TARP banks not lending to Main Street

I’ve already blogged on the upside of this issue — that is, the Obama administration is helping Main Street through expanding the lending capacity of the Small Business Administration and letting smaller banks in on some TARP action. The downside of this issue is eight of the top ten TARP recipient banks have cut small business loans since May. And that is disgusting.

From the second link:

The TARP program was set up to recapitalize banks so that they would bolster their lending to consumers and small businesses. In March, as the administration and the SBA took steps to stimulate small business lending, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ordered the top TARP recipients to begin sending the Treasury monthly reports on their small business lending activity.

“We need every bank in the country to do everything in their power to provide the credit that small businesses need to operate, expand and add jobs,” Geithner said as he announced the new requirements. “Given the role many banks played in causing this crisis, you bear a special responsibility for helping America get out of it.”

But in the five months they’ve been sending in those reports, the 22 biggest TARP recipients haven’t increased their small business lending. Instead, they’ve cut their outstanding balances by $8 billion. As of Aug. 31, the 22 reporting banks held a collective small business loan balance of $261.3 billion, down 3% from when they began reporting in April.

Check out this list of shame:

Treasury blasted on TARP transparency

And rightly so. When the government hands out $700 billion with essentially no debate as was the case a  little over a year ago, the public deserves to know where that money went and the government damn sure better be able to account for every cent. Or at least every $100,000.

From the link:

In a scathing report out Wednesday, a government watchdog blasts the Treasury Department for its handling of a $700 billion bailout program and for not adopting all of its earlier recommendations.

Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky, who is in charge of overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said Treasury’s failure to provide more details about the use of TARP funds has helped damage “the credibility of the program and of the government itself, and the anger, cynicism, and distrust created must be chalked up as one of the substantial, albeit unnecessary, costs of TARP.”

Barofsky has made 41 recommendations to better implement the program, of which Treasury has executed 18 and partially adopted seven.

One proposal calls for Treasury to require all of the hundreds of TARP recipients to report how they use the funds, which the Treasury has applied to only three of the largest recipients —American International Group,Citigroup and Bank of America.

Barofsky also describes at least nine unimplemented proposals, saying their adoption “could help bring greater transparency to TARP and answer some of the criticisms of the program.”

A stimulus by any other name …

… still spends public money.

All jokes and complaints aside, Obama does have an impressive economic team in place working hard to solve a massive and ongoing problem. I may not like the way things are going, but I will defer to experts implementing their plan.

From the link:

You won’t see it all in one neat package. And you won’t hear the White House call it stimulus.

But there’s a good chance lawmakers will decide to extend some of the stimulus measures included in the $787 billion economic recovery package passed in February and possibly create some new ones as well.

On Wednesday, House Democrats are convening a forum of economists to debate the state of the economy, with a specific focus on job creation. And lawmakers are convening hearings on Capitol Hill this week to discuss the economic outlook and the state of the housing market.

A number of ideas on the table are lifeline measures, while some are flat-out incentives to spur economic activity.

A trust deed investment primer

Trust deed investments can offer high returns relatively safety, but this investment vehicle isn’t for everyone. Like with any investment you should take the time to learn about the pros and cons of trust deed investment. Understanding the risks involved and the upside to any investment should be a major part of your investment strategy.

With trust deed investments your investment is secured by a deed of trust against a property owned by the borrower of your money. This promissory note involves risk to your investment, defines a time period for the return of your investment and is not covered by any federal insurance.

If the borrower default on this promissory note you will acquire the property through foreclosure. This could be a pro or a con depending on your view of directly owning and investing in real estate. Before a foreclosure you are buffered from direct real estate investment by the trustee of your investment.

Here are some points to consider with trust deed investment:

• Trust deed investments are high-yield and and relatively safe, but they aren’t liquid. Don’t make trust deed investments a part of your overall portfolio if you need access to your money at a specific time.
• Be sure to use a title company, and not your broker, to deposit your investment and receive your return when the loan is paid off. Allowing your broker to handle the funds make trust deed investment much more risky than necessary.
• Appraisal shouldn’t be the only method you use to value a property, but it is a major tool in your valuation toolbox. An appraisal will give you a wealth of important information about the property.
• Only invest in first trust deeds. You should never put money in a second, or even more junior, position in a trust deed investment.

Big Brother puts money and eyeballs into web 2.0

Via KurzweilAI.net — Something to think about before you go masquerading as an international terrorist again …

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Wired Danger Room, Oct. 19, 2009 In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the widerintelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media, part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using open-sourceintelligence. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Read Original Article>>

Pat Buchanan at it again

Buchanan is a wildcard as a pundit. He has a lot of very good, very serious ideas — and then he drops a load like this WorldNetDaily piece. Buchanan’s extreme prejudice (undeniable and very public) comes to the surface on a fairly regular basis and essentially undermines any serious points he adds to the overall political circus. Even people who agree with Pat on nine-out-of-ten topics are forced to shut their eyes and hold their noses when he cuts loose with the beleaguered white man act.

The title for the linked piece? “Traditional Americans are losing their nation.” And to make certain you don’t get confused about who these “traditional Americans” are Pat gives you this, “Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.”

And a column like this does the GOP no favors. The party really doesn’t need any more help being defined as that old, white and cranky.

About those Oath Keepers? I truly hope they are just one more marginal group the right wing media is fluffing, because if a large number of ex-military and law enforcement are ready to take up arms against the United States of America however many hinges the crazies have to work with just lost a few supporting  posts.

From the link:

In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.

Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be?

Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.”

Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.

“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.

“We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”

Small business stimulus

The stimulus plan finally comes to Main Street. This is something that should have happened months ago. Better late than never, I guess.

From the link:

President Obama will visit a Maryland business on Wednesday afternoon to announce initiatives to encourage lending to small businesses. According to an administration official, the proposal will increase the caps for existing Small Business Administration loans and give smaller banks better access to funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

An industry official involved in S.B.A. lending said the White House would propose raising the cap on the agency’s flagship 7(a) loan from $2 million to $5 million. But other programs are likely to see increases, too, including the 504 program.

There is one caveat, though:

Changing S.B.A. programs would be subject to Congressional approval.

Retirement planning for Baby Boomers

Early and often –it might not be a good idea at the ballot box, but it’s a great idea with retirement planning. Starting retirement plans early in a career gives you a head-start, but planning for your retirement finances often continues throughout  your career and even into retirement. For Baby Boomers there’s an online resource that provides information, resources and answers for retirement topics including lifestyle, career, personal and finances — the Baby Boomers Retirement Network (BBRN). Retirement planning is a big part of the Baby Boomers Retirement Network’s offerings.

Hit the link for a ten-minute online quiz to help you find answers for your retirement questions.

From the link:

Start your process and get your own answers…to the big questions on every Baby Boomer’s mind these days…about money, investments, health, well-being, work, lifestyle, travel, love, and much more…

Tap into an exclusive stream of benefits and discounts, find better investment options, feel better about decisions you make, and network with the best, most trustworthy individuals to help you get the job done. Your answers are confidential and are for your use exclusively.

The BBRN website includes links to news for Baby Boomers; expert resources for finance, jobs, health issues, travel and more; a forum on retirement topic for site members; and even free audio downloads on many topics.

The BBRN offers the Baby Boomers Retirement Club (BBRC) at two levels: basic and gold. A basic BBRC membership is free and comes with many membership benefits including a pharmacy discount card saving 10 percent below AARP rates. The gold membership requires a monthly fee, but comes with many more benefits, particularly relating to finance and investment.

Why FISA never needed reform in the first place

I’ve already done a post today on this excellent article by Julian Sanchez on the Obama administration and how it’s retaining some of the Bush administration’s overreaching tools for use in the “global war on terror.” So far the Obama administration has been a disappointment in not rolling back the beating U.S. civil liberties took in the Bush administration’s  panicked response to 9/11.

And as it turns out — and that I’ve argued repeatedly — the tools to fight international terrorists were firmly in place before 9/11, they were just implemented with Keystone Kop level competence.

From the second link:

The FISA Amendments Act is the successor to an even broader bill called the Protect America Act, which similarly gave the attorney general and director of national intelligence extraordinary power to authorize sweeping interception of Americans’ international communications. It was hastily passed in 2007 amid claims that the secret FISA Court had issued a ruling that prevented investigators from intercepting wholly foreign communications that traveled across US wires. Former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell even claimed that FISA’s restrictions had rendered it impossible to immediately eavesdrop on Iraqi insurgents who had captured several American soldiers. The New York Post quoted tearful parents of the captured men expressing their horror at the situation and a senior Congressional staffer who alleged that “the intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law.”

Yet as a Justice Department official later admitted, the FISA law clearly placed no such broad restriction on foreign wire communications passing through the United States; rather, there had been a far more narrow problem involving e-mails for which the recipient’s location could not be determined. And as James Bamford explained in his essential 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, the delay in getting wiretaps running on the suspected kidnappers was the result of a series of missteps at the Justice Department, not the limits of FISA — no surprise, since even when FISA does require a warrant, surveillance may begin immediately in emergencies if a warrant is sought later. (The suspected kidnappers, by the way, turned out not to have been the actual kidnappers.) Yet on the basis of such claims, a panicked Congress signed off on almost limitless authority to vacuum up international communications — authority that we already know has resulted in systematic “overcollection” of purely domestic conversations, and even resulted in the interception of former President Bill Clinton’s e-mails.

A wireless home entertainment system

A pipe dream for years and may finally become reality in the near future. Amimon, you have a huge rooting section right now. And a murderer’s row of consumer tech industry partners.

From the link:

Wouldn’t you love to get rid of the rat’s nest of cables connecting the pieces of your home entertainment system—and cut the hassle of hooking up new audio-video components? Engineers and consumers alike have dreamed of that possibility for years, but a handful of serious efforts up until now to devise wireless consumer electronics schemes have foundered on technical shortcomings and divisive standards battles.

Now a venture capital-backed Israeli startup, Amimon, is driving the latest attempt at a cord-free home entertainment standard—and this time it looks more likely to fly. The chipmaker’s Wireless Home Digital Interface technology, or WHDI, was co-developed with a who’s who of consumer electronics companies, including Hitachi (HIT), LG Electronics (LGEAF), Motorola (MOT), Samsung (SSNLF), Sharp (SHCAF), and Sony (SNE). The first TVs and laptops to use it should start appearing on store shelves in early 2010.

Eventually, WHDI could show up in everything from Blu-ray DVD players, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles to video projectors, camcorders, and portable audio players. Amimon expects the technology to add $20 to $40 to the cost of an electronic device at first, with prices falling rapidly as volumes increase.

UBS to clients …

… “oops.”

From the link:

UBS, the embattled Swiss bank that is being forced to divulge the names of about 4,450 account holders to the IRS, may have inadvertently tipped its hand on their identities by sending them registered letters through the U.S. Postal Service.

Twitter, Google, Microsoft, data mining and dollars

Whew, that’s some title up there and it’s the highly distilled — Twitteresque, even — news that it looks like Twitter is about to monetize in a very painless way. Most likely both Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engines will cut data mining deals with Twitter to leverage the power of Twitter’s real-time searchable information stream.

From the link (in bold is from me) :

The intense rivals (Google and MS) are in separate talks with the new online darling Twitter to set up their own data-mining deals , says a report from The Wall Street Journal ‘s AllThingsD Web site. The “advanced talks” are said to be over licensing deals that would allow them to integrate real-time Twitter feeds with their search engines, Google’s search and Microsoft’s Bing.

None of the three companies would respond to requests for information about the reported negotiations.

AllThingsD reported today that the individual deals could mean upfront payments worth several million dollars, or involve revenue-sharing plans.

“Ah, this could be a way for Twitter to make some money , and maybe more than just a little money,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Co.

“It finally means a business model for Twitter, or at least the beginnings of one. And, of course, it means real revenue, which is very important. Not just in licensing revenue from Google or Microsoft, but also in potentially getting a piece of the action on an ongoing basis. So there could be considerable upside here for Twitter,” Olds said.

Rhetoric v. reality in the Obama White House

Cato and Reason‘s Julian Sanchez has a great piece on the disconnect between what the Obama administration does, and what it says, in restoring balance to D.C. and ridding our government of some of the Bush administration’s overreach and blatant disregard for civil liberties and personal freedom.

To be fair Obama has been in office a total of nine months with a very full plate, and his administration may well be taking a long view in meeting some of these policy goals. If so, that’s great. In the meantime his feet should be kept to the fire on these issues that led many independent voters to pull the lever for him last year.

From the link:

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We’ve watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of “state secrets.” We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

Update — Here’s another post on this article.

Outdoor living and patio furniture

Outdoor living is certainly more than a fad — it’s here to stay. Like I’ve blogged previously, I’ve covered the topic fairly extensively when contributing to a no-longer-published do-it-yourself magazine geared toward young homeowners. At the extreme end, outdoor living can get pretty wild with fully outfitted living rooms outside featuring all-weather furnishings and electrical hookups for televisions. Outdoor living certainly doesn’t have to be that difficult. A simple deck, comfortable outdoor patio furniture and maybe a fire pit or outdoor fireplace is plenty to fully enjoy the relaxing benefits of outdoor living.

Of course if you are looking for something more than the basic outdoor patio furniture setup, there are plenty of options to choose from out there. Hit the link to head to Outdora.com where you can find outdoor patio furniture to meet any design, function or layout need. Outdora’s conversation sets are geared for comfort and to create a lounging atmosphere in your outdoor living space in a range of materials including wrought iron, aluminium and natural wood. The conversation sets of patio furniture are built to withstand the elements while encouraging pleasant lounging.

Outdora’s patio dining sets include seating and a table ready for your next gathering, or even just a family dinner in your outdoor living space. The patio dining sets are available in aluminum, wrought iron and wicker, and are built to withstand the seasons and as much use as you can throw at them. If you are looking for something a bit closer to traditional patio furniture, Outdora offers patio and pool seating that fits the bill and includes everything from pool-side lounge chairs to outdoor patio furniture that looks good enough to put inside.

Outdoor living is more than a trendy lifestyle and whether you want to keep things simple, or to create different outdoor living rooms and specialty areas, Outdora is a great resource for your outdoor furnishings.

Are we still evolving?

Of course.

The release:

Are humans still evolving? Absolutely, says a new analysis of a long-term survey of human health

Durham, NC – Although advances in medical care have improved standards of living over time, humans aren’t entirely sheltered from the forces of natural selection, a new study shows.

“There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans,” said Stephen Stearns of Yale University. A recent analysis by Stearns and colleagues turns this idea on its head. As part of a working group sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC, the team of researchers decided to find out if natural selection — a major driving force of evolution — is still at work in humans today. The result? Human evolution hasn’t ground to a halt. In fact, we’re likely to evolve at roughly the same rates as other living things, findings suggest.

Taking advantage of data collected as part of a 60-year study of more than 2000 North American women in the Framingham Heart Study, the researchers analyzed a handful of traits important to human health. By measuring the effects of these traits on the number of children the women had over their lifetime, the researchers were able to estimate the strength of selection and make short-term predictions about how each trait might evolve in the future. After adjusting for factors such as education and smoking, their models predict that the descendents of these women will be slightly shorter and heavier, will have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, will have their first child at a younger age, and will reach menopause later in life.

“The take-home message is that humans are currently evolving,” said Stearns. “Natural selection is still operating.”

The changes may be slow and gradual, but the predicted rates of change are no different from those observed elsewhere in nature, the researchers say. “The evolution that’s going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals,” said Stearns. “These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things,” he added. “But what that means is that humans aren’t special with respect to how fast they’re evolving. They’re kind of average.”

###

Additional authors on the study were Sean Byars of Yale University, Douglas Ewbank of the University of Pennsylvania, and Diddahally Govindaraju of Boston University.

The team’s findings were published online in the October 19th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

CITATION: Byars, S., D. Ewbank, et al. (2009). “Natural selection in a contemporary human population.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(42). doi: 10.1073_pnas.0906199106.

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is an NSF-funded collaborative research center operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University.

Get out from under debt

Household debt is an issue in the United States, and in the current economic climate and level of unemployment it is crippling for many people.

Check out the trend line on this chart of household debt from the beginning of 1953 to the middle of this year:

US household credit market outstanding debt

Once you’re underwater it is very easy to lose control of the situation and if you’re unemployed, or you are using credit to cover bills and basic necessities, debt can take over your personal financial situation. Once you reach that point your options become somewhat limited. The most drastic step is personal bankruptcy, but there are drawbacks to that approach and personal bankruptcy underwent significant reform in 2005 making personal  bankruptcy a much more difficult process. Other choices include credit counseling and debt settlement.

If personal debt gets beyond your control, of the three options listed above seeking professional debt settlement help is the best for most people. You don’t need to repair your credit. What you do need is to reduce your personal debt to a manageable amount, get that debt paid off as quickly as possible and move forward with your personal finances.

From the link:

Debt Settlement is process and approach to becoming free of unsecured debts. The goal of a debt settlement program is to find the best solution to lower your debts, help you deal with your creditors, and get you on the road to financial freedom.

And:

A debt settlement program can help you be free of unsecured debts in as little as 2-3 years for a fraction of your original owed amount. Even better than simply saving money is that once the settlement payment is made, your accounts will be satisfied – meaning you no longer have any of your original debt outstanding.

Hit the above link for the six steps to debt reduction.

Risk-taking and Wall Street

This BusinessWeek article is actually about the demise of risk-taking in Silicon Valley, and it does a great job of identifying some of the players who’ve collectively killed risk in the one-time land of starry-eyed entrepreneurs.

The final culprit — Wall Street — and the indictment against it is interesting, true and really applies across the spectrum of business sectors as a succinct reminder of the myriad problems facing the Street and what has become business as usual. Particularly the point about Sarbox and why entrepreneurs might shy away from IPOs.

From the first link:

WALL STREET

Wall Street hasn’t played as direct a role in Silicon Valley since the late 1990s, when analysts like Mary Meeker and bankers like Frank Quattrone knew as much about new startups in the Valley as the VCs did. That’s part of the problem.

Startups have to want to go public in order to go for the home run. And most entrepreneurs today just don’t. Blame it on bankers and analysts who no longer care about a company with a sub-$500 million capitalization; blame it on Sarbanes-Oxley; blame it on activist hedge funds who don’t give CEOs the leash to innovate; blame it on scars from companies going public in the 1990s that had no business going public and paid the price.

But too many great entrepreneurs sell early not because they’re lazy, not because they want a quick buck, but because the idea of running a company all the while trying to meet quarter-by-quarter Wall Street estimates is antithetical to risk-taking.

Verdict: There’s got to be a reward for all that risk, and until the public markets become a place great entrepreneurs aspire to get to, that risk-reward equation is hopelessly lopsided.

A small business primer for Google’s AdWords

A very informative AdWords/AdSense 101 for small business from the New York Times. Easy to understand and informative, this article is a great primer for anyone looking for a bit more guidance in using AdWords.

From the link:

Here are the basics: Google AdWords are keyword-driven ads that show up along the right-hand side of a Google search page under the rubric “sponsored links.” People who search for terms related to those you select — say, “widgets for sale” — will see your ad alongside the results of their search. How high up your ad appears on the list of sponsored links will depend, in part, on how much you’re willing to spend on your campaign. The more you spend and the more relevant your ad, the higher it will rank. Because AdWords is a pay-per-click service, you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad.

This is quite the publicity stunt

Getting the ISS involved in the marketing for “Planet 51.”

I’ll let the release hot from the inbox explain:

The International Space Station Discovers ‘Planet 51′

Upcoming Animated Comedy Hitches Ride on Space Shuttle

The Milky Way Galaxy, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ — To celebrate the Solar System Premiere of Columbia Pictures’ new animated comedy Planet 51, which will be released in theaters on Earth November 20, 2009, the film is currently orbiting the planet on the International Space Station!

(Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091019/LA94833)

The film was launched into space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on August 28, 2009, and was transferred to the space station by the astronauts a few days later.  The film is now cruising high above Earth at 17,500 miles per hour and orbiting the planet every 90 minutes, which is the exact running time of the movie, so it will make a full Earth orbit as the movie premieres on the ground.

In a joint statement, producers Guy Collins and Ignacio Perez said that, “Planet 51 is a fun film for all the family and one of its strong messages, particularly for children, is to not be afraid of the unknown. That is what NASA has been showing the world for 50 years and I hope that our film will encourage children to increase their understanding of the Universe and NASA’s work.”

Joshua Ravetch, a Senior Vice President at HandMade Films who arranged for the movie to get to the space station said, “What’s really amazing about this is that the movie will open day and date domestically, internationally and now, even a copy of the film will be available ‘orbitally’ circling the Earth for the astronauts to view at their leisure.”

In a photo accompanying the announcement, a disc of the film can be seen floating weightlessly in space, observing Earth as it floats by a Space Station window.  The photo mimics a shot from the film, in which Lem, an alien from Planet 51, observes his home planet from the window of a spaceship for the first time.

About the film:

Planet 51 is a galactic sized animated alien adventure comedy revolving around American astronaut Captain Charles “Chuck” Baker, who lands on Planet 51 thinking he’s the first person to step foot on it. To his surprise, he finds that this planet is inhabited by little green people who are happily living in a white picket fence world reminiscent of a cheerfully innocent 1950s America, and whose only fear is that it will be overrun by alien invaders…like Chuck! With the help of his robot companion “Rover” and his new friend Lem, Chuck must navigate his way through the dazzling, but bewildering, landscape of Planet 51 in order to escape becoming a permanent part of the Planet 51 Alien Invaders Space Museum.  The film is directed by Jorge Blanco, written by Joe Stillman, and produced by Guy Collins and Ignacio Perez Dolset.

About Sony Pictures Entertainment

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America (SCA), a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation. SPE’s global operations encompass motion picture production and distribution; television production and distribution; digital content creation and distribution; worldwide channel investments; home entertainment acquisition and distribution; operation of studio facilities; development of new entertainment products, services and technologies; and distribution of filmed entertainment in more than 130 countries.  Sony Pictures Entertainment can be found on the World Wide Web at www.sonypictures.com.

About HANDMADE FILMS INTERNATIONAL

HandMade is a UK public company quoted on the English Stock Exchange with offices in London and Los Angeles.  HandMade’s group activities include film production, sales and financing, and the license and exploitation of existing HandMade assets which includes ownership of a library of over 100 films.  HandMade Films International is the sales & marketing arm of the Group and is a wholly owned subsidiary.

Current films on the HandMade slate include animated CG feature Planet 51, which features the voices of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Jessica Biel and Seann William Scott.  The film is released across the US on Thanksgiving weekend in November on 3,500 screens and will roll out from day & date across the rest of the world.  Cracks starring Eva Green, Juno Temple and Imogen Poots.  Executive Producer Ridley Scott’s daughter Jordan directs the film.  Other titles include 50 Dead Men Walking starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Jim Sturgess, and 2010′s remake productions of The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa.

HandMade also owns and exploits the rights to Eloise, one of the best known and much-loved fictional characters in the United States.  A live action feature film to be directed by Charles Shyer  and featuring the mischievous character, Eloise In Paris, will shoot in Early 2010 starring Uma Thurman.

About ILION ANIMATION STUDIOS

Ilion Animation Studios was founded in 2002 to create state-of-the-art computer animated movies for worldwide theatrical release using its own purpose-built cutting-edge technology. Ilion Animation Studios and companies Zed and Pyro Studios, were founded and are run by Ignacio Perez Dolset (CEO of Ilion and Pyro) and Javier Perez Dolset (CEO of Zed).  Zed develops and markets entertainment and community products and services for mobile and the Internet. The company is the leading mobile value-added services (MVAS) player in the world in terms of revenue and geographical footprint, operating in 53 countries across 5 continents.  Pyro Studios, creator of the international best-seller video game saga Commandos is dedicated to latest generation video game development for the international market.

Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091019/LA94833
http://photoarchive.ap.org/
AP PhotoExpress Network:  PRN20
PRN Photo Desk photodesk@prnewswire.com
Source: Columbia Pictures

Web Site:  http://www.sonypictures.com/

The Federal IT Dashboard

Too bad something like this doesn’t exist for the entire U.S. budget. If you want to see where government IT spending ends up, the new Federal IT Dashboard is for you. It’s part of a “radical transparency” policy of the new federal CIO.

From the link:

It has been an interesting year – who would have thought that the federal government would have done such a thing – provided a Federal IT Dashboard of allocation of federal IT dollars to investments for all of us out there in citizen-land to read? Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, announced it and the keyword of the effort that made the headlines is “radical transparency.”  It’s very clever in its design and visuals – “mashup ready.“ It would be especially appealing if the shell of the software would be made available to anyone who wants it – since some real (taxpayer) money went into this project.

It’s a pretty cool dashboard from which we can learn that services for citizens are out spent by projects for management of government resources and that most VA projects are behind schedule.  And it is truly impressive that it is possible for the citizenry to comment, grab info to Tweet, and generally know which project dollar is where. So, should CIOs from the private sector or from non-US government organizations look at this as a transparency role model?

Pollution and ET

Via KurzweilAI.net — An interesting and novel idea on searching for extraterrestrial life.

To spot an alien, follow the pollution trail

New Scientist Space, Oct. 19, 2009 Light pollution from cities and the presence of CFCs and other artificial compounds in the atmosphere (indicated by absorption at characteristic wavelengths) could be signs of intelligent life on alien planets. Read Original Article>>

More optics in the supercomputing future?

Yes, http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24255/?nlid=2439&a=f.

From the Technology Review editor’s blog link:

This week at the Frontiers in Optics conference in San Jose, Jeffrey Kash of IBM Research laid out his vision of the future of supercomputers.

The fastest supercomputer in the world, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s IBM Roadrunner, can perform 1,000 trillion operations per second, which computer scientists call the petaflop scale. Getting up to the next level, the exaflop scale, which is three orders of magnitude faster, will require integrating more optical components to save on power consumption, Kash said. (Laser scientists at the conference are also looking towards the exascale, as I reported on Wednesday.)

A beautiful nanotech image

I regularly have blog posts that feature nanotech images, and sometimes I just run a nanotechnology image because it is so beautiful. This is one of those times –

2004: Quantum dot nanocrystals deposited on a silicon substrate (200x), Polarized reflected light. / Seth A. Coe-Sullivan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Courtesy of Nikon Small World. The 2004 runners up.

IBEX finds solar system surprise

This release is from Friday and I’ve read this news a few different places and caught several releases, but this one is pretty comprehensive and contains a multitude of citations and external links.

Surprises in any scientific research are interesting, and often they are pretty cool.

The release:

Satellite reveals surprising cosmic ‘weather’ at edge of solar system

		IMAGE: Priscilla Frisch, Senior Scientist in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and member of the science team, Interstellar Boundary Explorer. Collaborating with former UChicago astronomer Thomas F. Adams, she made the first spectrum… Click here for more information.

The first solar system energetic particle maps show an unexpected landmark occurring at the outer edge of the solar wind bubble surrounding the solar system. Scientists published these maps, based mostly on data collected from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite, in the Oct. 15 issue of Science Express, the advance online version of the journal Science.

“Nature is full of surprises, and IBEX has been lucky to discover one of those surprises,” said Priscilla Frisch, a senior scientist in astronomy & astrophysics at the University of Chicago. “The sky maps are dominated by a giant ribbon of energetic neutral atoms extending throughout the sky in an arc that is 300 degrees long.” Energetic neutral atoms form when hot solar wind ions (charged particles) steal electrons from cool interstellar neutral atoms.

IBEX was launched Oct. 19, 2008, to produce the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere, which reaches far beyond the solar system’s most distant planets. Extending more than 100 times farther than the distance from Earth to the sun, the heliosphere marks the region of outer space subjected to the sun’s particle emissions.

The new maps show how high-speed cosmic particle streams collide and mix at the edge of the heliosphere, said Frisch, who co-authored three of a set of IBEX articles appearing in this week’s Science Express. The outgoing solar wind blows at 900,000 miles an hour, crashing into a 60,000-mile-an-hour “breeze” of incoming interstellar gas.

Revealed in the IBEX data, but not predicted in the theoretical heliosphere simulations of three different research groups, was the ribbon itself, formed where the direction of the interstellar magnetic field draping over the heliosphere is perpendicular to the viewpoint of the sun.

		IMAGE: Image from one of the IBEX papers published in the Oct. 16, 2009, issue of Science showing a map of the ribbon of energetic neutral atoms (in green and yellow)… Click here for more information.

Energetic protons create forces as they move through the magnetic field, and when the protons are bathed in interstellar neutrals, they produce energetic neutral atoms. “We’re still trying to understand this unexpected structure, and we believe that the interstellar magnetic forces are associated with the enhanced ENA production at the ribbon,” Frisch said.

IBEX shows that energetic neutral atoms are produced toward the north pole of the ecliptic (the plane traced by the orbit of the planets around the sun), as well as toward the heliosphere tail pointed toward the constellations of Taurus and Orion. “The particle energies change between the poles and tail, but surprisingly not in the ribbon compared to adjacent locations,” Frisch said.

###

BEX is the latest in NASA’s series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers space missions. Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, leads and developed the mission with a team of national and international partners. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Explorers Program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Citations: N. A. Schwadron, M. Bzowski, G. B. Crew, M. Gruntman, H. Fahr, H. Fichtner, P. C. Frisch, H. O. Funsten, S. Fuselier, J. Heerikhuisen, V. Izmodenov, H. Kucharek, M. Lee, G. Livadiotis, D. J. McComas, E. Moebius, T. Moore, J. Mukherjee, N.V. Pogorelov, C. Prested, D. Reisenfeld, E. Roelof, G.P. Zank, “Comparison of Interstellar Boundary Explorer Observations with 3-D Global Heliospheric Models,” ScienceExpress, Oct. 15, 2009.

H.O. Funsten, F. Allegrini, G.B. Crew, R. DeMajistre, P.C. Frisch, S.A. Fuselier, M. Gruntman, P. Janzen, D.J. McComas, E. Möbius, B. Randol, D.B. Reisenfeld, E.C. Roelof, N.A. Schwadron, “Structures and Spectral Variations of the Outer Heliosphere in IBEX Energetic Neutral Atom Maps,”Science Express, Oct. 15, 2009.

D.J. McComas, F. Allegrini1, P. Bochsler, M. Bzowski, E.R. Christian, G.B.Crew, R. DeMajistre, H. Fahr, H. Fichtner, P.C. Frisch, H.O. Funsten, S. A. Fuselier, G. Gloeckler, M. Gruntman, J. Heerikhuisen, V. Izmodenov, P.J anzen, P. Knappenberger, S. Krimigis, H. Kucharek, M. Lee, G. Livadiotis, S. Livi, R.J. MacDowall, D. Mitchell, E. Möbius, T. Moore, N.V. Pogorelov, D. Reisenfeld, E. Roelof, L. Saul, N.A. Schwadron, P.W. Valek, R. Vanderspek, P. Wurz, G.P. Zank, “Global Observations of the Interstellar Interaction from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer-IBEX”, ScienceExpress, Oct. 15, 2009.

Related links:

Animation shows how energetic neutral atoms are made in the heliosheath when hot solar wind protons grab an electron from a cold interstellar gas atom. The ENAs can then easily travel back into the solar system, where some are collected by IBEX. Credit: NASA/GSFChttp://www.swri.org/temp/ibexscience/DM/SP_draft1.mov

Solar Journey: The Significant of Our Galactic Environment for the Heliosphere and Earth, Priscilla C. Frisch, editor.http://www.springer.com/astronomy/practical+astronomy/book/978-1-4020-4397-0

IBEX Web page at Southwest Research Institute http://ibex.swri.edu/

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer mission http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/index.html

To view a video related to this research, please visit http://astro.uchicago.edu/%7Efrisch/soljourn/Hanson/AstroBioScene7Sound.mov

If you’re dying for more on the topic, here’s another press release.

The credit card industry got greedy

No surprise there. Credit is certainly a privilege and not a right, but the industry players have proven to be bad actors when operating without significant oversight. With the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act scheduled to go into full effect over the next year — different provisions begin at different times — the industry took the grace period as an opportunity to gouge customers in the midst of this economic climate.

Needless to say Congress isn’t looking too kindly on Main Street being put under that much more economic pressure. The credit industry might want to start making major concessions and end predatory practices lest Congress decides the new act doesn’t go far enough.Now that the recovery is looking quite jobless and by appearance, if nothing else, mostly benefits Wall Street and the topmost tier of “haves,” a Democrat-controlled government may want a few pounds of flesh for the “have-nots” in this scenario.

From today’s NYT op-ed:

Some of the worst (and most common) abuses are now scheduled to be outlawed in February. These include the practice of arbitrarily raising interest rates, penalizing customers when they are late paying a bill unrelated to the credit card — so-called universal default — and charging customers interest on debt that they paid off a month or more earlier.

The banks claimed that they needed the long lead time to rework their computer processing system. Consumer advocates warned that this would invite banks and credit card companies to wring as much as possible out of consumers before the law finally took effect.

They were right.

A forthcoming study from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Safe Credit Cards Project shows that credit card interests rates — already too high — rose by 20 percent in the first two quarters of this year, even though the cost of lending went down as a result of low federal interest rates. In testimony before Congress earlier this month, one consumer advocate cited case after case of struggling consumers who had seen their credit card rates more than double for no apparent reason, even when they had faithfully paid on time.

Friday video fun — watch Glenn Beck …

… masquerade as a televangelist.

He’s either a terrible actor or very emotionally disturbed, but his sermonesque delivery of horseshit is funny. Or maybe frightening, depending on where you put him in terms of cultural significance.

(Hat tip: the Daily Dish)

Alvarez v. Smith

Why is this Supreme Court case important?

I’ll let Cato’s Ilya Somin provide the details:

Today, the Supreme Court hears Alvarez v. Smith, an important case that will affect the constitutional property rights of many people around the country but has failed to attract the attention as it deserves.

In Alvarez, the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was unconstitutional for Chicago police to seize cars and other property and hold it for many months at a time a without giving the owners any chance challenge the seizure. The Illinois Drug Asset Forfeiture Procedure Act (DAFPA) allows the police to seize property that may have been involved in a drug-related crime and hold onto it for up to 187 days without any kind of legal hearing. This rule applies even to property owned by completely innocent persons who simply had their possessions caught up in a drug investigation through no fault of their own – for example, if someone else used their car to transport illegal drugs without their knowledge. The three car owners involved in Alvarez were never even charged with a crime, much less convicted. Under DAFPA, the authorities also don’t have to prove that keeping innocent owners’ property is necessary in order to prevent the loss of valuable evidence.

Sanity from the Hill on small business

Hear, hear Mark Warner!

From the link:

The Obama administration should spend more money from the $700 billion bank rescue on programs to increase lending to small businesses, said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the banking committee.

Warner and other lawmakers are pushing regulators to consider ways to jumpstart credit to small companies, which he says is dwindling even after efforts to provide government support. The senator urged action at a meeting of the Senate Democratic Caucus yesterday.

Treasury Department officials said they are in discussions with Warner, Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat of Louisiana, and Republican Olympia Snowe from Maine, on how to address the issue, either through the Troubled Asset Relief Program or new legislation. A $15 billion program to purchase pools of small- business loans, announced in March, has attracted little interest even though it’s ready for use, an administration official said.

“The original notion of the TARP was, we were going to help Main Street by bailing out Wall Street,” Warner said in an interview. “We’ve seen Wall Street recover, but we have not seen Main Street reap the direct benefits.”

Too big to fail …

… and too much arrogance not to use our tax dollars to run up huge year-end bonuses. I know that’s an overstatement and Wall Street compensation is pretty arcane, but the message Main Street is going to get when the final numbers come out is one big middle finger from Wall Street.

If I were Goldman Sachs I’d ramp down a whole lot lest the heavy hand of a Democratic Congress and White House take unwanted action interfering with business as usual on the Street.

Call it what you want — balls, chutzpah, hubris, whatever — it’s very, very bad pubic relations, very questionable internal policy to continue the old ways when the entire game was changed by last year’s bailout, and frankly I think the best description for Goldman’s feeble justification is blind stupidity.

From the link:

As Wall Street firms typically do, Goldman set almost half that sum aside to compensate its workers. Through the first nine months of 2009, the firm socked away $16.7 billion, enough to pay the average Goldmanite $526,814.

The bonus pool is on pace to hit $21 billion for 2009, which would match the record bonus payout of 2007.

Goldman said it won’t decide the size of the bonus pool till year-end. In any case, the payments will be substantial — and will come just one year after huge sums of taxpayer dollars were funneled to financial institutions.

Critics charge that the lion’s share of Goldman’s profits comes from making big bets using cheap dollars printed by the Federal Reserve. Plus, given the crisis that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers, there’s a sense that government officials won’t let big firms go bust. That in effect gives too-big-to-fail firms a license to bet the house.

“This is almost an ‘in your face’ kind of setup here,” said Michael Panzner, a Wall Street veteran who blogs at financialarmageddon.com and who wrote a 2007 book predicting economic disaster. “They’re rolling the dice, and so far they’re winning,” said Panzner.

Firewood, fireplaces and wood-burning furnaces

Winter is coming and with it comes the season for burning wood. You may simply enjoy an indoor fireplace or maybe an outdoor fireplace or fire pit, and you might even use wood burning as a sustainable and economical way to heat your home with a modern wood-burning furnace. The common denominator in all these ways to burn wood is the firewood itself, and firewood means having a place and way to store your supply. The best way to do so is with a firewood rack that protects your firewood and keeps it ready for burning.

Firewood racks come in a number of varieties, but beyond helping organize your firewood pile most racks will keep your wood off the ground helping keep it dry and not quite so attractive to insects. Some firewood racks even feature covers to keep your firewood even more protected from rain, snow and other moisture. If you keep a large supply of firewood you’ll want a large rectangular rack to maximize your storage area, but if you only keep a small supply of firewood on hand you could go with a more decorative hoop-style rack. And if you need to transport your firewood around the yard you can even buy a portable rack on wheels.

If you are considering a wood-burning outdoor furnace as a way to cut down on your winter heating costs, you will certainly want a large firewood rack to keep a large and ready-to-burn supply of wood close to your outdoor furnace to keep it stoked.

Whether you are burning wood for pleasure, for heating your home or maybe even both, remember drier wood provides more heat per pound of wood when it burns. Make sure your firewood has been properly seasoned — that is allowed to dry for months or longer after it’s been cut — and then kept dry by storing your wood in a firewood rack.