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In October 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released the report Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy for Traumatic Brain Injury: Evaluating the Evidence, assessing the published evidence for the effectiveness of using cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT) to treat people with traumatic brain injury (TBI). TBI has gained increasing attention in the past 15 years because of its status as the signature wound of American military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Growing numbers of U.S. service members are suffering traumatic brain injuries and are surviving them, given that (a) the majority of traumatic brain injuries are mild and (b) lifesaving measures for more severe injuries have significantly improved. People with any level of injury can require ongoing health care in their recovery, helping them to regain (or compensate for) their losses of function and supporting their full integration into their social structure and an improved quality of life.

One form of treatment for TBI is CRT, a systematic, goal-oriented approach to helping patients overcome cognitive impairments. The Department of Defense (DoD) asked the IOM to evaluate CRT for traumatic brain injury in order to guide the DoD’s use and coverage in the Military Health System. Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy for Traumatic Brain Injury: Evaluating the Evidence was the IOM’s resulting study of the evidence. The report’s conclusions revolved around the fact that there is little continuity among research studies of the effectiveness of different types of CRT, and there exist only small amounts of evidence (or, in many cases, none) demonstrating the effectiveness of using CRT to treat TBI—although the evidence that does exist generally indicates that CRT interventions have some effectiveness.

The workshop brought together experts in health services administration, research, and clinical practice from the civilian and military arenas in order to discuss the barriers for evaluating the effectiveness of CRT care and for identifying suggested taxonomy, terminology, timing, and ways forward for CRT researchers. The workshop consisted of individuals and was not intended to constitute a comprehensive group. Select decision makers in the Military Health System and Veterans Affairs (VA) and researchers were invited to participate. The workshop was designed to spur thinking about (1) the types of research necessary to move the field forward toward evidence-based clinical guidelines, (2) what the translational pipeline looks like and what its current deficiencies are, and (3) considerations that decision makers may choose to use as they decide what research they will support and decide how they will balance the urgency of the need with the level of evidence for CRT interventions. Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy for Traumatic Brain Injury: Model Study Protocols and Frameworks to Advance the State of the Science summarizes the happenings of the workshop.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

One thing has been missing from Microsoft’s (MSFT) foray into the tablet world so far: A cheaper, smaller tablet that can go toe-to-toe with the Kindle Fire HD and the iPad mini. ZDNet reports that recent changes to Windows 8 hardware certification guidelines suggest that Microsoft is giving OEMs more freedom to make 7-inch tablets since “the new guidelines relax the minimum resolution for Windows 8 devices to 1024 x 768 at a depth of 32 bits.” ZDNet says that OEMs need to justify to Microsoft why they’re using lower resolutions, however, so it doesn’t give them carte blanche to release big-screen devices that have inferior displays. Microsoft said in releasing the guidelines that “partners exploring designs for certain markets could find greater design flexibility helpful,” so it certainly sounds as though we’ll be seeing some low-cost Windows 8 tablets in the near future.

Manually shutting down your PC when you’ve finished a task is easy enough, but Windows isn’t quite so straightforward when it comes to automating the process. Playing around with the power options and the task scheduler may deliver what you need, but for real flexibility you’ll be much better off turning to the free Airytec Switch Off.

The program is a surprisingly tiny download (191KB), which once installed adds an icon to your system tray. And right-clicking this displays a menu showing the various actions it can carry out: shutdown, restart, log off, sleep, lock, and more.

If you want to activate any of these immediately, then you can do so — just choose that action and click “Now”. But there are also timed delays, from 5 minutes to 5 hours. And these can each be applied in three different ways.

For instance, you could tell Airytec Switch Off to shut down your PC in precisely 5 minutes time; or to wait until the user has been inactive for 5 minutes (no mouse or keyboard activity); or to look for 5 minutes of computer inactivity (that is, CPU usage has been below a set threshold for all that time).

This works well, and is straightforward to use — but it’s just the start of Switch Off’s capabilities.

You don’t just have to choose from the program’s list of standard actions, for instance. Airytec Switch Off also supports scripts, so you can have it launch any program you like. For example, the default list of program actions doesn’t include “Hibernate”, but you can easily rectify this yourself: just use a script which calls the Windows Shutdown command to hibernate the system for you (“shutdown.exe /h”).

Airtytec Switch Off also includes a complete task scheduler. If you’d like actions to run daily, weekly, at system start or log on, perhaps, you can set them up here.

And there’s even a web interface, which allows you to shut down your PC from any internet-enabled device. (Although if you’re concerned about the security implications, this is at least turned off by default.)

Perhaps most impressive of all, though, is despite all this power, Airytec Switch Off really is very lightweight, with its core requiring less than 1MB RAM on our test PC.

One possible issue here is that development seems to have stalled. The program hasn’t been updated in almost two years, so it’s possible this will be the last version.

Right now, though, Airytec Switch Off works very well. And if you’re looking for a PC shutdown tool with some real power and versatility then it’s still worth a closer look.

Photo Credit: Sashkin/Shutterstock

How old are you?

I get asked that question all the time. In meetings, on conference calls, while pitching a new client. The answer really shouldn’t matter. I find myself wondering whether male entrepreneurs get asked the same question, and why the person asking me doesn’t consider it rude.

Age is messy these days, especially when it comes to jobs. While anecdotally, older workers (those 55+) claim that there is a bias against hiring them, their unemployment rate holds steady at 5.8 percent, according to the Department of Labor. While American culture often glorifies the young, this isn’t translating into young people getting hired. In fact, the unemployment rate for those aged 18-29 rose to a staggering 12.1 percent last December, up nearly a percentage point from a year before. And yet we’re not having a national conversation about age bias, even as we increasingly talk about other forms of bias.

Yes, employers want fresh, “hungry” college grads and workers (if you ask me, “hungry” is a euphemism for literal hunger, as jobs that often post for “hungry” individuals pay pennies) but it’s still very hard to find employment. Law students from prestigious universities are taking unpaid internships. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, I found it so difficult to find a job I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to work for Young & Rubicam. I found many of my classmates following suit — moving to other countries.

Hence my discomfort with the question: How old are you?

When I am asked that question, it’s usually to gauge if, at recently 26, the fact that I’ve had my own company, FinePoint Digital PR, for nearly two years is admirable, suspect, or something else. When asked, I often respond with, “You should never ask a lady her age.” Where did I get that? Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, apparently in the 19th century while my other business was churning butter.

And yet the world of digital media and tech entrepreneurship has turned a lot of our assumptions about age on its head.

It used to be that in any industry, years of experience meant knowledge, leadership, and wisdom. And this paradigm hasn’t completely died away; many male friends of mine lament about grey hairs, to which I often respond that it will probably help them in business, especially if they’re in more traditional sectors like insurance or finance. They will be taken more seriously because they’ll be perceived as older and more experienced. (Grey hair is decidedly more complicated for women.)

But if you work in entrepreneurship, technology, or digital media, it can feel like a competition to see who’s the youngest. This, too, is complicated. The Forbes 30 Under 30 is a goal for many entrepreneurs I know, myself included. And yet I wrote the satirical Highlights “5 Under 5” to underscore my ambivalence about how obsessed we are with youthfulness these days, from wunderkinds to genius college dropouts. At SXSW this year, I was struck by how young everyone was — and how it sets a bar that is almost impossible to meet. This year’s TED Conference even highlighted some speakers as young as 12. The speaking series has an entire teen division.

As complex as these ages issues are for men, being female renders them even more problematic. Too young, too old — we seem to instantaneously switch from one to the other. For instance, a close friend was asked her age at SXSW Interactive this year, and at 31, shocked the lothario who asked because, and I quote, “Girls aren’t usually pretty after 28.” Sure, that is only one guy’s obnoxious comment. But it does seem like there’s an awfully short window between “too young” and “too old,” whether you’re talking about business or pleasure. And with female leaders judged more harshly on their appearance, the two may not be as far apart as we like to think.

An entrepreneur is often the face, literally, of her company. When that face doesn’t match our expectations, it’s easy to become nonplussed. A male client, with whom I had worked for months before meeting in person, began our first face-to-face meeting with the exclamation “You’re so young!” I wasn’t quite sure what to say, and mostly I felt belittled and furious. (Think how you’d feel if you sat down with a client who blurted out, “You’re so old!” Exactly.)

Sure, I’m young compared to some of my clients. To my grandmother, I’m eleven. (And I hope she keeps sending care packages, forever.) But compared to app developers out of Stanford, I’m ancient.

Working hard, disruption, and the entrepreneurial spirit knows no age. To judge based upon it would be juvenile.

I distinctly remember learning how to read, and it wasn’t from a book or in a kindergarten classroom.

It was sitting at the breakfast table with my Dad every morning, when we would read the weather section of the Washington Post. We checked to see if it was hot in Arizona (it usually was) and cold in Canada (it always was). For this reason I’ve always felt an affection for the DC-area newspaper, and I continue to read some of its blogs and politics coverage to this day. But when the newspaper rolls out a paywall this summer, it’s doubtful I’ll start paying for access. I can still log in using my parents’ subscription, but if they stop paying? I might owe that newspaper my literacy, but with the rest of the internet at my fingertips, it’s still not enough to get me to pay.

There was an excellent post on Buzzfeed earlier this week about HBO Go passwords, in which John Herrman surveyed everyone in his office and asked how most of them access HBO, a content provider that only gives digital access to cable subscribers. The responses evoked a trend I see among my own 20-something friends, which is that hardly anyone actually subscribes to HBO.

The anecdote struck me as one that perfectly illustrates how much of my generation is building habits around digital content and what exactly we’re willing to pay for. We’ve grown up with a wealth of news and video available for free on the internet, and for many of us, we also have access to high-quality content through parents or friends with subscriptions to services like Netflix or the New York Times. We built media habits around this content from an early age, but we were never forced to actually pay for content.

And there are a lot of us. Will those companies be able to convince my generation that their content is special or unique — and that one day, we should pay for it ourselves?

Content for free, at our fingertips

In some ways, it’s pretty obvious why my generation is reluctant to pay for content — it’s because we’ve never had to.

I’m 22, and I took typing lessons in fourth grade, had computer classes on how to do Google searches and make Powerpoints in middle school, and joined Facebook when it launched in my early days of high school. Until I left for college, my family’s desktop computer was set to open to the New York Times homepage. (At the time, it was free for everyone.) My peers and I learned how to write research papers in high school by citing sources online and by not copying things from Wikipedia, and most of us read Hamlet with the assistance of Sparknotes.com. We discovered music on YouTube, and a few lucky kids got smartphones in high school, which were ubiquitous by the time we hit college.

My generation has grown up connected to the internet, and we’ve never been at a loss for finding news and information on the web — for free.

Families have been sharing physical newspapers and televisions for years, of course, but when my parents’ generation left home for college and then grad school or jobs, they had to call up their local newspaper or cable or phone providers if they wanted any of these services. Now, there’s less incentive than ever to leave Mom and Dad’s family cell phone plan, and it seems that for many of my peers, the same applies to digital subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and cable subscriptions.

Out of curiosity, I asked about 15 of my friends (most of whom are recent college graduates in varying levels of employment) what content they personally pay to consume. The answer from most of them — minus a few New Yorker-subscriber outliers — was not much. But when I asked everyone what they read or watch using a parent’s (or a friend’s parent’s) subscriptions, the answers went way up. Almost everyone had access to Netflix, and a good number read the news on paywalled websites like the New York Times, and soon, The Washington Post.

But when I asked if anyone would pay for this content themselves if their parents stopped paying, hardly anyone said they would. The only media that most people said they would pay for was Netflix, and a few said they would subscribe to avoid paywalls on their local newspapers.

My friends of course aren’t representative of the population at large, but as mainly upper-middle class college graduates, they’re the demographic combination that’s currently most likely to pay for news online, according to a 2010 Pew study. While most of my friends said they read the news and watch video on a regular basis through their parent’s subscriptions, most said if they lost free access, they’d probably go somewhere else rather than pay. That might not be to a place that offers the same quality, but at least it would be free.

As one friend told me, “If it’s online, it feels like it should be free.”

Finding solutions to get us to pay — one day

Now, it’s not necessarily surprising that 22-year olds aren’t clamoring for financial advice on retirement from the Wall Street Journal or picking up the tab on multiple subscriptions when the youth unemployment rate remains at 13.1 percent. Many people don’t have parents who subscribe to anything, and are perfectly content with the free content on the web and videos on YouTube. And for those who do, mooching a Netflix subscription still pales in comparison to the cost of cell phone plans 20-something share with families. Plus, my age group has always made up a fairly low percentage of newspaper readers anyway. Presumably the value we place on news will rise when we have kids and own houses and spend a few more years paying taxes.

It’s also possible that we’ll have to look more broadly at the media services my generation will pay for than just newspapers and magazines. While I personally pay for a variety of news subscriptions, Twitter remains my most valuable source of information and I would probably pay more for access to that feed than anything else. Instagram might not be the future of news and information, but it’s fair to say a lot of people would probably pay for that.

HBO has clearly decided that letting us mooch off subscriptions to access Girls is worth it, since one day some of us wil grow up, get jobs, and subscribe. But hoping and praying, while perhaps the defining media business strategy of this age, is not a particularly compelling long-term bet. Perhaps it should consider low-cost subscriptions meant for recent graduates, that would get us used to paying something but at rates more in line with our typical income levels. Maybe it means creating or structuring content specifically for younger readers and their digital tastes, or adopting micro-payments that remind us more of purchasing an iTunes song than a year-long subscription.

But even if the content providers move in this direction, will my generation ever pay for quality media? We have grown up with the world at our fingertips on the web, mainly for free. And we’re taking those habits and assumptions with us into adulthood.

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BlackBerry Z10 social butterflies rejoice! Updated Facebook and Twitter apps are now available for BB10 sporting new features and enhancements over previous iterations. Users should find it easier to “stay connected and do more with social media”, according to the Canadian smartphone maker which detailed the changes.

Twitter was previously updated three weeks ago alongside LinkedIn, and the latest iteration only contains more modest improvements by comparison. Twitter 10.0.2 features a Connect tab where users can view all interactions, similar to the Android, iOS or Windows Phone counterparts, a counter which displays the number of favorites for a tweet and the ability to display photos, summaries and other items straight within tweets.

By contrast Facebook 10.0.1 now comes with more significant improvements. The app can list the time when friends have checked-in on Facebook in a nearby location, display events, and allow users to respond, invite friends to attend and create and view posts on the event’s wall, post pictures and tag guests. Nothing groundbreaking compared to counterparts on other major platforms, more of a catch-up in terms of features.

Facebook 10.0.1 now also allows users to tag friends on photos when the files are uploaded onto the interwebs, save pictures onto the device, and share links from the news feed to BBM, email and Twitter, among others.

Facebook and Twitter are available to download from the BlackBerry World store.

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The 2012 Kickstarter darling Ouya has been anticipated ever since it skyrocketed past its fund-raising goal and began pre-production. While Sony has released information on its next-generation PlayStation and many people have been talking up the new Xbox, Ouya may have outdone both larger companies in terms of publicity and expectation.

CEO Julie Uhrman announces that “Today we start shipping our early backers their OUYAs. And at our unveiling event this evening, the first of you will get to see OUYA in the flesh (or, metal, as it were)”.

Following the big announcement some details were revealed. For one, customers will be prompted to install an update upon first boot up, though the company promises that these updates will be done in the background in the future. You will also need to enter in your credit or debit card information to grab games, but every game will be free to try before you buy — “Your card will only be charged if you buy content you love”, Uhrman promises.

The device supports up to four controllers and also Bluetooth pairing with other devices — a list of those compatible hardware is being prepared.

For now, the box is shipping to early backers from Kickstarter. Early pre-orders will follow and then the console will debut at retail on June 4. Ouya promises it will continue to add features, refine the user interface, and keep building the software. I am awaiting my box, or at least confirmation it has shipped — stay tuned for a review.

This week’s podcast is PACKED full of GigaOM-y goodness. Eliza Kern sits in as co-host and talks about Y Combinator’s Winter Demo Day. Then Kevin’s Tofel and Fitchard explain how T-Mobile wants to liberate us from phone service contracts. After that, Mathew Ingram stops by to talk about Yahoo’s purchase of Summly, and if that wasn’t enough, Derrick Harris explains how Instagram is making us all paparazzi.

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A more diminutive Y Combinator Demo Day

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Can Summly help make Yahoo greater than its parts?

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One month after Android 4.2.2 started to roll out into the wild for Nexus devices, the latest treat in the candy jar has also arrived on the Verizon-branded Samsung Galaxy Nexus. To complete the cycle, Google also updated the factory images for the handset to the latest green droid iteration.

The factory images can be used by Galaxy Nexus users to update their handsets to Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, restore the software to the factory default settings, return to the stock green droid flavor after running a custom distribution, or update the radios, among other purposes.

For the Verizon-branded Galaxy Nexus, the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean factory images come with seven img files, three of which have a March 19 time-stamp — the bootloader and the two radios (GSM and CDMA). The other four come with older time-stamps.

Using the “How to install Jelly Bean on Galaxy Nexus” guide, the Verizon-branded model can be upgraded to Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean by replacing the filenames from the guide with currently applicable ones found in the corresponding factory image.

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