Facebook CEO Zuckerberg donating $500M in stock

By BARBARA ORTUTAY ??|? posted 44 minutes ago

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday he is donating nearly $500 million in stock to a Silicon Valley charity with the aim of funding health and education issues.

By The Associated Press??|? posted Dec 18th - 5:12pm

Three U.S. cigarette makers say they have reached a settlement with 17 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico to resolve a dispute over payments required under a 1998 anti-smoking agreement.

By The Associated Press??|? posted Dec 18th - 4:45pm

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By The Associated Press??|? posted Dec 18th - 4:17pm

SEPARATE TRACK: House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that Republicans would march ahead with their own tax plan while he and President Barack Obama negotiate a broad deal on how to avoid the fiscal cliff.

By TOM MURPHY ??|? posted Dec 18th - 3:46pm

Amgen Inc. has agreed to pay $762 million to resolve federal litigation accusing the drugmaker of marketing the anemia treatment Aranesp for unapproved uses.

By The Associated Press??|? posted Dec 18th - 3:39pm

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER ??|? posted Dec 18th - 3:13pm

The U.S. current account trade deficit narrowed in the July-September quarter to the smallest level since late 2010, but the improvement may not last.

By ALEX VEIGA ??|? posted Dec 18th - 3:11pm

Confidence among U.S. homebuilders inched up this month, to the highest level in more than six and a half years, as builders reported the best market for newly built homes since the housing boom.

By The Associated Press??|? posted Dec 18th - 2:56pm

STEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE: More signs from Washington that policymakers are moving forward in crucial budget talks helped boost stocks. The Standard & Poor's 500 closed at its highest level in two months.

By The Associated Press??|? posted Dec 18th - 2:45pm

Stocks advanced on Wall Street Tuesday, pushing the Standard and Poor's 500 index to its highest close in two months, on optimism that lawmakers are closing in on a budget deal that will stop the U.S. from going over the "fiscal cliff" at the start of next year.

Source: http://www.ksl.com?nid=153&sid=23444359&s_cid=rss-153

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Worth The Calories! London's 11 Most Festive Dining Experiences

Worth The Calories! London's 11 Most Festive Dining Experiences

By Libby Banks

It?s one of life?s cruel ironies: Christmas party season insists on girly frocks and killer heels, but the traditional holiday diet ? banquets of cheeseballs, chocolate, and booze ? is better suited for track pants. Not to be deterred, we're going one step further, sampling some holiday meals that are anything but ordinary. To help you combat your festive-food ennui, we?ve scoured London for the city?s most innovative and experimental meals, and the freshest, most exciting venues.

The hardest thing about putting this feature together? Keeping tabs on London's blink-and-you'll-miss-it gastro scene. And while pop-ups like The Last Supper Club (pictured) and The Pale Blue Door may have closed their festive reservation lists already, we have plenty to keep your taste buds aroused.

From an entire Christmas dinner stacked in a burger bun in Soho to the gilded pleasures of Oscar Wilde's old Piccadilly haunt to a travelling ceviche pop-up, this is how we do.

Start Slideshow

Source: http://www.refinery29.com/holiday-meals?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=rss

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Video: Big snowstorm heads East

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50242059/

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Mindful Mynah Pulls You Away from Distractions with a Gentle Tone

Mac: When you lose focus or space out a bit throughout the day, your mind starts to wander. Mindful Mynah is a lightweight app that sits in your menubar and plays a gentle tone every once and a while to bring your attention back to work.

Mindful Mynah plays one of eight sounds, and you can set it to go off at a variety of intervals. That's all it does, but if you're looking for a simple tool that reminds you to pay attention, or an alarm that isn't filled with abrasive sounds, Mindful Mynah does the trick.

Mindful Mynah ($1.99) | Mac App Store via One Thing Well

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/s-w7-WX_wSw/mindful-mynah-pulls-you-away-from-distractions-with-a-gentle-tone

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Making Back Office Apps Fun ?

Business software is beginning to undergo a design revolution comparable to the seismic shift from the green screen to the graphical user interface (GUI) that began in the mid-1980s. Three forces are at work. One is the retirement of large numbers of members of the baby-boom generation and the rise of a generation that grew up with computers and computer games from a young age. Also, software and technology vendors have been recognizing the need to ?consumerize? business applications as mobile device interactions, gestures and other newer user interface (UI) conventions, and are incorporating these innovations in their stodgy products. I commented on this in my assessment of Tidemark?early this year. A third factor, ?gamification??is all the rage in business consulting circles. The idea is to engage younger employees more completely by transforming dull, routine chores into more entertaining pursuits. I join with those skeptical of just how fun one can make clerical tasks. But software can ? and should ? be made less tedious (and therefore more productive), especially for a new generation of users.

I saw evidence that the generational shift is upon us when walking around this fall?s Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld conferences, which were held just weeks apart. It struck me that the crowd at the 2012 Dreamforce was younger and its energy level was higher. While the focus of Dreamforce has shifted more to those working in IT rather than line-of-business roles (and in this respect the event is increasingly like OpenWorld), I found there more of a sense of fundamental change in design and use of business computing even (and maybe especially) when you stripped away the cloud ballyhoo. The applications I saw demonstrated seemed more fluid, agile and easier to use. By contrast, many of the newer business applications on offer from Oracle have a stale look and feel to them.

Supporting the design revolution over the next several years will be evolving information technology. For example, HTML 5 enables a richer, more capable set of capabilities in web-based and mobile software. A growing number of vendors offer low-cost computing infrastructure in the form of platform-as-a-service, which significantly reduces barriers to entry for startup software companies because up-front costs are low and businesses enjoy fewer constraints to scaling up. Third, there are the ongoing gains in the price and performance of computer processing power and memory. It is ? and will continue to be ? difficult to say which of these is most important, since each will feed off of and drive the others.

Until the 1990s, the market for business applications was pretty small. The client-server revolution had a profound impact on the design of business software, making it easier to work with and more flexible compared to the mainframe applications that preceded them. Much of this change was driven by a switch to relational and multidimensional databases, easier-to-use development tools, and the adoption of graphical user interfaces, which permitted event-driven programming. These underlying technologies made it easier for people to do computer-related jobs. With that came a change in how users expected to work with business software and the information they expected to get from their systems. The new generation of technology was easier to use, more flexible and more powerful. This, and the increasing homogenization of infrastructure elements and buyers? demand for open standards, also contributed to the decline in the cost of developing applications and drove demand for more off-the-shelf applications.

Today we?re on the cusp of a similar generational change as the evolution of underlying information technology drives a major redesign of business software. To oldsters, the coming shift in business computing may be welcome, disconcerting or both. If you?re a baby boomer, you probably can remember what things were like before the client-server era and maybe what life was like before personal computers. The major shifts that took place in the 1990s are about to be repeated in ways that are subtle individually but fundamental in aggregate. People entering the workforce today and people who are in the process of taking leadership positions in companies have a different set of experiences and expectations in dealing with computing devices and technology than the boomers. The set of CIOs that came of age in the 1990s and even some millennials will need to forget old certainties, or the organizations that employ them will be forced to lose their old CIOs.

I?m pretty sure that accounts receivable or order entry will never be fun for all but the chosen few. For the rest, I?m equally certain these processes can be far less painful to execute. More fluid interactions with the software, less burdensome training, easier collaboration and greater adaptability to personal preferences are all feasible and increasingly essential for the coming releases of business applications. I also foresee increased automation to improve efficiency and reduce processing errors in these sorts of purely mechanical tasks. The result will be that, more than ever, executives and managers will need to rethink how work is performed in their parts of the business. Corporations must automate as much of the purely mechanical aspects of work as they can. This is especially true in the finance function, which still grinds out work that can and should be handled hands-free by software. In the process, companies must shift the focus of what people do to tasks that require knowledge, insight, perspective and judgment ? things that (for now at least) are not easily supplied by IT. That would make back office work ?funner,? if not exactly fun.

Regards,

Robert Kugel ? SVP Research

37.769127 -121.960068

Source: http://blog.ventanaresearch.com/2012/12/17/making-back-office-apps-fun/

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U.N. chief alarmed by escalating violence in Syria

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed alarm on Sunday at the worsening violence in Syria, including the reported mass killing of Alawites and alleged firing of long-range missiles on Syrian territory, Ban's spokesman said.

"The Secretary-General is alarmed by the continued dramatic escalation of violence in Syria over the past several days, and the grave danger facing civilians in areas under fire," Ban's spokesman, Martin Nesirky, said in a statement.

"There have been extremely worrisome reports earlier this week of a mass killing of civilians in the village of Aqrab near Hama, as well as alleged firing of long-range missiles in some areas of the country," he said.

In the Aqrab incident, up to 200 members of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority were injured or killed in an attack on their village in central Syria on Tuesday, opposition activists said. The death toll was still not known.

There have also been reports of the Syrian government using Scud missiles. NATO's U.S. commander said on Friday the alliance was deploying the Patriot anti-missile system along Syria's northern frontier because Assad's forces had fired Scud missiles that landed near Turkish territory.

Nesirky said that "continued bombing raids by fixed-wing military aircrafts and attack helicopters on populated areas have been amply documented."

"Today's reports of aerial bombing amid intense violence resulting in many casualties among the Palestinian refugee population in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus are a matter of grave concern," he said.

Activists said fighter jets had bombed the Yarmouk camp, killing at least 25 people sheltering in a mosque.

Nesirky said Ban "calls on all sides to cease all forms of violence. The Secretary-General reminds all parties in Syria that they must abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect civilians."

"Targeting civilians or carrying out military operations in populated areas, in an indiscriminate or disproportionate fashion that harms civilians is a war crime," he added.

Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa told a Lebanese newspaper that neither forces of President Bashar al-Assad nor rebels can win the war in Syria. That is a view a number of U.N. officials and diplomats have voiced privately to Reuters.

The U.N. Security Council has been incapable of taking any meaningful action in the conflict. Veto powers Russia and China refuse to condemn Assad or support sanctions. Assad's government accuses Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the United States and other Western governments of supporting and arming the rebels, an allegation the governments deny.

Meanwhile, U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has failed to bridge the gaps between the Russian and U.S. positions on Syria, which U.N. diplomats say is at the heart of the longstanding deadlock on the Security Council.

Nesirky said Ban "reiterates his call on the international community to make every effort to stop the tragic spiral of violence in Syria and urgently to promote an inclusive political process leading to a peaceful political transition."

(Reporting By Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-n-chief-alarmed-escalating-violence-syria-042935759.html

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White House: Gun control is only part of answer to address violence

In the aftermath of Friday's Newtown school shooting, we've heard tales mostly horrifying and occasionally heroic, from surviving witnesses and mourning citizens alike, but this one lies somewhere in between, all the more unshakeable. One six-year-old Sandy Hook student played dead in her first-grade classroom, her family pastor said late Sunday, with the kind of quick thinking that ended up saving her life but now leaves her with the unshakeable memories of watching all her classmates being shot and killed. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-gun-control-only-part-answer-address-183917180.html

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