[OOC] Mythical Hunt

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This topic is an Out Of Character part of the roleplay, ?Mythical Hunt?. Anything posted here will also show up there.

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Forum for completely Out of Character (OOC) discussion, based around whatever is happening In Character (IC). Discuss plans, storylines, and events; Recruit for your roleplaying game, or find a GM for your playergroup.
This is the auto-generated OOC topic for the roleplay "Mythical Hunt"

You may edit this first post as you see fit.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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This will begin next week.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Okay let me check the spots left. If needed I will make two more.
EDIT: I'd rather not though.

Last edited by Zenia on Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Okay I have two spots left. One though is the traitor.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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So glad to be back.

You said you would always be there for me...I guess you lied

Nowfaleena

Member for 1 years

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Good to have you back Meraradus.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Okay since two people want to be beings Tonks, and Vampire Mistress.
Are either of you okay with being the traitor?

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Got it sorted. ^-^
Forgot to put this in rules so I will put it here first. As I said this will start next week. Also wait until I make the world post and my charries posts.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Also these posts are probably gonna be in the 100 to 200 words. Everyone can handle that right? My post may be longer, like my intro posts. Also because I am controlling so far three characters.

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Of course. Hunters are human, you know that correct?

Zenia

Member for 1 years

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Post a reply

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Sears stock soaring as retailer faces critical year

David Livingston / Getty Images

Khloe, Kourtney and Kim Kardashian attend an in-store appearance for the Kardashian Kollection at Sears.

By Eve Tahmincioglu

Kenmore and Kardashians.?

The dichotomy between these two Sears brands, representing?old-line appliances and trendy clothing,?points to what may be the biggest problem for the iconic 125-year-old retailer: It doesn?t know what it wants to be.?

Sears may have to figure that out soon if the company is to?survive.?

?They?ve lost their way,? said Anthony Dukes, associate professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, about the retailer?s failed attempts to compete with discounters such as Wal-Mart or add new merchandise to keep up with retailers such as Target. ?They have a future if they can find a space in retail that they can occupy.??

All?eyes seem to be on Sears right now, following last month's?announcement it will shutter up to 120 stores, rumors the company?may go private, and a recent infusion of capital from its chairman and investor Eddie Lampert. Shares of Sears Holdings Corp. have jumped about 49 percent so far this year, making it the best performer among companies in the S&P 500, according to?data from S&P Capital IQ.

?When you see the chairman out there buying blocks of stock that gives investors confidence,? said Mickey Klein, managing director and co-founder of the Astor Group, a global investment firm. ?He?s giving the company a price boost to give it some time to make improvements.??

Recently published reports show?Lampert had snapped up $159 million in stock and now owns 59 percent of the company's shares, fueling reports he plans to take the company private. One investment bank said the stock has been rising as short-sellers clear their positions in case of such a bid.

If improvements don?t come, however, Sears won?t survive, said Klein.

The bottom line, he added, is the overall shopping experience at Sears stores?is ?unappealing and un-adventuresome,? and has only gotten worse since the Kmart merger in 2004.?Sears operates a total of about 4,000 stories, including some 1,300 Kmart outlets, according to the company's latest filings with regulators. Analysts believe the Sears brand is the more valuable one.

A good sign for many analysts is Sears? recent move to name a new?chief merchandising officer, Ron Boire, who will head up both Sears and Kmart merchandising. Boire previously?was CEO of Brookstone Inc., the quirky gift and gadget company.

"By attracting someone with Ron's significant experience in retail, merchandising and product development as well as in leading companies through turnarounds, we're adding a key talent in accelerating our transformation," Sears Holding?s CEO and President Lou D?Ambrosio in a statement this month.?

But transformation won?t come easy.?

Sears stores seem to be trapped in a?time warp, said Steve Buxbaum, retail consultant and executive vice president of the Buxbaum Group. Trying to market new items?such as a clothing line by reality show stars the Kardashian sisters?in an old-fashioned store more conducive to selling?washing machines can be a?tough sell, he added.?

?If you don?t keep up the physical environment and make capital (investments) then ultimately you?ll fail,? he said? ?You can?t put trendy clothes in something that looks like a ?70s retail store.??

He said Sears still has a solid foundation of customers and strong brands including?Kenmore, Die Hard and Lands' End?that can help propel the company if it makes needed investments in its stories.

Sears remains one of the biggest retailers in the country with $43 billion in annual sales, and the retailer?s long history continues to give it some retail street cred.

?Many of us still have an emotional connection with the Sears toolbox we bought 20 years ago,? said Ken Tencer, a business consultant and author of ?The 90% Rule.??

?Most people, including myself, once thought that if you bought something at Sears, it would last forever,? he said.??Now we associate Sears with being cheap.?They stopped being what made them successful.?

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Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/23/10218677-sears-stock-soaring-as-retailer-faces-critical-year

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Photos from UFC?s first FX event

Check out pictures from the UFC's first full event on FX from Tracy Lee. The gallery includes Pat Barry's unique celebration, Jorge Rivera's final bout and more.

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/photos-ufc-first-fx-event-155109353.html

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Latest Apple suit towards Samsung directed at the Galaxy Nexus

The latest installment of Apple vs. Samsung saga sees Cupertino taking offense with the lockscreen on the Galaxy Nexus. The complaint, filed once again in Germany, is the first directed towards the Android 4.0 flagship device. The claim made is that the Galaxy Nexus infringes upon Apple's own slide-to-unlock utility model. 

FOSS Patent's blogger Florian Mueller describes this utility model as a limited fast-track patent that companies are allowed to file for alongside traditional patents. Apple has done just this with slide-to-unlock in Germany. Samsung's defense points to a device from Sweden known as the Neonode, which managed to persuade a court in the Netherlands in 2011 to question the validity of the Apple's slide-to-unlock filing.

The court is expected to come to reveal its decision on Mar. 16. What's clear already, though, is that we're sure to see more of these patent lawsuits as the year continues.

via Appleinsider

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/OS0rXQSUm2A/story01.htm

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Roy Speckhardt: Let's Stop Voting in Churches

Think about the last time you voted. Was it in a school? A government building? What about a church? It's only intuitive that where you vote, and what's visible in the polling location, impacts how you vote. That's why there is a political line 75 to 100 feet or more from the polling place over which ads for various campaigns and parties must not cross. It would be an unfair advantage, and possibly even intimidating, for campaigns to advertise any closer. It's no different with religious messages, many of which have real political consequences. So it's time to stop voting in churches, which are hardly neutral grounds for the issues of the day.

A Baylor University study just published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion found that having a church in clear sight can influence people's answers to questions. Co-author Wade Rowatt pointed out that the "important finding here is that people near a religious building reported slightly but significantly more conservative social and political attitudes than similar people near a government building." The Baylor study confirms an earlier Stanford University study that shows the same effect when looking specifically at how people's voting place influences their vote. Stanford researcher Jonah Berger said, "Voting in a church could activate norms of following church doctrine. Such effects may even occur outside an individual's awareness." A follow-up study in the laboratory asked participants to vote on several issues after being shown images of specific voting places. This showed that participants were less likely to support a stem-cell initiative if they were shown church images than if they were shown school images or a generic photo of a building.

Psychologically, this phenomenon is known as "priming," where what you are initially exposed to goes on to impact your responses or decisions afterward. It's a well-researched effect and explains what is happening in the polling places. So the studies covering this issue are sound and their conclusions make sense: where you vote matters.

Since polling place influences the vote, governments and election boards should do all they can to find neutral voting locations. And it would seem very unlikely that churches would be chosen if neutrality were the aim. Why not use schools, courthouses, firehouses and the like instead? It's been argued that some places exist where the church is the most convenient, and that may be true in certain exceptional rural areas, but that's no justification for the many thousands of churches used in some thirty percent of polling places today.

When connecting with American Humanist Association members, examples of clear-cut cases of abuse abounds. An Illinois member voted in a church that displayed a four-foot wooden crucifix right above the election judges. Another member in California was confronted with a large marble plaque dedicated to the "unborn children" who are "killed" by abortion and containing a quote from the Bible justifying the notion that the soul is alive in the womb. And a New York member voted in a room featuring large religious slogans on the wall behind the voting machines. Sure there are some churches that utilize gymnasiums carefully cleaned of religious paraphernalia, but even those places have the power to inappropriately influence the vote. Let's move the vote exclusively to public buildings.

?

Follow Roy Speckhardt on Twitter: www.twitter.com/americnhumanist

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roy-speckhardt/voting-locations_b_1219734.html

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Rescuers flee capsized cruise liner after vessel shifts

Workers risk their lives to find the 21 people who are still missing. NBC's Michelle Kosinski reports.

By msnbc.com news services

GIGLIO, Italy -- Italian rescue workers suspended their search of the capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia after the ship moved again on Friday, an official said.

Firefighters' spokesman Luca Cari told Reuters that?authorities were?evaluating the situation. He said he could not say by how much the ship had moved.

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The seas around the island of Giglio, where the ship capsized a week ago, were choppy on Friday and the weather was predicted to worsen in the course of the day.

The ship's sudden movement on the reef Wednesday had postponed the start of a weeks-long operation to extract the half-million gallons of fuel on board the vessel.

On Thursday, divers focused on an evacuation route on ship's fourth level, now about 60 feet below the water's surface, where five bodies were found earlier this week, Navy spokesman Alessandro Busonero told Sky TG 24.

Crews set off small explosions Thursday to blow holes into hard-to-reach areas for easier access by divers.

The $450 million Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew when it slammed into well-marked rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio on Jan. 13 after the captain made an unauthorized diversion from his programmed route. The ship then keeled over on its side and is still half-submerged nearly a week later.

Meanwhile,?a young Moldovan woman who translated evacuation instructions from the bridge after the Costa Concordia ran into a reef emerged as a potential new witness in the investigation into the captain's actions on that fateful night.

'He saved over 3,000 lives'
Italian media have said prosecutors want to interview 25-year-old Dominica Cermotan, who had worked for Costa as a hostess fluent in several languages but was not on duty when she boarded the ship Jan. 13 in the Italian port of Civitavecchia.

In interviews with Moldovan media and on her own Facebook page, Cermotan said she was called up to the bridge of the Concordia after it struck the reef to translate evacuation instructions for Russian passengers. She defended Capt. Francesco Schettino, who has been vilified in the Italian media for leaving his ship before everyone was evacuated safely.

"He did a great thing, he saved over 3,000 lives," she told Moldova's Jurnal TV.

Schettino, who was jailed after he left the ship, is under house arrest, facing possible charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship.

Eleven people have been confirmed dead in the disaster and 21 others are still missing.

The ship's operator, Crociere Costa SpA, has accused Schettino of causing the wreck by making the unapproved detour and the captain has acknowledged carrying out what he called a "tourist navigation" that brought the ship closer to Giglio. The company had approved a similar maneuver in August.

However, Lloyd's List Intelligence, a leading maritime publication, says its tracking showed that the ship's August route actually took the Concordia slightly closer to Giglio than the course that caused the grounding last week.

Costa is owned by Miami-based Carnival Corp.

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10196829-rescuers-flee-capsized-cruise-liner-after-vessel-shifts

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The curious case of Grammy nominee Linda Chorney (AP)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. ? Linda Chorney is the feel-good, do-it-yourself success story of this year's Grammy Awards. Or she's an unworthy impostor who broke the unwritten rules regarding self-promotion for music's top showcase.

It just depends who you talk to.

How the little-known 51-year-old singer-songwriter parlayed pluck into a career milestone provides an interesting window into the inner politics of the Grammys and the role influence can play in shaping nominations. Chorney's nod for best Americana album at the Feb. 12 ceremony has drawn a range of reactions, not all of them kind. She's been mocked on Twitter and by a majority of taste-making bloggers, and only occasionally has anyone come to her defense.

Since her Nov. 30 nomination for her self-produced independent double album "Emotional Jukebox," she's been taking advantage of the opportunities while turning some of the criticism back on itself in the same irrepressible way she's carved out a career in music over the past three decades.

"It's not cool," she said. "But what can you do?" The positive reaction has outweighed the negative, she says: "I've had an outcry of letters from people my age who have said what an inspiration this is. That it gave them hope. So that's been pretty nice. I didn't expect to hear that, which was really beautiful."

Her critics say Chorney's use of a National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences social-networking site to introduce her music to voters ran afoul of informal rules about lobbying. David Macias, a Grammy winner based in Nashville, thinks her nomination could have damaged the credibility of music's most prestigious showcase.

"The Grammys run the risk of being diluted," Macias said.

Chorney has defended herself, saying she simply took advantage of the Grammy365.com social-networking program the academy encouraged her to use. And Neil Portnow, the academy's president, agrees. He says her story shows there truly is a level playing field for all artists.

"It shows everybody has a shot," Portnow said. "That really is the truth."

Her competition is previous category winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Levon Helm, Country Music Hall of Fame member Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and Ry Cooder ? owners of nearly two dozen Grammys collectively. Chorney's detractors say she doesn't belong.

In what seemed to be a veiled swipe at Chorney, when Lost Highway Records congratulated Williams on her nominations on its website, it added: "One might think Lucinda would be up for the award alongside the likes of amazing albums such as `KMAG YOYO (& other American stories)' from Hayes Carll or Robert Earl Keen's `Ready for Confetti,' but alas, here is a full list of the Americana Album nominees," then listed Chorney's name first.

Chorney, a resident of Sea Bright, N.J., has made a living as a musician for 30 years outside the label system, visiting all seven continents and releasing six albums along the way. While she never achieved her larger goals, she engineered a career with a willingness to barter and surprisingly lucrative gigs in resort locales ? at one, she memorably sang in exchange for rounds of golf.

"Will sing for greens fees," Chorney said. "Seriously. It's an alternative way. I tried making it in the business, to get the big record deal, but I've had a pretty good life singing all around the world. I like to climb. I went to Mount Everest. So it's been pretty rewarding."

Along the way she made lifelong friends who contributed to her career in interesting ways. One gave her a pass that allowed her to fly standby anywhere in the world for seven straight years and she crisscrossed the globe. Another friend, anesthesiologist Jonathan Schneider, sent her career in a completely unexpected direction when he offered to pay for "Emotional Jukebox," dropping around $80,000.

Backed by a strong crew of musicians that included "Saturday Night Live" band member Leon Pendarvis, "Late Show" bassist Will Lee and famed session singer Lisa Fischer among others, Chorney produced what she feels was the best album of her career. The first disc includes eight original songs and covers of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. A second disc includes an original classical symphony.

She became an academy member at another friend's suggestion. With two weeks to go until the close of nominations, someone else urged her to use the Grammy365.com website to seek voter support. About 1,500 of the academy's 12,000 voters accepted her contact and after that it was up to them to listen to her music and make a decision.

"I think the system is a wonderful opportunity for independent artists," Chorney said. "Basically a one-year membership is $100. Grammy365 to me is, you buy your $100 lottery ticket and the odds are like winning the lottery. Except, rather than having a number, you have your music, which can make your odds better if your music speaks for itself and gives you an edge."

It's that edge Macias objects to. He says over the years, NARAS officials had made it clear in "unwritten rules" that blatant self-promotion was out of bounds. Not only was it always difficult to determine who voters were, if a publicist or artist did cross into forbidden territory they were asked to step back in line.

Macias, a Nashville-based artist manager who runs the management and marketing firm Thirty Tigers, is one of the few members of the loose-knit roots rock community willing to talk on the record about Chorney's nomination. He makes it clear that his opinion is his own and not that of the Americana Music Association, of which he is the outgoing president.

AMA's executive director Jed Hilley declined comment. And interview requests extended to the publicists or managers of the category's nominees and the artists who produced the top 10 most-played Americana albums in 2010 went mostly unanswered.

Macias realizes that he's coming off like a jerk for going after Chorney, but he believes she broke the unwritten rules about promoting yourself, depriving artists like Carll, Jason Isbell and John Hiatt of a well-deserved nod.

"I guess it just comes down to the question: What do the Grammys mean?" he said. "... Honestly, I think people voted for it because she asked them to and she worked really hard. And I think the Grammy voters by and large ? I hate to say it ? I feel like maybe they just weren't paying as close attention."

Portnow and Bill Freimuth, the academy's vice president of awards, said it's as easy as ever to make educated decisions, however. A listening function available to voters offers more than 90 percent of music that's eligible for nomination.

That's one of a handful of recent changes that Chorney was able to capitalize on while seeking her nomination. Freimuth said about four years ago the academy changed its outlook on lobbying and now embraces the practice within certain guidelines. Along with the Grammy365.com website, the academy worked with Billboard Magazine this year to produce a voter's guide that included "for your consideration" style advertising, for example.

Chorney simply used the system to her advantage.

"She kept herself very busy reaching out to the voting membership and tried to make sure as many people as possible, especially those who were voting in that category, knew about her work," Freimuth said. "All of that is perfectly legitimate as far as our process goes."

Enough people heard Chorney's voice that she's being fitted for a new dress, borrowing $6,000 earrings and heading to Los Angeles next month. And she intends to have a blast.

___

Online:

http://www.lindachorney.com

http://www.grammy.com

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/music/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120120/ap_en_mu/us_music_grammywatch_chorney

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Phoenix transient accused of skinning, eating cat

PHOENIX (AP) ? A transient has been arrested after police say he skinned and ate a cat while camping inside a Phoenix warehouse and music venue.

Authorities say the building's owners reported a burglary after they opened the warehouse Wednesday and heard blaring music.

Police found 24-year-old Russell Christopher Hofstad inside with his face painted and the cat's tail and intestines around his neck.

Hofstad told police he killed the cat because he was hungry. He also said he was going to use its skeleton as party decorations.

He was arrested on suspicion of burglary and animal cruelty.

The Arizona Republic (http://bit.ly/xyh0aX) reports Hofstad had been released from jail Jan. 10 and told police he had nowhere to go. He decided to camp in the building because he had attended music events there.

___

Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2012-01-19-Phoenix-Skinned%20Cat/id-5df3ceac8ff54ab1bf9b9b11cffa59d0

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Next-gen supercomputers have huge energy cost

Warehouse-size supercomputers costing $1 million to $100 million can seem as distant from ordinary laptops and tablets as Greek immortals on Mount Olympus. Yet the next great leap in supercomputing could not only transform U.S. science and innovation, but also put much more computing power in the hands of consumers.

The next generation of "exascale" supercomputers could carry out 1 billion billion calculations per second ? 1,000 times better than the most powerful supercomputers today. Such supercomputers could accurately simulate internal combustion engines of cars, jet plane engines and even nuclear fusion reactors for the very first time. They would also enable "SimEarth" models of the planet down to the 1 kilometer scale (compared to 50 or 100 kms today), or simulations of living cells that include the molecular, chemical, genetic and biological levels all at once.

"Pretty much every area of science is driven today by theory, experiment and simulation," said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of the Tesla business unit at NVIDIA. "Scientists use machines to run a virtual experience to understand the world around us."

But the future of supercomputing has a staggering energy cost ? just one exascale supercomputer would need the power equivalent to the maximum output of the Hoover Dam. To get around that problem, computer scientists and mathematicians must dream up an entirely new type of computer architecture that prizes energy efficiency.

Researchers gathered to discuss those challenges during a workshop held by the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics at Brown University in January.

"We've reached the point where existing technology has taken us about as far as we can go with present models," said Jill Pipher, director of ICERM. "We've been increasing computing power by 1,000 fold every few years for a while now, but now we've reached the limits."

We can rebuild them
Computer engineers have managed to squeeze double the number of transistors into the same microchip space every few years ? a trend known as Moore's law ? as they kept power requirements steady. But even if they could squeeze enough transistors onto a microchip to make exascale computing possible, the power required becomes too great.

"We're entering a world constrained not by how many transistors we can put a chip or whether we can clock them as fast as possible, but by the heat that they generate," Scott told InnovationNewsDaily. "The chip would burn and effectively melt."

That requires a radical redesign of computer architecture to make it much more energy efficient. The U.S. Department of Energy wants to find a way to make an exascale supercomputer by 2020 that would use less than 20 megawatts of power ? about 100 times less than the Hoover Dam's maximum power capacity of 2,074 megawatts that would be needed today.

Changing computer architecture also requires a rewrite of the software programs that run on today's computers. The job of figuring out that puzzle falls to applied mathematicians.

"When code is written, it's written for computers where memory is cheap," Pipher explained. "Now, if you're building these new machines, you're going to have to try writing programs in different ways."

You say CPU, I say GPU
Today's fastest supercomputers resemble hundreds of fridge-size cabinets packed inside huge rooms. Each of those cabinets can house more than 1,000 central processing units (CPUs), where one CPU is roughly equivalent to the "brain" that carries out software program instructions inside a single laptop.

The latest generation of petascale supercomputers (capable of 1 quadrillion calculations per second) has gotten by using thousands of CPUs networked together. But each CPU is designed to run a few tasks as quickly as possible with less regard for energy efficiency, and so CPUs won't do for exascale supercomputers.

A promising solution comes from a company well known among PC gamers. About a decade ago, NVIDIA created graphics processing units (GPUs) that focus upon running many tasks efficiently ? a necessity for creating the rich graphics of a video or game playing on a computer.

The energy savings can be huge when a GPU uses almost 8 times less energy than a CPU per computer calculation or instruction.

"GPUS were designed with power efficiency in mind first, not running a single task quickly," Scott said. "That's why they're uniquely qualified for this challenge. We have to much more efficient about how much more work we can do per watt [of energy]."

NVIDIA GPUs already reside within three of the world's fastest supercomputers, including China's Tianhe-1A in second place. GPUs will also boost the $100 million Titan supercomputer scheduled for installation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. ? a petascale supercomputer that could once again make the U.S. home to the world's fastest supercomputer.

Better computers for all
The road to exascale computing won't be easy, but NVIDIA has a timeline for creating new generations of GPUs that can lead to such a supercomputer in 2018. The company's "Kepler" GPU is expected to run 5 billion calculations per watt of energy when it debuts in 2012, whereas the next generation "Maxwell" GPU might carry out 14 billion calculations per watt by 2014.

But NVIDIA didn't invest in high-performance computing just to build a handful of huge supercomputers each year ? especially when each generation of GPUs costs about $1 billion to develop. Instead, it sees the supercomputing investment leading to more powerful computers for a much bigger pool of customers among businesses and individuals.

The same microchips inside supercomputers can end up inside the home computer of a gamer, Scott pointed out. In that sense, each new generation of more powerful chips eventually makes more computing power available for cheaper ? to the point where the rarest supercomputers today can become more ordinary tomorrow.

That result is less ordinary than extraordinary for moving science and innovation forward.

"When you can build a petascale system for $100,000, it starts becoming very affordable for even small departments in a university or even small groups in private industry," Scott said.

You can follow InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @ScienceHsu. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

? 2012 InnovationNewsDaily.com. All rights reserved. More from InnovationNewsDaily.com.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46077920/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/

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Streaming music app Raditaz hopes to beat Pandora at its own game (Appolicious)

Ever since the take-off in popularity of streaming music service Pandora, it seems like the field for services that bring music over the Internet has exploded, with all kinds of offerings. Some take different approaches to streaming music ? Spotify and Rdio, for example, are more on-demand ? while Pandora is more akin to listening to the radio. A new entrant into the race, Raditaz, takes the same approach as Pandora, with the aim to do it better.

The new service just launched an app for Android today, as well as on Apple?s iOS platform. Like Pandora, Raditaz offers music in a sort of randomized, radio-like presentation. You choose a song, artist or album you like, and Raditaz brings more songs similar to what you picked in order to create a ?station,? curating the list on the fly.

But Raditaz?s model seems to largely look at the things that are limiting or slightly irritating about Pandora and fix them on its own service. For example, the free version of Pandora that?s available to all users is ad-supported, which means every few tracks, users have to sit through a quick ad. As of right now, Raditaz is also free. It also boasts 15 million songs in its databases, compared to Pandora?s 900,000.

As for ad support, Raditaz uses advertising to pay for its service just as Pandora does, but it takes a different approach, focusing on ?geographically relevant? advertising based on where listeners are located as they use their mobile devices to access the service. In fact, geography seems to be Raditaz?s defining feature: the service pays attention to where and when you?re listening, gathering the information to make the service better. It also allows you to see what music is trending in the physical area around you, tying you into your location in new and different ways not approached by other services.

Raditaz seems to bring some cool ideas to the streaming music scene, but it?s likely to find it a tough one into which to break. At the moment, streaming, cloud-based music services are everywhere: Spotify, Pandora and Rdio lead the list of services, while Google Music, Amazon Cloud and iTunes Match make up the three big cloud-based storage services for users? music libraries. There have never been so many options for accessing and listening to music on the Internet before, and as Raditaz joins the race, it?ll likely find it crowded.

But there?s definitely a lot of value in tying social aspects into music services ? Spotify is seeing some real successes there with its Facebook integration ? and Raditaz has new things to offer in that department. It also doesn?t have to beat everyone if it can beat just one competitor: Pandora.

The audience Pandora serves is necessarily different than that served by Google, Amazon, Apple and Spotify: these are users who want to discover new music they might like and enjoy not know what they?ll hear next. Raditaz is approaching the radio model of music streaming, and if it can establish its foothold there, it has the potential to catch on the way Pandora has.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/internet/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/appolicious_rss/rss_appolicious_tc/http___www_androidapps_com_articles10820_streaming_music_app_raditaz_hopes_to_beat_pandora_at_its_own_game/44234499/SIG=13isv8n4e/*http%3A//www.androidapps.com/tech/articles/10820-streaming-music-app-raditaz-hopes-to-beat-pandora-at-its-own-game

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Pa. town with tainted wells getting new EPA water (AP)

ALLENTOWN, Pa. ? The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday that it will deliver fresh water to four homes in a northeastern Pennsylvania village where residential water wells were tainted by a gas driller. The agency also said it will begin testing the water supplies of dozens more homes as it ramps up its investigation more than three years after homeowners say the water supply was ruined.

Capping a tumultuous two weeks in which EPA first promised the residents a tanker of water ? and then quickly backed away, saying more study was needed ? federal environmental regulators said they have concluded that contaminant levels in four of the homes pose a health hazard and require emergency action. Some of the water samples, the agency said, were found to be polluted with cancer-causing arsenic and synthetic chemicals typically found in drilling fluids.

The first delivery of water is scheduled for Friday.

"I can't even tell you, again, what a relief this is. because that's all we've asked for ? water," said Julie Sautner, one of the homeowners.

Additionally, EPA said it will sample water at 61 homes in the area of Carter and Meshoppen roads "to assess further whether any residents are being exposed to hazardous substances that cause health concerns." The testing, to be carried out over the next several weeks, marks a significant expansion of the agency's probe in Dimock, a tiny crossroads at the center of a national debate over gas drilling and the extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

More than a dozen homeowners in Dimock say they have been without a reliable supply of clean water since Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., the Houston-based drilling firm blamed for polluting their aquifer, won permission from state regulators to halt daily deliveries on Nov. 30.

After analyzing sampling data provided by Cabot, the residents, and the state Department of Environmental Protection, EPA said hazardous substances were found in the water wells of several homes. But only in four homes were they in high enough concentrations to present a health threat, the agency said. EPA said it might provide water to additional homes, or stop delivering water altogether, depending on the results of its own testing,

"EPA is working diligently to understand the situation in Dimock and address residents' concerns," EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin said in a statement. "We believe that the information provided to us by the residents deserves further review, and conducting our own sampling will help us fill information gaps. Our actions will be based on the science and the law and we will work to help get a more complete picture of water quality for these homes in Dimock."

EPA said the federal Superfund program ? the environmental fund used to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites ? authorized it to take emergency action in Dimock.

It's not clear how many wells in Dimock were affected by the drilling, which began in 2008. The state has found that at least 18 residential water wells were fouled by stray methane gas from Cabot's drilling operation, although EPA said Thursday that its own door-to-door survey turned up 20 water wells on those same parcels.

Cabot, which was banned in 2010 from drilling in a 9-square-mile area around the village, took legal responsibility for the methane found in the wells, but contends that water wells in the area were tainted with the gas long before the company arrived. The company also says it met a state deadline to restore or replace Dimock's water supply, installing treatment systems in some houses that have removed the methane.

But 11 homeowners who are suing Cabot say their aquifer is still tainted with methane and also with toxic chemicals that are used in fracking, a technique in which water, sand and chemicals are blasted deep underground to free natural gas from dense rock deposits like the Marcellus Shale found in Pennsylvania and surrounding states. Cabot denies responsibility for the presence of any chemicals found in the wells.

EPA said the sampling data it reviewed turned up hazardous levels of substances including:

_arsenic, a cancer-causing element that may be present in elevated concentrations due to drilling;

_barium, a silvery-white metal and a common constituent in drilling fluids that can damage the kidneys with extended exposure.

_DEHP, a chemical added to plastics to make them flexible, a probable human carcinogen; also used in drilling;

_glycols, including ethylene glycol, an antifreeze commonly found in drilling fluids;

_manganese, a naturally occurring substance that is sometimes used in drilling fluids and can damage the central nervous system if ingested.

EPA's decision to intervene in Dimock is unlikely to sit well with Pennsylvania's environmental chief, Michael Krancer, who has accused the EPA of having only a "rudimentary" understanding of the situation there.

Krancer, a frequent EPA critic who serves under pro-drilling GOP Gov. Tom Corbett, urged Garvin in a letter released publicly last week to allow any EPA probe to "be guided by sound science and the law instead of emotion and publicity."

DEP spokeswoman Katy Gresh said after the EPA announcement Thursday that "EPA does not seem to have presented any new data here. More than a year ago, DEP's enforcement action addressed this issue and ensured funds were set aside to resolve the water quality issues for these homeowners."

She said DEP agrees that additional sampling is necessary in Dimock and is working with its federal counterpart.

Cabot rejected EPA's characterization of the sampling data and insisted that Dimock's drinking water meets federal standards.

"Cabot believes that the US EPA has a flawed interpretation of the data and has taken it out of context; this has resulted in an unwarranted investigation by US EPA regarding water quality. PADEP has extensively investigated alleged groundwater concerns in the Dimock area and concluded, using sound science, that it was safe," Cabot spokesman George Stark said in a statement.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/environment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120120/ap_on_re_us/us_gas_drilling_dimock

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Russian Claim that US Radar Downed Mars Probe Is False (SPACE.com)

Russian space industry officials say the United States may have accidentally destroyed Russia's most expensive and ambitious space mission since the Soviet era. But the accusation doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Officials at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, told newspapers that radar signals sent into space by the U.S. might have caused the catastrophic failure of its Phobos-Grunt probe, a spacecraft that was intended to go to one of Mars' moons but instead went haywire shortly after its Nov. 9 launch, got stuck in Earth's orbit, and finally crashed into the Pacific Ocean Sunday (Jan. 15).

They said the probe's electronics could have been damaged when the spacecraft flew through powerful radar from a U.S. station in the Marshall Islands, which they said was being used to track an asteroid at the time. "There is a possibility that [Phobos-Grunt] accidentally entered the area covered by the radar, which resulted in a failure of its electronics caused by a megawatt impulse," a space industry source told the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

U.S.-based radar astronomers say Russia's accusation is not at all plausible. For one thing, said Martin Slade of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "there is no asteroid-tracking radar in the Marshall Islands."

Furthermore, the Phobos-Grunt probe was in low-Earth orbit, at an altitude of 200 kilometers (120 miles), when it started to malfunction. Even if radar were being emitted and received in the Marshall Islands, "radar cannot?interfere with electronics at?that altitude," Slade told Life's Little Mysteries. [Why Must Electronic Devices Be Turned Off During Takeoff?]

In fact, it's unlikely that the probe encountered any beam strong enough to damage its systems. Jean-Luc Margot, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated the amount of radiation that the Phobos-Grunt probe would have (hypothetically) experienced had it accidentally crossed through the most powerful radar beam in the world ? the one emitted by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

"The amount of exposure is about 10,000 times less than the level that is considered safe for humans by the FCC," Margot said.

For more evidence that radar is an unlikely culprit, consider that commercial jets routinely pass through these radar beams, and because they fly at much lower altitudes than the space probe, they experience beams with power densities 400 times higher than the beam the probe would have experienced, Margot said. For these reasons, he finds the idea that crossing a radar beam would have damaged the Russian spacecraft "very difficult to believe."

According to Slade, a much more likely explanation for the probe's failure is outlined at RussianSpaceWeb.com, an English-language website based in Russia. The website cites a brief that was supposedly leaked from space industry sources to the online forum "Novosti Kosmoavtiki" today (Jan. 17). [The Worst Space Debris Events of All Time]

"The most likely culprit in the failure of the probe's propulsion unit to ignite soon after it had entered orbit on Nov. 9 was a programming error in the flight control system," the site states. "Post-failure tests (apparently simulating in-flight conditions) revealed that in 90 percent of cases, the processor of the main flight control computer onboard the spacecraft would be overloaded. It could easily lead to [computer] crashes and rebooting as more systems were being activated after the spacecraft had left the range of Russian ground control stations after reaching orbit."

Following the initial system crashes, the leaked brief suggests, new problems arose. A transmitter onboard the probe was running extremely inefficiently, consuming 200 watts of power for every 40 watts it transmitted. "As a result, the probe slowly drained its rechargeable power batteries and then its emergency power source, ? leading to a complete deactivation of onboard systems on Nov. 28, 2011," the website states.

The dead craft orbited for nearly two months before plunging back to Earth.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/space/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/space/20120117/sc_space/russianclaimthatusradardownedmarsprobeisfalse

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Plan on jailbreaking your iPhone 4S or iPad 2? Update to iOS 5.0.1 before Apple releases the next update!

If you plan on jailbreaking your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 as soon as a jailbreak for Apple A5 chipset-powered devices is released, update to iOS 5.0.1 ASAP if you haven't already.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/MFCZxuBTD48/story01.htm

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Scientific Advisors to the Stars

In late 2009, a writer, a producer, a director, and three scientists sat in a Los Angeles conference room. They were discussing Marvel's Thor?a film based on a comic book that was in turn inspired by the Norse god of thunder?about an arrogant warrior who, at the start of the film, violates a truce by attacking the Frost Giants. As the film team described their vision of the fight, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, knew the filmmakers had a problem. "They wanted the Frost Giants to fall off the edge of a disc-shaped planet," he says. "That makes no sense. Where does the gravity to pull them down come from? Enough people know how gravity works it would throw them out of the movie. You'd get a lot of giggles." Carroll and the other scientists argued their point, even though, Carroll says, "it was clear some people thought we were being uptight killjoys."

But producer Kevin Feige sided with the scientists, and in the final cut, the Frost Giants' planet was spherical. That was just one way that Carroll, a clean-cut 45-year-old who has advised on films such as TRON: Legacy and the TV show Bones, helped the production. As punishment for breaking the truce, Thor is exiled to earth. When Feige complained that using the term wormhole for Thor's passageway to our planet was "too '90s," Carroll suggested the scientific name for the phenomenon, the Einstein-Rosen bridge. That explanation is given by Natalie Portman's character, astrophysicist Jane Foster, whose motivations Carroll helped shape.

Scientists have been helping Hollywood since the start of cinema. But as science-fiction movies account for more revenue?in the '90s, an average of six a year were in the top 50 moneymakers; that number increased by nearly 50 percent in the first decade of the 2000s?filmmakers are turning more frequently to experts for ideas. "The more you ground your film in the real thing, the better it plays," says D.J. Gugenheim, VP of production at Inferno Entertainment. Scientists are willing to help Hollywood because they see a chance to expose a broader audience to science and humanize their profession. "People get images of what science is from movies," Carroll says. "I want to help get that image right."

To improve the information flow between the science community and Hollywood, the National Academy of Sciences launched the Los Angeles?based Science & Entertainment Exchange in 2008. The organization connects film- makers with scientists in biology, chemistry, and other fields. In its first year the Exchange's scientists consulted (for free) on 70 projects; by September 2011, on 350. Creators of TV shows such as Fringe and The Big Bang Theory, and films like Green Lantern and 2012's Battleship, have all talked to scientists with the Exchange.

But science and entertainment don't always mix. "Story creators might think scientists are geeks, but there's a sense of respect," says Malcolm MacIver, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University and adviser on TRON: Legacy. "That respect is not always there in the other direction. Scientists feel that filmmakers dumb down everything to make a buck." Despite holding scientists in high esteem, some filmmakers find them hard to work with. "Scientists say, ?No, you can't do that!'" Carroll says. "And the moviemaker finds that unhelpful."

These days, audiences are savvier than ever. And thanks to the Internet, there's little they haven't seen?so filmmakers look to what's happening in cutting-edge research. "Scientists are more imaginative than we are in Hollywood," says Jeffrey Silver, producer of Terminator Salvation and 300. "I used to say, that only happens in the movies, but now I say, that only happens in science."

The average moviegoer is also less willing to suspend disbelief. "If people see a movie and sense a disconnect between the logic of the movie and the science that governs the world of the film," Gugenheim says, "you risk turning off the audience." Viewers take their complaints to the Inter- net, where they spread faster than a zombie virus. "Advisers help you construct the movie with rules that keep you in the realm of what is theoretically plausible," Gugenheim says. That's what makes films feel real?and prevents bad word-of- mouth that could cripple box office.

Scientists are more concerned that inaccuracies will harm scientific literacy. In The Day After Tomorrow, a man-made ice age occurred in just a week. It would actually take at least a decade for the real thing to set in. And when scientists in K-19: The Widowmaker worried that a nuclear reactor would explode, it spread a dangerous notion: Damaged reactors don't explode, they melt.

Most scientists are willing to advise not only because it allows them to be gate- keepers of their disciplines, but because they want to be portrayed accurately on-screen. "It's rare that you have a relatable character," says Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research associate at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. That's why James Cameron created Avatar's xenobotanist, Grace. "Scientists are usually shown as geeks or losers or evil," he says. "I wanted to celebrate the mind and the passion of a scientist."

Working in Hollywood can be an educational experience for novice advisers, as Carroll discovered during his first consulting gig, on Ron Howard's Angels & Demons. In the film, Professor Robert Langdon tries to find antimatter stolen from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. It's a fact that when antimatter and matter come into contact, they annihilate each other in a violent explosion. What, Howard wondered, would it look like if that explosion occurred in the sky? Carroll suggested a series of rapid booms caused by air rushing into the vacuum created by the explosion.

But then the 2007 Writers Guild strike derailed both the production and his consultations. "They were over budget and behind schedule, and we didn't talk anymore," Carroll says. "That's Hollywood. I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual curiosity of those involved, but disillusioned that you can't always do it right." Angels & Demons eventually hit theaters in 2009. (Carroll's contribution, he says, looked "more or less" as he advised.)

Often filmmakers ignore a scientist's advice. When paleontologist Robert T. Bakker worked on Jurassic Park, he found the dinosaur artists to be "better animal morphologists than most tenured professors." But when he sent the film team diagrams of the T. rex's banana-shaped crowns, "the powers that be didn't like the real tooth shape," he says. "The CGI rex and the robot had their fangs sharpened."

Filmmakers defend their creative license; their first responsibility, they say, is to entertain. For 2012, director Roland Emmerich wanted an impossible global flood. "There isn't enough water on earth for that," he admits, "so you have to figure out something." Emmerich asked a geologist to work from the 1950s theory of earth-crust displacement. "He said, ?This could never happen.' And we said, ?Well, if it did happen, how would it work?'" Silver often talks to advisers, but even he says that "if [a story] doesn't break a fundamental law of physics, then it doesn't matter how far you stretch it."

Ultimately, advisers understand they're not creating award-winning research. "You have to accept that the goal is to tell a story first," says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Science & Entertainment Exchange director Marty Perreault agrees: "We're not the science police." They also realize that these films could get young viewers interested in science. "I can write a book where I explain real physics and reach several thousand people," Carroll says, "or I can help create Natalie Portman's character in a movie that will reach 10 million people. And some will be young girls who see that Natalie Portman's playing a scientist."

Now that Carroll's done with Thor, he's moved on to Doctor Strange, about a surgeon who becomes earth's Sorcerer Supreme. Carroll's job is to apply limits to Strange's powers. "You need constraints to provide tension," he says. A world where anything can happen makes for a very boring movie. It's when science imposes boundaries on what a superhero can do that the real drama begins.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/scientific-advisors-to-the-stars?src=rss

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House Democrats want new housing regulator (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? More than two dozen House Democrats called on Wednesday for President Barack Obama to unseat the acting regulator of housing finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying he has failed to take steps that would aggressively address the nation's housing crisis.

The group of 28 Democrats, led by Representative Dennis Cardoza, are all from California, which has been hard hit by the housing market's collapse. In their letter, the lawmakers urged Obama to replace Edward DeMarco as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and to immediately nominate a new director.

"FHFA has consistently and erroneously interpreted its mandate far too narrowly and as such has failed to take adequate action to help homeowners," the letter said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two congressionally chartered companies charged with providing liquidity to the U.S. housing market, were seized by the government in September 2008 as mortgage losses mounted.

DeMarco, a career civil servant who was named acting director of the FHFA in August 2009, has defended the steps he has taken as conservator as being well within the authority Congress has mandated.

DeMarco, who has never been selected as the FHFA'S permanent director, has argued that the roughly $169 billion in taxpayer-funded support paid out to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since they were seized was meant to get them back on their feet, not to provide relief to the housing market.

The Democratic call for a new leader at FHFA comes just days after Obama made a critical recess appointment of Richard Cordray as the director of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over Republican opposition.

"We urge that you take the same action to put in place a permanent director to the FHFA," the Democrats wrote.

The lawmakers said DeMarco has limited Fannie and Freddie from helping the troubled housing market by taking too narrow a view of his mission to protect the financial health of the two firms.

"There are steps that the FHFA can take to help prevent future foreclosures while also protecting taxpayers," the letter read. "Installing a permanent director of the FHFA will allow the FHFA to move forward to make key decisions that will help keep families in their homes and improve our economy."

The Obama administration had nominated North Carolina's banks commissioner, Joseph Smith, to be the FHFA's permanent director in November 2010, but Smith withdrew his name a few months later due to staunch Republican opposition. No new nominee has since been named.

(Reporting By Margaret Chadbourn; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/democrats/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120111/pl_nm/us_usa_housing_fhfa

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The Dow edges lower on new Europe worries

In this Jan. 10, 2012 photo, Warren Meyers, left, works with fellow traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World markets mostly rose Wednesday, Jan. 11, on hopes that the U.S. economic recovery will gather pace, helping corporate earnings and easing some of the stress generated by Europe's debt crisis. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In this Jan. 10, 2012 photo, Warren Meyers, left, works with fellow traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World markets mostly rose Wednesday, Jan. 11, on hopes that the U.S. economic recovery will gather pace, helping corporate earnings and easing some of the stress generated by Europe's debt crisis. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In this Jan.10, 2012 photo, trader Douglas Glander, right, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange .World markets mostly rose Wednesday, Jan.11, on hopes that the U.S. economic recovery will gather pace, helping corporate earnings and easing some of the stress generated by Europe's debt crisis. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

NEW YORK (AP) ? The Dow Jones industrial average crept lower Wednesday as Europe edged closer to a recession that would hurt corporate profits in the U.S. The first earnings reports from American companies didn't add much encouragement.

Germany reported that its economy, the largest in Europe, shrank slightly at the end of last year. And the European Union revised its figures for economic growth in the third quarter to 0.1 percent, its slowest pace in more than two years.

"Europe is still the main risk," said Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial. "Yes, they've been making progress on their budgets, but they clearly have growth problems."

The Dow dropped 13.02 points, or 0.1 percent, to close at 12,449.45 in another day of light trading. The other two main U.S. indexes eked out slight gains.

The European Commission also said Hungary has taken "no effective action" to contain its budget deficit. Stock markets in Germany and France fell slightly, and the euro dropped half a penny against the dollar, to $1.27.

Worries over Europe stoked demand for Treasurys and lowered the cost of borrowing for the federal government. The Treasury sold 10-year notes at the lowest rate on record Wednesday, 1.90 percent.

The United States depends on Europe to buy about 20 percent of its exports, and concerns about Europe have led analysts to lower their profit estimates for U.S. companies.

Profits at S&P 500 companies are expected to rise 7.2 percent for the last three months of 2011, according to Standard & Poor's Capital IQ. That's much lower than the 17.6 percent growth reported in the third quarter.

Judging by the S&P 500 index, investors seem to think earnings could fall much further, Kleintop said. The index is trading at about 13 times the past year's earnings of its companies ? close to what it was at the end of 1990, when the economy was in recession. Earnings fell 20 percent during that downturn.

The S&P 500 gained 0.4 of a point on Wednesday to 1,292.48. The Nasdaq composite index rose 8.26, or 0.3 percent, to 2,710.76. The Nasdaq has gained 4 percent this year, the most of the major indexes.

Supervalu, a grocery store operator, plunged after reporting a wider-than-expected quarterly loss because of high food prices and costs related to a turnaround plan. Its stock lost 12 percent.

Orange juice prices settled lower Wednesday. They hit their highest levels since 2007 on Tuesday when the U.S. government said that a potentially harmful fungicide had been found in Brazilian imports.

The futures contract for orange juice fell to $1.88 from $2.08 the day before. Futures have been rising since December, largely over concerns that cold weather in Florida could damage the crop there.

Even with Wednesday's decline, OJ is up 14 percent from its recent low of $1.65 on Dec. 21.

The recent jump in orange juice futures hit Coca-Cola, owner of Minute Maid, and PepsiCo, which has Tropicana. Coca-Cola sank 1.8 percent. PepsiCo fell 1 percent.

Among other large companies making moves:

? Urban Outfitters Inc. dropped 18 percent, the steepest fall of any stock in the S&P 500, following the abrupt resignation of its CEO, Glen Senk. The company, which also runs the Anthropologie and Free People stores, said last week that tough competition and a drive to reduce inventory led to more markdowns than expected during the holiday shopping season.

? Commercial Metals Co. fell 6 percent to $13.88 after investor Carl Icahn said he would end his hostile takeover attempt of the company. Only 23 percent of Commercial Metals' shareholders supported Icahn's $15-per-share offer, far short of Icahn's goal of 40.1 percent.

? Lennar Corp. rose 7.2 percent. Sales rose as the builder delivered more houses. Lennar reported a drop in quarterly earnings but said the housing market is starting to stabilize with the help of lower home prices and low interest rates.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-01-11-Wall%20Street/id-ca92e240576d4808be2740d2a27ff408

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Total Recall: Let's Put On a Show!

Oliver R. on 01-12-2012 09:18 AM

Nowhere in the article does it say "The most comprehensive list of films that culminate with an on-stage performance", nor does it say "A list of the best films that culminate with an on-stage performance."

People are taking this a little too seriously.

Back on topic... WHERE THE HELL IS HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL!?1111

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1924290/news/1924290/

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