Thursday, June 2, 2005

Darwin’s Ltd. opened a second location of their sandwich shop at 1613 Cambridge Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in late May. It is situated across from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Previously limited to one location at 148 Mount Auburn Street, the second store seats approximately 30 people and sells sandwiches, coffee drinks, locally made pastries, as well as some produce and snack foods. The establishment also provides free wireless access through the WanderingWifi service. The shop plays music during the day; during this reporter’s visit to the shop, selections played ranged from David Bowie to The Strokes. The store is air-conditioned.

Key differences between the original store and the new one include the unification of the cafe and the sandwich line now behind one counter, handicap accessible restrooms, no beer or wine sold at location, and a lack of a loyal customer base. Although the recent months have been slow, business is expected to pick up with the return of Cambridge area students this autumn.

While the original location of Darwin’s was recently cited for lacking sneeze guards before the kitchen counter, according to the Cambridge Chronicle, the new Darwin’s has acrylic sheets along the front of their sandwich counter. The original Darwin’s has installed the sneeze guard at the kitchen counter the day following citation.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

South Korean scientists have confirmed that they have completed the first ever commercial cloning of a dog to take place.

Bernann McKinney, who ordered the cloning for US$50,000, has said that she is pleased with the result of the cloning. “They are perfectly the same as their daddy. I am in heaven here. I am a happy person,” she said in a press conference delivered earlier today. The regular charge will be up to US$150,000, but was discounted for the first customer.

McKinney continued the press conference by saying that “Booger [the dog] had a kindness in his heart and I believe that kindness is something that can be, I don’t want to use the word reproduced, but the best way Dr Lee explained it is we can give him his body, you are going to give him the love and environment to recreate the original Booger’s personality.”

McKinney ordered five copies of her dog Booger, which she describes as her ‘partner’ and ‘friend’.

RNL Bio, which performed the cloning said that “we commemorate the world’s first commercial cloning of a pet dog, Booger,” on their website. They also stated that anyone interested in getting their pet cloned should contact them.

Friday, June 2, 2006

Katharine “Kerry” Close, a 13-year-old 8th-grader from Asbury Park, New Jersey, spelled “ursprache“, a word for the ancestor of a language or language group, to win the 79th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. Close beat out 274 other contestants from 9 to 15 years old. This was Close’s last year of eligibility; she was one of only two contestants this year to be in her fifth year at the national competition. She finished seventh in 2005, having gotten a better ranking every year she’s competed.

This is the Bee’s first appearance on network television, with the finals airing on ABC; earlier rounds were televised in the afternoon on ESPN. Close, who enjoys running, music, reading, and her puppy, is the first New Jersey resident ever to win the competition, which she prepared for up to two hours each day.

Saryn Hooks, 14, was nearly eliminated in the eighth round, with “hechsher”, a symbol indicating that a food has been certified kosher. The judges mistakenly had the word down as “hechscher”; after being removed, she was reinstated in the next round after the judges received the correction. Hooks, who spent six months reading the entire dictionary to prepare, came back with confidence and finished in third place, missing “icteritious” in round twelve. This is the first time the judges have made such a visible error in the televised broadcast.

Kendra Yoshinaga, 12, of Thousand Oaks, California, a favorite for the finals, was knocked out in the seventh round just before the ABC broadcast began by “cointise”, a scarf worn on a lady’s headdress. Yoshinaga said that this third national bee she’s competed in felt “a lot more rigid” than the previous two.

This year’s schedule was rearranged for the ABC news broadcast: previous championships have been held earlier in the day. The spellers have all been given more media attention; for this reason Yoshinaga is perhaps one of the few who didn’t want to win, claiming that it would be too much. She has already received her share of attention, as co-author of The Spelling Bee And Me: A Real-Life Adventure In Learning, a children’s book about her experiences.

“People I don’t know very well seem to make a big deal about it, but my really close friends know that it’s not a really huge part of my life,” she says, of her relative fame. Keenly interested in politics and social issues, Yoshinaga spent a large portion of her last two trips sightseeing in Washington, but this trip, she says, has been more focused on studying.

“My mom sometimes finds words for me from books and magazines,” says the homeschooler, who studied over 30,000 words in the week preceding the national bee. Paige Kimble, bee coordinator, wouldn’t have been surprised to see her break into the top ten.

Another favorite eliminated earlier on in the competition was Samir Patel, who tied for second in last year’s 19-round marathon and placed third in 2003. Patel misspelled “eremacausis” in round 7, joining Yoshinaga and 6 others in a tie for 14th place.

The studious 12-year-old has one more chance at the national finals; Yoshinaga has two, as students may compete from their fourth through eighth grade years.

Cody Boisclair, a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Georgia, misses the competition. He competed in the 1997 and 1998 finals, placing fourth in his second try. The Bee has changed since he began participating, becoming more international, and with increased media attention putting more pressure on spellers. Though many critics claim that the rote memorization and drilling of spelling bees is not a particularly beneficial activity, Boisclair believes his experience in the bee helped his knowledge of language rather than serving as a simple display of memory.

“I was one of those people who tried to dissect the word into its component parts, to find similarities to other words that I was familiar with,” says Boisclair, who began reading at the age of two. “Although I did do some drilling, I tried to find relationships to help me remember words, and even tried to analyze the words I was studying as I studied them.” His analysis skills led him not to a career in lexicography or linguistics but rather to graduate study in computer science.

Boisclair, who spent the evening watching the Bee on television while in a chat room with several other former national finalists, looks back on the competition as one of the highlights of his school years. “I think the best thing about it was a sense of camaraderie—for once, I really felt like I fit in somewhere. I was with people my age who were, by and large, ‘on the same wavelength’.” Also, Jasmine Kaneshiro, 14, from Honolulu, Hawaii, was not a favorite, having done quite badly last year, did better. She moved up from 72nd place in the 2005 bee to 45th place. It was her second year. “I’m pleased with my performance this year,” Kaneshiro said.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Top broker and Wall Street adviser Bernard L. Madoff, aged 70, was arrested and charged by the FBI on Thursday with a single count of securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud. He allegedly told senior employees of his firm on Wednesday that his $50 billion business “is all just one big lie” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme (since at least 2005).” Mr. Madoff faces up to 20 years imprisonment and a fine of up to $5 million. FBI agent Theodore Cacioppi said Mr. Madoff’s investment advisory business had “deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in investors’ losses of approximately $50 billion dollars.”

The former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market is also the founder and primary owner of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, the closely-held market-making firm he launched in 1960. The firm is one of the top market maker firms on Wall Street. He founded his family firm with an initial investment of $5,000, after attending Hofstra University Law School. He saved the money earned from a job lifeguarding at Rockaway Beach in Queens and a part time job installing underground sprinkler systems.

A force in Wall Street trading for nearly 50 years, he has been active in the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a self-regulatory organization for the U.S. securities industry. His firm was one of the five most active firms in the development of the NASDAQ, having been known for “paying for order flow,” in other word paying a broker to execute a customer’s order through Madoff. He argued that the payment to the broker did not alter the price that the customer received. He ran the investment advisory as a secretive business, however.

Dan Horwitz, counsel of Mr. Madoff, in an interview, said that “he is a longstanding leader in the financial-services industry with an unblemished record; he is a person of integrity; he intends to fight to get through this unfortunate event.” Mr. Madoff was released on his own recognizance on the same day of his arrest, after his 2 sons turned him in, and posting $10 million bail secured by his Manhattan apartment. Without entering any plea, the Court set the preliminary hearing for January 12.

Madoff’s hedge fund scheme may rank among the biggest fraud in history. When former energy trading giant Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001, one of the largest at the time, it had $63.4 billion in assets. The scheme would dwarf past Ponzis, and it would further be nearly five times the telecommunication company WorldCom fraud and bankruptcy proceedings in 2002.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a separate civil suit on Thursday against Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities and its eponymous founder Mr. Madoff. It was docketed as “U.S. v. Madoff,” 08-MAG-02735, by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan). SEC, New York associate director of enforcement, Andrew M. Calamari, asked the judge to issue seizure orders on the firm and its assets, and appoint a receiver. The SEC pleads, among others, that “it was an ongoing $50 billion swindle; our complaint alleges a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.” It further accused the defendant of “paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different investors” for years. Madoff’s hedge fund business had previously claimed to have served between 11 and 25 clients and had $17.1 billion in assets under management. But virtually all of the assets were missing.

United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Louis L. Stanton on Thursday appointed Lee Richards, a Manhattan lawyer, as the firm’s receiver. A hearing is set for Friday, for a ruling on the SEC’s petition to grant plenary powers to the receiver over the entire firm, and an absolute asset sequestration.

Doug Kass, president of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management said that “this is a major blow to confidence that is already shattered — anyone on the fence will probably try to take their money out.”

Monday, November 28, 2005

SpaceX called off the much-delayed inaugural launch of their new Falcon 1 rocket on Saturday from Kwajalein’s Omelek Island launch site. The intent was to launch the U.S. Air Force Academy’s FalconSat 2 satellite, which will monitor plasma interactions with the Earth’s upper atmosphere and magnetosphere.

The launch was delayed, then finally cancelled after an oxygen boil-off vent had accidentally been left open. The oxygen was unable to cool the helium pressurant, which then proceeded to evaporate faster than it could be replenished. A main computer issue, probably serious enough to cause a scrub on its own, was also discovered.

This long-anticipated flight was originally expected to be launched in January 2005, however a series of setbacks forced a series of delays, with the flight most recently scheduled to be in early 2006. It was intended to be launched from the Kwajalein atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The maiden voyage was originally intended to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with a Naval Research Laboratory satellite and a Space Services Incorporated space burial payload.

Friday, November 25, 2005

In Friday’s National Hockey League contest between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Boston Bruins at the TD Banknorth Garden in Boston, Massachusetts. Peter Forsberg almost netted his first “hat trick” in a Flyers uniform. At one point during the game, he had been given credit for three goals, however an official review took his first goal away, and officially he scored his eighth goal of the season at 13:06 in the second period with assists from Simon Gagne and former Hartford Whaler Sami Kapanen.

To date, there have been 24 hat tricks (3 or more goals in one game) in this NHL season.

Forsberg, a 32 year old native of Sweden, recently joined the Flyers for the 2005-2006 season after spending the NHL lockout season with Modo, Sweden.

The Flyers ended up winning the game 5-3, adding yet another loss to an already disappointing Bruins season.