WOW! Most teens (13-19) have seen this on Channel One news at their schools, but this has also been featured on Good Morning America and other popular television stations.
All the shots featured in their videos are one hundred percent real, they are even getting sponsorship requests for their videos now. This is a way to show teens that anything is possible. Good work guys.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Miley Cyrus, one of Disney’s hottest stars of the past three years with hit records and hit films, has been voted the worst celebrity influence of 2009 by the very people who made her a star, tweens and teens, according to an online poll on Wednesday.
Cyrus, 16, took 42 percent of votes in the poll for AOL’s JSYK.com (Just So You Know) website aimed at 9-15 year-olds, pushing Britney Spears and rapper Kanye West into second and third places, respectively, in a section on worst celebrity influences of the year.
No reasons were given for the poor showing of the singer-actress and the popular star of Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana” television series.
But the ranking follows a year which has seen Cyrus controversially dating a 20 year-old model, making “slant eyes” in an informal snapshot criticized as mocking Asians, and being accused of pole-dancing on a teen awards show.
Cyrus also came in No. 4 in the category of favorite female artist, behind 19-year-old country sensation Taylor Swift, “I Kissed a Girl” singer Katy Perry and R&B star Beyonce. The poll attracted almost 50,000 votes.
“I think Miley is in an interesting space where she is trying to graduate from being ‘Hannah Montana’ and a Disney channel celebrity and coming into her own and having a career beyond Disney,” said Stephanie Cohen, editor of JSYK.com.
“I think her fans still want her to be the sweet Hannah Montana and she is trying to age up…Parents are definitely resisting it,” Cohen told Reuters.
Cyrus has been one of the biggest teen idols in the world since 2006, selling more than 7 million albums, starting her own fashion line, and taking $154 million at the worldwide box-office for “Hannah Montana: The Movie” in 2009.
West, whose interruption of Swift’s acceptance speech at a music award show in September was deemed the most shocking moment of 2009, took 19 percent of votes in the worst celebrity influence section.
Swift, the best-selling U.S. artist of 2008, has risen again in popularity this year.
“I think Taylor Swift has done a great job of showing her true self and coming across as very sweet and down to earth. A lot of her songs are about the underdog and teens can really relate to her,” said Cohen.
Elsewhere, the stars of vampire movies “Twilight” and its forthcoming sequel “New Moon” dominated the JSYK.com poll. Kristen Stewart was voted favorite female movie actress and Taylor Lautner surged past Robert Pattinson in both the favorite male movie star and “cool guy you’d like to hang out with” categories.
Full results can be found at http://www.jsyk.com
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
Jimmy Kimmel owns Melissa joan Hart!
Posted in Amazing Things, Internet News, Latest Updates
Printable Electronics on a technical upgrade? You could say that!
Xerox on Tuesday announced a new silver ink (among other things) that it’s calling, and apparently is, a breakthrough in printable electronics, a leading edge concept that’s generated a lot of discussion but few actual products to date, largely because of the issues that Xerox’s new technology addresses.
In concept, printable electronics is just what it sounds like: using a printer, basically an ink jet, to print electronic circuits. If you can do that reliably, you can print electronic devices for far less than current methods cost. You can also print the devices on a variety of new materials.
The possibilities range from printing on flexible plastic (opening the door to displays you can roll up and put your briefcase), to paper and cardboard (for packaging that can give audio and video instructions for assembling a product, actively remind you to take your medicine, or confirm whether you already took it), to fabric (which will allow wearable electronics — a T-shirt with a display, say, replacing a printed slogan for marketing or for showing support for a political candidate.)
Until now the concept of printable electronics has been more promise than reality. One of the few actual applications has been printing antennas for RFID tags (the technology EZ-Pass or FastPass uses to charge passing cars tolls without forcing them to stop). . Those who keep an eye on the area have been predicting that the ability to print the entire RFID tag, instead of just the antenna (and print it cheaply enough), is the point where printable electronics will begin to take off.
As just one example of the possibilities, if you can print the RFID on packaging as easily as printing a bar code — right along the text and graphics, you can replace bar codes with RFID tags on every box of cereal, every frozen food package, and every can in a supermarket. Do that, and going through the checkout counter becomes a simple matter of walking past an RFID reader to register everything in your cart.
The big hurdle for printable electronics has been finding a practical (as well as economical) way to implement it. Given the goal of being able to print on everything from paper, to cardboard, to plastic, one of the big problems has been that the temperature needed to melt silver ink for printing — the conductor you need in electronics — tends to be too high for the materials you want to print on. Plastic, for example, tends to melt when it gets too hot.
According to Xerox one of the key benefits of its technology is that it can print with sliver ink at a much lower temperature than competing technologies, which makes it much easier for the materials it’s printing on to survive.
Another important benefit is that it can print reliable circuits in non-clean room environments. According to Xerox, printing with competing technologies in open air environments results in circuits that don’t last long or aren’t consistently reliable. However, Xerox says that its technology doesn’t need a clean room any more than a standard printer needs one for putting ink or toner on paper.
In addition to eliminating the need for a clean room and making it easier to print on various materials without ruining them, the new technology also promises to lower costs dramatically — enough to finally it make it practical to print entire RFID tags on anything. Xerox says it could bring the cost of RFID tags down from the current dollar or so each to roughly a penny each, which is to say, Xerox may have just reached the critical take off point that the industry has been looking for.
Still another important piece of the announcement is that Xerox says it will make the technology available to others. Assuming it does what Xerox is claiming, and assuming other companies agree it does what they need, this new technology may be just the breakthrough the industry needs to jump start printable electronics as a major new approach to building electronic devices.
Posted in Amazing Things, Internet News
Tagged electronics, printable, technical, upgrade
What is the scary movie to see this Halloween? According to a review by Richard Corliss (Time.com), Paranomal slays Saw VI!
There was blood at the wickets this pre-Halloween, as the corpses of every one of the weekend’s new movies littered the lobbies of North American theaters. The Saw torture-porn franchise took the biggest hit, with its sixth installment getting chainsawed by the Paranormal Activity phenomenon. Another horror entry, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, was D.O.A. Astro Boy, the third autumn movie based on a kids, pop-culture touchstone, didn’t fly; and neither did the aviation bio-pic Amelia, which took off at low altitude and instantly crashed. As for the weekend’s goriest psychodrama, Lars von Trier,s Antichrist, it performed anemically in limited release. If you’re keeping score of the weekend body count, that’s Trick: 5; Treat: 1. (See a review of Paranormal Activity.)
A very large picture has entered the cyber world and has begun to spread like wildfire among sites such as Digg.com, Facebook, and other related websites. We had to share it!
Real or not? Either way, the conversation is genius and very funny.
Credits to the many bored people among the internet who have time to do such a thing.
Click here to view the image spreading like wildfire!
(It was too big to post on our blog)
Posted in Amazing Things, Facebook/Trends/Insider, Internet News
If childhood obesity is an epidemic, then this viral classic could be easily its iconic “this is your brain on drugs” PSA. A large child and a lady named Janice take a spin on a coaster, and the whole thing is caught on camera. Janice is having a helluva time, laughing from start to finish, while the rotund fella next to her (the mystery of their relationship only makes the video more fascinating) seems to experience a full-blown panic attack as he witnesses the uncomfortable gravitational pull that barely keeps him strapped in while they fly through the air. To some, it’s utter hilarity while to others, it’s humiliation at its most raw. But everyone can agree on one question: how black must Janice’s heart be if she completely ignores the poor guy to her right? Shame, Janice, shame!
