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We’ve seen way too many stories of patents being used to hold back medical treatments or drugs in communities that need them most, and now a few of you have sent in this troubling story of how a French company, Nutriset, has been using patents to block competition with its therapeutic food paste for malnourished children. Apparently, the company came up with “a mixture of peanut butter, powdered milk, sugar and vegetable oil fortified with 40 vitamins and minerals,” called it Plumpy’nut, patented it, and started offering it to various aid agencies. Apparently, it works great, but anyone else who creates anything remotely similar comes under attack from Nutriset’s lawyers, who apparently like saving children only when there’s no competition from anyone who might do it more cheaply or more efficiently.

The article highlights a lawsuit that has been filed by some US organizations, looking to make and distribute a competitor called Re:vive, trying to invalidate the Nutriset patent. This isn’t a small issue either — millions of children are starving, and a recent study by UNICEF found that relying on a single supplier, like Nutriset, would not be enough to match the need, and could be a very unreliable way to help save malnourished children. It’s amazing that patents are being used to prevent the more efficient and economic delivery of food to malnourished children, but that’s what you get when you build up a world mentality that believes concepts like this can be “owned” and controlled by a single party.

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Democrats as far as San Francisco are freaked out by the fact that a fellow party member could lose in Massachusetts.

Mayor Gavin Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle: “We better get our act together – and quickly… (voters) are so angry. They don’t feel that we’re paying attention to their needs, in terms of their jobs, and what’s going on at the grassroots, in their neighborhoods.”

It’s actually not all bad for Dems. A Coakley loss is an early wake-up calll, and there are several months before November elections for them to turn things around and get their message right.

No doubt the Democrats wish that in 1994, they’d had a similar warning. After all, they were largely blindsided by the Republican revolution of that year, predicting with only weeks to go before the election that they’d maintain control of the house.

Meanwhile, Martha Coakley is down to 31% on InTrade, which is around the odds that Nate Silver called for.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• It’s Over: Scott Brown Is The 3:1 Favorite Over Martha Coakley
• Jim Cramer: Markets Will Surge Wednesday If Coakley Loses
• Martha Coakley Falls To 40% On InTrade

I’ll be honest: I’d watch Will Forte in a mullet wig for 90 minutes whether or not the trailer looked good. Luckily, it looks amazing. Screw the A-Team movie, this is the upcoming action movie I’m most excited about. [Rogue]

Republican challenger Scott Brown seems likely to pick up Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts. That would give Republicans a filbuster-enabling 41-vote minority in the Senate, and Democrats are rightly freaking out about the future of their agenda. So should the party go small and eschew big legislation. In other words: Should Obamaism descend into–gasp!–Clintonism?

Noam Scheiber asks the question in this
perceptive TNR piece about what Obama should do with his
social/economic agenda if the Democrats lose in Massachusetts today.
This is a telling paragraph:

According to the Senate aide, the first four weeks of the chamber’s
legislative year–which begins on January 19–will be devoted to three
initiatives: finishing up health care, hashing out a job-creation bill,
and raising the government’s debt limit, the last of which is like the
colonoscopy of Senate votes (necessary and not that
time-consuming in the grand scheme of things, but seemingly
interminable while it’s happening). Which means the earliest the Senate
could start working on regulatory reform, the next major item in the
queue, would be late winter. Unfortunately, the process of finalizing
that bill could take months. That leaves cap-and-trade on its
deathbed–“I can’t rule it out, but it’s fair to say it’s losing
steam,” says the Senate aide–to say nothing of other initiatives like
K-12 education.

Hate to say it, but I think Noam (or his source) is being too
optimistic even with this pessimistic read of the Senate’s near future.
If Brown takes Massachusetts, the House and Senate will have to
scramble to put health care reform on the president’s desk before Brown is seated. Next up, you’ve got a job creation bill whose prospects were dimming
among conservative Democrats like Bayh and Baucus even when the 60-vote
majority seemed safe. Passing a messy health care bill, followed by a
messy job creation bill and then raising the debt ceiling will
give Republicans months of ammunition to capture and hold moderates who
are getting skittish on the deficit.

The Senate has for a long time been less like an avenue to pass
legislation, and more like mud pit to watch it sink. A Brown victory
would effectively change the Senate’s consistency from viscous to solid
amber. A united Republican opposition would block anything resembling
Big Liberal Agenda, and Democrats will almost have to play small to create even the illusion of a working Senate. What kind of ideas would work? A small jobs bill that leans harder on tax cuts could make it out of Congress. Or Democrats could pass something small for the environment like the “green bank” proposal, “which would
use government money to help fund clean energy investments, and for
requirements that utility companies generate a certain amount of
renewable energy within a decade or so.”

If Brown wins tonight, the commentariat will be focused on What Democrats Did Wrong. Liberals will say they didn’t move fast enough, or treat 2009 like the precious window of opportunity it was. Republicans will say they moved too fast, and Massachusetts is the public pumping the breaks on an out-of-control experiment in liberal one-party rule. It doesn’t really matter who’s right. A 59-41 Senate with a united opposition is, unbelievably, the equivalent of a house divided against itself.

Apple isn’t going to use LaLa to launch a subscription service, a “variety of insider sources” have told the founder of MP3.com. It’s exactly what we speculated: Storing your iTunes library in the cloud and access it from anywhere.

It’s a bit hard to tell where his insider sources stop and his own thoughts begin, but Robertson says that the next version of iTunes will integrate one of LaLa’s premiere features: scanning you entire music library, and letting you access the whole thing from the internet (it uploads any songs it doesn’t already have on the service), via a “personal URL using a browser-based iTunes experience,” not to mention from your iPhone.

The reason Apple didn’t just build it themselves, he says, is speed. We’ll probably see in September, like always with Apple and music events. [TechCrunch]

One month to the day after the death of actress Brittany Murphy, the star’s husband, Simon Monjack, and her mother, Sharon Murphy, opened up about their loss and blame Hollywood for contributing to the star’s death.

The Clueless star, 32, died Dec. 20 after suffering a suspected cardiac arrest in her Los Angeles home.

I’m re-reading the excellent book Into the Silent Land by neuropsychologist Paul Broks and was reminded of a part where he recounts an eerie poem about a 1938 operation to remove a brain tumour.

The poem is by Welsh poet and doctor Dannie Abse and, looking it up on the internet, I discovered that the poetry archive has a wonderful entry for the piece online that not only includes the text but also a recording of Abse introducing and reading the poem.

The uncanny incident, probably caused by stimulation of the cortical surface, was witnessed by Abse’s brother, also a doctor, when observing an operation by the famous neurosurgeon Lambert Rogers.

In the Theatre
by Dannie Abse

(A true incident)

Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’
sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’
the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’;
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’—
the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go—till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.

Link to poetry archive entry for ‘In the Theatre’.

Cornea Donor Study Investigator Group Finds Preoperative Cell Density Not a Factor in Success

A new predictor of cornea transplant success has been identified by the Cornea Donor Study (CDS) Investigator Group. New analysis of data from the 2008 Specular Microscopy Ancillary Study (SMAS), a subset of the CDS, found that the preoperative donor cell count of endothelial cells, previously considered to be an important predictor of a successful transplant, did not correlate with graft success. Instead the study found that a patient’s endothelial cell count six months post-cornea transplant is a better indicator of subsequent failure of the graft rather than the donor’s cell count. These results offer an additional, reliable indicator of success that surgeons can use for monitoring patients at the six-month milestone after transplantation.

Endothelial cells form the back layer of the cornea and keep the cornea clear and prevent it from swelling. Previously it was thought that the more endothelial cells/mm2 in the donor cornea, the better, which put pressure on the eye banks to have donors with the highest count possible to distribute to corneal surgeons. However, the SMAS findings show no correlation between it and a patient’s graft success rate five-years post transplant, as long as the industry standard minimum of 2,000 cells/mm2 was met. The results of this study are published in the January issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

“These new findings of the SMAS are excellent examples of evidence-based medicine impacting clinical practice,” says Jonathan H. Lass, M.D., senior author of the study and professor and chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals Case Medical Center. “This evidence offers surgeons a broader pool of donors for their patients and will allow more individuals to donate to eye banks.” The results were analyzed at the Specular Microscopy Reading Center, part of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Case Western Reserve University and the University Hospitals Eye Institute.

Conceived in 1998, the CDS is a prospective cohort study that has already reported: 1) The age of the donor does not impact transplant survival after five years for conditions with moderate risk for graft failure due to endothelial dysfunction (Fuchs’ dystrophy, pseudophakic/aphakic corneal edema) (Ophthalmology 2008); 2) Incompatibility of blood type between the donor and recipient also does not impact graft survival at five years (Am J Ophthalmology 2009); and 3) There was a trend toward greater endothelial cell loss (75 percent) in the older donor age group (over 65 years to 75 years of age) than the younger donor age group (under 65 years) (69 percent), but this difference did not impact graft survival at five years (Ophthalmology 2008). This NIH-funded study has been extended through 2012 in order to determine whether these findings persist for a total of ten years post-transplant.

“The more than 100 physicians and researchers involved in the Cornea Donor Study have been leading the effort to identify factors that will keep donated corneas clearer for longer,” says Roy W. Beck, M.D., Ph.D., the principal investigator of the Cornea Donor Study Investigator Group and Executive Director of the Jaeb Center for Health Research in Tampa, Florida.

Additional support for CDS was provided by: Eye Bank Association of America, Bausch & Lomb, Inc., Tissue Banks International, Vision Share, Inc., San Diego Eye Bank, The Cornea Society, Katena Products, Inc., ViroMed Laboratories, Inc., Midwest Eye-Banks (Michigan Eye-Bank, Illinois Eye-Bank), Konan Medical Corporation, Eye Bank for Sight Restoration, SightLife, Sight Society of Northeastern New York (Lions Eye Bank of Albany), and Lions Eye Bank of Oregon.

For more information contact Jessica E. Studeny, 216.368.4692.

For more information contact Christina DeAngelis, 216.368.3635.

D4 Thermal Shock is a diet pill that “helps you obtain your fat loss and fitness goals much more efficiently than previously thought” (website). This D4 Thermal Shock review will give you the information you can’t find on the Cellucor (D4 Thermal Shock manufacturer) website so you can determine if D4 Thermal Shock is the diet pill for you.

D4 Thermal Shock Ingredients

Embelic Myrobalan Extract
Caffeine is a clinically proven diet pill ingredient. Although D4 Thermal Shock does not list how much of each ingredient it contains, the customer service representative told me there are 298 mg of caffeine contained in D4 Thermal Shock. Based on this information, this D4 Thermal Shock review finds the caffeine in D4 Thermal Shock is sufficient to contribute to weight loss.
White Willow Bark Extract is an anti-inflammatory. It does not cause weight loss.
Octopamine has not been proven to contribute to weight loss.
Yohimbine causes weight loss by mobilizing fatty acids. Unfortunately, D4 Thermal Shock does not reveal how much Yohimbine it contains.
Evodiamine does contribute to weight loss.
Scareolide
Vinpocetine increases blood flow to the brain; it has not been shown to cause weight loss.
Passion Flower Extract
Acetyltyrosine has been shown to contribute to weight loss when taken in doses of 500 to 1500 mg per day. Since there is no record of how much tyrosine D4 Thermal Shock contains, there is no way to determine if it will actually cause weight loss.

This D4 Thermal Shock review finds the ingredients in D4 Thermal Shock could very well cause weight loss, if they are included in the necessary amounts. However, since D4 Thermal Shock does not list how much of each ingredient is included, there is no way of knowing whether or not the product will cause weight loss.

D4 Thermal Shock Cost

D4 Thermal Shock diet pills cost $71.99 for 120 capsules. If you take the maximum recommended dosage of 4 capsules per day, one bottle of D4 Thermal Shock will last a month. This is on the expensive side for a diet pill, but not outrageous considering it actually has potential to be effective.

D4 Thermal Shock Customer Service

I had several questions about D4 Thermal Shock, so I tried their live online chat. Usually this means you are chatting with a computer that can only answer general questions. However, the chat I had about D4 Thermal Shock was with a live person and was very informative.

I asked what how much of each ingredient is included in D4 Thermal Shock. The representative (Jerry) told me that because of patent issues, they can’t release information on ingredient amounts.

He did inform me that if you purchase D4 Thermal Shock you will receive free counseling from a personal trainer. With the trainer you agree on a feasible weight loss goal. If you do not achieve your goal, D4 Thermal Shock will refund your money. Fairly impressive.

D4 Thermal Shock Conclusion

This D4 Thermal Shock review finds there are several effective ingredients contained in D4 Thermal Shock diet pills. Unfortunately, there is no indication of how much of each ingredient is included. While this would usually be reason enough for us not to recommend a product, we really like the guarantee associated with D4 Thermal Shock and the great customer service.

A third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week. According to new data from Forrester Research, more than half of what the report calls “conversationalists” are female and 70% are 30 years old or older. Forrester’s data also shows that 59% of all U.S. Internet users now use social networks and that 70% consume content on social media and social networking sites.

Sponsor

As Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff notes, two years ago, when the company first looked at similar data, people’s online behavior with regards to creating and consuming content was very similar to what Internet users are doing today. One major difference, however, is the rise of conversational interactions. People still blog, comment and vote on social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Over the last two years, however, the fastest growing group in Forrester’s surveys have been conversationalists who use Twitter and Facebook to post status updates and engage in conversations with their friends.

More People Join Social Networks – Number of Creators Remains Stable

Creators – those who publish their own blogs or upload audio they created – now make up 24% of all Internet users. Joiners – those users who maintain a profile on a social networking site – make up 59% of all users. Interestingly, while the number of joiners has grown rapidly, the number of creators has remained relatively stable over the last few years. This makes sense, though, given that it’s very easy to join a social network but relatively hard to create a podcast or maintain a blog.

Forrester classified 17% of all respondents as “inactives.” These users don’t participate in social networking activities at all.

Discuss

The Dow is up 96 points while the NASDAQ and S&P are up 26 and 12 points, respectively.

Oil is just about breaking even, unchanged at $78 a barrel of crude.

Gold is up $4.20 to $1138 an ounce and silver up $0.34 at $18.77.

Apple (AAPL) is doing well on the hard news of ra coming Apple tablet launch. It’s currently up 3.8% at $214 a share.

AIG (AIG) is also having a good day amid news that it may sell its Alico unit to MetLife (MET) for $14-15 billion. It’s up 2% at $28.64 a share.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Stocks Predict A GOP Win In Massachusetts
• Here’s What Will Happen To Healthcare Stocks If Scott Brown Wins Tomorrow
• Stocks Boom Across The World After Intel Numbers

Reality fans could be “Snookin’ for Love” sooner than originally thought. Jersey Shore’s Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi has revealed that she is fielding offers from several networks to star in her own reality dating show.

“Definitely there is no set thing but it has been talked about. I got offers from VH1 and other reality networks,” she tell Us Weekly.

Snooki, a 21-year-old self-described “guidette,” has previously said she’d like to appear in a Flavor of Love-esque show, tentatively-titled Snooki For Love, where she will hand out pickles to the men she wanted to keep in the competition.

“A guy I can be real with. I love to be a dork; I love a guy with a sense of humor,” Snook replied when asked what kind of man she would like meet.

Snooki recently admitted to “hooking up” with co-star Mike ‘The Situation” Sorrentino, but insisted that the arrangement is “not awkward at all.”

Jersey Shore airs Thursdays on MTV.

Helmut Marko acaba de desmentir los últimos rumores que situaban a Bruno Senna como nuevo piloto de la escudería Toro Rosso. Según ha afirmado el propio Marko:

No es cierto, nunca he oído esa historia. Será Alguersuari. Hay algunos detalles contractuales que hay que resolver, pero en principio, será Alguersuari.

Por lo visto, ya se habría concretado una fecha para confirmar la renovación de Jaime Alguersuari. Asi que, es muy posible que en los próximos días los seguidores españoles de la Fórmula 1 volvamos a recibir otra buena noticia.

Por lo visto, Franz Tost tendría que ser informado al completo de todo lo referente a la renovación de Alguersuari. De confirmarse esta noticia, tendríamos tres pilotos españoles en la parrilla, Fernando Alonso, Pedro de la Rosa y por último, Jaime Alguersuari.

Related posts:

1. Jaime Alguersuari firma con Toro Rosso para 2010
2. Bruno Senna podría sustituir a Jaime Alguersuari
3. Sebastian Bourdais es destituido de Toro Rosso

THERE has long been enthusiasm among the “nudge” behaviouralists for the posting of calorie content in restaurants. The availability of this information, it is assumed, will encourage diners to choose healthier options, thereby improving public health, without heavy-handed government limits on what can actually be sold and consumed. And so there was a great deal of disappointment when early results out of New York City, where mandated calorie count information was introduced in 2008, failed to show the expected decline in calories consumed:

The results were pretty dismal: only about half the respondents even noticed the calorie counts and only 15% said they influenced their choice. But the receipts told an even more dismal story: overall, people actually purchased more calories after the law went into effect. The results aren’t statistically significant, though, so basically all the researchers can really say is that the law (so far) hasn’t had any effect. The only glimmer of good news is that among people under 35, respondents who noticed the labeling did seem to cut back a bit. No other subgroup showed any effect.

But perhaps that initial analysis underestimated the effect of the programme. Here’s a new piece of research from NBER, by Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen:

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers’ purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers’ food choices—there is almost no change in purchases of beverage calories. There is no impact on Starbucks profit on average, and for the subset of stores located close to their competitor Dunkin Donuts, the effect of calorie posting is actually to increase Starbucks revenue. Survey evidence and analysis of commuters suggest the mechanism for the effect is a combination of learning and salience.

That is what we’d expect to see; after all, consumers seem to significantly underestimate the calorie content of junk food, occasionally by thousands of calories. What’s interesting is that Starbucks actually benefitted financially, relative to nearby competitors, from posting this information. That suggests that firms should be quick to adopt calorie posting in places where it’s not yet mandated. And, oddly enough, the government mandate seems to have turned up a few twenty dollar bills, just lying around on the sidewalk.

Play.me – the newest music platform where users can stream ad-free music on demand from virtually anywhere at any time – has officially launched. Play.me’s browser-based service gives users instant access to over 2.5 million songs to create playlists and customize radio stations to share and stream through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Play.me enables music fans to quickly find and play all the songs they love from a comprehensive, continually updated catalog and find new artists with Play.me’s discovery tools, including similar artist suggestions, new releases, and dynamic commercial-free radio stations which can be instantly created based on genre, artist, and decade.

For the music listener on-the-go, Play.me’s pioneering Android app — the first of its kind in the US market — allows users to temporarily save playlists directly to their phone. This new feature enables users without a signal to enjoy uninterrupted listening while “off the grid,” such as being on a plane or in a subway tunnel where you don’t have cell phone reception or wi-fi access.

Play.me offers consumers both a premium monthly subscription service ($9.99) and a free trial version with limited streaming capabilities and complimentary downloads.

Play.me has licensing deals with major music companies including Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, IODA, The Orchard and Beggars Group. In addition, Play.me is actively working to add more content providers, and is in the latter stages of negotiations with the other major labels. From mainstream hits to buzz-worthy indies and everything in between, Play.me provides over 10 million minutes of non-stop music.

“We believe that our easy-to-use navigation and extensive catalog — combined with the trial and paid offerings — makes Play.me the ultimate destination for music enthusiasts to hear and discover music the way they want, when they want,” said Massimiliano Pellegrini (Chairman, Play.me Inc.).

“We are pleased to make our unparalleled roster of music available through the Play.me platform. We think well-built, easy-to-use services that provide a compelling consumer experience to fans have a huge opportunity to meet consumer demand for legitimate digital solutions,” said Michael Paull, Executive Vice President, Global Digital Business, Sony Music Entertainment.

In the coming weeks, Play.me will launch new features, including the release of its mobile application for iPhone and Blackberry; and Play.me News featuring artist interviews, special promotions, and the latest music news. Developers are also encourage to check out Play.me Labs, and be sure to check out Play.me blog for the latest updates and company news.