Archive [page 5]

The last original Dunkin’ Donuts sign standing anywhere has been dismantled and is now in storage and facing an uncertain fate.

The 1957 neon landmark, which towered over the intersection of Market and North Beacon streets in Brighton, was in poor condition with extensive rust. A backlighted fluorescent plexiglass sign with a modern Dunkin’ Donuts steaming coffee cup logo was erected in its place after the old sign came down on April 3.

The artist who is a member of the Critical Arts Ensemble was cleared of all charges by a judge who ruled that the indictment against him was “insufficient on its face.” Steve Kurtz, who was the subject of the 2006 film Strange Culture, was charged with suspected bioterrorism after police came to his home to investigate the death of his wife and discovered biological specimens he was using for an art project about genetically modified foods.

Now, with conference committee negotiations over the final shape of the Farm Bill at a critical stage, Congress needs to change the foreign food-aid program and help avert this calamity. The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food.

By helping Africa develop a self-sustainable agricultural system, we can work toward curing the disease and not just the symptoms.

UCLA basketball, recently left short-handed by the one-and-done departure of freshman All-America center Kevin Love, may soon get bigger and better.

The Dallas Morning News has reported that J’Mison Morgan, a senior center at South Oak Cliff High in Dallas, has asked out of his letter of intent at Louisiana State and is interested in transferring to UCLA.

LANSING, Mich. (AP) – The Michigan Senate on Thursday voted to prohibit smoking in all bars, restaurants and workplaces.

The 25-12 vote, a major development in efforts to enact a smoking ban in the state, came after a Democratic senator asked to discharge legislation from a committee where bills traditionally have gone to die.

Great news, this is my biggest complaint about Ann Arbor since moving from California.

On July 8, 1965, Otis Redding was a young soul singer of modest renown, less than three months removed from releasing his first Top 10 r&b hit single. By July 10, he had become something else entirely: It took only 24 hours to lay down 10 of the 11 songs that would make up Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, arguably the 1960s’ greatest studio-recorded soul LP. (The only track not recorded at that time was the #2 hit, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”.) Friends and associates had noticed Redding’s growing confidence as a singer, and once Otis Blue hit shelves it was clear he was poised enough to pick up the mantle of the recently slain legend Sam Cooke, up to that point the greatest soul singer in America. He was also prepared to take on the Temptations and the Rolling Stones and B.B.King on their own turf; the only way to top him would be to give one of his original compositions to Aretha Franklin (”Respect”). In the simplest terms: It’s a hell of a record, the crowning achievement of a man who could sound pained and celebratory and tender and gritty and proud all at once, with a voice that everyone from John Fogerty to Swamp Dogg to Cee-lo owes a debt to.

The 2008-2009 home kit from Adidas, now available in the U.S. from soccer.com.

Underworld is beginning a series of quarterly web broadcasts from their recording studio starting today. The show begins 6 PM UK/1 PM Eastern.

Over the last twenty years, scientists have built a mountain of evidence that Bisphenol A, the key ingredient in polycarbonate plastic, should scare the daylights out of us. It should have been banned a long time ago, as a precautionary measure, but regulators were asleep at the switch — allowing the chemical industry to run roughshod over them.

[...]

Unfortunately, a mix of deception and apathy has left us exposed for decades. Last year, a highly-biased government panel pulled a snow job that would make the Tobacco Industry proud: They claimed that Bisphenol A is not a cause for concern two weeks after scientists issued a damning report about the chemical. Their trickery bought the chemical industry months of slack, until the Canadian government announced that it may ban baby bottles made from the questionable substance. Soon thereafter, Wal-Mart announced that it would no longer stock polycarbonate baby bottles and Nalgene Outdoor Products agreed to stop making their trademark water bottles.

I have a Nalgene bottle but use it rarely, such as when I’m playing soccer. I’ve heard that BPA tends to leak out of the bottles when the plastic is in contatct with hot liquids or during washing with detergent. So if you wash your water bottle with soap, make sure you dry it thoroughly before refilling.

Ann Arbor isn’t the movie-making mecca of the Midwest just yet, but local sources say interest in the city as a film location is heating up.

Commercial real estate agents say there has been a surge of inquiries about properties that could be used by filmmakers, several local schools are being scouted for filming locations, and the Ann Arbor Convention and Visitors Bureau is expanding its role as the go-to group for production companies seeking to shoot in the area.

“There’s certainly a flurry of activity and inquiries coming in. It goes a lot deeper than finding hotel rooms and mapping out sites for them to take a look at,” said Mary A. Kerr, Convention and Visitors Bureau president.

Fabric nightclub owner Keith Reilly is featured in a two-part mix on the Fabric podcast.

YouTube is linking any featured video on its home page to the infamous Rick Astley “Rick Roll” video this morning. At least one company managed to do a prank right this year.

The iPhone requires a fundamentally different approach to user interaction. Something that goes way beyond the obvious things like the multi-touch interface.

If you can have a background process running on your iPhone, what is that process going to do when it detects a state change? What happens with a buddy comes online, or a new piece of data is available, or when a long running calculation is completed?

[...]

You’re [sic] phone soon becomes a fricken’ pinball machine as multiple applications fight for your attention. With 24 notification permutations for every application, things will quickly get out of hand.

Calendar notifications are jarring enough for me, so I’m glad that it won’t be possible for any custom applications to deliver sound notifications when I am not actively using them.

In its second annual statistical report, the Alzheimer’s Association projects that 10 million baby boomers will suffer from the disease.

[...] Fewer people are dying from heart disease, stroke and conditions such as breast and prostate cancer. If you avoid those illnesses, or beat them through successful treatment, you still have to die eventually of something. And the older people get, the greater the chance they’ll develop, and possibly die from, Alzheimer’s.

One aspect of the report says that, if they live to age 55, women are nearly twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as men. The report’s authors say that’s also age-related. When researchers measure the risk of developing Alzheimer’s at any particular age, men and women show no real difference [...]. But to the extent that they outlive men, women are considered more likely to develop the Alzheimer’s.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism just released The State of the News Media 2008, its annual analysis of cable television news. The mediascape proved barren: on average, five hours of viewing would yield 71 minutes of politics, 26 minutes of crime, 12 minutes of disasters and 10 minutes of celebrities. Science, technology, health and the environment received just six minutes of coverage (with health and health care accounting for half of that.)

Newspapers, network news and online news all provided more science coverage, though not by much.

Bands have always sold CDs at concerts, and nearly every indie label has some sort of online storefront these days (see, for instance, Fall, Suicide Squeeze, and Rough Trade). What’s more recent is the trend toward offering digital distribution, often in fan-friendly formats like MP3 and FLAC. Reuters has a piece this weekend on three indie labels (Merge, Def Jux, and Sub Pop) that are examples of the trend, and it points out the obvious problem that such sites face: most music lovers will never visit a label-specific store.

But in the digital, long-tail era, such stores can succeed by targeting a niche fan base with exclusives, rarities, and out-of-print material. They can also cater to online buyers concerned about audio fidelity by offering lossless versions of tunes, something that the major stores don’t even make available.

I disagree with the Reuters report that says that music fans will not buy direct from a label through their web site. Just last week Trent Reznor made $1.6 million from Ghosts I-IV from his web site. Labels like Def Jux and Sub Pop have a large fan base and will be successful. The rise of lossless digital audio (i.e. FLAC) is a boon for consumers, offering identical quality as the CD with no digital rights management.

However, I think one potential issue is the cost of FLAC versus CD. The example in the article points to Our Ill Wills by Shout Out Louds. The CD is available for $13 while the FLAC is available for $11.49. The pricing on the FLAC version is a complete rip off. For only $1.50 more, you get the professionally pressed disc, which lasts longer than a burned CD, as well as artwork. I think Trent Reznor is more on target with his pricing. He charged $5 for the FLAC and $10 for the CD.

A team of scientists including Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a scientific paper after the scientists could not reproduce their original findings.

The Harvard Medical School, where the researchers worked when the findings were published in the journal Nature in 2001, has begun a review of the research to determine if there is any evidence of misconduct.

The retraction was published on March 6th, in Nature 452, 120.

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) – A chain of popular Middle Eastern restaurants owned by a man linked by federal authorities to terrorists has gone out of business.

A company spokesman said the La Shish restaurants saw business fall off by 50 percent after federal agents raided Talal Chahine’s homes and businesses in 2005 looking for evidence of a $6.5-million tax evasion scheme.