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Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
Google shares hit record high, find favour on Street
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc
The stock reached $748.90 in afternoon trading, inching past a previous record set in November 2007 of $747.24. It traded below $300 in 2009 during the global economic crisis and remained under pressure in the ensuing years as investors worried that Google's best years were behind it.
The world's No.1 search engine, which generated $38 billion in revenue last year, now looks increasingly attractive compared with a new crop of social Web companies, analysts say.
Facebook Inc
"The markets have to come to appreciate that Google's been making money hand over fist all this time," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group.
Google's lucrative search advertising business, as well as its efforts expanding into display and mobile advertising, have helped the company maintain robust revenue growth.
In contrast, Facebook faces much more uncertainty.
"It's so new that there's a lack of data points for anyone to point to," Wieser said.
AT THE HELM
The stock was up almost 2 percent at $748.20 in early afternoon trade. It has surged roughly 27 percent since mid-July, compared with the Dow Jones Industrial Average's roughly 6 percent gain and a 9.5 percent rise on the Nasdaq.
But at roughly 17 times expected 2012 earnings, it still trades at a hefty discount to Facebook's roughly 47 price-earnings multiple.
Google's rising stock price comes about a year-and-a-half after co-founder Larry Page returned to the chief executive's role, replacing Eric Schmidt, who had the helm of the Web company for the previous decade.
Page has moved aggressively to pare the company's sprawling portfolio of products, eliminating projects involving green energy and health among others, while stepping up Google's social networking efforts.
But many of the challenges that pressured its stock in the past have not gone away. The company's ability to manage the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility -- Google's first major foray into the lower-margin hardware business -- remains unproven.
And Google is now facing significant regulatory scrutiny around the world, including antitrust investigations in the United States and in Europe.
(Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-shares-hit-record-high-favour-street-174434447--sector.html
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Friday, September 21, 2012
95% The Queen of Versailles
All Critics (96) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (91) | Rotten (5)
Seriously, if this was the American Dream, couldn't we have come up with something better?
"The Queen of Versailles" is funny, sad, infuriating, instructive. It's the American Dream inflated to ridiculous extremes, until it bursts.
More than a social morality tale, this is a character study, with the title well chosen.
"The Queen of Versailles" ought to be required viewing for anyone who blames the rich for yanking the rug out from under America's economy.
By the end, the movie has pulled off a small miracle: You become absorbed in the lives of these people for who they are and not what they own.
What I left with was not hatred. I disapprove of the values they represent, but I also find them fascinating and just slightly lovable.
Documentaries are rarely as hilarious as this one. Well, the first half of it at least
Filmmaker Greenfield has a wonderful eye for the absurd, finding moments of offbeat humanity all the way through this involving documentary
[E]nds up an ever less slightly ungenerous look at the .01 percent than it might have been... But this is still a brutal film from many angles.
One of the great unsayable truths about the American dream is that it is a bit of a Ponzi scheme ... our system admits a glimmer of hope that anyone, no matter how lowborn, can rise to the top.
Extremely funny and revealing ...
[Siegel] is now suing Greenfield for "misrepresentation". Well, I know whose side I'm on.
She epitomises a Western culture struggling to wean itself off debt.
Greenfield's film is bathed in Florida sunshine, adding to the sensation that we're watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with a Marxist punchline.
Never has grotesque wealth looked so unenviable, or its removal been so entertaining, as in this garishly watchable riches-to-rags documentary ...
[Siegel] ultimately emerges as someone who belongs more in The Little House on the Prairie: ever cheerful, and triumphantly unimpeachable.
The temptation to be moralistic must have been overpowering, yet Greenfield finally manages to summon sympathy for people who at first seem vain, selfish and greedy.
Prepare to be shocked, disgusted and compelled.
In the end, these are human beings, not emblems - and it is this that makes this documentary one of the most watchable, for rich and poor alike.
A bizarre and mesmerising journey to the heart of Cloud Cuckoo Land.
It is a comedy that aspires to tragedy, and a metaphor for a nation collapsing beneath the incompatible, intolerable pressures of excess and inequity.
For all their garishness, the Siegels are pretty likable, even if attempts to make you sympathetic to their "plight" fall short.
It scores a lot of laughs at the Siegel's bad taste and odd ways of adapting to their newfound misfortune. Thankfully, Greenfield also makes the Siegels sympathetic.
If you get some kind of sick kick watching the mighty take a fall, The Queen of Versailles will be nothing short of a schadenfreudic ball.
More Critic ReviewsSource: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_queen_of_versailles/
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Hamilton returning to Texas, Beltre back in lineup
ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) ? Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton is returning to Texas for further examination of a sinus problem that has forced him to miss two straight games.
Hamilton tops the majors with 42 home runs. He left Tuesday's series opener in the fourth inning with a recurring sinus problem that makes it tough for him to breathe.
"Everybody in my family's been sick," Hamilton said before the AL West leaders took batting practice. "The last five or six days I've been battling something. Anytime I get sick, it usually turns into a sinus infection. Sometimes it can cause me to be off-kilter, off-balance, but this is the first time it's caused me not to be able to focus the way I want to on the field."
"The more you run when you can't breathe as good, you get a little dizzy, a little thrown off. It just is what it is. If your head's a little stopped up, you can get a little starry-eyed, dizzy. I had the MRI just to make sure everything was good to go. My eyesight is great. I got that checked out. It's 20-15. It used to be 20-10, but I'm getting a little older. That's good, but all the congestion that's in there is slowing things down a bit as far as depth perception and things like that."
Hamilton entered Thursday with one more home run than Detroit's Miguel Cabrera. That's the only Triple Crown category Cabrera is trailing in as he attempts to become the first Triple Crown winner since Boston's Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.
"Maybe I'm sick for a reason. Maybe it's his time," Hamilton said. "I don't really care about holding on to the home run lead. He's a good dude and he's played consistently well for a long time. It would be cool if there was another winner. There's nobody I'd rather see win it than him."
Fellow Texas slugger Adrian Beltre was back in the lineup for the AL West leaders on Thursday night against the Angels. Both players missed Wednesday's game with ailments.
Beltre sat out one game with abdominal discomfort and wasn't in the Rangers' initial lineup Thursday, but talked his way into the cleanup spot as a designated hitter after batting practice.
The Rangers' road trip concludes with three weekend games in Seattle.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hamilton-returning-texas-beltre-back-lineup-014316091--mlb.html
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Climate scientists put predictions to the test
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Climate-prediction models show skills in forecasting climate trends over time spans of greater than 30 years and at the geographical scale of continents, but they deteriorate when applied to shorter time frames and smaller geographical regions, a new study has found.
Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, the study is one of the first to systematically address a longstanding, fundamental question asked not only by climate scientists and weather forecasters, but the public as well: How good are Earth system models at predicting the surface air temperature trend at different geographical and time scales?
Xubin Zeng, a professor in the University of Arizona department of atmospheric sciences who leads a research group evaluating and developing climate models, said the goal of the study was to bridge the communities of climate scientists and weather forecasters, who sometimes disagree with respect to climate change.
According to Zeng, who directs the UA Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center, the weather forecasting community has demonstrated skill and progress in predicting the weather up to about two weeks into the future, whereas the track record has remained less clear in the climate science community tasked with identifying long-term trends for the global climate.
"Without such a track record, how can the community trust the climate projections we make for the future?" said Zeng, who serves on the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Academies and the Executive Committee of the American Meteorological Society. "Our results show that actually both sides' arguments are valid to a certain degree."
"Climate scientists are correct because we do show that on the continental scale, and for time scales of three decades or more, climate models indeed show predictive skills. But when it comes to predicting the climate for a certain area over the next 10 or 20 years, our models can't do it."
To test how accurately various computer-based climate prediction models can turn data into predictions, Zeng's group used the "hindcast" approach.
"Ideally, you would use the models to make predictions now, and then come back in say, 40 years and see how the predictions compare to the actual climate at that time," said Zeng. "But obviously we can't wait that long. Policymakers need information to make decisions now, which in turn will affect the climate 40 years from now."
Zeng's group evaluated seven computer simulation models used to compile the reports that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, issues every six years. The researchers fed them historical climate records and compared their results to the actual climate change observed between then and now.
"We wanted to know at what scales are the climate models the IPCC uses reliable," said Koichi Sakaguchi, a doctoral student in Zeng's group who led the study. "These models considered the interactions between the Earth's surface and atmosphere in both hemispheres, across all continents and oceans and how they are coupled."
Zeng said the study should help the community establish a track record whose accuracy in predicting future climate trends can be assessed as more comprehensive climate data become available.
"Our goal was to provide climate modeling centers across the world with a baseline they can use every year as they go forward," Zeng added. "It is important to keep in mind that we talk about climate hindcast starting from 1880. Today, we have much more observational data. If you start your prediction from today for the next 30 years, you might have a higher prediction skill, even though that hasn't been proven yet."
The skill of a climate model depends on three criteria at a minimum, Zeng explained. The model has to use reliable data, its prediction must be better than a prediction based on chance, and its prediction must be closer to reality than a prediction that only considers the internal climate variability of the Earth system and ignores processes such as variations in solar activity, volcanic eruptions, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and land-use change, for example urbanization and deforestation.
"If a model doesn't meet those three criteria, it can still predict something but it cannot claim to have skill," Zeng said.
According to Zeng, global temperatures have increased in the past century by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.8 degrees Celsius on average. Barring any efforts to curb global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, the temperatures could further increase by about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius) or more by the end of the 21st century based on these climate models.
"The scientific community is pushing policymakers to avoid the increase of temperatures by more than 2 degrees Celsius because we feel that once this threshold is crossed, global warming could be damaging to many regions," he said.
Zeng said that climate models represent the current understanding of the factors influencing climate, and then translate those factors into computer code and integrate their interactions into the future.
"The models include most of the things we know," he explained, "such as wind, solar radiation, turbulence mixing in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation and aerosols, which are tiny particles suspended in the air, surface moisture and ocean currents."
Zeng described how the group did the analysis: "With any given model, we evaluated climate predictions from 1900 into the future ? 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years. Then we did the same starting in 1901, then 1902 and so forth, and applied statistics to the results."
Climate models divide the Earth into grid boxes whose size determines its spatial resolution. According to Zeng, state of the art is about one degree, equaling about 60 miles (100 kilometers).
"There has to be a simplification because if you look outside the window, you realize you don't typically have a cloud cover that measures 60 miles by 60 miles. The models cannot reflect that kind of resolution. That's why we have all those uncertainties in climate prediction."
"Our analysis confirmed what we expected from last IPCC report in 2007," said Sakaguchi. "Those climate models are believed to be of good skill on large scales, for example predicting temperature trends over several decades, and we confirmed that by showing that the models work well for time spans longer than 30 years and across geographical scales spanning 30 degrees or more."
The scientists pointed out that although the IPCC issues a new report every six years, they didn't see much change with regard to the prediction skill of the different models.
"The IPCC process is driven by international agreements and politics," Zeng said. "But in science, we are not expected to make major progress in just six years. We have made a lot of progress in understanding certain processes, for example airborne dust and other small particles emitted from surface, either through human activity or through natural sources into the air. But climate and the Earth system still are extremely complex. Better understanding doesn't necessarily translate into better skill in a short time."
"Once you go into details, you realize that for some decades, models are doing a much better job than for some other decades. That is because our models are only as good as our understanding of the natural processes, and there is a lot we don't understand."
Michael Brunke, a graduate student in Zeng's group who focused on ocean-atmosphere interactions, co-authored the study, which is titled "The Hindcast Skill of the CMIP Ensembles for the Surface Air Temperature Trend."
###
University of Arizona: http://uanews.org
Thanks to University of Arizona for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/123678/Climate_scientists_put_predictions_to_the_test
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Who?s sabotaging Iran?s nukes?
The chief of Iran?s nuclear program?says the power lines to his nuclear facilities were sabotaged. U.S. Special Forces have trained for operations inside Iran for years. Do these latest disclosures suggest they are already on the ground?
On Monday, Fereydoun Abbasi, Iran?s vice president and the chief of its nuclear-energy agency, disclosed that power lines between the holy city of Qom and the underground?Fordow nuclear centrifuge facility were blown up?with explosives on Aug. 17. He also said the power lines leading to Iran?s Natanz facilities were blown up as well. On the day after the power was cut off at Fordow, an inspector from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked to visit the facility.
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?It should be recalled that power cut off is one of the ways to break down centrifuge?machines,??Abbasi said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks to the IAEA on Monday. ?Then during the early hours of next morning an agency inspector requested to conduct an unannounced inspection. Does this visit have any connection to that detonation??
In recent years, the West?s stealth war on Iran?s nuclear program has been waged through sabotage, industrial explosions, cyberviruses, and targeted killings. But until recently elements of the country?s civilian infrastructure were off limits in this not-so-secret shadow war.?
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The disclosure is significant. To start, it is the first piece of evidence to suggest opponents of the Iranian program are targeting the country?s electrical grid and doing so on the ground. The U.S. military has studied Iran?s infrastructure closely. In 2009, a research lab attached to the U.S. joint staff and combatant commands known as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center discovered a weakness in Iran?s electrical grids that at the time would make it vulnerable to a cyberattack.
The attack described by Abbasi suggests, however, a physical explosion as opposed to a cyberattack. He specifically said the power lines from Qom to the Shahid Ali Mohammadi complex at Fordow ?were cut using explosives.? In this case, special-operations forces on the ground in Iran would carry out such an attack, as opposed to cyberwarriors half a world away.?
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A retired U.S. intelligence officer who still works as a contractor with the U.S. military on operations with regard to Iran told The Daily Beast that U.S. Special Forces have trained for sabotage missions inside Iran for years. ?From the first reports, this attack looks like something from our guys,? this source said. This former official also said U.S. Special Forces conducted a series of targeted attacks on Iran?s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in late 2011 as the U.S. military was exiting Iraq. That stealth offensive is widely credited with stopping Iran from attacking U.S. forces as they left Iraq.
If the United States conducted the sabotage of Iran?s power lines, it may help ease concerns from Israel?s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week a private disagreement between Netanyahu and President Obama went public when the Israeli leader chastised Western countries for failing to set red lines for Iran, beyond which there would be a military strike. While at times Israel and the United States have disagreed on Iran policy, the intelligence services of the two countries continue to cooperate on efforts to sabotage the program.
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Patrick Clawson, the director of research for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said,??Covert American operations against the Iranian program is a good way to persuade the Israelis that the United States will back up its words with deeds.? Spokesmen for the National Security Council, the CIA, and the IAEA all declined to comment on Abbasi?s disclosure.
Overall the shadow war against Iran?s nuclear program is one reason some top national-security officials in Israel have said they have more time. Meir Dagan, the chief of Israel?s?Mossad between 2002 and 2010, said in an interview aired by CBS?s?60 Minutes?in March that bombing Iran would be the ?stupidest idea? he?d ever heard. Dagan said other measures conducted by Israel and the United States, which he did not elaborate on, had done enough to delay Iran?s quest for a nuclear weapon.
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But it?s unclear whether the sabotage by Western spies is still working. Abbasi in his speech, for example, said Iran was now taking countermeasures to protect its scientists. He said Iran?s nuclear facilities have become better at spotting cyberattacks.
Whether a cutoff in the power supply is successful depends on whether the nuclear facility has a backup power supply. Robert Avagyan, a research analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, said, ?If a cutoff of power is aimed at the centrifuges, it would be aimed at slowing down the centrifuge. Sudden changes of spinning speed can cause severe damage to the centrifuge. But this kind of attack would not be effective if there was a backup power source that prevents such a power cutoff.??
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The latest IAEA reports paints a mixed picture on the success of Iran?s nuclear program. On the one hand, Iran has yet to install the advanced centrifuges it has been developing for at least 10 years. The latest report says the centrifuges it has installed at the Fordow facility are still based on the 1970s-era model first stolen by Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan.
At least in his presentation to the IAEA, Abbasi said Iran?s program was resilient in the face of sabotage. He said, ?Plotters of attack against Iran?s nuclear facilities have realized, through the IAEA published reports, that they have not gained any success in this regard.?
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sabotaging-iran-nukes-084500157--politics.html
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