Blog

It’s easy to remember the most recent stories or advances in health and medicine – but what about what else has happened since the hysteria of Y2K? Whether it’s Terri Shiavo in 2005 or the H1N1 virus in 2009, it’s impossible to list a “top 10″ list with everyone in agreement. However, the idea of the top 10 lists is to help us remember, to think about what’s happened, and maybe to continue making a difference. Here is a list of top 10 health stories that did get a lot of press:

2000: The Human Genome Project. Scientists had been working on mapping out the genes of humans and finally, in June 2000, they were able to present their draft of the human genome.

2001: Anthrax scare. According to CNN.com news people, the anthrax scare made it to the top 10 news stories of the year. Envelopes with anthrax, a powdery, white substance, were being mailed to various locations throughout the United States. People were becoming afraid to open mail and any hint of a white powder set off security concerns.

2002: Hormone replacement therapy became the new no-no in health. Researchers had been studying the use of hormones in 16,000 healthy postmenopausal women. The study was ended prematurely (after five years, instead of eight) because of an increase in the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, strokes and blood clots among women who were taking both estrogen and progestin.

2003: SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) – In early 2003, SARS came on the scene very suddenly. The virus spread easily from person to person and had a death rate of almost 10%.

2004: Although not technically a health story, the story of the year had to be one that happened within its last week: the tsunami that killed over 230,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean. This truly was a disaster of immense proportions and still affects the people in those countries today.

2005: Terri Schiavo. On March 31, Terri Schindler Shiavo, died after becoming a cause celebre for living wills and the right to die. Fifteen years before, Terri experienced a cardiac arrest, at the age of 26 years. For 15 years, she remained alive only because of her feeding tube that provided nourishment directly into her stomach. Her husband wanted to discontinue her feedings, saying this is what Terri would have wanted. Her parents fought to keep Terri alive. (Terri’s foundation)

2006: HPV Vaccine, Gardasil. The United States FDA approved the use of Gardasil, a vaccine that helps reduce the infection rate of some forms of human papillomavirus, the virus that causes genital warts. Two of these viruses are known to contribute to the development of cervical cancer.

2007: Children’s Cough Medicine – another no-no. It was in 2007 that news hit the wires: cough medicines were not mean for children under the age of 2 years and should not be given to them, despite directions on the label. The FDA did say that if the child’s doctor recommended it, that was ok, but for parents not to routinely give their children this type of medication.

2008: New CPR Guidelines: Out with the old number of compression combined with number of breaths. The idea of having to give breaths of air while doing chest compressions was changed when researchers found it was better just to give effective and rapid chest compressions. This allowed the blood to circulate and provide the brain with much needed fresh blood.

2009: H1N1 Virus. The H1N1 virus, or so-called swine flu, took over the health news in 2009. Whether it was overblown hype or a true near-disaster, we may never know. If the world responded well and prevented massive infection and deaths, then it was a success. If the disease wasn’t as bad as originally felt, then maybe it was overblown. Whichever it is/was, it was definitely the news maker of 2009.

~~~

Images: iStock.com and PhotoXpress.com

Post from: Blisstree

Top 10 Medical Stories for the Decade

Here are two main points I am making you may want to read before or instead of reading the rest of this message: (1) raise taxes on the very wealthy, and (2) rebuild the US manufacturing sector via a ‘clean, renewable energy economy. It seems that …

First of all: congrats and welcome to the future! You’re really going to love that phone you have there.  Secondly: you are most definitely at the right website – if you’re looking for answers about your phone, we have them here – heck, we have answers to questions you didn’t know you had.

If you’re completely brand new to webOS (That’s the operating system running on your Pre or Pixi), we have a walkthrough of the major new features you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with, including Synergy (which syncs your data from multiple sources), Cards (how you switch apps), and Universal Search.  Find it all right here. If you’re really looking for depth, you can find out a lot of extra little details by reading our full Palm Pre Review. Pixi Owners will probably want to check that out too, but there’s also a Pixi Review if you’re interested.

That’s all a bit much, though, we know. So up top is "Everything you need to know about the Pre in 10 minutes," 95% of which applies to the Pixi too. Watch that to get a feel for what the journey you’re about to start looks like.

Now, if you’ve done all that, perused the App Catalog and installed some apps, and still have a hankering for more, we got that too. You can install Themes and Apps that aren’t in the App Catalog. We have a great Getting Started with Homebrew Article.

Last but most certainly not least, it’s a great idea to join PreCentral.net as a member which lets you do one exciting thing: participate in our webOS forums. There is no bigger or more helpful group of webOS owners on the planet. If you have a question, searching the forums will almost always find you an answer.

(Oh, and if you didn’t get a Touchstone, our store has them for as little as $39.95 and also has a few different kits for putting together a solution. Just saying).

As we were discussing the Chevy Volt with some colleagues the other day, a potentially serious problem for EVs came up during the conversation. For the foreseeable future, the primary market for plug-ins and EVs will be urban areas where the range limitations of battery-powered cars figure to be less of an issue. However, if you look at the older residential areas in many cities, you’ll find that many homes don’t have garages, and people have to park on the street.

As we know, street parking carries along its own unique set of risks. Break-ins and thefts are not uncommon, as is vandalism like dragging keys along the paint. Now, imagine the type of miscreant who would commit such an act when he’s faced with a fun new target: several blocks and dozens of cars plugged into curbside chargers. Such an individual would likely be inclined to simply unplug all the cars as they walk by. Or worse.

You can put a locking fuel cap on an conventionally-powered prevent gas from being siphoned out, but the proposed locking mechanisms on some charging couplers don’t totally eliminate the possibility of someone simply disconnecting the cord. We’re not sure what the solution is, but if this sort of thing were to happen on a wide scale, it’s just another potential impediment to getting drivers to consider plug-in vehicles.

Will curbside EV charging fall prey to vandals and miscreants? originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 11:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

É provável que qualquer usuário de um PC com o Windows instalado conheça a famigerada “Tela Azul da Morte”. O nome é assustador e, é claro, tem um bom motivo: você perdeu tudo que estava fazendo. Clique aqui ou na imagem para ler esse artigo do baixaki.

BEIJING, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) — China’s top legislature adopted Saturday an amendment to the renewable energy law to require electricity grid companies to buy all the power produced by renewable energy generators. The amendment says the State Council …

 
this is war | 30 seconds to mars (2009)
it has been four years since a beautiful lie released in 2005, 30 seconds to mars is back with their third album, “this is war”. it is worth the wait as it is outstandingly brilliant. definitely one of my top 10 favorite albums in 2009. i have nothing else to say except “this album is epic”.

Although not revolutionary in the truest sense of the word (as it is already featured on several European models, like the Skoda Fabia), the new three-blink lane change technology from Ford is a welcomed addition to the gadgetry featured on the 2011 Ford Fiesta.

Simply put, the technology allows for the turn signals to be automatically shut off after the switch has been activated. This helps prevent annoying blinker flashing on the car, as they prove to be very disturbing for dri… (read more)

If ever there was a seasonal drink, eggnog is it. Imagine drinking eggnog on spring break or poolside during the summer… it just doesn’t work, does it? We’re getting towards the end of prime eggnog drinking season and if you don’t make a batch soon you’re going to have to wait until next December rolls around to have some. Now is the time to whip up a batch, and it’s easier than you might think. The little effort it does require is worth it; homemade eggnog has a pure, custard-like flavor and is less sugary and less full of questionable ingredients than most of the eggnog sold in stores. We’d actually forgotten how good homemade eggnog could be until one of our readers, Anna Salveson, reminded us. This recipe is inspired by the eggnog recipe she sent in and hers is included below, too. According to Anna she’s been continually making batches of eggnog all month to keep her family satisfied, which we think qualifies her as an eggnog expert.

Ingredients:

• 4 beaten egg yolks
• 3 cups coconut milk, almond milk, or whole cream
• 1 teaspoon maple syrup or sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ground nutmeg and cinnamon to taste

Directions:

Mix egg yolks, 2 cups of coconut/almond milk or cream, and sugar. Stir gently but constantly over medium-low heat until the mixture thickens enough to cling to and coat the back of a spoon, about five to ten minutes. Be patient with this process – if you turn the heat up too high or don’t stir, the egg yolks might turn into scramble eggs.

Remove from heat and set the pot in a larger bowl filled with ice water (careful, so no water overflows into the eggnog!) and stir for 2-3 minutes then add the last cup of milk/cream and the vanilla.

If you want to add any additional holiday spirit (a few tablespoons of rum, bourbon or whiskey) to the eggnog, now is your chance. Let the mixture cool down to room temperature then chill for a while longer in the fridge. The longer you let the eggnog chill, the thicker and more custard-like it will become. Before serving, generously dust with cinnamon and nutmeg. If you can, buy whole nutmeg and grate it yourself (a microplane zester works great for this).

Makes 4-6 servings.

For a quick eggnog fix, you can try Anna’s recipe for one serving: In a blender, mix 1-2 raw egg yolks, 6 ounces coconut milk (or almond milk), 1-2 teaspoons maple syrup and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract. Blend for 30 seconds and serve dusted with nutmeg.

Happy holidays, everyone. Cheers!

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Frozen Primal Custard
2. Primal Pies: Fill ‘er Up
3. Make Your Own Primal Energy Bars in 10 Easy Steps

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? “Objective” descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

Sponsor

Editor’s note: In this series, called Redux, we’re re-publishing some of our best posts of 2009. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Austrian researcher Corinna Bath argues that there is a real risk that the semantic web of the future will be built with the perspectives and assumptions of male computer scientists baked-in unconsciously – at the expense of everyone else.

Background

Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the “Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society” in Graz, Austria. She’s now working on engaging the several decades old study of gender and technology with the emerging world of the semantic web.

What is the semantic web? We define it as a paradigm that makes the meaning of particular web pages understandable by machines – not just in full text searches or keyword categories, but in terms of which concepts are central to a given page and the relationships between them.

The semantic web is hot. World Wide Web founding father and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are now in place for a semantic web to emerge.

So is it a boy or a girl?

When You Assume, You Make an…

Corinna Bath did an interview last week for the Austrian Semantic Web Company where she articulates her concerns about gender and the semantic web. Unfortunately, the interview is extremely academic in language and tone – so we’ll try to explain her arguments here.

Her first argument is that the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn’t until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities.

Too often, Bath argues, “binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use.”

Right: The Semantic Web made me grow this beard. Semantic web t-shirt via SpreadShirt.

For example, the Dublin Core ontology concerns Documents. It consists of a list of elements that can be used to describe a document, including “creator,” “contributor,” and “isReferencedBy.” Are there types of relationships that aren’t included on the list but are important to an accurate understanding of a document? There probably are, and different perspectives could help articulate what those relationships might be.

For example, some feminist critics argue that the Western cannon of almost every type of literature is full of work that men didn’t give women appropriate credit for. Some argue that Albert Einstein’s wife deserves substantial credit for his theory of relativity – should that be included in semantic markup wherever the book is cataloged? How should that relationship be described? Calling her a contributor would be controversial and wouldn’t really capture the history – a new category may be needed.

There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of “minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic.”

Is Categorization Itself The Right Solution?

The semantic web today is based largely on what are called “triples” – sets of subject, predicate and object. For example Marshall Kirkpatrick [subject], loves [predicate] Punkin’ the Tabby Kitten [object]. (Hypothetical, I don’t have any kittens and please don’t send me any.)

This way of describing things isn’t beyond question, however. As Bath argues:

Even the modeling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes.

In other words life aint so simple: people change, conflicts and context matter and things in this world don’t just get their meaning by one object bumping into another, one event leading to another, child inheriting traits from a parent, etc.

Computer logic may necessitate simplification of some of life’s richness – but this is nothing to take lightly. We’re talking about helping computers understand meaning and that is not a simple or trivial matter.

Is Knowledge Only The Absence of Doubt?

Bath calls into question “computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology,” or the belief that way we know that we really “know” something is by having no doubt about it.

If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist – ought we conclude that we’ve determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there’s a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth. Repeated attempts to disprove a theory make a much better basis for working knowledge.

Or, as political blogger Karoli Kuns said to NPR’s Andy Carvin this morning when Carvin asserted otherwise, “I’d argue that tag dissent balances folksonomies, not undermines.”

Let’s talk about “working knowledge” and stop whispering about “truth”, before the robot children hear us.

Philosophy Aside, What Does This Mean?

It means that as the language we use to communicate meaning to machines develops, we’d better watch out who is building it and what perspectives they take into consideration. Unconsidered assumptions could lead to a real disconnect between the meaning that machines know of the world and they way that millions of other people experience it.

Bath isn’t suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. “I am convinced,” she says, “that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace.”

She has her own explanation why this is important: “With the use of the Internet we are already witnessing a radical change in practices of how knowledge is represented, stored and spread. In the future most of our work and life will involve the manipulation and use of information. It will crucially depend on the epistemologies, concepts and leading metaphors of the Semantic Web, which direction the semantic “human-machine reconfigurations” (Lucy Suchman) will take.”

That’s a nice way to say that we need to work hard to avoid creating fascist robots that exercise a homogenizing influence on diverse human experiences. There are people who are doing semantic web work in directions that take this into account, but it’s something worth considering for all of us.

Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies.

Discuss

Tobias Levkovich at Citi highlights that, once again, the percentage of companies experiencing upward earnings revisions has spiked. At one point in October, 74% of companies had received higher earnings adjustments from analysts, shown by the blue line below. Yet this has eased back as of late.

Citi remains cautiously bullish on the market going forward.

Tobias Levkovich: Indeed, even the earnings revision trends that had spiked to 74% upward revisions back in October have moderated back to about 64% of late (see 6 Figure 15) and things may be setting up for a January rally as strong earnings reports and pre-announcements emerge. Indeed, the very recent slight “panic” readings are supportive of a rally within the next six months. Thus, we perceive that there are mixed signals and markets can move higher on such uncertainty early in 2010.

Other sentiment indicators aside (Citi goes through a long list of them to arrive at the above conclusion), while earnings revisions have spiked recently, it may not be cause for alarm… yet. Most upward revisions so far are likely corrections of the overly bearish estimates analysts made during the end of 2008 and early 2009.

Nobody wants to see a huge spike in earning revisions already baked-into stocks, it’s surely a red flag worth investigating, but at the same time it’s not automatically bad news. For example, for the U.S. economy as a whole, it’s comforting to know that many companies have higher earnings expectations today than six months ago.

(Via Citi Investment Research, ‘The Late Year Attitude’, Tobias Levkovich, 24 December 2009)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Citi: Sentiment Slips Into Panic Mode
• CHART OF THE DAY: Investor Sentiment Rebound Could Be A Bearish Sign
• Big Jump In Consumer Sentiment

Ammonia spotted in the jets could act as antifreeze in under-ice oceans.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store

Our friends over at Touch Arcade have put together their list of the best iPhone games of 2009, and if you happened to unwrap an iPod touch or an iPhone yesterday, that’s as good a place as any to start hunting for your favorite games. Spider: Secret of Bryce Manor [$2.99, iTunes link] topped their list, and we agree that it’s an excellent showcase for original iPhone software (there’s also a promo version if you want to try the gameplay for free).

Other than that, there’s a few of our favorites missing from the list (no Ramp Champ? No Galcon Labs?), but there are plenty of terrific games to download and play on into 2010. It’s been a fantastic year for iPhone gaming — if you haven’t yet jumped in and checked out some of the best the platform has to offer, what are you waiting for? Get downloading!

TUAWTouch Arcade picks their favorite iPhone games of 2009 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

It’s over a week later, and armed forces from both Iraq and Iran are still battling over a dispute oil well.

Reuters:

Iraqi troops say they will defend the well, where Iranian troops raised a flag for several days this month.

It is unclear how many troops are involved in the stand-off, but as many as 30 lightly armed Iraqi troops usually occupy border outposts in sensitive areas, and up to 10 in other areas. Some 11 Iranian soldiers are stationed near the disputed well.

The seizure of the well, which Iraq says is part of its Fakka oilfield in southeast Maysan province, triggered protests from the government in Baghdad and caused a rise in prices on jittery world oil markets.

For more, go re-read Stratfor’s analysis of the situation, about the message Iran is sending to the US.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Stratfor: An Iraqi Oil Renaissance May Destroy OPEC
• STRATFOR: The Iran Incursion Wasn’t Trivial, Was Meant As A Clear Message To Washington DC
• Stratfor: It’s Not Just Greece; Other Eurozone Countries Are Teetering On The Brink