Category: News

Just in time for the holidays, The Illustrated Cat (remember those amazing colored pencil drawings?) now has two perfect gift items for the cat lovers in your life: pendants and tote bags, both featuring Johnnie Scoutten’s beautiful cat portraits.

The glass pendants are individually handcrafted and adorned with beads to match the portrait. Each pendant comes with a black satin cord and sells for $60. The tote bags are made of micro fiber material and measure 18″ x 12″ x 5.5″. The bags are fully lined with two inside pockets and a zippered pouch, and they have a magnetic closure. Tote bags are $80 each.

BONUS GIVEAWAY! ENTER TO WIN A PENDANT!

One lucky winner is going receive a handcrafted pendant of their choice from The Illustrated Cat! The winner will get to choose one of Johnnie’s six cat portraits. To enter, please leave a comment on this post. One entry per person. The winner will be chosen in a random drawing on November 22. This giveaway is open to readers everywhere!

This is no surprise at all. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves continues to impress as as it goes on to sell copies, breaking the one million un…

The weight of Harper College’s pewter Presidential Medallion is meant to remind those who wear it of the heavy burden running a school of 40,000 students.

But for the most current recipient, Harper’s newest president, Kenneth Ender, the weight for him is something more, he said.

At Ender’s formal installation last week, community college presidents paraded in cap and gowns and politicians and educational leaders congratulated him in a 90-minute ceremony on the Palatine campus.

Harper’s fifth president in its 44-year history took a more somber tact in his speech compared to the jovial festivities.

Ender has said the almost 1,200 community college presidents like himself are at crossroads.

A high school diploma used to mean employment after graduation but now more than ever some sort of post-secondary education is required as the evolving economy demands a skilled labor force, he said

It’s likely community colleges will be expected to fill a void for its 11.7 million students, especially after a $12 billion federal community college initiative was announced earlier this year.

That challenge is exactly what Ender will be grappling with during his tenure at Harper, he said.

“What we have is a great result – the creation a great 20^th century community college,” Ender said. “What we are all trying to figure out what is a great 21^st Century Community College.”

Challenge for the future 

The American Association of Community Colleges offers a snapshot into the current state of community colleges: Almost half of undergraduates in the U.S. attend a community college. Forty percent are full time. The average age is 29. Almost 60 percent are women and nearly 40 percent are the first generation to attend college. Average tuition is about $2,400 compared with about $6,600 for a 4-year public institution, according to the association.

In June, community colleges came to the educational forefront after President Barack Obama announced a $12-billion initiative to pump money into community colleges, which is designed to boost high school and college graduation rates.

The new federal push has been on the horizon for quite some time, said James Rosenbaum, Northwestern University’s professor of education and social policy.

“A generation ago, community colleges started out as minor element,” Rosenbaum said. “But now they are becoming a big deal.”

The reason for the shift has to do with the demands of the economy, which continues to quickly transition toward a more educated labor force with specialized skills, Rosenbaum said. Health care and information technology are major sectors that are developing rapidly, but to be part of those fields requires serious skills that a high school education can’t offer, he said. A lot of high schoolers don’t like school, preferring to finish and then look for work, but this tactic will likely to fail, leading to one low-paying, dead-end job after another, he said.

Community colleges provide education past high school, like a certificate or associates degree, which students will need if they want any economic stability, he said.

“Society does a bad job warning students what they need,” Rosenbaum, said. “Some kids don’t like school, but they are coming to terms that some college is necessary.

Harper’s role

Ender said he’s well aware of how the economy continues to change education. At 59, he’s committing at least 10 years to Harper where he’ll attempt to address the challenge, he said.

One of solution is for community colleges to work more closely with high schools and colleges. The school will work more closely with local high schools, encouraging students to take college level courses at Harper.

The school will continue to partner with universities to provide 4-year degrees, Ender said.

Through Northern Illinois University, Harper provides a bachelor’s degree in nursing. Just last month, Harper announced the addition of another applied management for students, who are pursuing careers in law enforcement and firefighting.

At Ender’s previous community college, Cumberland County College in New Jersey, the school offered bachelor’s and master’s programs through university partnerships.

Another solutions for community colleges to fill the void will be to provide a broader range of educational opportunities that students might not immediately consider.

Ender points to mechatronic skills, which combines engineering, electronics and computers in the manufacturing field. It can be applied to a variety of other fields, including automotive, pharmaceutical and printing.

Also, community colleges will not be just for younger people, he said. Years ago, a high school diplomas was enough, but now older adults are finding out they need more.

“They find themselves in a situation that they never dreamed of,” Ender said. “These people had jobs. They did everything right, but it wasn’t enough. The 50-plus crowd will be another huge market.”

-Story by Sue Ter Maat, Triblocal.com reporter

 

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 This is the week, guys! No more filler games! Well, alright, so we still have a couple of titles from the Imagine and Petz series, but never min…

As he raced through the U.S. Capitol this fall, Dr. Richard “Buz” Cooper, a 73-year-old University of Pennsylvania medical school professor, didn’t mince words. He denounced as “malarkey” a reigning premise of the health care debate — that one-third of the nation’s $2.5 trillion in annual health spending is unnecessary — and said that the idea came from “a bunch of clowns.”

The harsh language underscores Cooper’s disdain for highly regarded work — as close to a sacred cow as anything in health care — developed over two decades by the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. The work by Dartmouth Medical School researchers shows huge geographic variations in the amount of care that hospitals and doctors provide, with spending in some areas running three times as much as in others. Dartmouth argues much of the high spending is due to extra procedures and tests that often don’t help patients, but bring in more money for doctors and hospitals.

The argument has been embraced by President Barack Obama’s administration and several lawmakers, who have repeatedly said that the nation could save as much as $700 billion a year — if only doctors and hospitals in high-spending areas, such as Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago, would end their profligate practices and adopt the thriftier ways of say, the Geisinger Health Systems, based in Danville, Pa. The House has inserted provisions in the health bill that could punish high-spending hospitals in Philadelphia and elsewhere, while rewarding low-spending facilities in places such as Albuquerque, N.M., Madison, Wis., or Portland, Ore.

The Poverty Factor

But Cooper and some allies say that would be a disaster and hurt efforts by doctors and hospitals to care for the poor. Cooper says the Dartmouth research doesn’t take into account the high cost of helping the impoverished, who often spend more time in hospitals because they don’t have people to care for them at home and often return to the hospital when they can’t afford needed medications.

“There is abundant evidence that poverty is strongly associated with poor health status, greater per capita spending, more hospital readmissions and poorer outcomes,” he wrote in an Oct. 24 post on his blog. “It is the single strongest factor in variations in health care and the single greatest contributor to ‘excess’ spending.”

“Don’t say our failure is that medicine is bad in Mississippi and the South Bronx,” Cooper adds in an interview. “That’s a social problem. We’re bad because we don’t spend enough in areas of poverty.”

Cooper is emerging as the most provocative voice among a small group of health care experts raising doubts about Dartmouth’s methods, which focus on comparing how hospitals treat Medicare patients in their final two years of life. It is from those studies that Dartmouth came to its most far-reaching conclusion: that too much medical care can actually hurt patients rather than help them. But the skeptics say the way hospitals treat Medicare patients can’t be translated into firm conclusions about the country’s overall health spending and trends.

Dartmouth researchers say that Cooper is flat-out wrong. They say that even when you take the socio-economic levels of patients and sicker populations into account, some hospitals spend far more than others without good reason. And they say their studies show Medicare spending is a good indication of how hospitals generally operate.

“It’s impossible to carry on a debate with somebody who does not understand statistics, and seems uninterested in learning,” Jonathan Skinner, a senior author of the Atlas, says of Cooper.

Other critics of Cooper — and there are many — say he has not offered a better way to analyze spending variations among hospitals, but instead takes potshots. They say he tends to embrace data that back up his long-held view that the country needs more doctors, and is too eager to flout professional customs. In December, he was banned from writing for the journal Health Affairs for five years for breaking a rule against sharing articles before publication.

Hospitals Defend Spending

The counterattacks haven’t slowed Cooper down. These days, he’s working with several Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Allyson Schwartz, D-Pa, whose district includes parts of Philadelphia, and Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. Cooper’s criticisms are also being cited by the lobbyists for the nation’s teaching hospitals and some state hospital associations, including New York’s. All are trying to ensure the health overhaul bills don’t lead the government to unfairly penalize high-spending parts of the country.

“Our institutions are barely getting by,” says Atul Grover, chief advocacy officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges. “They’re struggling to take care of people who can’t get care anywhere else, and now they’re talking about cutting them, saying they’re inefficient.”

Hospitals in the greater Philadelphia area certainly have reason to worry. Overall, the region’s hospitals billed Medicare $66,974 on average for patients in the last two years of life, according to the most recent Dartmouth data, covering the years 2001 through 2005. That was 25 percent above the state average of $53,373, and 27 percent above the national average of $52,838.

The highest-spending hospitals – such as Temple University Hospital, which Dartmouth says spent $85,538 on the average Medicare patient for the period – say they provide more treatment because their patients are poor and enter Medicare with greater health problems. A Temple spokeswoman says they treat more Medicaid patients than any other hospital in the state. Teaching hospitals in the city note that under Medicare rules they get paid extra.

“Our costs are higher because we have more technology, we have a wider range of programs,” says Ralph Muller, chief executive officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which spent $80,727 on Medicare patients in their final two years of life. “When you adjust for a teaching hospital, a lot of the variation goes away.”

Dartmouth researchers counter that they have compared hospitals with similar patients’ populations and still found wide differences in spending.

“There are a lot of people and a lot of hospitals, particularly in big cities, that feel threatened by the message of the Dartmouth Atlas,” says Skinner. “For them to find a spokesperson who is absolving them of all sin is very appealing to them.”

So who’s right? To help find an answer, the House health overhaul legislation would direct the prestigious Institute of Medicine to research the causes of geographic variations. The institute then would recommend how Medicare can best identify and clamp down on regions where the spending is unjustifiably high. In a partial victory for Cooper and his allies, the bill requires that the institute take into account “socio-economic factors” as well as the health status of patients.

Other researchers’ work is raising questions about Dartmouth’s conclusions. A recent study published in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, followed patients at six California teaching hospitals who had been hospitalized for heart failure. The study found that those who received more treatment from the hospital — through procedures, tests or days as a patient — were more likely to survive than those who got less medical care.

Measuring Waste

Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, a consulting firm in Washington, says some low-spending hospitals may be providing insufficient care, while higher spenders may be giving the needed amount. “What the Cooper analysis does is show why it’s so difficult to change the system,” says Mendelson, a top health budget expert in the Clinton administration.

But many of the nation’s most prominent health economists, including Princeton University’s Uwe Reinhardt and Harvard University’s David Cutler, argue there is substantial variation among hospital spending even when the special needs of high poverty areas are fully analyzed.

“I have yet to meet anyone who really plays around in the health care system who really thinks there’s less than 20 percent waste,” says Cutler, who advised Obama during his presidential run.

More answers are coming. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent congressional agency, is performing its own analysis. Early on, it has found that regional spending differences persist even after patients’ health is taken into account. But the disparities are not as wide as Dartmouth’s.

“Before Dartmouth came along, nobody measured anything,” says Skinner. “We did use the methods we thought would work the best, given our very scarce resources. Are they the best measures? No. Are there better measures? Yes. But there is certainly information in these measures that cannot be denied by the people who want to deny them.”

Ultimately, Cooper may be vindicated not for his denunciations of Dartmouth, but for being an early, vocal doubter that the government can pinpoint excessive health care spending with enough precision to justify paying doctors and hospitals less.

“The thing with Buz Cooper is he does raise significant and important issues that challenge the status quo’s thinking and conventional wisdom and he should always be taken seriously,” says Reinhardt, the Princeton economist. “If he goes around the Hill and says, ‘Don’t cut Florida and don’t cut Louisiana and Texas until you know more,’ I would be on his side with that one. If he totally belittles the (Dartmouth) work, I think that would be totally wrong.”

By studying how hospitals treat Medicare patients in their last two years of life, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has found wide geographic differences in how medicine is practiced. The research shows patients in some areas are more likely to get operations and tests than other areas.

The Dartmouth scholarship argues that more care does not always lead to better health, and sometimes can actually harm patients. As a result, Dartmouth believes much of the nation’s current medical spending—as much as $700 billion, or 30 percent of the country’s $2.5 trillion annual tab—may be not necessary. If the government is able to trim those costs, advocates of health care overhaul legislation believe the savings can help finance an expansion of health insurance to most of the population.

But some dissenters, including University of Pennsylvania medical school professor Dr. Richard “Buz” Cooper, argue Dartmouth overstates the amount of potential waste because its methods don’t fully factor in the heavy medical needs of very poor people. In addition, the skeptics say you can’t draw conclusions about overall health spending just by studying Medicare patients.

Here are some views on the debate:

Paul Ginsburg
President, Center for Studying Health System Change
“I think the Dartmouth analysis does show that a lot of the difference in utilization in hospitals or delivery systems in high use areas probably is waste. What Cooper has done is not convincing to me.”

 

Robert Muller
Chief Executive Officer, University of Pennsylvania Health System

“The Dartmouth people use Medicare data because that’s what’s available. It’s like a drunk looking for his keys under the lamp post. All of us who run hospitals know it’s your total income that determines the breadth and depth of your spending. There are variations among hospitals. There are variations inside hospitals. That’s worth looking at. But they’re not 30 percent differences.”

Joseph Newhouse

Professor of Health Policy and Management, Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy

“My general take is that accounting for factor price variation and health status reduces the variation but that it remains substantial.  How much of the remaining variation is excessive and unnecessary, however, is more of an open question.”

 

Jack Hadley

Professor and Senior Health Services Researcher, George Mason University’s Department of Health Administration and Policy

“The desire to have a simple solution to a complex issue is very strong. The idea that all spending above the minimum is waste is a very appealing concept. If you’re looking for the silver bullet, this looks like a good candidate. The reality is the process of medical care is much more complicated, and I don’t think any study does a totally adequate job of controlling for differences in patients’ health.”

Stuart Guterman

Assistant Vice President on Payment System Reform, The Commonwealth Fund
“The potentially harmful thing is by quibbling about what Dartmouth is implying, he [Cooper] gives what might be perceived as ammunition to people arguing against health reform, and I don’t think that’s a viable case.”

 

Robert Berenson
Institute Fellow, Urban Institute
“There is increasing reason to believe Dartmouth didn’t do as good a job in risk adjusting for health status. My own experience practicing medicine would suggest there’s a lot of wasted spending going on.”

A new update of Woopsi is now available courtesy of homebrew coder ant512. In case you’re not familiar with the Woopsi, this AmigaOS system-based app …

Ed. Note: The town hall begins in three and a half hours at 11:45pm EST.  Be sure to tune in at www.whitehouse.gov/live.

The town hall meeting is at the core of grassroots American democracy.  It is a tradition that brings together members of a community — both leaders and ordinary citizens — to discuss and shape the direction of their futures.   On Monday, November 16, President Obama will bring that tradition to China — a country with thousands of years of history, but a land where political and social values are different from ours.  In Shanghai, he will hold an historic town hall meeting with China’s youth to talk directly with some of the young people who represent China’s future.

The planning stages leading up to the town hall have been filled with months of negotiation and cooperation.  Our Chinese hosts are committed to working with us to ensure a successful visit and are genuinely curious as to how an American town hall works.  Together we are creating a unique event mixing American and Chinese elements – a first by an American president visiting China.   Even the language showed the differences in political concept as the word “town hall” doesn’t exist in Mandarin.  In English, this is President Obama’s town hall with China’s youth, but in Chinese, it is mian dui mian or a face-to-face dialogue.

The cultural differences are vast.  The challenges of creating an event hosted by the President of the United States for China’s youth are numerous.  But the popularity of this American President is high in China and shows that even young people look to U.S.-Chinese cooperation to solve  global issues.  This town hall meeting in Shanghai will show the youth of China that President Obama has come not just to talk, but to listen.

Richard Buangan is the Deputy Press Spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing

Learn more about the President’s trip to Asia.

Here is an email exchange I recently had:

November 06, 2009

Hi Jack,

I’ve been vegan for almost two years and am wondering about a skin condition I recently developed. I have a red flaky patch of skin right below the corner of my lip and above both eyelids. The patch is not itchy or yellowish, so I suspect it is not eczema. I am wondering if the patches are the result of a vitamin deficiency. I used to take a multivitamin, but I quit taking it because my skin took on a yellowish hue, especially in the winter when I eat more squash (and my doctor thought I might be getting too much beta-carotene). I now only take a B-complex vitamin. Is it possible that the skin patches are a sign that I’m not getting enough of a particular vitamin?

My response:

A lack of vitamin D can cause psoriasis in some cases, but other than D and B-vitamins, which it sounds like you are good on, I don’t know what it might be or if it is likely to be nutrition-related. It’s definitely not a common complaint I hear from people who are vegan.

November 14, 2009

Dear Jack,

I saw my primary care doctor this week and she speculated that I might have a vitamin D deficiency. I began taking supplements and going outside for 30 minutes a day around noon. The patches have all but disappeared in a matter of days. Just wanted to let you know in case you ever come across any other individuals with the same condition. I have since read more about the health problems associated with vitamin D deficiency, and I am thankful my deficiency manifested itself in a way that I was able to take notice and do something about it.

Addendum Nov 15, sent from a different reader:

I had ‘eczema’ for years every winter and when I started taking Vitamin D2, 2000 IU, it went away for good. I also had my 25-hydroxy-Vitamin D level tested and it was at the very lowest end of normal…. Any skin condition that’s worse in the winter (where UV is low in the winter) I would suspect Vitamin D deficiency.

The NO!SPEC campaign: Serves as a vehicle to unite those who support the notion that spec work devalues the potential of design and ultimately does a disservice to the client.
Our mission: To educate the public about speculative, or ‘spec’ work.
Our target: Those who use creative services, as well as creative professionals (designers, photographers, illustrators, typographers, writers and those in marketing, branding and advertising).
What you can do: Read NO!SPEC’s Protocols. Place a “NO!SPEC” logo on your site. Sign the NO!SPEC petition. Distribute the “NO!SPEC” posters. Contact us with your thoughts, comments, articles and insights.
Requirements: The only requirement for participation is putting the appropriate value on your profession.

An independent report by Professor Sube Banerjee, commissioned and funded by the Department of Health on the use of antipsychotics in dementia has been published (freely available here). Professor Banerjee has considered the evidence base including systematic reviews and meta-analyses regarding the use of antipsychotics in dementia and the report contains an estimate of the national morbidity and mortality associated with the use of antipsychotics in dementia. The report recognises the need for antipsychotics in certain situations and goes on to make a series of recommendations which focus in particular on clinical governance, recommendations which should lead to an improvement in the quality of care. The government have produced their response to this document (freely available here) and support these recommendations indicating that a national audit of antipsychotic use in dementia will be undertaken initially at six-months and then annually for at least three years and that the National Clinical Director for Dementia will take on a leadership role in this area. The Royal College of Psychiatrists has welcomed the report and responded here emphasising the need for input of specialist older adult mental health services. The response of the Alzheimer’s Society who have also welcomed the report is here. NHS choices have coverage of the report here.

The 26th Annual Pittsburgh Schizophrenia Conference took place on November 13th 2009. An 11.7T MRI scanner is being developed in France through a pan-European partnership and is due to begin operating in 2012. In a press release from the company that undertook the researhc, in conjunction with university researchers, the gene product for the gene Rps23r1 was associated with a reduction in two Alzheimer’s Disease related proteins amyloid beta and tau in a murine model. A recent study involved 205 Norwegian couples and used ‘client feedback’ therapy during problematic episodes in their relationship. At 6-months after the last session, the researchers reported a 50% reduction in divorce or separation rates compared to those who did not receive this intervention. The approach is described as patient focused research (the Research Advocacy Network has more information on this).

News Round-Ups

The ‘Heal My PTSD’ blog has a news round-up which includes the use of telemedicine for PTSD. Mind Hacks has another episode of Spike Activity where he reviews the news including a link to a study showing an association between creativity and horizontal eye movements, adding to previous research suggesting an association with recall of information.

Psychiatry 2.0

The FDA has convened the social media hearings to examine the issue of regulation of pharmaceutical companies use of social media and this has been widely discussed in the mainstream media, the blogosphere and the twittersphere. An article here has lots of discussion in the comments section.

This BBC article looks at Google Wave and includes a interview with the founders and some examples of use. Google wave is a collaborative tool that is described as facilitating the linking of ideas and data, allowing for instance data to be inserted relatively easily by multiple authors into a collaborative document. There is further coverage of Google Wave applications in this article which contains an embedded video and lists uses including research where Google Wave has provided benefits. The ICS healthcare blog has an article on how the doctor-patient relationship might be changing due to the influence of factors such as health 2.0. Ted Eytan in his blog has coverage of a study published in May that involved a focus group of patients who use the internet. The findings included an expressed interest by the people in the study to have access to their medical records. ‘360 digital influence’ discuss trends in the use of social media by doctors here including a look at research in this area. John Grohol has an article at PsychCentral on how ‘first impressions count’ online and argues that these impressions are formed through inspection of photographs and he also reports on a study looking at Facebook use which is due for publication next year. There is a presentation available here on how web 2.0 might affect education. The Gov 2.0 conference is due to take place online on December 10th 2009. Biomedcentral has an open-access article on a ‘database of everything’. A German petition is currently underway requesting that all publicly funded studies should be made available through open-access articles. The ZZoot blog has coverage of a recent workshop on the future of the semantic web for scientific communication. In this article there is a look at an organisation which matches researchers with research participants.

Evolutionary Psychiatry

Dr Shock has a link to a video showing that squirrels work together to recall where food is located in the environment. The combination of social cooperation and memory abilities displayed here may be important in understanding similar abilities in primates including humans. Recent evidence suggests that the Sahara may have experienced wet periods roughly 120,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago and that this may have facilitated the migration of early humans across the Sahara. There is an article at Live Science on the decreasing size of the human brain over the last 10,000 years which asks the intriguing question ‘is our evolution accelerating?’. The FOX-P2 gene product in chimpanzees was found to behave differently to the gene product in humans in a recent study which might contribute to an explanation for the absence of spoken language in chimpanzees.

Twitter

You can follow ‘The Amazing World of Psychiatry’ Twitter by clicking on this link

Podcast

You can listen to this post on Odiogo by clicking on this link (there may be a small delay between publishing of the blog article and the availability of the podcast).

TAWOP Channel

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Responses

If you have any comments, you can leave them below or alternatively e-mail [email protected]

Disclaimer

The comments made here represent the opinions of the author and do not represent the profession or any body/organisation. The comments made here are not meant as a source of medical advice and those seeking medical advice are advised to consult with their own doctor. The author is not responsible for the contents of any external sites that are linked to in this blog.

It is officially on: we’re running our super duper, extra sassy Holiday Gift Guide from now until the end of time, giving you the latest in hot gift ideas for you and yours. Why are we doing this so early? Because we have so much to give away this year it’s scary. That said, let’s hit the slopes and shush our way into Gift Guide Nirvana.

What do you need to do? Well, first you have to click through to our gift guide and keep your eye on daily posts for news of what we’re giving away. We’re starting off with the five days of Peek Pronto: five full days, one Peek Pronto each day. How do you win? Just comment with your actual email and we’ll pick a winner a day from this post. We’ll also run other giveaways concurrently with this one, so fear not.

Good luck and thanks for reading!

We’ve been told now by a couple tipsters that the Sprint HTC Hero is now going for $99 with a 2-year agreement at Best Buy locations. No word on whether Sprint will end up discounting the device directly.

As you’ve heard in some of our travel updates, there are a lot of things you can do on Air Force One. You can use computers, make phone calls, use the Internet. One thing you can’t do is avoid surprise birthday celebrations.

Yesterday, Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes had a birthday party thrust upon them unwittingly at about 30,000 feet.

Lured into the conference room with the promise of a security briefing, they were instead treated to cake and good cheer by the President and some of his staff. No one was more surprised than myself, who arrived on the scene with my camera too late to film the event, but just in time for some cake. No one was less surprised than Ben Rhodes, who was unconvinced by POTUS personal aide Reggie Love’s clumsy promise of "some sort of briefing."

Analog vs. Digital. A battle that has lasted for all time (all the time that matters anyway), and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Although a sort of armistice seems to have been called of late, with the rising trend of analog controllers for digital software. algoriddim and Vestax have combined forces to bring you just that, a hardware turntable for their iTunes DJ software, djay 3.

Christened Spin, this “turntable” connects to your Mac with USB, allowing you to control djay 3, and by extension, iTunes, seamlessly. It weighs just a little over 3 pounds, making it a very mobile system. The two jog wheels and various faders allow you to control speed, looping, cue points, effects, and EQ, just as with a traditional DJ rig. There are dedicated mic in and headphone out ports, as well as a pair of stereo RCA jacks for house speakers.

You can pick one of these controllers up exclusively at any Apple Store for $249.95, which includes the djay 3 software. The software standalone price is $49.95.

Reaction to the amendment restricting abortion in the House health reform bill, passed more than a week ago, continued to reverberate through news outlets today.

Roll Call: “On the eve of the Senate debate over health care reform, a leading Democratic moderate predicted Sunday that reform legislation won’t pass if it doesn’t include a controversial measure to restrict abortion funding. ‘What is clear is that for this bill to be successful, there can be no taxpayer funding for abortion,’ Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said, appearing on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’  Conrad said he did not know whether the Senate would ultimately adopt the restrictive language that the House passed last week, which dictated that any new government-funded health insurance option cannot pay for abortions” (Kurtz and Roth, 11/15).

Fox News: “White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod suggested Sunday that President Obama will intervene to make sure a controversial amendment restricting federal funding for abortion coverage is stripped from final health care reform legislation. In doing so, the president would be heeding the call of abortion rights supporters like Planned Parenthood that have called the White House their ‘strongest weapon’ in keeping such restrictions out of the bill. The abortion amendment was tacked on to the House health care bill and was a key factor in securing the votes of moderate Democrats before the bill was approved by a narrow margin last weekend. … Axelrod said in an interview Sunday that the amendment changes the ‘status quo,’ something the president cannot abide” (11/15).

Politico: “By teeing up a public battle over abortion in the health care bill now before the Senate, congressional Democrats could be risking more than just the fate of the legislation. Hanging in the balance are millions of Catholic swing voters who moved decisively to the Democrats in 2008 and who could shift away just as readily in 2010. According to exit polls, President Barack Obama won the support of 53 percent of Catholic voters, a seven-point increase over the showing of the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Catholic. … ‘It could be harder for the Democrats to keep those Catholics voters they gained and they may put some of their members at risk,’ said John Green, a religion and politics expert at the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron. Moreover, said Green, Catholics are a constituency that backs the reform effort itself. ‘To alienate them on abortion could be to alienate them on health care reform,’ he said” (Cummings, 11/15).

The Associated Press: “Abortion rights groups, outflanked and outnumbered in the health debate, are scrambling to regain lost ground after the House passed a health bill with strict abortion limits. They’re blanketing Capitol Hill with lobbyists, petitions, letters and phone calls in efforts to defeat the restrictions in the Senate, where debate could begin in a few days. They also have a larger goal: to prove that with their Democratic allies in control of the White House and both congressional chambers — but increasingly appealing to conservative voters who back abortion limits — they still have clout.  …. NARAL says it has begun a major grass-roots mobilization, including collecting more than 40,000 signatures on a petition addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., demanding that he omit the abortion curbs from health legislation he’s drafting” (Hirschfed Davis, 11/14).

The New York Times: “Robert J. Blendon, a professor of health policy at Harvard, said the choice between trying to stop an erosion of abortion rights and trying to improve health care for women pitted ‘what are described as two fundamental human rights — the right to universal coverage and the right of access to reproductive services — against each other. They aren’t just policy trade-offs,’ he said. ‘And that’s why this is so wrenching.’ Some House Democrats initially vowed that if the final bill contained the anti-abortion measure, they would oppose it — even though they had just voted for the House bill with that language” (Seelye, 11/14).

The Washington Post has a Q & A on the abortion language: “1. What is the status quo? Under the 33-year-old federal ban, there is no abortion coverage under Medicaid, the federal employee health benefits plan or the Tricare plan for military families, except where the life of the mother is endangered. Seventeen states use their own funds to provide abortion coverage for Medicaid recipients. A study co-authored by the Guttmacher Institute, which backs abortion rights, found that one in four women who would other get an abortion carry an unwanted pregnancy to term if they lack abortion coverage. Abortion coverage is widespread among private insurance plans — at least half of people with private coverage have abortion coverage, according to surveys by Guttmacher and the Kaiser Family Foundation” (MacGillis, 11/15).

NPR: “Backers of controversial abortion language added to the House health overhaul bill last week say it merely continues longstanding policy that bans federal funding of the procedure. But opponents say it could have much more far-reaching consequences on access to abortion, particularly in the private insurance market. The ultimate impact of the House abortion amendment could be to change abortion from being a procedure routinely covered by most private insurance plans to a procedure routinely excluded — even in cases of medical emergency” (Rovner, 11/14).

Related KHN story: How The House Abortion Restrictions Would Work (Appleby, 11/10).

Chicago Tribune has a Q & A about various aspects in the health bills, including: “Q: Will abortions be covered by the health care legislation, as it stands now? A: The House health care bill passed this month includes a provision that would bar the government-run insurance plan (the ‘public option’) and all private insurance plans that receive federal dollars from covering abortion services. That does not prevent employers from offering abortion services under their benefits packages. The Senate is considering similar provisions but has not decided on specific language” (Geiger and Oliphant, 11/15).

 

Now, it’s not this blog’s intention to post every little bit of gaming news (or is it?), but this is a more signal event than all the PR out there. Modern Warfare 2 for the PC, which infamously lacks dedicated servers, a console, the ability to kick players, and other things integral to a good PC game. Infinity Ward, maddeningly apathetic to the needs and requests of their users, has said that no changes to the stated areas are forthcoming.

Well, you can’t keep a good PC gamer down. Certain cracks already allow some online play, and now the console has been enabled, allowing players to kick, change POV and FOV, and presumably do most of the stuff Infinity Ward decided had to stay in the cookie jar. Tut tut, developers. You didn’t see this coming? You could have made it easier on yourselves, but instead you turned a whole segment of your market against you.

Here’s the download link for the tool (use at your own risk) and the discussion thread at Guru3D.