A Mini mindset: how an automaker's Connected platform could spark a seismic shift in infotainment expectations

Mini sold some 66,000 vehicles in the United States last year, and despite being on American soil (in its current incarnation, anyway) for just 13 years, this market has quickly become its biggest. Those drawn to the brand are likely intrigued by, if not outright enamored of, its quirkiness. Mini likes to say that the company is "Not Normal," and it only takes a glance inside its cartoonish Countryman to see what that means.

During a recent kickoff event to celebrate the impending launch of its Paceman model, we sought to get beneath the sheet metal and gear ratios, instead looking at the kinds of decisions that impact the marriage of automobiles and technology. Turns out, Johnly Velasquez and Chris Potgieter -- two gentlemen in charge of determining what technology ends up in Mini products -- were more than happy to discuss those nuances. In particular, we discussed how those details relate to the future of its Connected platform, the role that infotainment plays in its entire range of motorcars and the opportunities that lie ahead for Mini to embrace alternative power.

Could Mini's prioritization of technology as a pillar of automotive manufacturing influence the entire industry? That's exactly what we'll explore just beyond the break.

Gallery: 2013 Mini Paceman launch gallery

Filed under: Transportation

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Charlie Sheen pays for injured teen's therapy dog

In this Feb. 1, 2013 photo, trainer Jake Guell holds an English golden retriever puppy in Fond du Lac, Wis. Guell will train her to become a therapy dog for a teenager who was severely injured in a fall from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010. Actor Charlie Sheen says he's donating $10,000 for the dog's training and other expenses. (AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger)

In this Feb. 1, 2013 photo, trainer Jake Guell holds an English golden retriever puppy in Fond du Lac, Wis. Guell will train her to become a therapy dog for a teenager who was severely injured in a fall from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010. Actor Charlie Sheen says he's donating $10,000 for the dog's training and other expenses. (AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger)

FILE - In this Feb. 20, 2012 file photo, Teagan Marti, of Parkland, Fla., left, and her mother, Julie, walk to the entrance of American Family Childrens' Hospital in Madison, Wis. Actor Charlie Sheen is gifting the $10,000 to pay for a therapy dog to help Teagan who almost died after plummeting 100-feet from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010. (AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, Craig Schreiner, File)

FILE - In this June 26, 2012 file photo, actor Charlie Sheen attends the FX Summer Comedies Party at Lure in Los Angeles. The actor wired $10,000 to teenager Teagan Marti and her family on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2013, for a therapy dog to help in her rehabilitation from injuries sustained when she plummeted 100-feet from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010. (Photo by Todd Williamson/Invision/AP, File)

One of these English Golden Retriever puppies, photographed on Feb. 1, 2013 in Fond du Lac, Wis., will be trained to become a therapy dog for a teenager who was severely injured in a fall from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010. Actor Charlie Sheen says he's donating $10,000 for the dog's training and other expenses. (AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger)

In this Feb. 1, 2013 photo, an English golden retriever puppy sits with her litter in Fond du Lac, Wis. She will be trained to become a therapy dog for a teenager who was severely injured in a fall from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010. Actor Charlie Sheen says he's donating $10,000 for the dog's training and other expenses. (AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger)

MILWAUKEE (AP) ? (AP) ? There's a 15-year-old Florida girl who didn't really know much about Charlie Sheen before this week ? but does now.

The actor wired $10,000 to Teagan Marti and her family on Thursday for a therapy dog to help in her rehabilitation from injuries sustained when she plummeted 100 feet from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010.

"I think he's a very kind person for helping me and my family and very generous," Teagan Marti said by phone Thursday from her home in Parkland, Fla.

Teagan Marti suffered brain, spine, pelvis and internal injuries in July 2010 when nets and air bags that were supposed to catch riders on a free-fall ride were not raised. She had convinced her family to make the trip from Florida to Extreme World in Wisconsin Dells after seeing the amusement park's Terminal Velocity ride on the Travel Channel.

She was hospitalized in Wisconsin and Florida for three months. She initially had no use of her arms or legs but through physical therapy is able to walk again with a walker.

Teagan Marti's mother, Julie Marti, said they are financially in trouble from the medical bills and her recent divorce. Their house is being foreclosed upon and insurance isn't covering physical therapy anymore, she said. She had no idea how they would pay for the English Golden Retriever puppy.

"I'm in such disbelief," Julie Marti said. "I was crying. ... What a guy. What a guy."

The dog is being trained in Fond du Lac to turn on lights, pick up objects and be the teen's constant companion.

Lucia Wilgus, of Eau Claire, became friends with the Martis after hearing of the accident and has spearheaded fundraising and helped find the dog and arrange training.

She sent a letter this week to Sheen through Sheen's godfather, who is a Wilgus family friend and Benedictine brother in the Benet Lake, Wis. She estimated the training and related costs would be around $6,000.

Sheen said he decided to give more for extra costs. The request had a "personal vibe" since it came through his godfather, and "if there's a need for more I told them to call me," he said.

"I like to pay it forward," Sheen said Thursday in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "People come into your orbit for a reason. You don't always know what that is ahead of time, but if I ignore these requests then I don't have any opportunity to see where these things lead us, or lead me."

He said he doesn't like to publicize most of his donations, but wanted to talk about this one to inspire others to donate.

Teagan Marti gets the dog on her birthday in September but hasn't made up her mind on a name.

"I think they should name the dog Charlie," Sheen joked.

___

Follow Carrie Antlfinger at http://twitter.com/@antltoe

Associated Press

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ROSE PARADE & ESPERI & LORI MCTEAR

Mar 8, 2013

STUDIO THEATRE (A)

Tickets: ?10

Studio Sessions at The Gaiety Studio Theatre continue. Rose Parade are a three piece band from Ayr, committed to experimenting with their own mixture of folk, punk, indie and blues to establish a unique and exciting new sound. Esperi is Scottish multi-instrumentalist Chris Lee-Marr. His music ranges from acoustic storytelling to colourful electronica soundscapes incorporating his trademark acoustic guitar. Lori McTear is one of Scotland?s finest upcoming new singer songwriter talents, blessed with a beautiful voice and disarmingly easy going charm, she?s one for the future..

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Bizarre sea slug discovered with a disposable penis

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Why Beef Is Becoming More Like Chicken

The beef industry has been shrinking for decades

Photo by Pablo H. Caridad/iStockphoto/Thinkstock

A new cattle drug called Zilmax is being widely used in the industrial feedlots where most of America?s beef comes from, but not because it produces a better sirloin. In fact, it has been shown to make steak less flavorful and juicy than beef from untreated cattle. Many feedlot owners, big meatpackers, and at least one prominent industry group resisted the drug, worrying that the beef industry would turn off consumers if it started churning out lower-quality steaks.

So what accounts for the sudden popularity of Zilmax? Zilmax is a highly effective growth drug, and it makes cattle swell up with muscle in the final weeks of their lives. And despite concerns within the industry, the economics of modern beef production have made the rise of Zilmax all but inevitable.

The beef industry has been shrinking for decades, a problem that can be traced to cheap chicken. Poultry companies like Tyson Foods figured out in the 1930s and ?40s how to raise chickens in a factory-like system. Using a business model called vertical integration, poultry companies like Tyson began to control every aspect of animal production, from the hatchery to the farm and the slaughterhouse. After the dawn of vertical integration, chickens were raised in barn-like warehouses on the farm, killed and butchered along assembly lines nearby, and, later, shipped out to big customers like McDonald?s and Wal-Mart?with every step of the process dictated by the same company. In the 1990s, the same model was widely applied to pork production, cutting out the middlemen and leading to a drop in pork prices (after adjusting for inflation).

As chicken got cheaper, it took top billing on fast-food menus. Beef got pushed aside. Some companies have tried to vertically integrate cattle production, but it has never panned out economically, thanks to the stubborn biology of cows. Chicken and pigs have offspring in big numbers, which lends itself to industrial-sized barns. (Hens lay a steady supply of eggs that yield full-grown chickens in about two months; sows bear big litters of piglets that reach maturity in about six months.) But a cow can only have one calf at a time, and the gestation period lasts nine months. After that, a calf suckles from its mother for about four months. It would be exorbitantly expensive to confine that life cycle in a warehouse, since the cow and calf would have to be sheltered and fed for over a year, just to get one full-grown heifer out of the deal. As a result, the vast majority of calves are still born and reared on wide-open ranchland, where herds of them eat free grass and stick by their mother?s side.

But cattle producers still imitate the heavily industrialized chicken industry to compete. Zilmax is part of a new regime for raising cattle that emphasizes higher production and cost-cutting wherever possible. This regime is what created the modern-day feedlot, where thousands of cattle, after being raised on open ranchland, are corralled on muddy hillsides to spend the last few months of their life eating corn. It is also what necessitates the battery of pharmaceuticals and feed additives that cattle must consume to stay healthy and gain weight?as Michael Pollan and others have noted, cattle didn?t evolve to digest corn, so they easily become sick on feedlots without careful monitoring.

Even with these advancements, the cattle business is still divided in half: On one side are independent ranches and feedlots that raise cattle; on the other side are big meatpackers that buy cattle from feedlots, slaughter them, and sell the beef. The relationship between cattlemen and meatpackers veers between amiable and adversarial. Neither can succeed without the other, but both are desperate to increase profits.

Enter Zilmax. Originally developed to treat asthma in humans, it was later found to be a ?repartitioning agent? in cattle, changing the animals? metabolism so they produce more muscle instead of fat. While this can boost the amount of meat per carcass, it can remove the very qualities that people like about beef, like the fatty marbling that adds juiciness and flavor. In 2006, Intervet Inc., the company that originally made Zilmax, won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to use it in the food supply, even after noting in its application to the FDA that ?overall tenderness, juiciness, flavor intensity and beef flavor were all statistically different [in Zilmax-treated beef] compared to controls.? (Intervet?s application also said consumers probably wouldn?t notice the lesser quality.) The drug wasdrug d launched commercially in the United States in 2007 and is now sold by Merck Animal Health.

At first, meatpackers greeted Zilmax with skepticism. Early research showing the harmful effects on beef quality scared off many feedlot owners who would have purchased it. By the late summer of 2011 only two of the major meatpackers, Tyson Foods Inc. and JBS SA, accepted cattle treated with Zilmax, according to feedlot managers and the companies. Cargill, which was concerned about quality, didn?t accept Zilmax-treated cattle until 2012. National Beef Packing Co. refused to comment on its Zilmax practices for this article, but according to feedlot managers, that company also began accepting Zilmax-treated animals last year. Those four major meatpackers control roughly 85 percent of the market, so when they decide to accept a new practice, as they now have with Zilmax, its implementation is swift across the entire beef supply.

As Zilmax gains popularity, it is creating a kind of positive feedback loop. As more feedlots use it and more meatpackers accept it, more of their competitors feel pressured to do the same just to keep up, even if they have concerns about Zilmax?s effects.

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Media Alert Because Shepard Smith is interviewing Catholic guests in Rome, Bill...

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Google Now widget, Movie options, and new search options added to Android 4.1 smartphones

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The Google Search Android app has been updated to include a new Google Now widget that shows small versions of important cards on the home screen, and adds new options for Google Now search cards.

A Google Now widget has been added to the home screen. The widget can take up an entire screen and showcase current weather, upcoming appointments, stocks, news, and more. It can be resized to show just the basic information about current weather and the forecast for the following day.

Android 4.1 or later devices can now download the updated Google Search application, which includes support for Movie passes from Fandango. Google Now already provided search options and movie times on films, but users can now set it to provide notifications when near a theatre or on "Movie Days" and get tickets from Fandango. Movies have also been updated to include ratings from film critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Other features include Zillow real estate listings, the ability to add collegiate sports, and a button that can listen to identify music being played in the background. It's easy to access the music button by tapping the blue music note when launching a Voice search, but it works only in the U.S.

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Source: http://www.mobileburn.com/21231/news/google-now-widget-movie-options-and-new-search-options-added-to-android-41-smartphones

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