MLManley

Here is a neat video of the DC snowfall. 30 inches in 30 hours in a 30 sec time lapse.

#diabetes >> (www.diabeteshealth.com) by Olivia Grider Feb 4, 2010

(www.connecttristates.com)

FT. MADISON, IA. — Fort Madison police and search and rescue teams have called off the search for a 22-year-old Keokuk man.

Around 2 a-m Sunday police received a report that Ray Charles Newell Dean of Keokuk had fallen through the ice along the Mississippi River, just west of Riverview Park.

Emergency crews searched the area by land and water. The search ended at 8:30 a-m.  The search was hampered by icy conditions on the water.

Dean’s body wasn’t found.  Police believe Dean was out for a walk when he walked out onto the ice about 100 feet off the shore.

#NoAgenda For Sunday February 7th 2010
Palin Teapot Party

“There’s a flip side to everything,” the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician since 1987, he started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients.

In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company, MuckWork, where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their “uncreative dirty work.”

This website in the article below (www.patientslikeme.com) is NOT just for ALS, but for a lot of other diseases. Patients especially talk about medications they are on and the side effects. Very informative. /MIke

When Jamie Heywood’s brother was diagnosed with ALS, he devoted his life to fighting the disease as well. The Heywood brothers built an ingenious website where people share and track data on their illnesses — and they discovered that the collective data had enormous power to comfort, explain and predict.

After finding out that his brother, Stephen, had the terminal illness ALS, Jamie Haywood founded the ALS Therapy Development Institute in 1999. ALS TDI is the world’s first non-profit biotechnology company and accelerated research on the disease by hiring scientists to develop treatments outside of academia and for-profit corporations. They were the first to publish research on the safety of using stem cells in ALS patients.

In 2005,Jamie and his youngest brother Ben, along with close friend Jeff Cole, built PatientsLikeMe.com to give patients control and access to their healthcare information and compare it to others like them. Its bold (and somewhat controversial) approach involves aggregating users health info in order to test the effects of particular treatments, bypassing clinical trials. It was named one of “15 companies that will change the world” by CNN Money.

Although his brother passed away in the fall of 2006, Jamie continues to serve as chairman of PatientsLikeMe and on the board of directors of ALS TDI. Jamie has raised over $50 million dollars for ALS TDI and was the subject of the biography His Brother’s Keeper, written by Jonathan Weiner. He was also featured in the documentary So Much So Fast, exploring the development of ALS TDI and the personal story of he and Stephen.

(slashdot.org)
“US government policy is that photos produced by federal employees as part of their job responsibilities are not subject to copyright in the US. But Kathy Gill writes that after originally putting official White House photos in the public domain, since January the Obama White House has been asserting that no one but ‘news organizations’ can use its Flickr photos taken by the official White House photographer, who is a US government employee. This change appears to be a heavy-handed response to last month’s controversy resulting from a billboard that implied the President endorsed The Weatherproof Garmet Co. after the company used an AP photo of the president for a Times Square billboard. However a New York law already protects individuals from unauthorized use of their image for advertising, and the billboard was quickly taken down. Gill writes, ‘Whatever the reason, the assertion of these “rights” seems to be in direct contrast to official government policy and is certainly in direct contrast to reasonable expectations by the public, given that the photos are being produced with taxpayer (i.e., public) money. Ironically, the same Flickr page that claims (almost exclusive) copyright also links to the US copyright policy statement.’”

Where you live: It impacts your health as much as diet and genes do, but it’s not part of your medical records. At TEDMED, Bill Davenhall shows how overlooked government geo-data (from local heart-attack rates to toxic dumpsite info) can mesh with mobile GPS apps to keep doctors in the loop. Call it “geo-medicine.”

Bill Davenhall has spent three decades creating useful intelligence out of what seems ordinary demographic and geographic data. In the ’70s he built the first geo-demographic models that helped some of America’s most well-known franchises expand across the nation; in the ’80s he founded a start-up market research company that developed the first national database of estimates for the demand of healthcare services.

Davenhall leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the largest geographic information system (GIS) software developer in the world.

This video is an eye opener. It is a rather long video over 20 minutes, but well worth it. /MIke

MacArthur winner Sendhil Mullainathan uses the lens of behavioral economics to study a tricky set of social problems — those we know how to solve, but don’t. We know how to reduce child deaths due to diarrhea, how to prevent diabetes-related blindness and how to implement solar-cell technology … yet somehow, we don’t or can’t. Why?

To study big questions such as “What are the measurable effects of corruption?”" Sendhil Mullainathan and his collaborators look at the day-to-day decisions made by real people, running deep-data studies on groups around the world to tease out patterns. Awarded a MacArthur “”genius”" grant in 2002, he has produced and collaborated on a string of research papers that make for a must-read CV — including a fascinating, if dispiriting, study of the corruption involved in getting a driver’s license in India.

Lately he and his team have been studying women who sell fruit and vegetables on the streets in developing countries. They’re usually in debt to a moneylender in the market, who takes about half their profits each day as interest. Some of the women have figured a simple way to get out of debt and keep all their profits. But most of the women make a choice every day that keeps them in debt. How would these businesswomen behave, he wondered, if the slate was wiped clean? So he got a grant, paid off their debt, and waits to see what happens next.”

“R&D in the poverty space has huge potential returns and there is too little thinking about that.” – Sendhil Mullainathan