Based on data from the Intrade prediction market. 10-30-2010
2010 Senate Race For Republican Control Handicap - What To Watch For
A Republican Party politico in the thick of watching the races for the Senate on November 2, 2010, explained the simplest way to do the math, with 9 pickups meaning a 50-50 Senate and 10 giving Republicans control.
The Senate seats that seem to be Republican Party locks are Indiana, Arkansas and North Dakota. All-but-sure things, in this Republican's view, are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Illinois. THAT'S SIX. Then start adding states where margins are razor thin.
His order is: Nevada would be 7; Colorado would be 8; West Virginia would be 9; Washington would be 10; California would be 11.
Needless to say, a run of the table would become not just an undeniable and historic change of power in Washington D.C. but a restraining order on the 16% growth of spending in Government budgets applied over these last 19 months at a time the economy grew only 1.2%.
So ... get out there on November 2, 2010 and not just vote for a Republican Party candidate, issue a restraining order!
Always wondered where Springfield really is? Does anyone really know? Well the folks at 7-Eleven do – in fact they’ve been working very closely with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. The Kwik-E-Mart was made famous in The Simpsons and has landed in the streets of Burbank, Ca.. Image Credit: 7-Eleven Corporate website - YouTube Video (below) Credit: LAMISCH
Kwik-E-Mart Debut In Twelve "Springfield's"
Just before the release of the feature length movie, "The Simpson's Movie", scheduled for release on July 27th, twelve 7-Eleven convenience stores in North America have been converted to the famed "Kwik-E-Mart" stores.
We, at MAXINE were just minding our own business when all of a sudden we came upon a very crowded store where once a 7-Eleven stood on Olive Avenue in Burbank.
To our amazement, there stood a complete Kwik-E-Mart store and about 400 people were snaked from the front door to around the corner of the building wanting to share in the experience of a real life movie promotion.
It is pretty cool in that the Kwik-E-Mart not only looks like a Kwik-E-Mart, but it will sell products only found at the fictional store in Springfield. That's right, Buzz Cola, KrustyO's cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.
Every promotion though has something that can kill a BUZZ ... no, really!
You are correct in guessing that there will be NO BUZZ BEER sold at the Kwik-E-Mart.
That is a Buzz Killer for sure!
Excerpts from AP via Yahoo! News -
7-Elevens become Simpsons 'Kwik-E-Marts' By DAVID KOENIG, AP Business Writer - Sun Jul 1, 7:44 PM ET
DALLAS - Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of "The Simpsons" fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art.
Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO's cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.
It's all part of a campaign to hype the July 27 opening of "The Simpsons Movie," the big-screen debut for the long-running television cartoon, which loves to lampoon 7-Eleven as a store that sells all kinds of unhealthy snacks and is run by a man with a thick Indian accent.
For 20th Century Fox Film Corp. and Homer's creators at Gracie Films, the stunt is a cheap way to call attention to their movie, since 7-Eleven is bearing all the costs, which executives of the retail chain put at somewhere in the single millions. ---- "We thought if you really want to do something different, the idea of actually changing stores into Kwik-E-Marts was over the top but a natural," said Bobbi Merkel, an executive for of 7-Eleven's advertising agency, FreshWorks, a unit of Omnicom Group Inc. "It shows they get the joke."
The monthlong promotion has been rumored a long time — it's hard to keep a secret known by so many suppliers and franchisees — but 7-Eleven managed to keep the locations of the stores quiet until early Sunday morning. That's when the exteriors of 11 U.S. stores and one in Canada were flocked in industrial foam and given new signs to replicate the animated look of Kwik-E-Marts.
The U.S. locations where a 7-Eleven store was transformed into a Kwik-E-Mart are New York City; Chicago; Dallas; Denver; Burbank, Calif.; Los Angeles; Henderson, Nev.; Orlando, Fla.; Mountain View, Calif.; Seattle; and Bladensburg, Md. ---- The Fox/7-Eleven deal is an example of a practice called reverse product placement. Instead of just putting products prominently in a movie or TV show, fake goods move from the screen to reality.
In some cases, 7-Eleven has contracted with manufacturers of similar products to make their Kwik-E-Mart counterparts. Malt-O-Meal, the Northfield, Minn., cereal maker, will conjure up a recipe for KrustyO's, for example. In others, existing products will simply be renamed. One flavor of 7-Eleven's own Slurpee will be sold as "WooHoo! Blue Vanilla" Squishee for the month. ---- After Fox pitched a 7-Eleven tie-in last year, representatives from the studio, the stores, and Gracie Films — including Simpsons creator Matt Groening and executive producer James L. Brooks, met in Los Angeles to kick around ideas. Brooks added one — holding a contest to let one fan be drawn into a future episode of the TV show.
7-Eleven executives loved the idea. They had surveys showing a strong overlap between their customers and fans of the show — both tend to be young and male. It sounded like cash registers ringing.
"They've been looking at Squishees and KrustyO's and Buzz Cola for years and have never been able to put their hands on it," said Merkel, the advertising executive.
But they won't find Duff beer, the brand chugged by Homer Simpson. The movie will be rated PG-13, and selling a Simpson-themed beer "didn't seem to fit," said Rita Bargerhuff, a 7-Eleven marketing executive. "That was a tough call, but we want to make sure it's considered good, responsible fun."
Bargerhuff predicted extra sales to Simpsons fans will more than offset the cost of the promotion and create new customers for the chain. She also said the chain is prepared for crowds and will have extra security and clerks at the Kwik-E-Marts. Reference Here>>
Always wondered where Springfield really is? Does anyone really know? Well the folks at 7-Eleven do – in fact they’ve been working very closely with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.
Scientists have discovered the most effective method yet to convert glucose, found in plants worldwide and nature’s most abundant sugar, to HFM, a chemical that can be broken into components for products now made from petroleum. Image Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Hydroxymethylfurfural - A Substance For The Ages
Oil has become the root substance of our modern society. The compounds not only fuel our automobiles, they are the building blocks that form plastics and chemical compounds that make modern life easier.
Corn and other plant material, when distilled to make Ethanol, have been heralded as the replacement for gasoline for our cars but what if we were able to use plant material for more … much more.
Well, scientists at the The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland Washington is a US Department of Energy (DOE) government research laboratory, have released an article to the journal, Science, that describes just this breakthrough.
Scientists have discovered the most effective method yet to convert glucose, found in plants worldwide and nature's most abundant sugar, to Hydroxymethylfurfural - HMF, a chemical that can be broken into components for products now made from petroleum.
Excerpts from press release issued from The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) -
Scientists get plastic from trees Submitted by Vidura Panditaratne - PNNL - Fri, 2007-06-15
The researchers at PNNL-based Institute for Interfacial Catalysis, or IIC, took a giant step closer to the biorefinery when they directly converted sugars ubiquitous in nature to an alternative source for those products that make oil so valuable, with very little of the residual impurities that have made the quest so daunting.
“What we have done that no one else has been able to do is convert glucose directly in high yields to a primary building block for fuel and polyesters,” said Z. Conrad Zhang [Chief Scientist - Institute for Interfacial Catalysis, Pacific Northwest National Lab], senior author who led the research.
That building block is called HMF, which stands for hydroxymethylfurfural. It is a chemical derived from carbohydrates such as glucose and fructose and is viewed as a promising surrogate for petroleum-based chemicals.
Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature’s most abundant sugar. “But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,” Zhang said. “In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,” including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals.
Zhang, lead author and former post doc Haibo Zhao, and colleagues John Holladay and Heather Brown, all from PNNL, were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70 percent from glucose and nearly 90 percent from fructose while leaving only traces of acid impurities. To achieve this, they experimented with a novel non-acidic catalytic system containing metal chloride catalysts in a solvent capable of dissolving cellulose.
The solvent, called an ionic liquid, enabled the metal chlorides to convert the sugars to HMF. Ionic liquids provide an additional benefit: It is reusable, thus produces none of the wastewater in other methods that convert fructose to HMF. ---- “This, in my view, is breakthrough science in the renewable energy arena,” said J.M. White, IIC director and Robert A. Welch chair in materials chemistry at the University of Texas. “This work opens the way for fundamental catalysis science in a novel solvent.”
The chemistry at work remains largely a mystery, Zhang said, but he suspects that metal chloride catalysts work during an atom-swapping phase that sugar molecules go through called mutarotation, in which an H (hydrogen) and OH (hydroxyl group) trade places. ---- “The key is to take advantage of the open form to perform a hydride transfer through which glucose is converted to fructose.”
Zhang’s next step is to tinker with ionic solvents and metal halides combinations to see if he can increase HMF yield from glucose while reducing separation and purification cost.
“The opportunities are endless,” Zhang said, “and the chemistry is starting to get interesting.” Read All>>
Based on data from the Intrade prediction market. 10-30-2010
