Archive [page 5]

Om Malik’s blog, GigaOm, regularly breaks news about the technology industry. Last week, the journalist turned blogger broke a big story about himself. Mr. Malik, 41, blogged that he had suffered a heart attack on Dec. 28.

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“The trouble with a personal brand is, you’re yoked to a machine,” said Paul Kedrosky, a friend of Mr. Malik’s who runs the Infectious Greed blog. “You feel huge pressure to not just do a lot, but to do a lot with your name on it. You have pressure to not just be the C.E.O., but at the same time to write, and to do it all on a shoestring. Put it all together, and it’s a recipe for stress through the roof.”

[...]

In his post last Thursday, Mr. Malik blamed a variety of vices. “Friends and family have purged my apartment of smokes, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods — I am even going to be drinking decaf,” wrote Mr. Malik. His online avatar features a drawing of him wearing a press fedora and chomping a cigar, and until he rented an office last year he worked largely out of a Starbucks in San Francisco.

Get well soon, Om.

My dad recently bought the 40″ Bravia XBR4 model and loves it. Looks like Sony is rolling out cheaper versions of the XBR line with similar feature sets. Maybe I’ll be able to afford a decent HDTV set in 2008.

An Ohio State fan sums it up nicely:

• His cousin goes to UM and family is important.
• UM has a better academic program.
• RR is a pure spread coach, Tressel is not.
• New football facility coming.
• Stadium renovation coming.
• What a hero he would be if he beats OSU.
• UM is known as quarterback U and should continue to be.
• New athletic study center.
• Largest stadium in the country
• Will get a lot of TV exposure.
• New successful and innovative weight training program.
• RR has made other quarterbacks very successful.

Rick Parsons, Columbus, Ohio (unfortunately)

Also, Michigan beat Florida, with Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow, while Ohio State got embarrassed in the BCS national championship game yesterday.

In the “60 Minutes” interview, for example, the analysts noticed that Clemens swallowed hard, looked down, and licked and pursed his lips when answering questions — all signs, they said, that he might not have been telling the truth. “That’s indicative of deception, that’s indicative of stress,” said Joe Navarro, a retired F.B.I. agent who trains intelligence officers and employees for banks and insurance companies. Navarro has also written a book about how to tell whether someone is bluffing in poker.

Watching the interview, I too felt that Roger wasn’t completely frank. I hope for the sake of baseball that the steroid allegations are false, but when he said “B-12 and lidocaine” it looked forced to me.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. will begin delivering movies and other programming directly to televisions later this year through a set-top box that will pipe entertainment over a high-speed Internet connection.

The set-top box, to be made by LG Electronics Inc. as part of a partnership announced late Wednesday, is designed to broaden the appeal of a year-old streaming service that Netflix provides to its 7 million subscribers at no additional charge.

LG Electronics didn’t reveal how much the set-top box will cost when it hits the market in the summer or early autumn. Similar devices made by Apple Inc. and Vudu Inc. cost $299 to $399.

This sounds like a great expansion, which I’m hoping will coincide with added support for streaming in Firefox and Safari.

Within the next few months, researchers at three medical centers expect to start the first test in patients of one of the most promising — and contentious — ideas about the cause and treatment of cancer.

The idea is to take aim at what some scientists say are cancerous stem cells — aberrant cells that maintain and propagate malignant tumors.

“Within the next year, we will see medical centers targeting stem cells in almost every cancer,” said Dr. Max S. Wicha, director of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the sites for the preliminary study that begins in the next few months (the other participating institutions are Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston).

Wedge-shaped vertebrae in the lower back might be the key evolutionary adaptation that helps human females maintain a stable posture over the course of pregnancy.

According to anthropologists, the human adaptation is unique among primates and may have arisen shortly after early humans started walking upright.

BALI, Indonesia - Slimy, green and unsightly, seaweed and algae are among the humblest of plants.

A group of scientists at a climate conference in Bali say they could also be a potent weapon against global warming, capable of sucking damaging carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at rates comparable to the mightiest rain forests.

“The ocean’s role is neglected because we can’t see the vegetation,” said Chung Ik-kyo, a South Korean environmental scientist. “But under the sea, there is a lot of seaweed and sea grass that can take up carbon dioxide.”

The Dalai Lama will visit Ann Arbor in April for a series of talks in Crisler Arena.

The spiritual leader will present a two-day program, with two sessions on April 19 and 20 in Crisler Arena. The sessions will focus on “Engaging Wisdom and Compassion.”

The USPS is apparently sick of Netflix’s patented DVD mailers clogging its sorting machines and has decided to charge the DVD rental company 17 cents per envelope to cover the estimated $61.5 million extra processing costs over the next two years.

After an audit, the USPS concluded that 70% of the mailers “sustain damage, jam equipment and cause mis-sorts during automated processing”. The extra charge will cut Netflix’s average monthly income from $1.05 to just 35 cents per customer.

Dear Netflix, I really enjoy your service, but if you raise prices to cover costs instead of redesigning your envelopes, I will cancel my service.

The Florida Marlins won the World Series more recently — in fact, much more recently — than the Detroit Tigers.

But here we are, just four years after Dontrelle Willis, Miguel Cabrera and the Marlins unleashed a champagne waterfall inside the visitors’ clubhouse in Yankee Stadium. And any minute now, there won’t be a single teal-clad human being left who can reminisce about one pitch of that World Series.

They’ll all be gone. Every one of them. At least they will be as soon as the Marlins get around to announcing that they’ve traded Willis and Cabrera to Detroit for a six-player package headed by stud prospects Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller.

Amazing.

The Tigers? They’re now an official baseball superpower.

If I lived a little bit closer to Detroit (than Ann Arbor), I would think about buying season tickets.

A weblog that offers biting, hilarious descriptions of the daily Marmaduke comic strip. My personal favorite is from October 2nd, 2007. “The moonwalk goes backwards…there’s no hopping involved.”

We knew they were working on it, and then wrapping it up, and now we know they’re actually going to release it this time. We even know approximately when! According to an Island Records rep, the as-yet-untitled new studio album from Portishead will arrive in April in the UK, a mere 10-odd years after the one before it. Patience pays, people!

Dummy is one of my favorite albums, so I’m hoping this new release is just as amazing.

Last year, UCLA threw USC off its game with a defensive scheme that flummoxed the Trojans and resulted in constant pressure on Booty, who was sacked twice and held without a touchdown pass for the only time in his two seasons as a starter.

After the game, UCLA defensive coordinator DeWayne Walker said, “As far as I was concerned, it was me against Booty. If I could get into his head, we could win.”

Said cornerback Rodney Van: “Late in the game, Booty was shell-shocked, you could see it; when he was supposed to be looking for receivers, he was trying to figure out where the rush was coming from. A quarterback of his stature shouldn’t be so shaken, but he was shaken.”

The Bruins will have Booty on their mind at the Coliseum this Saturday with a trip to the Rose Bowl on the line.

The Buck was founded on the premise that ageing and disease are manifestations of the same biological processes, and they can be understood only by working across disciplines. It is a modern take, but it has its supporters, including the US National Instutites of Health (NIH). In 2005, the agency named the Buck as one of five national Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. And in September, it gave the institute US$25 million to create a new ‘interdiscipline’ called geroscience: defined as the study of connections between ageing and age-related disease.

In an unprecedented feat of biological alchemy, researchers have turned human skin cells into stem cells that hold the same medical promise as the controversial embryonic stem cells.

Scientists believe stem cell research will be able to cure numerous diseases and regenerate failing bodies. The new technique, however, doesn’t require the destruction of embryos, or use human eggs or cloning. Thus, it sweeps aside the ethical objections to stem-cell research.

Even in a field accustomed to breathless proclamations of breakthroughs, the research — published Tuesday in two papers appearing in the journals Cell and Science — has provoked wonder among many scientists. They say the advance is more significant to medical research than last week’s announcement that scientists had cloned the first monkey embryo.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It’s not every day that you hear a football coach quoting an Irish poet. But Lloyd Carr of Michigan, who revealed the worst-kept secret in American sports Monday morning when he announced his retirement, was not an everyday coach.

“Thirteen years ago, when I was named the head coach,” Carr said, “I took as my guide the words of Pakenham Beatty. He said:

By your own soul, learn to live.
If some men thwart you, take no heed.
If some men hate you, have no care.
Sing your song. Dream your dream.
Hope your hope and pray your prayer.

“And that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

People have been talking about his possible successor for months, if not years.

LSU coach Les Miles seems to be at the top of the list because he played for Schembechler at Michigan, where he met his wife and later became an assistant there under Schembechler.

Even though Miles appears to be in a great situation leading the top-ranked Tigers in a talent-rich area of the country, the school was concerned enough about him bolting for Michigan that it put a specific clause in his contract to make it an expensive move.

In the “termination by coach” section of his deal, Michigan is the only other school mentioned. It states that Miles will not seek or accept employment as Michigan’s coach. If Miles does leave LSU to coach the Wolverines, he must pay LSU $1.25 million.

Beacon is the internal project name at Facebook around an effort to work with third parties and gain access to very specific user data. An example may be a purchase of a book or DVD from Amazon. Under Beacon, the fact of that purchase will be sent to Facebook and automatically included in the user’s News Feed.

At the point of sale on the third party site, the user will see a “toast” popup asking them if they approve the sale information being included in their Facebook News Feed.

If Facebook does roll out this feature, there is absolutely no way I will participate in this. Privacy advocates are going to have a field day.