The worst of the lot included housing starts which dropped more than 10% and jobless claims which swelled to 337K against 312K expected. The news pushed the Fed Funds futures to a 75% chance of a rate cut in October dragging the dollar to new lows. To add insult to injury the TICs data proved shockingly weak, printing at -$69 Billion versus $60 Billion projected. Many analysts noted that the vast majority of the outflow was in equities during the massive liquidation in August. With equity markets having recaptured and exceeded their record highs, the expectation for next month is that many of these negative capital flows will reverse. Although the prospect of an October rate hike is quite real, as we noted in our brief on Friday, "Chairman Bernanke must be aware that further monetary easing so soon after the 50bp cut in September, would immediately spur speculation of yet more cuts before the year end and could easily push the EURUSD to the 1.4500 figure within a matter of weeks, destabilizing an already woefully weak dollar." Next week the US calendar is relatively uneventful with yet more housing data and durable goods on the docket.

Mother Earth Mother Board

During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented. A web of wires was spun across every modern city on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some of the early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it quickly became evident that it was best to keep the number of individual wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more information onto them.

This requires more ingenuity than you might think - wires have never been perfectly transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded the information put into them. In general, this gets worse as the wire gets longer, and so as the early telegraph networks spanned greater distances, the people building them had to edge away from the seat-of-the-pants engineering practices that, applied in another field, gave us so many boiler explosions, and toward the more scientific approach that is the standard of practice today.

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Six Apart prides itself on giving its users more control over their profile, such as showing or hiding individual actions,, that other services (remember Facebook Beacon). "We are starting a new wave of open technology with a Facebook style news feed," Anil Dash, vice president at Six Apart told me.

Controversy over cutting of ‘Boondocks’ episodes

Sooner or later, any satirist who wins a Peabody Award for re-animating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and having him denounce "Soul Plane" runs the risk of upsetting corporate America.

On his Myspace.com page, McGruder has posted the following message to fans: "Okay, so … maybe it's a 13-episode season." More cryptically, links to YouTube clips said to contain content from the episodes posted on McGruder's Myspace page have been mysteriously taken down (when users click on the links to the clips to view them, a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message pops up instead).

Tata working on ultra-green 'air car'

A car that runs on air and releases no pollutants into the atmosphere at low speeds could be offered for sale in India as soon as this year.

The vehicle, which burns small amounts of conventional fuels at higher speeds, has been developed by Moteur Development International (MDI), a French-based, family-owned group that has been working on a roadworthy "air car" for the past decade.

Weather: P/CLOUDY

AUTRYVILLE — Twelve-year-old Jonathan Pounders probably just wishes everybody would leave him alone.

It was noon on a school day, but Jonathan, who has ADHD and bipolar disorder, had been suspended for acting up, and he was waiting for his mother to take him to a doctor’s appointment in Chapel Hill.