stations of the cross nike foamposite galaxy bill maher seabiscuit dingo nba all star weekend malin akerman
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Separating Space Shuttle from 747 Is Easier than It Sounds [Nasa]
New Jersey Couple Sues Landlord...Over a Ghost [Wtf]
little big town little big town bennett bennett daniel day lewis patti stanger pasadena
Klout Launches Brand Pages To Help Companies Engage Influencers
Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and other social apps, is launching a new feature called Brand Squads, consisting of dedicated profile pages which give companies a centralized place to engage with influencers. For background, Klout evaluates users' behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. The company is now topping 12 billion API calls, which is up from 100 million API calls in January 2011. The company has more than 5,000 API partners, up from around 100 in early 2010. And it has indexed north of 100 million public profiles. Klout also just raised around $30 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and others, with partner Chi-Hua Chien joining the startup's board.annie zuccotti park leymah gbowee ows kindle fire review community matt schaub
ASUS won't release Transformer Prime GPS dongles in Italy or Greece (updated)
We're afraid we've got some bad news. Transformer Prime users outside of America and Taiwan in Italy and Greece won't receive a GPS dongle to address their tablet's lackluster mapping performance. The company confirmed on its Italian Facebook page that while it was advertised in the US and Taiwan as having "Full GPS," once issues were found, the European advertising was changed to read "GPS Locator" -- in short: it's not its problem, go away. We've included a machine-translated version below so you can hear it from the horse's mouth Facebook wall and we apologize in advance for any errors.
"Guys confirm that the initiative is reserved for those territories where Prime was marketed with the GPS between the specifications of the product. So mainly the U.S. and Taiwan. In Italy Prime was marketed with a GPS locator, and not with a "Full" as car navigation. Function that we believe the rest is useless in combination with a tablet. Customers who bought Prime has done with the understanding that GPS is not present, then from our side there were no broken promises or misleading claims. We do not understand then what the reason of your critical Riccardo. Among other things, the satisfaction level of users who bought Prime is very high. In sharp contrast with what you say. It means that the product performs its function very well"
Update: Looks like there's some confusion between the company's Italian arm and the rest of Europe. Readers have forwarded links to various European-country pages to apply for a dongle before July 31st this year.
Update 2: ASUS got in touch to clarify the position, saying that only customers in Italy and Greece won't be able to get GPS dongles, but all other customers are invited to check if they're eligible on the official website (More Coverage), adding that
"ASUS Global would like to further clarify that we're always committed to delivering the best experience for our customers through regular software updates and, where necessary, accessories like the GPS Extension Kit."
[Thanks, Carmine]
ASUS won't release Transformer Prime GPS dongles in Italy or Greece (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Apr 2012 05:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink |
ASUS (Facebook) | Email this | Comments
ufc diaz vs condit josephine baker askew super bowl start time target jason wu gi joe jason wu for target collection
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Hollywood warms to China's new openness
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? There's a new breach in China's great cultural wall and Hollywood is cautiously moving in.
Disney's announcement Monday that it will make "Iron Man 3" in partnership with a Chinese company is the latest sign that movie studios are warming to China's new openness.
For decades, China has capped the number of foreign films it allows into the country. Until recently, the limit was 20, but in February Chinese officials announced that they are increasing the quota to 34.
China said it will also allow foreign studios to garner a greater share of box office revenue. Foreign companies can now expect to earn 25 percent of their movies' ticket sales in China, up from between 13.5 and 17.5 percent.
The changes are a significant move for a bureaucracy that is leery of outside cultural influences and competition from foreign films. The change could affect everyone from action movie fans in Guangzhou to Hollywood's most powerful filmmakers.
The relaxing of China's strict rules comes at a price for U.S. studios. The world's most populous nation wants foreign studios to bring their moviemaking know-how to China by forming joint ventures with Chinese studios.
Still, Hollywood isn't gushing. In recent years, U.S. movie studios have developed a rocky romance with China. Chinese people adore foreign movies, especially 3-D adventures like "Avatar," or more recently "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island." But studios have been jilted when Beijing has promised new openness only to reverse course. In Disney's case, many of its movies have made it into the country, but recent hit "Tangled," for instance, was stopped at the border.
In a recent interview, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg summed up the industry's attitude: "The goal lines are moving all the time," he said. "Everyone is wondering how it plays out."
China has long kept up a barrier against foreign films ? wary of insidious cultural influences while sheltering its own filmmakers. Officials last raised the annual cap on foreign movie imports as a condition of joining the WTO in 2001. The recent increased foreign movie quota is a belated response to a trade dispute the U.S. won nearly three years ago.
Studios are patiently trying to make the relationship work, because of China's enormous potential. Box office revenue in China rose more than a third last year to $2 billion, putting the country on pace to become the world's second largest movie market after the combined U.S. and Canadian region this year. It is expected to top $5 billion by 2015. The U.S. and Canadian theatrical market, meanwhile, shrank two years in a row to about $10 billion in 2011. So far this year, however, revenue at U.S. and Canadian theaters is up about 19 percent.
It's only a matter of time before China's movie-going market is the world's biggest, according to some industry-watchers. Whether it is the most profitable for outsiders is another question. In 2006, Warner Bros. pulled out of a two-year-old theater chain joint venture when Beijing changed the rules, suddenly disallowing the studio's majority stake. Late last year, production company Legendary Pictures' joint venture, which is set to make the movie "The Great Wall," hit a stumbling block when its Hong Kong-based partner failed to raise enough capital.
Entertainment lawyer Schuyler Moore says he has warned clients not to be overly optimistic in dealing with the country, and says it will take a year to see how China implements its new movie policy. Moore believes China's new openness is aimed mainly at boosting its own cultural industries.
"In the long term, it's no different than China trying to make aircraft and cars and everything else. Their goal is to have the expertise so they can displace Hollywood," he says.
Against that backdrop, companies like The Walt Disney Co. and Katzenberg's DreamWorks are entering a delicate dance.
Katzenberg traveled to China in mid-March to meet with Chinese officials about how the expanded quota rules would be applied. He also sought to work out details regarding the company's new joint venture in China, Oriental DreamWorks.
"(China) is big, it is the fastest growing and that's what makes it challenging," Katzenberg told The Associated Press prior to his trip.
Disney and its new partner, Beijing-based DMG Entertainment, didn't offer many details about their "Iron Man 3" project, although the companies say the movie will incorporate Chinese elements and be partly funded by DMG.
The DreamWorks' deal, announced in February, is for a joint venture studio based in Shanghai that is 45 percent owned by DreamWorks and 55 percent owned by its Chinese partners, capitalized at $330 million.
Some analysts questioned whether it was worth it for DreamWorks to give up a 55 percent stake in the venture.
"It is not clear how well DreamWorks will do when it has to relinquish creative controls," said Janney analyst Tony Wible. "This just adds to some of the uncertainty with the deal. However, there is a good long-term potential, so the risk goes with the return."
China isn't just waiting for Hollywood to come running.
Last month, a key official in China's movie infrastructure, Yang Buting, appealed to Hollywood's finance community to enter new joint ventures in the country.
He once led the nation's primary distributor of foreign films, China Film Group, and now chairs a co-financing arm of the government, China Mainstream Media National Film Capital Hollywood Group Inc., which set up an office in Beverly Hills, Calif., this year.
"I have a vision of an ideal version of film cooperation between China and the United States: Chinese or American stories, joint investment, co-production, joint cast and credits, distributed globally," he said at a conference in Los Angeles. The formula will "surely be a win-win miracle for both China and the U.S."
So far, co-productions have had mixed success. The 2007 Ang Lee-directed film, "Lust Caution," which paired Hai Sheng Film Production Co. and Universal Pictures' Focus Features group, won critical acclaim but failed to make its money back.
On the other hand, the retelling of the 1984 classic "The Karate Kid" by Sony Pictures and China Film Group in 2010 reinvigorated a franchise. Much of its success can be credited to the charming chemistry between its new star, Will Smith's son Jaden, and martial arts legend Jackie Chan, a well-established Hong Kong-born hit with Chinese audiences. The movie was a global hit. It cast China and kung fu in a positive light and grossed $343 million worldwide.
Still, it is unclear whether new rules favor Chinese co-productions, or movies brought in under the new quota.
Based on a deal announced by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping and U.S. counterpart Joe Biden, China will let in 14 more foreign movies a year as long as they are in 3-D or the Imax format. That lifts the number of foreign films allowed under the quota system each year to 34.
These foreign films will also share 25 percent of the box office receipts, up from 13.5 percent to 17.5 percent now. The rest goes to theater owners and the government.
While the new, higher cut is less than the 43 percent share China offers domestic movie studios, it still could be a better deal for Hollywood than being the junior member of a joint venture.
Meanwhile China's home movie market is dominated by pirated films. The fledgling market for legitimate online movie rentals is tiny.
One of the clearest beneficiaries of the rule change is Imax Corp., the big-screen movie company that licenses its technology for a share of ticket sales. Imax is hugely popular with Chinese movie fans. It receives about half of the studios' share of the box office for movies that end up on its screens in China. As more Imax-format movies are let in, more films will contribute to its Chinese revenue going forward.
Still, CEO Rich Gelfond treads carefully.
"I'd say there's always country risk wherever you do business in the world," he says. "But by creating a win-win scenario where it's good for the Chinese partners, it's good for the Chinese consumer, and it works for Imax, we think we can minimize that risk."
___
Business Writer Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.
pac 12 championship game al franken al franken mary did you know philadelphia eagles vince young vince young
X-rays create a window on glass formation
ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2012) ? Scientists have for the first time visualised the transformation of powder mixtures into molten glass. A better understanding of this process will make it possible to produce high quality glass at lower temperatures, leading to significant energy savings in industrial glass manufacturing. The results are published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.
The team of scientists was led by Emmanuelle Gouillart from the joint research unit between CNRS and Saint Gobain, a global glass manufacturer, and included scientists from the Universities of Toulouse and Grenoble, INRIA Saclay and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble.
Glass is one of the oldest human-made materials, use of which spread during ancient Egyptian and Roman cultures. A non-crystalline amorphous material, it is produced by the fusion of crystalline powder mixtures heated to high temperatures. These ingredients are quartz sand (silica, SiO2), sodium and calcium carbonates (Na2CO3, CaCO3), and minor more specific additives.
In industrial foundries, the powder mixture is heated to about 1500?C and kept at this elevated temperature for many days to eliminate bubbles and unmolten grains. This consumes a lot of energy and one of the current industrial challenges is obtaining glass of good quality at lower temperatures. For example, the global glass industry's energy consumption (86.5 TWh in 2005) compares with the entire electricity production of the Netherlands (108 TWh in 2008).
An individual grain of silica normally melts at very high temperatures (1700?C). Adding carbonates triggers chemical reactions that lower this temperature. However, the interplay between the geometry of the grains and the rate of chemical reactions during the early stages of the melting which starts already well below 1000?C, have remained a mystery to date.
The scientists set out to understand what exactly happens at the different stages of the transformation from powder to molten glass. For their experiment, they used mixtures of raw materials similar to that for making industrial window glass: two-thirds silica sand and one-third of sodium and calcium carbonates.
To make visible chemical reactions between individual grains, the scientists used X-ray microtomography, a technique allowing visualising in real time changes in shape and positions of all grains in a given volume. These changes are probed by a fine, intense beam of X-rays sent through the sample. Like a three-dimensional "frame by frame" sequence -- tiny variations of the transmitted X-ray intensity are recorded when sand and carbonate grains start to react chemically, changing their shapes and transforming themselves into molten glass. "At the ESRF, we can take a microtomography image with a spatial resolution of 1.6 micrometres every few seconds. Observing fast changes with a high spatial resolution deep inside an oven held at close to 1000?C is impossible without X-rays," says Marco Di Michiel from the ESRF.
The sequences of microtomography images confirmed the importance of good contact between grains of different substances, as it is these contacts which determine whether or not the mixture turns into liquid glass. For example, a calcium carbonate grain can either incorporate itself into the highly reactive amorphous liquid or remain a crystalline defect, depending on the presence or absence of such contacts. The researchers were surprised by the high reactivity of sodium carbonate when still solid: these grains move just before the melting begins which increases the number of contacts with other grains and facilitates the reactions.
By merging hundreds of X-ray tomography images, the scientists produced a video sequence visualising how different grains in the mixture move and fuse, one after the other, into molten glass as the temperature rose from 750?C to 930?C. "I have been working on these processes for many years, and it was absolutely fascinating to see like in a movie what happens at the onset of the powder/glass transition," says Emmanuelle Gouillart.
The scientists now wish to vary the sizes of the grains and the way in which they ramp up the temperature. In the long term, these fundamental studies will tell us how to reduce the number of defects produced at the start of the glass formation process, and help to find faster and less energy consuming manufacturing processes. "We also wish to make X-ray imaging methods and data analyses a routine visualisation tool for reactive granular mixtures. These are not only used in the manufacture of glass but also of other materials, and I see a huge industrial potential for optimising these processes," concludes Emmanuelle Gouillart.
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Emmanuelle Gouillart, Michael J. Toplis, Julien Grynberg, Marie-H?l?ne Chopinet, Elin Sondergard, Luc Salvo, Michel Su?ry, Marco Di Michiel, Gael Varoquaux. In Situ Synchrotron Microtomography Reveals Multiple Reaction Pathways During Soda-Lime Glass Synthesis. Journal of the American Ceramic Society, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-2916.2012.05151.x
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
kim jong il died warren hellman survivor south pacific survivor south pacific house of wax patrick willis team america
Firm Skin color With The Finest Anti Aging Items - Health and Fitness ...
It is not difficult to know why the individuals who hunt for the best anti-wrinkle goods are overwhelmed and also confused within deciding which usually of these anti ? products works the best for them.
Anti-aging are not able to simply be defined as adult epidermis growing older. Simply by categorizing the different top features of aging skin color and the problems that plague them will help you know what type of anti-aging merchandise will work perfect for each of your skin layer conditions. These kind of major classifications include Laxity (while skin sags), lines and wrinkles, redness, photo voltaic elastosis (the yellowing of pores and skin), brown discolorations, stones (keratosis) and irregular texture.
Medical research shows their classification plans of getting older skin must be determined over a severity size from Zero to Four, with Some being probably the most severe. For individuals who suffer essentially the most severe skin problems, they may require a battery of numerous anti-aging products and also anti-wrinkle products in order to reverse the damaging effects various other skin conditions.
In order to narrow down the big amount of anti-aging ingredients that are used to make anti-wrinkle products, with the best products, can be determining exactly what specific actions is required to eliminate or decrease the each individual problem. By using the precise ingredients built to specifically focus on a particular getting older skin problem may have dramatic and also immediate final results by improving the texture, seem and issue of your skin.
The best anti-wrinkle products make use of a barrier fortification compound along with a Genetics defense compound to reduce your wrinkles by plumping the skin on the location from the wrinkle. A number of ingredients are used for collagen recovery to become thick the skin as well as dramatically reduce or eliminate the wrinkle. For anti-redness merchandise, the ingredients ought to include an emollient/moisturizer to aid restore and also rejuvenate your epidermis at the cell level.
Anti-brown staining can be decreased using pro-skin thickness ingredients to aid reverse harm to your skin. Last but not least, overall general anti-aging products can have re-texturizing ingredients to fix the signs of aging.
The field of anti- has long used their validated distinction systems to be able to categorize the various signs of aging skin color, and the enclosed anti- aging ingredients. While using new discoveries and results of preventing the signs of growing older, scientists tend to be only starting out create the very best anti-aging products in order to effectively opposite these skin disorders, and make your skin layer look as well as feel younger again.
Simply by applying a mixture of anti aging skin creams with anti aging care products, it is certainly you will get a younger look and also retain it for many years. For more information about anti aging skin creams visit the website now.
tacoma narrows bridge weather nyc open marriage department of justice doj dept of justice weather chicago
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)