Thursday, January 31, 2008

Record number of soldiers committed suicide last year

clipped from blogs.usatoday.com
A record number of active-duty soldiers killed themselves last year, according to The Washington Post.
The paper cites an internal Army study that shows 121 soldiers committed suicide in 2007. That's a 20% increase over the prior year
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed severe stress on the
Army, caused in part by repeated and lengthened deployments," the paper
reports. "Historically, suicide rates tend to decrease when soldiers
are in conflicts overseas, but that trend has reversed in recent years.
From a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 --
the lowest rate on record -- the Army reached an all-time high of 17.5
suicides per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2006
The number of attempted suicides among soldiers is six times higher than it was
The Associated Press is quoting preliminary figures that show more than a quarter of the suicides took place in Iraq
Click here for the warning signs that suggest someone is considering suicide
Army
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To Cut Medicare Growth, Bush Targets Hospitals

clipped from blogs.wsj.com
Bush’s proposed Medicare budget would cut $15 billion over five years through a reduction of annual updates for inpatient care. It would also cut $25 billion from payments to hospitals serving large numbers of poor people, and $20 billion from payments for capital projects such as putting up new buildings and buying equipment, the New York Times reports.
The president would also cut $1.2 billion from Medicaid next year and nearly $14 billion over five years, according to the NYT. One cost Bush wouldn’t cut: Payments to private insurance companies who manage Medicare Advantage plans, which cost more than traditional Medicare plans.

Medicare and Medicaid accounted for $627 billion in federal spending last year, and the cost of the programs is projected to double in the coming decade, the Times said.

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The Water Cube Unveiled, China

Looks awesome.
clipped from news.xinhuanet.com
Photo taken on Jan. 28, 2008 shows the exterior view of the National Aquatics Center also known as
Photo taken on Jan. 28, 2008 shows the exterior view of the National Aquatics Center also known as "Water Cube" in Beijing. The National Aquatic Center was delivered for use on Monday
after four years of construction. (Xinhua Photo/Luo Xiaoguang)
clipped from www.tropolism.com
watercube_027_m.jpg

Wacky in a way only state-sponsored architecture can be is the National Swimming Center in Beijing, going up right next to another of H&DM's stadiums (no, not this one). The center is enclosed by what appears to be a wall whose structure is an irregular spaceframe (made to resemble the cellular pattern of soap bubbles) and is clad in what appears to be a frosted or patterened glass. All of this from a wonderful photo gallery at Structurae. The building was conceived by Australian-based PTW Architects. Structural design by Arup, of course.

The Arup/PTW designed Water Cube plays on the geometry of water bubbles in a rectangular form.
clipped from images.google.com
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Friday, January 25, 2008

She's a one-in-six-billion miracle

clipped from news.aol.com
An Australian teenage girl has become the world's first known transplant patient to change blood
groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a "one-in-six-billion miracle."

'The Holy Grail
Of Transplants'

Demi-Lee Brennan, 15, is the first known transplant recipient to adopt the blood type and the immune system of her organ donor, to the amazement of the medical community and Brennan alike. "It's like my second chance at life," she said. "It's kind of hard to believe."
"It's like my second chance at life," Brennan told local media
Brennan's body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs
Her new liver's blood stem cells then invaded her body's bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.
Doctors
said they had no explanation for Brennan's recovery, detailed in the
latest edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.
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Generational Housing Bubble on the Way

clipped from www.economist.com
IN THE first years of the 21st century, no area of the American economy has excited more emotion than the property market.
America should be bracing itself for the end of the “generational housing bubble”, according to a new study by Dowell Myers and SungHo Ryu of the University of Southern California
The old sell more homes than they buy, according to data covering 1995-2000 (see chart).
The ratio of old to working-age people is expected to grow by 67% over the next two decades.
Young adults make up the bulk of new demand, with most purchasing homes when they reach their early 30s.
The flood of elderly people selling their homes
may lead to a drawn-out buyers' market. Prices may fall further as younger people, perceiving a downturn, delay purchasing.
The mismatch between buyers and sellers may be most acute in the rustbelt, where numbers of young people and immigrants are rising slowly, if at all, says William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank.
House Bubble
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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Who Are You Jerome Kerviel?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com
Before today the world knew very little about Jerome Kerviel
Only one Google reference we could find
Here is what has emerged this morning on the latest entrant into the rogue (trader)’s gallery.
Kerviel
Jerome_blog_20080124114334.jpg
who turned 31 this month,
Societe Generale in 2000
was working as a trader on the futures desk at the bank’s headquarters near Paris, according to The Wall Street Journal.
He was apparently in charge of futures hedging for European equity market indexes
The enormity of the losses caused by the Frenchman is inversely proportional to the size of his pay
Kerviel earned less than 100,000 euros a year ($146,000), including bonus, according to Bloomberg
Kerviel only moved to the trading floor from the back office in 2006
t was there, presumably, that he learned how to game the giant bank’s compliance system and cause a more than $7 billion write-down in the process
A spokesperson for the bank told Bloomberg that Kerviel is “very quiet and a loner
He had made his dream of becoming a trader come true.”
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Home Sellers Competing with Sales of Foreclosed Properties

clipped from blogs.wsj.com
The continuing troubles in the housing market — see “Existing-Home Sales Resume Decline” — spell trouble for homesellers, who are competing against the sellers of foreclosed properties. In one example cited in Mr. Hagerty’s story, a four-bedroom house in a Phoenix suburb sold for $775,000 in August 2006. Then a lender acquired the home through foreclosure last year. It sold again in December for $380,000.
foreclsosure
It’s getting harder to hide from the housing bust, writes James R. Hagerty in today’s Journal. Even the Pacific Northwest and North Carolina are feeling the pain, both areas until recently had avoided the housing slump. Even Manhattan, Mr. Hagerty writes, is feeling the pinch, thanks to Wall Street’s woes.
Still, Mr. Hagerty points out that local markets vary hugely, according to the Wall Street Journal’s quarterly survey of housing data in 28 major metropolitan areas. Inventories are enormous in Phoenix, Florida, Las Vegas and the Detroit area.
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Who Are the Sandwich Generation?

If the term Sandwich Generation leaves you feeling hungry, you may not know about the new buzz surrounding a subset of caregivers nicknamed the “Sandwich Generation”. This colorful name refers to caregivers who find themselves squeezed between caring for younger loved ones (usually children) and elderly parents or family members. This may be nothing new, but these caregivers are becoming a rising interest within American society.
picture2.jpg
Who are the Sandwich Generation?
hey are the nearly 10 million boomers that are now raising kids, teenagers or young adults while providing financial support for an aging parent.
According on one survey, 70 percent of the Sandwich Generation are providing care simultaneously for parents and children
“You either are a caregiver, will be a caregiver or someone will be caring for you between now and whenever you die,” Donna Schempp, of the National Family Caregivers Alliance
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Thursday, January 17, 2008

I Missed the Early Signs of Dementia in my Mother

Looking back, there is little doubt in my mind I should have realized my mother was suffering from dementia sooner. Sadly, I didn't have the proper education, information, or frame of reference. Most people tend to ignore the early symptoms of the disease believing they are simply signs of "old age". Anyone who ends up in my shoes knows and understands that a person in the early stages of Alzheimer’s can function normally--even drive a car. Only when they deteriorate or some "event" takes place do we wake up to reality.

Sometimes these changes can be quite subtle but if detected raise a “red flag”.
Behavior changes slowly in the elderly and as they begin to suffer cognitive impairment these changes are hard to detect.

If my mother had been enrolled in any of the studies listed below, I feel certain she would have been diagnosed sooner. This would have allowed me to get her in an exercise program, get her proper nutrition, and insured that she was taking her medication as prescribed. I learned in the last four years how important these factors are in the quality of her life.

The woman in the picture is my 91 year old mother (yes the picture is current). She suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. I am her CareGiver.

Sensors could help catch first signs of dementia
Monitors and online tests track subtle changes in daily mobility, behavior

Source Associated Press and
MSNBC

WASHINGTON - Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist’s home, tracking the seemingly healthy 86-year-old’s daily activity.

It’s like spying in the name of science — with her permission — to see if round-the-clock tracking of elderly people’s movements can provide early clues of impending Alzheimer’s disease.

“Now it takes years to determine if someone’s developing dementia,” laments Dr. Jeffrey Kaye of Oregon Health & Science University, which is placing the monitors in 300 homes of Portland-area octogenarians as part of a $7 million federally funded project.

The goal: Shave off that time by spotting subtle changes in mobility and behavior that Alzheimer’s specialists are convinced precede the disease’s telltale memory loss.

Simple early signs

Early predictors may be as simple as variations in speed while people walk their hallways, or getting slower at dressing or typing. Also under study are in-home interactive “kiosks” that administer monthly memory and cognition tests, computer keyboards bugged to track typing speed, and pill boxes that record when seniors forget to take their medicines.

More than 5 million Americans, and 26 million people worldwide, have Alzheimer’s, and cases are projected to skyrocket as the population ages. Today’s medications only temporarily alleviate symptoms. Researchers are desperately hunting new ones that might at least slow the relentless brain decay if taken very early in the disease, before serious memory problems become obvious.

So dozens of early diagnosis methods also are under study, from tests of blood and spinal fluid to MRI scans of people’s brains. Even if some pan out, they’re expensive tests that would require lots of doctor intervention, when getting someone to visit a physician for suspicion of dementia is a huge hurdle. And during routine checkups, even doctors easily can miss the signs.

Bloomquist, of Milwaukie, Ore., knows the conundrum all too well. She volunteered for Kaye’s research because her husband died of Alzheimer’s, as did his parents and her own mother.

“It’s hard to know when people begin Alzheimer’s,” she reflects. “Alzheimer people do very well socially for short periods of time. If it’s just a casual conversation, they rise to the occasion.”

‘Typical’ days monitored

Measuring how people fare at home — on bad days as well as good ones, not just when they’re doing their best for the doctor — may spot changes that signal someone’s at high risk long before they’re actually demented, Kaye told the Alzheimer’s Association’s international dementia-prevention meeting last week.

“If you only assess them every once-in-a-blue-moon, you really are at a loss to know what they are like on a typical day,” Kaye explains.

High-tech monitors under study:

Researchers at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine are heading a study that ultimately plans to recruit 600 people over age 75 to help test in-home “kiosks” that turn on automatically to administer monthly cognitive exams. A video of a smiling scientist appears on-screen to talk participants through such classic tests as reading a string of words and then, minutes later, repeating how many they recall, or seeing how quickly they complete connect-the-dot patterns.
An Oregon pilot study of the motion sensors tracked 14 participants in their upper 80s for almost a year. Half had “mild cognitive impairment,” an Alzheimer’s precursor, and half were healthy. Impaired participants showed much greater variation in such day-to-day activities as walking speed, especially in the afternoons.

Why? The theory is that as Alzheimer’s begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent — like static on a radio — well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.

Study receives unique grant

The pilot study prompted a first-of-its-kind grant from the National Institutes of Health to extend the monitoring study to 300 homes; 112 are being monitored already, mostly in retirement communities like Bloomquist’s. They’re given weekly health questionnaires to make sure an injury or other illness that affects activity doesn’t skew the results.

In addition, participants receive computer training so they can play brain-targeted computer games and take online memory and cognition tests. The keyboards are rigged to let researchers track changes in typing speed and Internet use that could indicate confusion.

Finally, a souped-up pill dispenser called the MedTracker is added to some of the studies, wirelessly recording when drugs are forgotten or taken late.
Electronics giants already sell various medical warning technologies for the elderly, including dementia patients, such as pill boxes that sound reminder alarms at dose time. And the Alzheimer’s Association and Intel Corp. are jointly funding research into how to use television, cell phones and other everyday technology to do such things as guide dementia patients through daily activities.

The next step of companies selling early symptom monitoring isn’t far off, and unbiased data on what really helps will be crucial, Kaye warns.




Wednesday, January 16, 2008

'Instant' Alzheimer's Drug Claim

Ten minutes after the injection, the researchers reported that the patient was calmer, less frustrated and more attentive. He could correctly identify California as his home state, but incorrectly identified the current year. At two hours, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment had improved from seven out of a possible 30 to 15. The man's wife and son confirmed the improvements.
A drug used for arthritis can reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's 'in minutes'", the Daily Mail reported. Several newspapers covered the story of how an 81-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease improved within 10 minutes of being injected with a new drug, etanercept. The BBC reported that his wife described the effect on her husband as being "put back to where he was". His son said, "This was the single most remarkable thing I've seen".
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Home Prices in California Fall More Than 13%

clipped from blogs.wsj.com
The Associated Press is reporting that the median home price in a six-county region of Southern California plunged more than 13 percent in December versus a year ago, according to DataQuick Information Systems.
The average median price in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties hit $425,000 last month, the lowest level since February 2005, when the figure was $420,000, according to DataQuick. December’s median price dropped 2.4 percent from the November figure of $435,000.
housing down
Home sales in the region, one of the hardest hit in the nation by the mortgage crisis, also plummeted compared to December 2006, dropping 45.3 percent to 13,240 — the lowest sales total for any December in more than 20 years
“We’re in the midst of turbulence and we won’t know what really has been going on until things have settled down and we can look back,”
California’s housing market has been hammered by falling sales and home prices
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Monday, January 14, 2008

Kleiner Perkins, Google, Amazon, Netscape back Electric Car

clipped from online.wsj.com
The race to develop an electric car is heating up and drawing increasing interest from the same venture-capital investors who helped build Silicon Valley.
The latest entrant is expected to be announced today at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit when Fisker Automotive Inc. unveils an $80,000 battery-powered luxury car it aims to begin delivering in late 2009.
The Fisker Karma, a so-called plug-in hybrid, can go 50 miles on electricity before a small gasoline engine kicks in to generate electricity
The company has backing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, perhaps Silicon Valley's best-known venture-capital firm and a backer of household tech names such as Netscape Communications, Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc.
[photo]
Mr. Fisker's vision is to sell 15,000 electric cars a year.
Mr. Fisker believes his company is a couple of years ahead of bigger rivals because the design of the car has been finalized.
The Karma, Mr. Fisker said, will use lithium-ion batteries
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