A Chinese professor at a University in Beijing, who happens to be a government advisor, has publicly stated that the nation needs to take its owngreenhous gas emissions more seriously. While the language of his message is quite polite and as non-conflictual as possible, it’s still quite a surprise to hear a public figure speak out against the party line.

Hmmmm…. Olympic spirit?

From Reuters: China should bind itself to international goals to slash greenhouse gas pollution, one of the nation’s most prominent policy advisers said, in a striking break with Beijing’s official stance.

Hu Angang, a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, warned failure to act could doom global climate change talks.”

This isn’t like the Battery recall of years past… this is actually a physical problem with the laptop that could potentially lead to minor problems like short circuiting, overheating…. and death.

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it, a while back Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi caused a bit of outrage among Catholics when she claimed that the Catholic Church did not define the start of life, and that it was an “issue of controversy.” — In fact, the Catholic Church has been quite clear about its position that life begins at the moment of conception.

Now Archbishop Nierderaur of San Francisco is inviting the Speaker of the House to have a “conversation” with him about Church teachings on abortion and other issues that may be of use the next time she is asked about Catholicism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a very interesting article that describes a study of Vaginal proteins from a group of Kenyan sex workers. Evidently some women seem to have either a natural or environmentally developed resistance to HIV.

From Science Daily: In the new study, Adam Burgener and colleagues note that 140 of more than 2000 sex workers studied in Nairobi, Kenya, appear resistant to HIV infection. Although evidence suggests that certain biological factors in their vaginal fluid may play a role in resistance, the exact identity of these substances was unclear.

The scientists used a high-tech analytical method to compare differences among proteins in vaginal fluids from HIV-resistant women and those infected with the virus or susceptible to it. HIV-resistant women had proteins significantly different from other women. Vaginal fluids of the HIV-resistant women had higher levels of proteins with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory actions.

As somebody who lived in Milwaukee for a year, I know how serious they can be about their bikes. With Harley Davidson just up the road from my community, I saw a devotion to the biker culture that rivaled many of the great religions… which is why it warms my heart to see this story — A group of nuns who open their home to travellers of all faiths who just happen to be bike enthusiasts. — This is the the kind of “non-traditional ministry” that gets my blood-pumping…

From Catholic News: “It was a bit scary,” said Sister Ann Josepha Lencioni of the decision. “But the sisters pulled together and felt it would be a good thing for Milwaukee.”

“It wasn’t that we were scared; we just wanted to make the nuns as comfortable as possible,” said Mike Ankeny of the group, which signed contracts to follow a few house rules such as no smoking indoors. “We’re a good mix, even though we’re on different parts of the tree.”

From the AP: Citigroup’s “account sweeping program” automatically removed positive balances from customers’ credit card accounts, Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. said. For instance, if a customer double-paid a bill by mistake or refunded a purchase for credit, that positive balance was then taken from the customer without notification, Brown said.

The best part of this article is the section where a Citigroup representative take umbrage at the “characterization of their actions.” — Excuse me? Let me get this straight… you take money out of the accounts of your customers with no explaination or documentation of why you are doing so, then when the government comes along and says “uhh…. you ARE going to give that back, right?” you take offense?

Granted that 18 million to a company like Citigroup is a paltry sum, but if average Joe or Jane had walked into a Citi branch and taken 18 million that wasn’t theirs, I don’t think it wouldn’t have taken 16 years to reach the conclusion that it was theft.

LinkedIn and CNBC announced today that they will be forming a beautiful new relationship. Starting this week, LinkedIn, the business social networking site, will offer its users the added value of seamless interaction between business news, blogs, video, and ”jobs and money” on CNBC and sharing them with their business contacts within LinkedIn. On the other side, CNBC will also start a comment sharing forum within their website that LinkedIn users can access and post comments directly to CNBC’s site.

I have been waiting for a major partnership like this to happen to LinkedIn for a long time now. In the earlier days when Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting article written back in May by a writer for the Catholic News Service who also hapens to be an Alaskan. It’s a great back-story filler on Palin and the things that she has done to win the admiration of her constituency and the loyalty of the Pro-Life movement. — Palin definitely seems to be one of those people who “walks the walk” and is deserving of respect.

From Catholic News: This small-town girl was elected by catching an anti-corruption wave that rolled across the state and carried her straight to the governor’s mansion. In a wealth of embarrassment for Alaska, state legislators have been convicted of bribery, and two of the three members of our congressional delegation are under federal investigation.

Palin based her campaign on honesty and transparency, and that’s what Alaskans craved.

I watched Palin’s speech and I have to admit that I admire how she fired up the crowd. She’s definitely a strong woman and a savy politician, but even so I found her party-line speech to be just a little too embellished.

From the Huffington Post: PALIN: “The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.”

From Inhabitat.com: Most modern wind turbines utilize a flat three-blade design, wherein the head of the windmill is directed into drafts by a computer. The tips of these windmills can reach up to six times the speed of the wind. By contrast, the Energy Ball is designed to take advantage of the the Venturi effect, which was originally a measurement of pressure created by channeling an incompressible liquid through a restricted section of pipe. This spherical Energy Ball takes those principles and uses them to channel air through its six blades and around its generator.”

One of the problems with conventional windmills is that the forces exerted on the blades increases exponentially as the speed at the tips approaches supersonic. The end result is that wind turbines require more maintenence and have a higher chance of a catastophic failure if the braking system manfunctions and the turbine is allowed to go above its rated speed. — This new design of windmill can harness the same wind, but with much less of a chance of failure because the design itself should keep the rotational speed of the blades below critical.

The geek over at Wired.com have put together a pretty comprehensive Wiki that explains the do’s and dont’s of surviving a power blackrout. A lot of it is basic sense, but it’s still worth a read to be in the know in case the lights ever go out.

Here’s a teaser

• Water. A three-day supply, one gallon per day per person.
• Food. A three-day supply, per person, of non-perishable food. If you include canned food, remember the can opener.
• A radio. Battery-powered or hand-crank powered, along with extra batteries. Consider an NOAA Weather Radio, or a portable that receives those bands.
• A flashlight with batteries. Go for an LED flashlight, which lasts a long time on a single charge. There are also hand-crank models available. Even better, consider a wall-plug emergency version that keeps charged and automatically lights up (so you can find it) when the power cuts out.
• A first aid kit.
• A whistle to signal for help. If you’re in the dark for long and have to keep the kids from fighting, this could also serve as your referee whistle.
• Plastic sheeting along with duct tape and a dust mask.
• Personal sanitation items like wet naps or moist toilettes, garbage bags and plastic ties.
• A wrench or pliers for turning off utilities.
• Maps of your city or local area.

Here’s a little YouTube video of Adam Savage at HOPE talking about how a MythBusters episode about the weaknesses of RFID was killed by the legal team of American Express, Visa, Discover and a handful of other financial services company. — Now I’m not one of those hackers who believes that EVERY security flaw MUST be exposed in the brightest light, but I do feel that a carefully prepared and generally responsible show like MythBusters should be able to demonstrate what has become the running joke of RFID security.

Are you like me and find it a bit cumbersome to find applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch within iTunes? Well you’re in luck my friends, because now there’s iPhonexe. With over 3,000 apps listed so far(including jailbroken apps), it’s a simpler, faster, easier, and more organized way of finding that app you’ve been dreaming about. It even links you directly to iTunes to buy the app once you’ve checked out the description and screenshot. Check it out and tell me what you think! As usual, comment below or tweet me at www.twitter.com/kewlgirl.

Here’s a little something for anybody who has ever wanted an easier way to have remote or mobile displays. In October, IOGEAR will be releasing a kit that can extend your desktop through a wireless USB port. Details on how they plan on doing it are still a little sketchy, but I’m betting that they’re going to modify one of their Wireless USB products to work with a chipset from DisplayLink. We had a chance to check out DisplayLink at CES2008 and again at Interop Las Vegas 2008.

Read the rest of this entry »

From The Examiner: Brad will play Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit scientist,who travels with a four-member crew to the newly-discovered world of Rakhat. The film is based on Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow.

Warner Brothers nabbed rights to the book for Brad’s production company, Plan B. They tapped screenwriter Michael Seitzman to adapt the novel for the big screen.

For those uberGeeks of you who have not read Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow” I suggest that you pick it up and give it a try. It isn’t a hardcore SciFi novel, nor is it a tender-lilly of a spiritual tome, but it is an interesting ride through space and theology. — One word of caution… don’t read the sequel.

Anybody who has ever worked with compressed or cryogenic gasses knows how much power can be contained within a cylinder of air. Now a New Jersey company is ready to commit $20 million into the development of an energy storage system that would take power from a variety of sources and store it in immense underground caverns and wells. It’s an interesting proposal to be sure, but does anybody really trust that underground caverns can safely contain all that pressure?

Read the rest of this entry »

From News.com: Instead of just pulling down pirated clips, copyright owners are choosing to use YouTube’s copyright filters to generate advertising revenue, Google said Wednesday.

Late last year, Google introduced a copyright identification system called Video ID, which tracks unauthorized videos. It enables a copyright owner to either block the clip, leave it up, or enable YouTube to sell ads against the material.

In theory this sounds like a good idea: if somebody posts a clip of copyrighted material onto YouTube the real owner of that media will have the option to delete the clip or to earn revenue from the traffic. It’s only fair… if they OWN the material, then they should be the ones to bennifit from its display.

Unfortunately a problem arises when you combine this new program with the “Safe Harbor” provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) which provides protection for an ISP (in this case YouTube) if they pull down the content in question the moment a DMCA takedown notice is filed by a copyright holder. — That process has not been well scrutinized and all-too-often it has been used by copyright holders as a shotgun solution for piracy, often catching videos and users who have not violated copyright at all.

If YouTube is going to give the larger copyright holders the ability to earn from offending videos, then Google needs to simultaneously implement a program to curb DMCA takedown abuses. To not do as much is to invite a different kind of piracy in which large corporations can wantonly filed DMCA notices to steal the revenue of content creators who cannot otherwise fight the legal onslaught.