Friday, September 23, 2011

What is your favorite vegetarian recipe? | AnswerFuse.com

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't really eat alot of meat. My favourite recipe is carrot quiche or flan. what you do is mix grated carrots with onions in a frying pan for about 5-10 minutes(you can add salt, pepper, herbs, anything you like). Then add ...

Source: http://answerfuse.com/food-drink/what-is-your-favorite-vegetarian-recipe/-44589/

van gogh usa jobs usa jobs adele someone like you lyrics adele someone like you lyrics beyonce knowles mtv awards

Thursday, September 22, 2011

This Week In Education: Five Best Blogs: Don't Hate The Reformer ...

Blog_robby_robot Why education reform keeps failing?David Cohen: Niche ?reforms? like this could not do enough by themselves to offer real improvement, even if they were accurate and reliable, which they are not.?

Merit Pay Loses Luster?Huffington Post:?Two competing pressures--decreased finances and rising policy interest--have left the future of performance-based teacher compensation uncertain.?

"Fundamentally Devoid of Value Judgement?"?Tom Hoffman:?Is this how David Levin actually thinks??As you can see above, the strengths and virtues chosen certainly reflect value judgements.

Concerns and Recommendations on USDOE Waiver Process?DFER: ?Some states [such as California and Mississippi] should be ineligible for goal-lowering waivers prima facie.?

How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores?ED Hirsch (NYT):?Attention to these structural issues has led to improvements in the best public schools, charter and noncharter. But it is not enough.?

School district uses Race to the Top money for public relations?The Answer Sheet:?A school district that is a finalist for the soon-to-be announced $1 million 2011 Broad Prize for Urban Education is embarking on a public relations effort to end public opposition to its school reform program, which includes a slew of new standardized tests.

Two easy steps to catch cheating schools?LAT (editorial):?California should analyze the multiple-choice test forms to see if they have unusual numbers of erasures. And it should flag schools where the improvement in test scores seems too good to be true.

Pearson Sends Education Commissioners on Free Trips?Winerip (NYT): ?The Knowledge Network, a division of The New York Times Company that provides courses and education services, has also sponsored some events for the state school officers? group.?

Source: http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2011/09/asdfsd.html

philadelphia phillies cher verizon wireless alyssa milano tcf schwarzenegger strike

The Issues With Socially Responsible Investing - CBS MoneyWatch ...

Socially responsible investing (SRI) has been referred to as ?double-bottom-line? investing. The implication is that you?re seeking not only profitable investments, but also investments that meet your personal standards. For instance, some investors don?t want to support companies that sell tobacco products or rely on animal testing. Of course, not everyone has the same set of beliefs, so SRI can mean different things to different people.

According to the Social Investment Forum, total SRI assets in the United States rose from $639 billion in 1995 to $3.07 trillion at the start of 2010. Clearly investors believe in SRI. One question for investors in SRI funds is: Is there a price to pay for avoiding ?sin stocks??

Expenses
To answer the question, we begin by considering that SRI funds are typically more expensive than index funds and passive funds in general. One reason is that they incur the extra costs of screening out the undesirables. Those extra costs hurt returns.

Diversification
SRI investors also typically sacrifice diversification. SRI funds typically are domestic and large cap. Thus, investors sacrifice exposure to small-cap and value stocks, and perhaps international and emerging market stocks as well. They also then lose exposure to the higher expected returns provided by small-cap, value and emerging market stocks.

SRI investors also may be accepting other risks. Because they avoid investing is ?sin? stocks, they?re not fully diversified across industries.

Cost of Capital
There?s one other important point to consider. Economic theory tells us that because there are $3 trillion of SRI investments that avoid ?sin? stocks, the cost of capital of sin stocks is driven higher than it would otherwise be, and the cost of capital of the non-sin stocks is driven lower. In other words, by avoiding investing in sin stocks, investors make those stocks cheaper (smaller and more value-oriented). And since the flip side of the cost of capital is the expected return to investors, SRI investors are missing out on the higher expected returns of ?sin? stocks.

The authors of the study, ?The Price of Sin: The Effects of Social Norms on Markets,? provide evidence that the hypothesis that there?s a societal norm against investing in ?sin? stocks is correct, and that it does impact the cost of capital. The following is a summary of the findings:

  • When compared to stocks of otherwise comparable characteristics, sin stocks have less institutional ownership ? approximately 18 percent lower institutional ownership than comparable stocks (23 percent versus 28 percent).
  • Sin stocks receive 21 percent less analyst coverage.
  • Sin stocks are less held by norm-constrained institutions such as pension plans as compared to mutual or hedge funds that are natural arbitrageurs.
  • The prices of sin stocks are relatively depressed, and, therefore, have higher expected returns than otherwise comparable stocks ? consistent with them being neglected by norm-constrained investors and facing greater litigation risk (e.g., tobacco stocks) heightened by social norms.
  • For the period 1965-2006, a portfolio long sin stocks and short their comparables has a return of 29 basis points per month after adjusting for a four-factor model comprising of the three Fama-French factors and the momentum factor. The statistics are economically significant. And just looking at a portfolio long sin stocks would yield even more significant out-performance of sin stocks relative to these benchmarks.
  • The market-to-book ratios of sin stocks are on average about 15 percent lower than those of other comparable companies. These valuation ratios, using a Gordon growth model calibration, imply excess returns of about 2 percent a year.
  • As out of sample support, sin stocks in seven large European markets and Canada outperform similar stocks by about 2.5 percent a year.

The conclusion we can draw from this study is that social norms have important consequences in for the cost of capital of sin companies. They also have consequences for investors who pay a price in the form of lower expected returns and less effective diversification.

While many investors will vote ?conscious? over ?pocketbook,? there?s an alternative to socially responsible investing that?s at least worth considering: Avoid socially responsible funds and donate the higher expected returns to the charities that you are most passionate about. In that way, you can directly impact the causes you care most about and get a tax deduction at the same time!

Photo courtesy of sludgegulper on Flickr.

More on MoneyWatch:

9 Bits of Conventional Wisdom You Should Ignore
Passive Management Wins in Emerging Markets
T. Rowe Price: Does It Add Value?
Rebalancing Myths That Need to Be Debunked
Why Interest in GNMAs Doesn?t Make Sense

Three ways I can help you become a wiser investor:

Source: http://moneywatch.bnet.com/investing/blog/wise-investing/the-issues-with-socially-responsible-investing/2976/

eli manning ny giants new york giants cbs richard pryor richard pryor nflx

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Monday Music Video: A Biochemical Cover of a Tune from Wicked!

The internet is full of re-jigged tunes where people force a narrative of scientific concepts into a recognizable song. We all know many of these can be painful to listen to (or watch if it is in video format).

But today, I have one so well done, I can watch it over and over. I?ll admit it is more enjoyable in that I?ve taken my fair share of biochemistry.

Ben needed to prove he knew about enzymatic inhibition which he couldn?t do on his midterm exam, so he wrote clever, catchy lyrics to the ?Popular? song from the musical ?Wicked?. To top it off, he can actually sing!

By the way, I get asked a lot by students which courses to take to be a great biologist. One of my top suggestions is biochemistry. Eminently worthwhile.

My favorite verse:

?Now I must begin
Competitive Inhibition
Substrate and inhibitor fight
For the active site
Apparent Km turns out high
Now we know we can kiss that free energy change goodbye.?

Singing begins 2 minutes in, with lyrics provided below!

Lyrics provided by Ben himself:
[Inhibition! ...To the tune of Popular]

When I studied for the midterm I?d forgotten to address
The topic that I skimmed through and bombed it on the test
I see it and my tender heart still cries

Then Professor Villa said there?d be
An extra opportunity
To show we?d learn that topic if we tried
Now this I must admit
I?d underestimated it a bit
That topic that I?d failed so to define
I?ve opened my mind to learn the
Nature of In-

Hibitors! Enzymatic inhibitors
Counted there?re three different kinds
That reversibly bind
And the irreversables
Resemblance of most substrates
React at slower rates
Some don?t even react at all

Now I must begin
Competitive Inhibition
Substrate and inhibitor fight
For the active site
Apparent Km turns out high
Now we know we can kiss that free energy change goodbye

But also know apparent Vmax doesn?t change
Substrate concentrations overcome at higher range
Unlike the uncompetatives that come out strange
Because it?s slower, Apparent Km?s lower
Now let us see mechanisms
For uncompetitive inhibitions

Inhibitor never wins
If substrate?s not in
The E-S complex like we hear, well, heard
Km over Alpha prime goes
Up through rule Le Chatlier, er
La la, It works great, La la, With more substrate
Which makes the product fail to make

Inhibition mixed you?ll see ones
Move in either or directions
Binds to enzyme-substrate complex
Or free enzymes, Raising up apparent Kms
While apparent Vmax drops happen to them
Is that not suicidal
That can?t be right

That?s irreversible! Please!
Irreversible inhibitors
They never come out the same
Cause they chemically change
Never changing back you?ll see
Forever it inhibits the enzyme activity-
Because irreversible inhibitors permanently bind to or damage essential functional groups and may also form a stable noncovalent complex with the enzyme, inhibition cannot therefore be reversed inhibiting most or all binding of the substrate so that the final product will never form which I won?t go into because there was only one slide on irreversible inhibitors and I just said everything that was on there.

It was so much fun
Learning inhibition
I know now not to cram
I?m gonna mind and grind it
When comes the final day?s exam

La la la la, Biochemistry
Just got way less complicated to me!

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=7f1bae197abb3c0bcbb365001ff1091d

monsters vs aliens jeremy maclin julio jones green bay packers dallas cowboys denver broncos patriots

Scientists find way to "disarm" AIDS virus (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) ? Scientists have found a way to prevent HIV from damaging the immune system and say their discovery may offer a new approach to developing a vaccine against AIDS.

Researchers from the United States and Europe working in laboratories on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) found it is unable to damage the immune system if cholesterol is removed from the virus's membrane.

"It's like an army that has lost its weapons but still has flags, so another army can recognize it and attack it," said Adriano Boasso of Imperial College London, who led the study.

The team now plans to investigate how to use this way of inactivating the virus and possibly develop it into a vaccine.

Usually when a person becomes infected with HIV, the body's innate immune response puts up an immediate defense. But some researchers believe HIV causes the innate immune system to overreact. This weakens the immune system's next line of defense, known as the adaptive immune response.

For this study -- published on Monday in the journal Blood -- Boasso's team removed cholesterol from the membrane around the virus and found that this stopped HIV from triggering the innate immune response. This in turn led to a stronger adaptive response, orchestrated by a type of immune cells called T cells.

AIDS kills around 1.8 million people a year worldwide. An estimated 2.6 million people caught HIV in 2009, and 33.3 million people are living with the virus.

Major producers of current HIV drugs include Gilead Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline.

Scientists from companies, non-profits and governments around the world have been trying for many years to make a vaccine against HIV but have so far had only limited success.

A 2009 study in Thailand involving 16,000 volunteers showed for the first time that a vaccine could prevent HIV infection in a small number of people, but since the efficacy was only around 30 percent researchers were forced back to the drawing board.

An American team working on an experimental HIV vaccine said in May that it helped monkeys with a form of the AIDS virus control the infection for more than a year, suggesting it may lead to a vaccine for people.

HIV is spread in many ways -- during sex, on needles shared by drug users, in breast milk and in blood -- so there is no single easy way to prevent infection. The virus also mutates quickly and can hide from the immune system, and attacks the very cells sent to battle it.

"HIV is very sneaky," Boasso said in a statement. "It evades the host's defenses by triggering overblown responses that damage the immune system. It's like revving your car in first gear for too long -- eventually the engine blows out.

He said this may be why developing a vaccine has proven so tricky. "Most vaccines prime the adaptive response to recognize the invader, but it's hard for this to work if the virus triggers other mechanisms that weaken the adaptive response."

HIV takes its membrane from the cell that it infects, the researchers explained in their study. This membrane contains cholesterol, which helps keep it fluid and enables it to interact with particular types of cell.

Normally, a subset of immune cells called plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) recognize HIV quickly and react by producing signaling molecules called interferons. These signals activate various processes which are initially helpful, but which damage the immune system if switched on for too long.

Working with scientists Johns Hopkins University, the University of Milan and Innsbruck University, Boasso's team found that if cholesterol is removed from HIV's envelope, it can no longer activate pDCs. As a result, T cells, which orchestrate the adaptive response, can fight the virus more effectively.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/diseases/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110919/hl_nm/us_aids_hiv_disarm

fsu football fsu football miami hurricanes ted kennedy warren zevon susan lucci halloween costumes

[WATCH]: HCG Diet-From Sleep Apnea-High BP and Type II ...

Health & Fitness Categories

Source: http://optiononeinfoseeker.com/2011/09/19/watch-hcg-diet-from-sleep-apnea-high-bp-and-type-ii-diabetes-to-perfect-health-in-32-days/

beyonce and jay z beyonce and jay z usopen ppl alfred hitchcock corpus polaris

Palestinians to seek UN membership (AP)

UNITED NATIONS ? Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is pressing ahead Tuesday with his diplomatic campaign to gain full U.N. membership, as the divisive issue of Palestinian statehood takes center stage ahead of the opening of the U.N. General Assembly session.

Abbas had meetings scheduled with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, among leaders, as he sought to line up support ahead of his speech Friday to the General Assembly when the Palestinians vow to submit a letter formally requesting U.N. membership.

Envoys of the Quartet of Mideast mediators ? the U.S., the U.N., the European Union and Russia ? planned to meet again Tuesday in an effort to avert a showdown over Palestinian statehood by crafting a way forward that would be enough to persuade the Palestinians to drop their bid and have enough caveats for Israel to get its support.

As the Palestinians edged closer to seeking statehood recognition from the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for Abbas to meet with him in New York. The Israel leader said he wanted to resume peace talks, upping the pressure on Abbas and building on the frenzied diplomacy swirling around the Palestinians' bid.

While any submission by the Palestinians wait weeks or months for the U.N. action, it has Mideast mediators scrambling to find a way to draw the two sides back to a negotiating table.

Regardless, Abbas said he had not been swayed by what he called "tremendous pressure" to drop the bid for U.N. recognition and instead to resume peace talks with Israel. Senior aides to the Palestinian leader said Abbas was undaunted by threats of punitive measures.

"Abbas says to every one: it's enough, 20 years of negotiations are more than enough, the world should intervene and end the Israeli occupation as long as the USA can't," said Mohammed Ishtayeh, an Abbas aide.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, however, there was still time to find a solution to the diplomatic crisis.

Clinton told reporters in New York that the U.S. is talking with all sides to defuse the standoff, noting that there were still several days to seek a compromise before Abbas' speech.

She joined Netanyahu in calling for new talks and repeated the U.S. position that the only path to a separate state for Palestinians is through negotiations with Israel.

Nabil Shaath, senior aide to Abbas, told The Associated Press that the Palestinian leader informed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during their meeting Monday that he would present him with a letter requesting full membership on Friday, ahead of Abbas' speech to the General Assembly.

Any candidate for U.N. membership must submit a letter to the secretary-general stating it is a "peace-loving" state and accepts the U.N. Charter. Ban is expected to examine the Palestinian letter and then send it to the 15-member U.N. Security Council, which must give its approval before a vote in the larger General Assembly.

Ishtayeh said the letter will state: "Palestine is a peace-loving state and has contributed to human civilization, that it has succeeded in building state institutions." It would also cite the need to consider the pre-1967 Mideast War borders as those of the Palestinian state, he said.

Although any submission by the Palestinians could wait weeks or months for U.N. action, it has sparked a flurry of diplomatic activity with Mideast mediators scrambling to find a way to draw the sides back to the negotiating table.

Shaath said last ditch efforts to dissuade the Palestinian president from approaching the Security Council had failed. He said Palestinians had been threatened with harsh punitive measures but had decided to move ahead nonetheless.

The comment appeared to refer to the warnings by some in the U.S. Congress that current and future financial aid to the Palestinian Authority could be in jeopardy if they move ahead with the membership bid. The U.S. gives some $500 million a year in aid to the Palestinians.

Israel has not said how it will respond to a Palestinian declaration of independence, though hardliners in Netanyahu's government have called for a variety of measures, including annexing parts or all of the West Bank or withholding tax funds that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said that by going to the U.N., the Palestinians are violating "the spirit and the word of signed commitments" that pledged to resolve disagreements through negotiations. "Israel reserves the right to respond," he said Tuesday, refusing to elaborate.

Each side in on-again-off-again Israeli-Palestinian talks has accused the other of being an untrustworthy and intransigent participant in the peace process.

In a statement issued late Monday, Netanyahu called on Abbas to begin "direct negotiations in New York and continue them in Jerusalem and Ramallah." It provided no other details or indications that Netanyahu was willing to cede to any of the Palestinians' demands.

Ban "reiterated his support for the two-state solution and stressed his desire to ensure that the international community and the two parties can find a way forward for resuming negotiations within a legitimate and balanced framework," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said after the secretary-general met with Abbas.

The comment underscored the desires of some members of the Quartet of Mideast mediators that Palestinian statehood should not be granted before a resumption of peace talks. While the four international mediators have repeatedly called for renewed negotiations, Russia supports U.N. membership for Palestine.

The long-stalled negotiations have been unable to solve key issues including Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and the status of east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as their capital. Israel captured both areas in the 1967 Mideast war.

Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed at a Monday night meeting that the Quartet envoys should meet again for the third straight day on Tuesday, officials said.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomatic work, said progress was being made on a joint Quartet statement that would include a modest upgrade to Palestinian status at the U.N., address Israel's demand that it be recognized as a Jewish state, and set a broad timeline for renewed negotiations.

The timeframe wouldn't be a deadline, as such, but would be aimed at addressing the Palestinian desire to see quick action. The offer would come with an unchanged message that Washington would veto the Palestinian bid at the Security Council for U.N. membership, but at the very least it would represent a dignity-saving compromise for Abbas' U.S.-backed government.

By already promising a veto in the Security Council, the U.S. has blocked that course for the Palestinians before they even submit the request.

Alternatively, the Palestinians could seek the approval of a majority of the General Assembly's 193 member states to upgrade their status from a permanent observer to a nonmember observer state ? a designation that would leave them with a symbolic victory despite years of failed negotiations and waning hopes for statehood.

In either scenario, the Palestinians will have shown they have the power to force action on the issue at a time when Israel is feeling increasingly isolated in the region.

___

Associated Press writers Amy Teibel in Jerusalem, Karin Laub in Ramallah, West Bank, Matthew Lee and Bradley Klapper in New York, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Diaa Hadid in Jerusalem and Julie Pace in Washington, D.C., contributed reporting.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110920/ap_on_re_us/un_mideast

vegan the bachelor black hole quarantine quarantine frederick douglass john