Actor Patrick Swayze dies from cancer
Posted on Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer.
He had kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting The Beast, a television drama series for which he had already made the pilot.
It drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran on the A&E cable television station in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.
Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making The Beast because they would have taken the edge off his performance.
He acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.
When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was "considerably more optimistic'' than that.
"I'd say five years is pretty wishful thinking,'' Swayze told ABC's Barbara Walters in early 2009.
"Two years seems likely if you're going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I'd better get a fire under it.''
A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad boy Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing.
As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theatre, he seemed a natural to play the role.
A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort's sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made great use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique.
It became an international phenomenon in 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in (I've Had) the Time of My Life, stage productions and a sequel, 2004's Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, in which he made a cameo.
Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad She's Like the Wind, inspired by his wife Lisa Niemi.
The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner.''
A major crowd-pleaser, Dirty Dancing drew only mixed reviews from critics, though Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times: "Given the limitations of his role, that of a poor but handsome sex-object abused by the rich women at Kellerman's Mountain House, Mr Swayze is also good. ... He's at his best - as is the movie - when he's dancing.''
Swayze followed that up with the 1989 action film Road House, in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar.
But it was his performance in 1990's Ghost that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side.
He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee (Demi Moore) - with great frustration and longing - through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg.
Swayze said at the time that he fought for the role of Sam Wheat (director Jerry Zucker wanted Kevin Kline) but once he went in for an audition and read six scenes, he got it.
Why did he want the part so badly? "It made me cry four or five times,'' he said of Bruce Joel Rubin's Oscar-winning script.
Ghost provided yet another indelible musical moment: Swayze and Moore sensually moulding pottery together to the strains of the Righteous Brothers' Unchained Melody.
It also earned a best-picture nomination and a supporting-actress Oscar for Goldberg, who said she wouldn't have won if it weren't for Swayze.
"When I won my Academy Award, the only person I really thanked was Patrick,'' Goldberg said in March 2008 on the ABC daytime talk show The View.
Swayze himself earned three Golden Globe nominations, for Dirty Dancing, Ghost and 1995's To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which further allowed him to toy with his masculine image.
The role called for him to play a drag queen on a cross-country road trip alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo.
His heartthrob status almost kept him from being considered for the role of Vida Boheme.
"I couldn't get seen on it because everyone viewed me as terminally heterosexually masculine-macho,'' he said at the time.
But he transformed himself so completely that when his screen test was sent to Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin pictures produced To Wong Foo, Spielberg didn't recognise him.
Among his earlier films, Swayze was part of the star-studded lineup of up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 adaptation of SE Hinton's novel The Outsiders, alongside Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane.
Swayze played Darrel "Dary'' Curtis, the oldest of three wayward brothers in a poor family in small-town Oklahoma.
Other '80s films included Red Dawn, Grandview USA (for which he also provided choreography) and Youngblood, once more with Lowe, as Canadian hockey teammates.
In the 90s, he made such eclectic films as Point Break (1991), in which he played the leader of a band of bank-robbing surfers, and the family Western Tall Tale (1995), in which he starred as Pecos Bill.
He appeared on the cover of People magazine as its Sexiest Man Alive in 1991, but his career tapered off toward the end of the 1990s, when he also had stay in rehab for alcohol abuse.
In 2001, he appeared in the cult favourite Donnie Darko, and in 2003 he returned to the New York stage with Chicago; 2006 found him in the musical Guys and Dolls in London.
Swayze was born in 1952 in Houston, the son of Jesse Swayze and choreographer Patsy Swayze, whose films include Urban Cowboy.
He played football but also was drawn to dance and theatre, performing with the Feld, Joffrey and Harkness Ballets and appearing on Broadway as Danny Zuko in Grease. But he turned to acting in 1978 after a series of injuries.
Within a couple years of moving to Los Angeles, he made his debut in the roller-disco movie Skatetown, USA.
Swayze had a couple of movies in the works when his diagnosis was announced, including the drama Powder Blue, starring Jessica Biel, Forest Whitaker and his younger brother, Don, which was scheduled for release this year.
Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on "man's greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature's laws,'' he said in 2004.
Swayze was married since 1975 to Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. The couple did not have children.
Kanye grabs microphone from Taylor Swift
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Cadbury rejects Kraft's business model
Posted on Monday, September 14, 2009
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Kraft Foods launched a 10.2-billion-pound ($US16.7-billion-dollar) bid for Cadbury last Monday - an offer spurned by the British group as takeover activity appeared to be returning to the market.
"In my letter of August 31, I informed you that the board had rejected your unsolicited proposal on the grounds that it is unattractive and fundamentally undervalues Cadbury," wrote Carr in the letter.
"Under your proposal, Cadbury would be absorbed into Kraft's low growth, conglomerate business model, an unappealing prospect which contrasts sharply with our strategy to be a pure-play confectionery company."
"Your proposal fundamentally fails to reflect the current value of Cadbury as a standalone business, its growth prospects and the potential synergies of a combined entity."
Despite the snub, Kraft said it hoped the venerable maker of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars and Trident chewing gum, among other brands - would eventually jump on board.
Kraft Foods, the world's second largest food company after Nestle, said it hoped the takeover would increase annual revenues to $US50 billion dollars a year from $US42 billion dollars presently.
It added that by combining the groups, plans for about 500 job cuts at Cadbury in Britain would be scrapped.
New HIV-fighting antibodies found
Posted on Friday, September 04, 2009
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US-based researchers attached to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVA) have identified the new "broadly neutralising antibodies" - named PG9 and PG16 - which have been shown to be able to stop the highly-mutating virus from spreading.
They are the first to be identified in more than a decade, and the first to be identified in an HIV-infected but otherwise resistant person from a developing country.
Commenting on the research, Melbourne-based Associate Professor Damian Purcell said the discovery had pointed to a new and potentially broadly available "chink" in the AIDS virus's armour.
"I think this is a very significant finding," says Prof Purcell, who heads the Molecular Virology Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.
"And it's actually a foretaste for what we're going to require over the next couple of years in order to make an effective HIV vaccine."
Work towards an HIV vaccine has continued for decades, and its success hinges on finding an unchanging part of the virus which otherwise mutates furiously inside the body.
The search is centred on a rare group of people referred to as "elite neutralisers", because while they had contracted HIV they appeared to live without ill effect.
The IAVA research, published in the journal Science, took in 1,800 blood samples from HIV-infected people across the African continent but also from Australia, Thailand, the UK and USA.
They settled on a sample from an HIV-resistant Kenyan man, and the unique antibodies found in his blood were shown to work against a part of the virus not considered for potential vaccine application before.
It also worked against a range of different HIV strains, Prof Purcell says, raising hopes of finding "the chink in the armour, the susceptible target that seems to be across all of these (HIV) viruses".
"They chose an elite neutralising patient in Africa, and the antibodies they plucked out were able to neutralise viruses from Australia, from USA, from Asia," Prof Purcell says.
It was also "very potent" compared to earlier antibody discoveries.
Prof Purcell also says the effort to develop an HIV vaccine could continue for another five to 10 years but "at least we now know what we're aiming at, the target has become more visible".
Further developments in HIV will be discussed at the 2009 Australasian Sexual Health Conference, to be held back-to-back with The Australasian HIV/AIDS Conference 2009, in Brisbane next week.
Nokia to Use Linux-based Operating System to Beat the iPhone
Posted on Wednesday, September 02, 2009
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Following criticism that it had failed to come up with a handset to match the iPhone, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President & CEO of Nokia, said that it was aiming to be "even more competitive".
"We are competitive in the marketplace right now as we speak, and we will make efforts to be even more competitive going forward."
Apple secured the second largest share of the industry's profits in the second quarter, which goes to show that it has become a force to be reckoned with as a mobile phone maker.
Mr. Kallasvuo was interviewed by Financial Times and based on his statement, I noticed that Nokia will fight back and will even try to invade Apple’s turf by transforming itself from a mobile phone maker into a supplier of handset services, like maps and (you guessed it) music.
I think Nokia's move to a Linux-based OS for its smartphone line is a good one since its Symbian operating system has failed to impress new consumers. Symbian is just mediocre compared to webOS on Palm Pre or Android on HTC Dream.
Will Nokia utilize Android just like the so-called Dell Mini 3i, or is it developing its own Linux-based software? For now, we'll wait and see.
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Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7
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Since I use Mac OS X (dual boot with Xubuntu) on Macbook Pro, Ubuntu on my main workstation, and Windows XP on some of our computers used for our family business, I'm looking forward to these consecutive "big-time" updates. However, I still haven't made up my mind if I'll immediately upgrade to the new versions. But I did a little research and collected some important information so that I could somehow find out early on if the upgrades will be worth it.
For all of you, I'm going to highlight the main features of Ubuntu 9.10, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and Windows 7. I will also share my quick observation later on.
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Researcher Says Dogs Are as Smart as a 2-year-old
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Although you wouldn't want one to balance your checkbook, dogs can count. They also can understand more than 150 words and will intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats, according to psychologist and leading canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia.
Coren, author of popular books on dogs and dog behavior, has reviewed numerous studies to conclude that dogs have the ability to solve complex problems and are more like humans and other higher primates than previously thought.
"We all want insight into how our furry companions think, and we want to understand the silly, quirky and apparently irrational behaviors [that] Lassie or Rover demonstrate," Coren was quoted as saying. "Their stunning flashes of brilliance and creativity are reminders that they may not be Einsteins but are sure closer to humans than we thought."
According to several behavioral measures, Coren says dogs' mental abilities are close to a human child age 2 to 2.5 years. The dog's breed has some bearing on the intelligence of the animal, Coren says. "There are three types of dog intelligence: instinctive (what the dog is bred to do), adaptive (how well the dog learns from its environment to solve problems) and working and obedience (the equivalent of 'school learning')."
Data from 208 dog obedience judges from the U.S. and Canada showed differences in working and obedience intelligence of dog breeds, Coren reported. "Border collies are number one. Poodles are second, followed by German shepherds. Fourth on the list is golden retrievers; fifth, dobermans; sixth, Shetland sheepdogs; and finally, Labrador retrievers."
The average dog can learn 165 words, including signals, and the "super dogs" -- those in the top 20 percent of dog intelligence -- can learn 250 words, Coren said. "The upper limit of dogs' ability to learn language is partly based on a study of a border collie named Rico who showed knowledge of 200 spoken words and demonstrated 'fast-track learning,' which scientists believed to be found only in humans and language learning apes," Coren said.
Dogs can also count up to four or five, said Coren. They have a basic understanding of arithmetic and will notice errors in simple computations, such as 1+1=1 or 1+1=3. Coren consulted four studies that examined how dogs solve spatial problems by modeling human or other dogs' behavior using a barrier-type problem. By observing humans or other dogs, dogs can learn the location of valued items (treats), better routes in the environment (the fastest way to a favorite chair), how to operate mechanisms (such as latches and simple machines) and the meaning of words and symbolic concepts (sometimes by simply listening to people speak and watching their actions).
During play, dogs are capable of deliberately trying to deceive other dogs and people in order to get rewards, said Coren. "And they are nearly as successful in deceiving humans as humans are in deceiving dogs."
Vascular Disease Patients Face Recurring Heart Attacks and Strokes
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There is no easy way out for those battling vascular disease. Despite treatments and medications, a large international study shows patients have high rates of multiple heart attacks and strokes that may lead to hospitalizations and death.
The international REACH (Reduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health) Registry, presented by a researcher from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine examined data of over 30 thousand patients. Patients who had vascular disease had a 28.4 percent rate of reoccurring attacks just after three years of their last vascular episode. The data presented also named North America, including the United States, as having above average rates for recurring heart attacks, strokes, hospitalizations and death.
"We are surprised by the high rate of these recurring vascular events," Mark J. Alberts, lead author, M.D. professor of neurology at the Feinberg School and director of the stroke program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital was quoted as saying, "We know how to prevent vascular disease and the events that it produces. This points to the need for better prevention, better use of medications and a need to develop more potent medications. These are the number one and two causes of death throughout the world."
The cost of recurring vascular events in the United States alone is in the billions. Hospitalization is the leading factor driving health care costs. Adopting healthy lifestyles, with a healthier diet, and regular exercise are necessary to reducing health care expenses and the likelihood of reoccurring heart attacks, and strokes according to researchers.
Slackware goes 64-bit
Posted on Tuesday, September 01, 2009
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"Touted as focusing on ease of use and stability as top priorities, Slackware is also known as "the oldest surviving Linux distro," predating even the first desktop version of Red Hat Linux. Over the years, it has spawned a number of other distributions, including Minislack and GoblinX. The last major upgrade version 12, arrived in July, 2007.
"The new version jumps on the 64-bit bandwagon with native support for the 64-bit x86_64 architecture. It also adopts the 2.6.29.6 kernel, bringing journaling filesystems, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (Logical Volume Manager), GRUB, Ext4, and encrypted filesystems support to the distro. The new kernel also supports X DRI (Direct Rendering Interface) for hardware-based 3D graphics acceleration, says the Slackware project."
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Linux in 2013: One *Billion* Dollars!
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