Archive [page 6]

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.

Dr. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat.

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone.

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you’re fine: that’s just how it works.

[...]

L.A. is the apocalypse: it’s you and a bunch of parking lots. No one’s going to save you; no one’s looking out for you. It’s the only city I know where that’s the explicit premise of living there – that’s the deal you make when you move to L.A.

The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.

It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.

What matters is what you do there.

1. Kitchen sink
2. Airplane bathrooms
3. A load of wet laundry
4. Public drinking fountains
5. Shopping cart handles
6. ATM buttons
7. Purses
8. Playgrounds
9. Health club workout equipment
10. Bath tub
11. Office phone
12. Hotel room remote control

British and Dutch police have shut down a “widely-used” source of illegally-downloaded music. A flat on Teesside and several properties in Amsterdam were raided as part of an Interpol investigation into the members-only website OiNK.

The UK-run site has leaked 60 major pre-release albums this year alone, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

A 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough was arrested on Tuesday morning.

There are a number of inaccuracies in the BBC report and press release issued by the IFPI. OiNK is not a pay site and does not specialize in distributing pre-release material. It is a free, by invitation only site that specializes in “secure” rips (i.e. with Exact Audio Copy) of hard to find, often out of print material.

WESTWOOD, Calif. — Ask John Wooden, UCLA’s living treasure, how he’s doing, and the legendary 97-year-old coach will respond with a still-quick wit and say, “Well, I’m here!”

He is. And, for however long he can continue to offer guidance or a living history of the UCLA program, Bruins freshman Kevin Love is going to listen.

Q: In the Goblet of Fire Dumbledore said his brother was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms [JKR buries her head, to laughter] on a goat; what were the inappropriate charms he was practicing on that goat?

JKR: How old are you?

Eight.

JKR: I think that he was trying to make a goat that was easy to keep clean [laughter], curly horns. That’s a joke that works on a couple of levels. I really like Aberforth and his goats. But you know Aberforth having this strange fondness for goats if you’ve read book seven, came in really useful to Harry, later on, because a goat, a stag, you know. If you’re a stupid Death Eater, what’s the difference. So, that is my answer to YOU.

[loud applause]

Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extend, but he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that’s how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair… [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!” [laughter] If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!

In celebration, the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois-produced modern classic will– according to Billboard.com– be re-released in four increasingly-elaborate ways: a single CD, a double-CD set, a double-CD/single-DVD box, and a double-vinyl package.

[...]

Billboard.com also creeped out onto a pretty shaky limb to add that “although details have yet to be announced, Joshua Tree demos, alternate versions, and B-sides from the period are expected to appear.” Whatever they’ve got, it’ll all hit shelves November 20 from UMe.

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — More than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly infections each year from a drug-resistant staph “superbug,” the government reported Tuesday in its first overall estimate of invasive disease caused by the germ.

Deaths tied to these infections may exceed those caused by AIDS, said one public health expert commenting on the new study. The report shows just how far one form of the staph germ has spread beyond its traditional hospital setting.

The overall incidence rate was about 32 invasive infections per 100,000 people. That’s an “astounding” figure, said an editorial in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, which published the study.

Cracking open the fridge on a sweltering August day, there is an endless choice of beverages: flavors unnatural or natural; pops or sodas or cokes; beer or wine or alco-pops, but always in the correct order. How to choose? Excepting that packet of Capri-Sun at the back, the better choice is: plastic or glass? While the former is appropriate for the road-trip cup holder, it’s glass that promises refreshment. Given those options, here are the drinks we’d reach for.

WUHAN, China — Denmark demanded more answers Friday following a FIFA investigation into why two men with video cameras were hiding behind a two-way mirror in the team’s meeting room.

The alleged spying happened Tuesday, the eve of Denmark’s opening match against host China at the Women’s World Cup . The men, who the team spokeswoman said were Chinese, were discovered a half-hour before Denmark was to hold a strategy meeting.

If this is going on at the Women’s World Cup, I can’t wait to see what China has in store for the 2008 Olympics. Maybe they have Bill Belichick on their payroll.

The Buck Institute for Age Research is launching a new scientific discipline called Geroscience, which will be focused on the interface of normal aging and age-related disease. A five-year $25 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research will establish an Interdisciplinary Research Consortium in Geroscience at the Institute. The Buck received one of nine Roadmap awards granted in the U.S. This is the largest grant received by the Institute in its eight year history.

The interdisciplinary grants address health challenges that have been resistant to traditional research approaches. At the Buck Institute the award will allow scientists to employ novel and unconventional approaches to studying various diseases in the context of aging, which is the single largest risk factor for disease in developed countries. For example, researchers who study aging using worm models will be designing experiments with neuroscientists. Scientists studying nutrition and aging in fruit flies will be working on projects with a cancer specialist. Experts in human embryonic stem cells will be designing experiments with cancer and age researchers to understand how stem cells age and determine how tumor suppressor genes function as the cells develop. The award also establishes the nation’s first post-doctoral training program in Geroscience.

Television has Nielsen ratings. The web has a mess of competitive standards. Is there something wrong with web analytics, or will the market settle this on its own? Om and Joyce put top execs from Quantcast and Hitwise on the couch this week to find out. Plus, on the Hitlines, Gateway, Earthlink, pink slips and a flood of VC funding. Don’t miss this week’s episode of The GigaOM Show!

I still think the best analytics come from software that runs on the web server, such as Urchin. Google recently purchased Urchin and will likely integrate it with Google Analytics in the future. However, the interface is clunky and slow. Right now I use Shaun Inman’s Mint to monitor most of the traffic on my site.

Most people use word processors like MS Word as they would a typewriter — manually making section headers bold and centered, inserting hard breaks between paragraphs, etc. This formatting method is fine for short documents, but for long documents that include multiple sections, figures, tables and other elements that need to be styled consistently throughout the text, it pays to learn Word’s advanced features.

These features are easy-to-use, but poorly documented and, in my experience, underused — even by professionals that frequently write long documents. This tutorial presents ten tips to help you start using Word the smart way.

For the second year in a row, immunologist Shizuo Akira occupies the top tier, this time by virtue of seven Hot Papers on Toll-like receptors, innate immunity, viral recognition, and other topics. Akira and colleagues also published a 2006 report that wound up among the year’s most cited (K.J. Ishii, et al., #33 in the first table).

I found this report interesting because I just completed my preliminary examination here at the University of Michigan on the antiviral response in plasmacytoid dendritic cells. Many of the papers I cited were published by Shizuo Akira and his colleagues.

James Murphy and Pat Mahoney delve into their New York roots for FABRICLIVE 36, a hot sweaty blend of seminal disco, deep rare grooves and edgy tech-infused funk from influential artists such as Donald Byrd & 125th St, Chic, Lenny Williams, Junior Byron and Love of Life Orchestra. A delightful nod to their future, past and present (including LCD Soundsystem’s own ‘Hippe Priest Bumout’), this mix is unashamed hand-clapping fun, full of upfront rhythms, obscure treats and heart warming guilty pleasures.

I can’t wait for this one! You may know James Murphy through LCD Soundsystem, his collaborative project with DFA partner, Tim Goldsworthy (formerly of UNKLE).