in Molecular Ecology demonstrates a conflict for reproduction between worker bees and their Queens, leading some workers to selfishly exploit the colony for their own needs. ^{link »}

The study focused on Melipona scutellaris a Brazilian species of highly social stingless bees, found throughout the Atlantic rainforest. Colonies contain around 1,500 workers and are headed by one single-mated Queen. ^{link »}

Denise Alves, Dr Tom Wenseleers, and their co-authors carried out a genetic study of nearly 600 males from 45 colonies to discover the parentage of the worker population. Their results showed that 22.89% of Melipona scutellaris males are sons of the workers rather than the Queen, demonstrating an on-going conflict for reproduction. ^{link »}

“Surprisingly our results show that over 80% of the worker’s sons had genotypes that were incompatible with them being the sons of the present queen,” said Alves. “This demonstrates, for the first time, how workers continue this conflict by reproductively parasitizing the next-generation of the workforce for their own selfish benefit.” Worker bees are generally unable to mate, but are capable of laying unfertilized eggs which can develop into male offspring. To assure dominance over reproduction the Queen often selectively eats any worker laid eggs. In some species other workers may eat the eggs of fellow workers in what is known as ‘worker policing’. Even with these barriers there is much to gain for worker bees producing their own offspring, however the benefit is entirely for the individual and can be costly for the colony overall. The team found that workers who reproduce can live as much as three times longer, meaning that reproducing workers have a life expectancy almost matching the Queen herself. This added life expectancy is thought to be because workers who reproduce do not usually carry out risky tasks such as foraging. However as worker bees who are reproducing are not working, an increase in individual workers who reproduce puts the collective production of the colony in jeopardy, hence a queen-worker conflict over the production of males ensues. To demonstrate this conflict the team studied the genotypes of worker and queen bees from 45 colonies. If a male carried a genotype not present in either the mother queen or her mate, then it was clear the male was either the son of an invading bee or of a worker who superseded the Queen. The team found that of 576 males genotyped, 61 (10.59%) could not be assigned to the Queen and were therefore definitely worker’s sons. Of these 61, 14 (22.95%) were consistent with being sons of workers of the current queen while 47 (77.05%) were derived from workers derived from a previous, superseded queen . The team estimates 77.11% of the males were the queen’s sons. 4.34% were the sons of the workers derived from the current queen and 18.54% were the sons of workers derived from a previous, superseded queen. “These results are the first explicit demonstration that conflict over male parentage in insect societies is not just played out between the queen and workers,” concludes Alves, “but shows that the conflict may also spill over from one generation of workers to the other.” ^{link »}

tags: sep 09, eurekalert.org, annotations, science, biology

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/w-nrd0907 · Original page