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A few months ago, I walked into a Paradise Bakery & Café in Phoenix — a place known for its excellent food and free Wi-Fi. Like a lot of places with free Internet access, there were plenty of laptop users. What stood out to me was that all but one of the computers was either a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

It’s not just me looking through at the world with an Apple-tinged bias. The more places I go, the more I see people using Macs, or at least considering them. The Apple stores in Phoenix are still nearly elbow to elbow with people every time I visit, however the lone Microsoft store in Scottsdale was pretty empty the one time I visited.

There’s now data to back up these observations. Macsimum News reports that iMacs were the top-selling desktop for the month of October 2009 according to the NPD Group. After the proverbial jaw-dropping moment, there was quickly speculation as to why Macs finally outpaced PCs when it came to desktops. According to The Daily Gleaner, the NPD Group stated that PC sales were down as a result of the impending launch of Windows 7.

Or, it could also be indicative that Windows users are finally getting fed up.

“If Microsoft Windows is seen as a buggier, less-secure product that is slower, harder to use and ultimately raises costs for everybody, that opens up the market for Apple to gain that high-end segment. . . ,” Harvard Business School’s David Yoffie said in The Daily Gleaner. “If Windows 7 is not seen as more of an improvement (over Vista) then I think you’ll see more erosion at the high end.”

TUAWApple’s “renaissance” is under way originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ComScore, a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity.

Flurry announced the partnership on the heels of its merger with Pinch Media last month. The service boasts a nearly ubiquitous presence in the mobile market and will add a host of real-time data to comScore’s reports.

Sponsor

Flurry collects mobile application data from approximately two out of every three iPhone and Android devices. Each month, the company aggregates application usage data from over 1 billion end-user sessions across more than 50 million unique handsets from more than 200 countries. Over 10,000 developers have chosen to integrate Flurry Analytics within their applications.

That’s 9,700 developers more than the company started with just a year ago.

Using Flurry’s data, comScore will add “real-time consumption data, including frequency of use, length of use, user geographic location, new vs. repeat usage and Wi-Fi vs. carrier network usage” to its mobile application data.

In a market that’s only going to see growth, some are already predicting Flurry’s acquisition by a big-time player in the near future. Analytics remains hot, as evidenced further by this morning’s news of a $27.5 million investment in comScore-competitor Quantcast by Cisco and Polaris Ventures.

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Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm, a status update service that allows users to update posts on over 50 social networks through SMS, mobile apps, IM services and 3rd party apps that support the service. Seesmic plans to integrate Ping.fm into all of its applications in the near future. In addition, Seesmic’s users will be able to send updates to their favorite social networks through Ping.fm’s email, SMS and IM gateways. Ping.fm’s founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough will join Seesmic as full-time employees and continue to work on Ping.fm.

Sponsor

Neither Seesmic nor Ping.fm disclosed the terms of the acquisition. It’s worth noting, however, that both Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman invested in Ping.fm in December 2008.

Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur notes that he hopes that this acquisition will allow the company to speed up “its vision of becoming your default application to stay in touch with your friends and constantly managing your online social presence.” Through Ping.fm, Seesmic’s users will soon be able to easily update their status on a wide variety of social networks like Ning, Yahoo Meme, Yammer and Status.net. Seesmic already offered built-in support for Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace.

According to Le Meur, Ping.fm currently has over 500,000 registered users, though the number of active users is likely far smaller. In total, Ping.fm posts about 200,000 updates per day. Seesmic’s own Twhirl has offered support for Ping.fm since early 2009.

Seesmic Wants to be a Lot More Than Just a Twitter Client

Given Seesmic’s vision, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company is interested in broadening its scope beyond Twitter. The acquisition of Ping.fm gives Seesmic all the necessary infrastructure like SMS and IM gateways to execute this vision. Ping.fm offers it’s own URL shortener and gives users access to detailed statistics about how these links were used.

One of the most interesting aspects of the company’s recently announced native Windows client, for example, is that it includes support for a plugin architecture. This will allow developers to integrate support for virtually any social network into Seesmic. In the near future, Seesmic plans to expand this feature to all of its clients.

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Looks like Nokia is going all-out in it patent fight with Apple: in addition to the lawsuit it’s filed over GSM standards and last week’s International Trade Commission complaint, Espoo just filed a second complaint with the federal court, alleging that Apple’s infringing several “implementation patents” that cover everything from camera sensors to touchscreens. That’s three fronts in the same war, if you’re counting — the original regarding GSM patents, and these two latest over specific device technologies. The biggest bombshell so far is the ITC complaint, in which Nokia’s asking the commission to ban imports of basically every Apple mobile product from the MacBook to the iPhone for infringing its device patents — a strategy we’ve seen in other high-profile cases. Since the ITC has the ability to move quite quickly, we’d expect that case to be the primary battleground for the moment — but remember that Apple has plenty of its own incredibly broad patents of its own to fight back with here, so don’t expect a quick resolution. Looks like 2010 is going to be awfully good for these attorneys, don’t you think?

Nokia asks ITC to ban iPhone, iPod, and MacBook imports, files another lawsuit against Apple originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI planning to a show dual-screen e-reader, 3D laptop at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Scrybe from Synaptics brings new life to your tired touchpad originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Even though you probably still can’t figure out what good the ability to connect your Bluetooth keyboard to your iPhone will do, the BTstack project is steaming ahead with this demo of a connected Magic Mouse twirling its pointer all over Apple’s handset. The driver code is still unreleased, but we get to see some nice lag-free interaction between the two devices, suggesting it shouldn’t be too far away from public consumption. As if to answer your earlier quandary, the video also features a Celluon CL800BT virtual keyboard, which projects onto and responds to your touch of any flat surface. A gimmick most likely, but a fun journey into the dream of nomadic computing nonetheless. Check out all the action after the break.

[Thanks, Daniel]

Continue reading iPhone and Magic Mouse linked up by BTstack (video)

iPhone and Magic Mouse linked up by BTstack (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Southland’s Kevin Alejandro has been cast as a love interest for Nelsan Ellis’s Lafayette on the upcoming third season of HBO’s popular supernatural drama True Blood, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In a guest arc kicking off this spring, Alejandro will play Jesus, a Latino orderly assigned to care for Lafayette’s ailing Ruby Jean Reynolds at an assisted living facility.

The actor, who is still billed as a series regular on the gritty TNT police drama, joins the recently-cast Joe Manganiello, Lindsay Pulsipher, and James Frain on True Blood. He has also appeared in guest arc on Ugly Betty and Weeds.

Facing a great deal of pressure from EU law makers to reduce emissions, Porsche is planning on offering its next-generation Boxster with a new 4-cylinder or even a turbocharged 3-cylinder. According to the Boxster model line director Hans-Jurgen Wohler, Porsche is planning to offer an entry-level model with a downsized engine in a move that will help it reduce fleet emissions.

“A Boxster with a four-cylinder engine, or maybe even a three-cylinder turbo, could produce between 180bhp and 200bhp and emit just 180g/km of CO2,” Wohler told AutoCar. “Given the Boxster’s history — that it started with a 200bhp, 2.5-litre engine — I think this is possibly something that customers could accept.

“We are under a great deal of pressure from the EU law makers to reduce emissions, but we don’t know yet how much we’ll have to come down by,” he added.

In order to avoid fines, companies like Porsche that produce less than 300,000 units a year will have to reduce their fleet CO2 emissions by 25 per cent compared with 2006 levels in order to avoid fines.

– By: Kap Shah

Source: AutoCar

KODE ICD-10: H52.1 : Myopia

Seorang ayah bercerita: “ Ketika anak perempuan saya masih kelas I SD, berulang kali kami selaku orang tua dipanggil ke sekolah oleh gurunya. Kami diberi tahu bahwa anak kami sering tidak menyelesaikan tugas menulis di sekolah sehingga harus pulang lebih akhir dibanding teman-temannya. Selain itu katanya anak kami suka menyontek tulisan temannya saat diberi tugas menyalin tulisan di papan tulis “. Si Ayah melanjutkan: “ Belakangan kami mengetahui mata anak kami minus 2,5 setelah konsultasi ke dokter.”

Sementara itu seorang Ibu berkisah: “ Putra saya memiliki hobi menggambar, tapi nampak tidak senang jika diminta menulis dan membaca. Dia juga suka banget menonton TV dan main game di layar komputer dalam jarak dekat sambil sesekali memicingkan matanya. Kata gurunya, putra saya kurang bisa menangkap pelajaran yang ditulis di papan tulis. Nilai raportnya kurang bagus terutama untuk pelajaran matematika. Atas saran dokter, saya memeriksakan mata anak saya. Ternyata minus 4. Setelah menggunakan kacamata, nilai pelajarannya berangsur membaik .”

Cerita seorang ayah dan ibu atas putra-putri mereka menunjukkan kepada kita bahwa peran orang tua dan guru sangat diperlukan untuk mengenali kemungkinan gangguan penglihatan anak melalui pengamatan di sekolah dan di rumah ketika anak sedang belajar, menggunakan komputer, ataupun bermain yang menggunakan fungsi penglihatan.

Mata minus atau myopia merupakan kelainan refraksi dimana sinar sejajar yang masuk mata dibias membentuk bayangan di depan retina mata sehingga obyek terlihat kabur apabila melihat jauh.

Myopia ditandai dengan kabur jika melihat jauh, melihat obyek lebih jelas dalam jarak dekat,  mata mudah lelah dan kerap mendekatkan mata ke obyek yang dilihatnya.

Bagi anak yang mampu menyampaikan keluhan penglihatan, biasanya orang tua segera memeriksakan anaknya ke dokter.  Namun anak yang masih kecil atau tidak mampu menyampaikan keluhan penglihatan, para orang tua dapat memantau fungsi penglihatan anaknya melalui pengamatan sejak dini.

Myopia dapat dikenali apabila anak menunjukkan gejala-gejala sebagai berkut:

• Kabur jika melihat jauh.
• Memicingkan mata bila melihat jauh.
• Membaca dalam jarak dekat.
• Mata mudah lelah saat membaca.
• Kadang mengeluh sakit kepala.

Bagaimana menanggulangi myopia ?

• Menggunakan kacamata, yakni dengan koreksi lensa negatif terlemah yang menghasilkan penglihatan terbaik.
• Lensa kontak. Penggunaan lensa kontak terutama pada myopia tinggi dan anisometria.
• Bedah retraktif, meliputi: (a) Bedah refraktif kornea, yakni dengan mengubah lengkungan permukaan kornea menggunakan laser atau operasi lasik. (b) Bedah refraktif lensa, yakni tindakan ekstraksi lensa jernih yang diikuti dengan implantasi lensa di dalam mata (intraokuler). Tindakan bedah biasanya dilakukan jika dengan koreksi kacamata ataupun penggunaan lensa kontak tidak memberikan hasil yang memuaskan. Hanya saja, para orang tua hendaknya menanyakan efek samping yang mungkin timbul pasca operasi.

FAQ SEPUTAR MATA MINUS PADA ANAK

Apakah vitamin A dan wortel dapat mengurangi mata minus ? Jawab: Tidak. Mata minus bukan karena kekurangan vitamin A tapi karena kelainan refraksi sebagimana penjelasan pada pengertian myopia.

Apakah mata minus pada anak harus sering kontrol ? Jawab : Ya. Mata minus pada anak sebaiknya kontrol 6 bulan hingga setahun sekali terutama pada awal penggunaan kacamata karena mata minus pada anak biasanya cenderung bertambah sampai usia sekitar 20 tahun.

Semoga bermanfaat.

Edisi cetak, file PDF 499 KB, silahkan download di sini atau di sini.

Referensi:

• PDT Ilmu Penyakit Mata RSU Dr. Soetomo, Surabaya, edisi III, 2006.
• Ilmu Kesehatan Anak, Jilid II, ceakan XI, FKUI, 2005.

Berapa biaya operasi Lasik ? Silahkan lihat di sini.

:: :: :: posting menggunakan WLW :: :: ::

Posted in Artikel, Gaya Hidup, Health, Informasi, Kesehatan Tagged: Kacamata, Lensa Kontak, Mata Minus, Myopia, Penyakit Mata, Refraksi

Jakub Kornfeil and Sturla Fagerhaug head for the 2010 125 World Championship, KTM announced today. Kornfeil, the 16-year-old Czech rider who won the Rookies Cup by just 2 points, has signed for Racing Team Germany, while Fagerhaug, the 18 year old Norwegian, runner up in the Rookies Cup, will race for the I.S.P.A. Ongetta, Worldwide Race Team.

Kornfeil knows very well that the step into the World Championship will be tough. "I know that the competition will be very very hard…. (read more)

How can AOL CEO Tim Armstrong fix his company? He has a very big to-do list, of course — like hacking away at his cost base, through buyouts, layoffs and asset sales. And then there’s the whole automated content plan, whatever that actually is.

But here’s one very important priority — reversing the direction of this chart. Via JP Morgan Imran Khan, it tracks the amount of money the company has been able to generate from every 1,000 page views:

As Khan notes, you can pin a lot of AOL’s (AOL) ad slump on the previous regime’s decision to sell much of the company’s inventory through its “Platform A” ad network, which stressed volume over price. That is, the AOL sales team was rewarded for selling as much as it could, no matter how much money it got for the stuff.

Armstrong’s solution sounds simple, and it’s one that other big Web players, like CBS (CBS) and Yahoo (YHOO) are trying to do as well: Sell less stuff, at higher prices. It won’t be that easy, of course.

And Armstrong’s task may be  even harder then his peers’, because AOL’s sales force, once one of the top shops on the Web, has been in free fall for several years. It’s not a coincidence that Armstrong is a career sales guy, but the sotto voce criticism of his tenure at Google (GOOG) is that he never really needed to sell anything, because Google’s ad product sells itself.

That’s a gross simplification, of course. But the best way for Armstrong to prove his critics wrong is to turn that chart around.

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Of all the many major issues to think about in the digital sector over the next year, perhaps the most important sector to focus on will be the mobile space.

And that’s why the swirl of controversy around the inability of AT&T (T) to maintain a reliable network for users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone–especially in New York and San Francisco–is perhaps the flashpoint story of the coming year.

It’s not only an appalling predicament for consumers who have paid for promised service and been denied it, as well as a future Harvard Business School case study in corporate incompetence (or malfeasance, depending on your mood), but it is a really bad development for tech in general.

In other words, failed calls and glitchy apps are more than just annoying–they’re holding back a key spark of future innovation for computing.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens way too much in the digital space.

In fact, this AT&T debacle actually reminds me a lot of AOL’s busy-signal crisis of 1997, when the then-high-flying online service signed up too many consumers for its all-you-can-eat access and did not have the equipment in place to deliver what it sold.

At the time, its CEO Steve Case used the same lame excuses that AT&T has, pretty much asking users to buck up during the shortfall. But he quickly retreated, apologized and fixed the situation.

That particular self-inflicted mess is now but a distant memory and certainly did not stop the progress of either AOL or Internet use overall. But it was a stark reminder that the relentless march of innovation should not be throttled.

That’s more true than ever as computing moves into what I consider an entirely new era of development, all centered on portable “smart” devices, whose standard-bearer is the iPhone, iPod Touch and–soon–iSlate.

That’s purely my opinion, of course (hey, Scoble, Web 3.0 is still mobile!)

But, as Walt Mossberg and I wrote before our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last summer:

“So what’s the seminal development that’s ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It’s the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services. The poster children for this new era have been the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, which have sold 37 million units in less than two years and attracted 35,000 apps and one billion app downloads in just nine months.”

That all means plenty of need for strong networks that can handle all the wireless data that is going to be pumped through it in ever increasing amounts.

Perhaps this looks like bandwidth hogfest by customers, but it’s the landscape now and AT&T must adapt or, well, you know.

So, following in the footsteps of a lot of really terrific work done pretty much by bloggers on the mess AT&T has created, it is probably a given that–as I have obsessively done with Yahoo (YHOO) and its management woes–I and many other journalists should stop making jokes about it and spend a lot more time monitoring what the telecom giant, as well as others, are doing or, really, not doing.

As usual, all tips and delicious memos appreciated, as well as suggestions of stories to look into.

Until then, here’s a short and mostly silly video I did recently of some dropped calls I had on my iPhone, as well as an interview Walt did with AT&T President CEO and Chairman Randall Stephenson at D7 last summer about these very issues:

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Prader-Willi syndrome or PWS syndrome is thought to be one of the most common genetic disorders. Prader-Willi syndrome and Angelman syndrome were the first examples in humans of genomic imprinting in Cytogenetics. Angelman syndrome has an entirely different clinical condition with PWS syndrome. I will explain about the Angelman syndrome in my future post.
 
What is genomic imprinting? Imprinting is a type of marking process that has a memory. Genomic imprinting is where a segment of DNA is marked or imprinted during gametogenesis. This mark will be retained and recognized throughout the life of the individual. Maternal and paternal inherited alleles will be marked differently and are expressed differently in the offsprings. Therefore, the offspring with the same genetic material will have different appearances. The individual with Prader-Willi syndrome is because the loss of paternally inherited region 15q11 – q13 of chromosome 15. Simple to say, the PWS individual does not inherit the region 15q11 – q13 of chromosome 15 from his/her father but only from mother.

Prader-Willi syndrome is the most common genetic cause of marked obesity in humans according to Cytogenetics. It is a complex disorder with cardinal features of
 
i)    Infantile hypotonia (low muscle tone)
 
ii)   Mild growth retardation
 
iii)  Frequent occurrence of breech presentation (baby enters the birth canal with the buttocks or feet first)
 
iv)  Small hands and feet with gracile and tapering fingers
 
v)   Microcephaly (smaller head)
 
vi)  Almond-shaped eyes
 
vii) Mental deficiency (average IQ of 65)
 
viii) Short stature and so on.
 
From the age of about one and half years onward, hyperphagia becomes a serious problem, leading to gross obesity. Due to hyperphagia and gross obesity, diabetes often sets in during adolescence or later. Epilepsy is found in a minority of cases. Mental development is characterised by moderate to severe retardation with tendency to behaviour disorders, especially reactive to food deprivation. Patients with this syndrome may need specialists for assessment and treatment of their behavioural and learning problems, at the beginning of childhood. Prader-Willi syndrome is present in all races and ethnic groups and most cases are sporadic.
 
In conclusion, Prader-willi syndrome is a genetic disorder that needs treatment and assessment to overcome the learning problem and obesity problem of the patients. I will write a series of Prader-Willi syndrome in this Cytogenetics and Cancer Research blog in order to give people a clear mind about this syndrome. Stay tuned!

Prader-Willi Syndrome – Genetic Disorder That Cause Obesity is a post from: Cytogenetics and Cancer Research

Related Posts

• January 22, 2010 — Human Genome Project – Find out Human Database (2)
• November 18, 2009 — 5 Hypotheses Causing Down Syndrome (2)
• October 20, 2009 — XXX Syndrome (Superwoman) | Birth Defect In Cytogenetics (3)
• October 19, 2009 — Mosaicism (2 In 1 Human) | Birth Defect In Cytogenetics (0)

It’s a new year, and it’s a time for big dreams. While you’re dreaming of losing ten pounds though, Square Enix wants to use the year to “take root” in an effort to eventually lead the entire entertainment industry.

It’s a common practice for Japanese companies to issue statements at the beginning of a new year. Square Enix’s message, titled “Taking Root,” suggests that video games will soon be competing with the likes of movie studios, if they aren’t already.

“In the near future, the rate of convergence between video games and other digital entertainment content will only continue to accelerate,” Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said in a statement (via Kotaku).

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I recently received an email question from a knowledge-hungry reader.

Mark,

I’m becoming VERY interested in learning how the body works; what happens when we eat carbohydrates, the effects of antioxidants, etc. I was given a good introduction in “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and of course the 3rd chapter in your book, where you talk about insulin, or even your article “what happens when you carb binge”. Wikipedia and Google help me to a certain point, but I soon become overwhelmed; it’s hard to put everything together… where do I go from there?

Great question. Yeah, Google is a godsend, but it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially when a top 10 Google search ranking doesn’t necessarily indicate quality of content so much as it indicates the effectiveness of a site’s search engine optimization (although it doesn’t hurt to have both…). And a quick peek into the blogrolls of your favorite sites can be useful, but there’s often little explanation or explication to accompany the listings. Besides, blogrolls don’t cover books, or films, or other offline resources, and despite the undeniable ease of relying totally on blogs and websites, those offline resources can’t be ignored.

Quick. How’d you hear about your favorite book or album of all time? Did you let an online algorithm determine what genre/artist/author/etc you’d prefer? Or did a trusted friend, colleague, or family member make a recommendation? I dunno about you, but I’ll take personal recommendations from people I trust over what some impersonal line of code thinks I should like, given the choice between the two.

You’re reading MDA, so I’m going to assume you care about what I have to say – at least a little bit. So, without further ado, I present my recommended list of nutrition, health, fitness, and all things Primal-related readings, viewings, listenings, and perusings.

(more…)

Abbott (NYSE: ABT) will announce its fourth-quarter and full-year 2009 financial results on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010, before the market opens.

The announcement will be followed by a live webcast of the earnings conference call at 8 a.m. Central time (9 a.m. Eastern), and will be accessible through Abbott’s Investor Relations Web site at abbottinvestor.com.

An archived edition of the call will be available after 11 a.m. Central time.

About Abbott

Abbott is a global, broad-based health care company devoted to the discovery, development, manufacture and marketing of pharmaceuticals and medical products, including nutritionals, devices and diagnostics.

The company employs more than 72,000 people and markets its products in more than 130 countries.

Abbott’s news releases and other information are available on the company’s Web site at abbott.com.

Bulgaria’s households pay the lowest electricity bills in the EU, a report of the Center for the Study of Democracy reveals. Price corrections to cover new investments in Bulgaria’s electric power production and supply are unavoidable while the …