After yesterday’s bad news for the owners of Nokia Belle first generation phones, the Nokia N8, C7, C6-01, E7 and X7, Nokia has confirmed that a separated update is being prepared.
The Official confirmation came from discussions.europe.nokia.com forums by a moderator that have reported that Nokia is gathering feedback from the recent update released and new changes and fixes should come soon. Here’s the post in question:
[Thanks djak272 for the tip]
Facebook plans to increase its $2.5 billion credit line to help cover a major tax hit when employee stock awards vest shortly after it goes public, according to two sources familiar with the company's plans. The world's largest social media network, which boosted its borrowing capacity by two-thirds just six months ago, is taking advantage of its strong position to get more financing for its phenomenal growth, the sources said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about such plans. A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment. "All these tax obligations are being created and you need cash to take care of it. You see this all the time but in this case it will be substantial," said Michael Moe of GSV Capital, which owns Facebook shares. "Having the cash to be able to take care of that makes a lot of sense. That would be the motivator of a larger credit facility." Facebook has said it plans to pay taxes on its employees' restricted stock units, or RSUs, when they vest six months after the company's initial public offering. The exact amount is likely to total billions of dollars, based on Facebook's stock price at the time. Helping employees cover tax on RSUs is relatively unusual and leaves the employer with a "very expensive obligation" that could increase if Facebook shares climb, said Bart Greenberg, a partner at law firm Haynes and Boone who advises start-up tech companies. "It could create such a large cash obligation that it eats up most of the credit facility," Greenberg added. "That facility may have been originally set aside for acquisition opportunities or working capital." Facebook said it may sell equity securities, tap its credit facility, use cash or a combination of these options to meet its tax obligation, according to its IPO filing. In February 2011, Facebook set up a $1.5 billion credit agreement with affiliates of Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America's Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital, the leading underwriters of the company's IPO. In September 2011, the borrowing capacity was increased $2.5 billion. "The golden rule of finance is that you get the money when you can, not when you need it," said Moe, who co-founded investment bank ThinkEquity. "Creating maximum flexibility will allow you to be efficient with your use of capital but also opportunistic when appropriate." Some other tech companies that recently went public have also arranged similar credit facilities. Zynga [ZNGA Loading... () 
] , the social games giant, set up a $1 billion facility with some underwriters of its IPO, which happened late last year. Facebook and Zynga generate substantial profits, but the companies have big credit facilities because it is good corporate finance strategy to line up back-up cash from a position of strength, Moe and others said. The months leading up to an IPO are a good time for companies to arrange credit facilities because they have the most negotiating power with banks vying for lucrative roles in equity offerings, according to the chief financial officer of a large private tech company who asked not to be identified.Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.There were no reports of injuries among the 71 people aboard.
Authorities say Flight 5124 landed around 6:20 p.m. Monday, shortly after the pilot was approaching the airport to land as scheduled and noticed a landing gear problem.
Newark firefighters were called to the scene, but found no smoke or fire aboard the plane.
A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says the airport was closed shortly after the landing. Two of the airport's three runways reopened about an hour later.
Additional details were not immediately available.
The report, compiled from interviews with more than 300 people, delivers a scathing view of how leaders played down the risks of the meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant that followed a massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The report by the private Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation also paints a picture of confusion during the days immediately after the accident. It says the U.S. government was frustrated by the scattered information provided by Japan and was skeptical whether it was true.
The U.S. advised Americans to leave an area within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the plant, far bigger than the 12-mile (20-kilometer) Japanese evacuation area, because of concerns that the accident was worse than Japan was reporting.
The misunderstandings were gradually cleared up after a bilateral committee was set up on March 22 and began regular meetings, according to the 400-page report.
The report, compiled by scholars, lawyers and other experts, credits then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan for ordering Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility running the plant, not to withdraw its staff and to keep fighting to bring it under control.
TEPCO's president at the time, Masataka Shimizu, called Kan on March 15 and said he wanted to abandon the plant and have all 600 TEPCO staff flee, the report said. That would have allowed the situation to spiral out of control, resulting in a much larger release of radiation.
A group of about 50 workers was eventually able to bring the plant under control.
TEPCO, which declined to take part in the investigation, has denied it planned to abandon Fukushima Dai-ichi. The report notes the denial, but says Kan and other officials had the clear understanding that TEPCO had asked to leave.
But the report criticizes Kan for attempting to micromanage the disaster and for not releasing critical information on radiation leaks, thereby creating widespread distrust of the authorities among Japanese.
Kan's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
Kan acknowledged in a recent interview with The Associated Press that the release of information was sometimes slow and at times wrong. He blamed a lack of reliable data at the time and denied the government hid such information from the public.
It will take decades to fully decommission Fukushima Dai-ichi. Although one of the damaged reactor buildings has been repaired, others remain in shambles. A group of journalists, including a reporter from The Associated Press, were given a tour of the plant on Tuesday.
Workers have used tape to mend cracks caused by freezing weather in plastic hoses on temporary equipment installed to cool the hobbled reactors.
"I have to acknowledge that they are still rather fragile," plant chief Takeshi Takahashi said of the safety measures.
The area is still contaminated with radiation, complicating the work. It already has involved hundreds of thousands of workers, who have to quit when they reach the maximum allowed radiation exposure of 100 millisieverts a year.
The report includes a document describing a worst-case scenario that Kan and the chief of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission secretly discussed two weeks after the disaster.
That scenario involved the possibility of more nuclear fuel rods burning, causing the release of more radiation and requiring the evacuation of a much wider region, including Tokyo.
The report also concludes that government oversight of nuclear plant safety had been inadequate, ignoring the risk of tsunami and the need for plant design renovations, and instead clinging to a "myth of safety."
"The idea of upgrading a plant was taboo," said Koichi Kitazawa, a scholar who heads the commission that prepared the report. "We were just lucky that Japan was able to avoid the worst-case scenario. But there is no guarantee this kind of luck will prevail next time."
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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Okuma, Japan, contributed to this report.
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Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at http://twitter.com/yurikageyama and Mari Yamaguchi at http://twitter.com/mariyamaguchi
The campaign has launched telephone robocalls throughout the state slamming rival Mitt Romney for opposing the auto industry bailout in late 2008 and early 2009, and urging Democrats to show up for Tuesday’s Republican primary and cast ballots for Santorum.
“Michigan Democrats can vote in the Republican primary on Tuesday. Why is it so important?” the voice on the call says. “Romney supported the bailouts for his Wall Street, billionaire buddies, but opposed the auto bailouts. That was a slap in the face to every Michigan worker, and we’re not going to let Romney get away with it.”
The call urges listeners to “send a loud message” to Romney by voting for Santorum, even though Santorum, too, opposed the auto industry bailout. It ends with the line: “This call is supported by hard-working Democratic men and women and paid for by Rick Santorum for president.”
Ryan Williams, a Romney spokesman, issued a statement late on Monday that said: “It is outrageous that Rick Santorum is inviting Democrats into the Republican primary to vote against Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum has moved beyond just ‘taking one for the team.’ He is now willing to wear the other team’s jersey if he thinks it will get him more votes. We believe that Republicans will decide who wins Michigan, and we are confident that will be Mitt Romney.”
A Santorum spokesman defended the attempt to turn out Reagan Democrats for Santorum, despite the fact that Santorum’s position on the bailout was the same as Romney’s.
“Any conservative message that reaches out, when it's about creating jobs for all Americans is going to be attractive to Reagan Democrats,” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said in an interview, explaining the raionale for the robocalls. “We’re going to need those Reagan Democrats to win this election.”
Asked about the contradiction in Santorum's robocalls criticizing a position Santorum himself took, Gidley said the content of the robocalls is justified because Romney supported the financial industry bailout while opposing the auto bailout, while Santorum opposed both, suggesting the issue is consistency.
“Governor Romney opposed the auto bailout for the workers of Detroit, but was fine pushing the bailout for his friends on Wall Street,” Gidley said. “Either be all for the bailout or all against the bailout, but don’t pick winners and losers.”
However, the robocalls do not mention Santorum's opposition to the auto bailout, or the consistency issue, and in fact leave listeners with the impression that Santorum supported the auto bailout.
Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by their name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway.
The more pronounceable a person’s name is, the more likely people are to favor them.
“When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it’s easier to comprehend, we come to like it more,” said psychologist Adam Alter of New York University and co-author of a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study published in December.
Fluency, the idea that the brain favors information that’s easy to use, dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that people most liked images of Chinese characters if they’d seen them many times before.
Researchers since then have explored other roles that names play, how they affect our judgment and to what degree.
Studies have shown, for example, that people can partly predict a person’s income and education using only their first name. Childhood is perhaps the richest area for name research: Boys with girls’ names are more likely to be suspended from school. And the less popular a name is, the more likely a child is to be delinquent.
In 2005, Alter and his colleagues explored how pronounceability of company names affects their performance in the stock market. Stripped of all obvious influences, they found companies with simpler names and ticker symbols traded better than the stocks of more difficult-to-pronounce companies.
“The effect is often very, very hard to quantify because so much depends on context, but it’s there and measurable,” Alter said. “You can’t avoid it.”
But how much does pronunciation guide our perceptions of people? To find out, Alter and colleagues Simon Laham and Peter Koval of the University of Melbourne carried out five studies.
In the first, they asked 19 female and 16 male college students to rank 50 surnames according to their ease or difficulty of pronunciation, and according to how much they liked or disliked them. In the second, they had 17 females and 7 male students vote for hypothetical political candidates solely on the basis of their names. In the third, they asked 55 female and 19 male students to vote on candidates about whom they knew both names and some political positions.
Altogether the researchers found that a name’s pronounceability, regardless of length or seeming foreignness, mattered most in determining likability. Ease of pronunciation accounted for about 40 percent of off-the-cuff likability.
“These settings were pretty impoverished, of course. In the real world, so many other things are going on that play a role,” Alter said.
In the latter studies, Alter’s team wanted to get a better sense of name-pronunciation effects outside the lab. They collected the names of 500 randomly selected lawyers, which undergraduates then rated for pronounceability and likability. When the researchers compared their tastes against the lawyers’ academic pedigrees, average salaries and corporate positions, they found a small but noticeable correlation.
With other variables eliminated, about 1.5 percent of a lawyer’s success — at least in this study — seemed to rest on the pronounceability of his or her name.
“Obviously that’s a lot smaller than 40 percent, and we don’t know which lawyer is most competent, which is clearly going to matter the most,” Alter said. “But the name still matters.”
Alter has already been influenced by his own work. If and when he has children, he said, he plans to keep their names simple.
Image: Dave Mosher/Wired
Citation: “The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun.” By Simon M. Lahama, Peter Kovala and Adam L. Alter. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, published online Dec. 9, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002
Dave Mosher is a Wired.com contributor and freelance journalist obsessed with space, physics, biology, technology and more. He lives in New York City. G+