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Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering ballooning crises: • 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

With low skills, little capital and no scale economies, these businesses have low productivity and lead to meager earnings that cannot lift their owners out of poverty. Creating opportunities for steady employment at reasonable wages is the best way to take people out of poverty.

In similar experiments about language learning, you listed to nonsense sentences made of nonsense words. Unknown to you, the sentences all conform to a grammar. If asked to explain the grammar, you would probably just say "huh?" but if asked to pick between two sentences, one of which is grammatical and one of which is not, you can do so successfully.

So researchers restricted the diets of the flies and ran the same experiments. The calorie-restricted flies didn’t live any longer when p53 was reduced in the insulin-producing cells. This evidence supports the notion that p53 reduction is one of the direct effects of caloric restriction. Even more intriguing, Helfand said, is the fact that the 14 insulin-producing cells that seem to be critical for lifespan extension are the equivalent of beta cells in the human pancreas. Beta cells make and release insulin, the hormone that controls the level of glucose in the blood. The research team found that when p53 activity drops, so does insulin-responsive activity in the fat body, the major metabolic organ in the fruit fly.

To disrupt their ability to mimic, the students clenched a pen between their teeth, an act that exercises many of the muscles needed to perform facial expressions. This significantly impaired the students' ability to correctly identify happiness, and to some extent also their ability to identify disgust.

We think that the best way for you to manage your network is to stop thinking about all of the little pieces and to start focusing on the big picture: you and the people who matter to you. We think relationships mean more than email addresses or which service you're signed on to at the moment. So we've created an experimental demo based upon open technologies OpenID, the Microformats hCard and XFN, and FOAF that allow you to see your entire network of relationships in one place - across services, across platforms, across the entire Web. Interested? Let's see how it works.

Originalets titel: Archangel (imdb)

Med Daniel Craig i en av huvudrollerna

Detta är en TV-serie i två delar. Jag missade den första delen (ja, jag visste inte ens om att fillmen fanns), men har nu sett större delen av del 2. Jag tycker att den var riktigt bra. Rekommenderas!

Den utspelar sig i det moderna Ryssland, där två västerlänningar kommer en hemlighet på spåren.

Die hard möter Pojkarna från Brasilien skulle man kunna säga. Fast med mindre action än Die Hard, men med samma patos.

This morning, Lebanese parliamentarian Antoine Ghanem was assassinated in Beirut. Ghanem, a Phalange MP allied with the pro-West Government led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was the third parliamentarian in the anti-Syrian majority to be killed this year. A fourth, Gibran Tueni, was killed in December 2005. With Ghanem’s death, the Government’s majority has decreased to 68 of 127 MPs--down from 72 a few years ago. The shrinking majority of this democratically elected government raises the very real prospect that terrorism will overturn the results of the 2005 Lebanese General Elections.

The assassination comes just weeks after Israel attacked an alleged North-Korean related nuclear facility in Syria, and on the same day that Jane’s Defense Weekly reported that an explosion at a Chemical Weapons facility in July—involving mustard gas and sarin and VX nerve agents—killed 15 Syrian military personnel and “dozens of Iranian missile weaponisation engineers.”

Since Jurassic Park aired, dinosaurs like Velociraptor have received something of a makeover. It began in the late 1990s when Chinese palaeontologists found a stunning series of dinosaur fossils with distinct traces of feathers around their bodies. Some were just covered in a downy fluff, while others like Microraptor had fully-formed wings and were probably capable of true flight.

On my Toshiba Laptop, I had a weird problem this morning. My usual external monitor, a very bright Sony 1280 x 1024 LCD, did display at 1024 x 768 or so, but allowed me to pan around to see the entire 1280 x 1024 desktop. How to get it right? I apparently have an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M card in it.  I tried to change the resolution, but all in vain, the display settings already reported the 1280 x 1024 resolution.

The trick turned out to be to right click on the desktop, select  Properties->Settings->Advanced, and go to this tab:

Uncheck the "Preserve wide aspect ratio.." box (which was checked) and then click "Apply" You need to click "Apply" or you cannot make any changes to the monitor at the left.

Once you'ce clicked apply you can click at the "Monitor" text.

In the dialog that pops up, adjust the maximum resolution to in  my case 1280 x 1024. It seems this setting applies to what you might call the physical size of your display, while the standard resoltion controls applies to a virtual size. As I am doing screen captures now, I notice that the settings is now 2560 x 1024 !

I did not set that, go figure... Anyways, tweaking the settings here got my display finally back to normal.

BRUSSELS (AFP) - Internet auction website eBay on Monday withdrew an unusual second-hand sale item, the country of Belgium, which had attracted an offer of 10 million euros (13.9 million dollars). ADVERTISEMENT "Belgium, a kingdom in three parts" was posted on the Belgian ebay site as offering "plenty of choice" despite the caveat that it comes with "300 billion of National Debt."

Militanta demonstranter längtar inte efter frihet, utan efter Absolut Förtryck(tm).  Kanske dags att formge lite flaskor?

Jag hoppas att det inte blir någon skadegörelse (som i Göteborg) eller provokation mot poliser ikväll på stan som gör att polisen får ingripa, för om det blir det så är det ju ganska intressant: Man protesterar mot något som man uppfattar som en polisstat, skadegör och provocerar ända tills man får sin frihet helt kringränd och är arresterad. Om polisen misslyckas med att ta friheten från militanta demonstranter, kommer såklart de militanta demonstranterna att ta makten och införa en riktig totalitär polisstat, med riktigt förtryck, så att det blir riktigt gjort. I denna stat kan sedan de tidigare militanterna njuta av att någon annan tar alla beslut för deras liv.

Det krävs olika talanger för att bygga upp och att riva ned. Man kan vara bra på det ena men inte på de andra.

Jag såg att det drog ihop sig till en rätt stor demonstration när jag passerade Sergels Torg för en halvtimma sedan. Via dyslesbisk har jag sett att det ska vara ett antal organisationer inblandade, alla på den yttre vänsterkanten. Demonstrationen är mot den sittande regeringen, som ju på tydligen på ett oerhört sätt skiljer sig i politik från den tidigare i dessa personers ögon.

Uppdatering:

DN har nu en artikel om demonstrationen

Uppdatering 2007-09-19

Det verkar som att det faktiskt inte blev någon skadegörelse efter demonstrationen; det finns ingen information om det på DN i alla fall (och man får väl räkna med att det inte var yttersta vänstern som låg bakom rånet mot pengacentralen ). Det var ju bra! Efter Göteborg var man lite orolig. En del av kommentarerna på den här bloggposten talar om demonstrationsfrihet. Det har jag absolut inget emot, det är just de här attentaten som vi såg i Göteborg som är problemet.

Neither do I need to retell here the story of the alleged relaxation or suspension of natural selection in civilized mankind. The dangers from this source, although not necessarily exaggerated, have often been presented in a wrong perspective. A notion, which is less frequently stated explicitly than implied in many writings, is that the progress of mankind would be safe and even irresistible if only the natural selection were permitted to operate unobstructed by civilization and its amenities. This notion does not stand critical examination. Natural selection does not even insure that the species on which it acts will survive, let alone that it will improve, in any sense of the word "improvement." Dinosaurs became extinct, despite their evolution having been piloted by natural selection, quite unhampered by culture, medicine, or charity (Dobzhansky 1963:148).

The results reveal Pycnogenol lowers stress hormones by 26.2 percent in the case of adrenaline and decreases neurostimulant dopamine by 10.8 percent, which plays an important role in brain physiology involving learning, cognition, attention and behavior.

The lesson seems to be that generic praise is less effective than specific praise. But how generic is too generic? A new study led by Andrei Cimpian makes a subtler distinction between the generic and specific praise to see if the effect persists.

Summary

To get a Billionton Bluetooth Class 1 USB dongle (probably this one) with the Broadcom BCM2035 chip, to work on Windows XP, download the 1.2 driver from here, and install it on your computer

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Yesterday I bought a cheap, really cheap (~$27 + VAT) headset for Bluetooth, a Hama BTH-150, and decided to hook it up to my Windows XP laptop so I can use the headset with Skype. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought.

About a year ago I bought a USB Bluetooth dongle from Billionton. It is a class 1 device, which as far as I can tell gives it a longer reach than personal Bluetooth equipment. I do not know if it helped with the headset I was going to use though. Maybe they both need to be class1 devices. However in the end I got very good range.

A couple of years ago I tried connecting a Jabra BT headset to my computer, and I could not walk around my entire apartment without losing connection. I hoped this time around that would not be a problem.

Back then I also had problems getting Bluetooth to work at all with the Jabra device. I found a web page that said that Microsofts Bluetooth stuff does not work and that you have to install some third party stuff to get connectivity. That turned out to be correct. I got it to work, but gave up on using it due to the limited range I could move in.

This time around I thought the Bluetooth incompatibilities would surely have been ironed out by Microsoft. That turned out to not not be the case. Pairing worked out fine, but there were no profiles presented (I needed the headset profile) so it was meaningless.

Incidentally, if you have a BTH-150, you may be confused by the instructions for how to set it in pairing mode. It says in the manual that you should keep the s1 button depressed for a couple of seconds to put it into pairing mode. These are virtually the same instructions as for how to switch it off, keep s1 depressed for a couple of seconds. The trick is to realize that they mean that you should start with headset switched off to get into pairing mode.

The Billionton site sucks. they do not have a support or downloads section. Still the stuff is there, if you resort to a bit of googling. I found two dongles that looked like mine, that were class 1 devices. I'll be damned if I could make out the difference between them but then I realised they had the same chipset, and that is often what matters.  At another part of their site that I found through Google, I then found a list of drivers with different version numbers. It is not clear what these numbers mean. They seem to be ordered along the release dates, but they seem to serve different chipsets.  It meant I should use the 1.2 version. I found the 1.2 driver from here and downloaded it. It took a while with the download being 65 MB and the speed about 9KB/s. The FTP server asks for a password, but anything seems to be fine.
The install was painless, I re-paired the headset and computer and it got the headset profile and it worked fine in Skype.

The initial tests seem to indicate that the bluetooth headset has a high noise level. I will need to do some more tests, but I bought this el cheapo device so that I can find out more about what I really want to to get out of a Bluetooth headset.

The range is excellent. I can walk around my apartment and get good reception everywhere.

Jan Björklund gjorde det bästa intrycket, med mest schvung i sitt tal. Annars var det kognitivt och avmätt, vilket inte slår så bra igenom i TV. Och det är TV som är det viktigaste mediet fortfarande. Alliansen måste kommunicera med mer känsla!

Bloggarna Ingerö och Gudmundson närvarade:

Här är publiken:

Hägglund gjorde också en rätt bra insats:

Men som helhet (jag gick efter  de fyra talen dock, så om något hände efter det så vet jag inte), så är det för avslaget. men det kanske inte gör så mycket för materialet är bra.

The goal was to be able to respond yes or no, within ten seconds, to a customer’s request for a flight between two participating airports, and that goal has been achieved. Given that capability, DayJet has been able to create a new business model that prices tickets according to the value of each customer’s time. If you value your time highly, you can request a narrow time window for your flight, and pay more for your ticket. If you’re willing to accept a wider window — say, you’re OK with leaving anywhere between 10AM and 3PM — you’ll pay a lot less. Ed calls this “time arbitrage” and it’s at the heart of what’s really revolutionary about this system from the customer’s point of view.