Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Advance directives: Implementation leaves much to be desired

Advance directives: Implementation leaves much to be desired [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 1-Oct-2012
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Contact: Jrgen in der Schmitten
jids@med.uni-duesseldorf.de
Deutsches Aerzteblatt International

Advance directives are not widespread among the elderly. This was revealed by a cross-sectional study of 11 German nursing homes performed by Sarah Sommer and her colleagues and presented in the latest issue of Deutsches rzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109(37): 577). In the year 2007, only 11% of the nursing home residents had a personally signed advance directive, while a further 1.4% had a proxy directive, i.e., a document signed not by the resident but by a representative.

Few of the advance directives made any provision for an acute health crisis. Therefore, many directives are of little help in deciding what treatment to give in such circumstances. Agreements of the nursing staff, who ought to be aware of the directives and their contents, also left much to be desired. For 14 of 23 residents, for example, there had been no discussion of whether they should be resuscitated.

The authors surmise that the Advance Directives Act of 2009 will not bring about any substantial or lasting improvement in this state of affairs, because it neither provides incentives nor foresees resources for active guidance.

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http://www.aerzteblatt.de/pdf.asp?id=129878

Contact: jids@med.uni-duesseldorf.de


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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Advance directives: Implementation leaves much to be desired [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 1-Oct-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Jrgen in der Schmitten
jids@med.uni-duesseldorf.de
Deutsches Aerzteblatt International

Advance directives are not widespread among the elderly. This was revealed by a cross-sectional study of 11 German nursing homes performed by Sarah Sommer and her colleagues and presented in the latest issue of Deutsches rzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109(37): 577). In the year 2007, only 11% of the nursing home residents had a personally signed advance directive, while a further 1.4% had a proxy directive, i.e., a document signed not by the resident but by a representative.

Few of the advance directives made any provision for an acute health crisis. Therefore, many directives are of little help in deciding what treatment to give in such circumstances. Agreements of the nursing staff, who ought to be aware of the directives and their contents, also left much to be desired. For 14 of 23 residents, for example, there had been no discussion of whether they should be resuscitated.

The authors surmise that the Advance Directives Act of 2009 will not bring about any substantial or lasting improvement in this state of affairs, because it neither provides incentives nor foresees resources for active guidance.

###

http://www.aerzteblatt.de/pdf.asp?id=129878

Contact: jids@med.uni-duesseldorf.de


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-10/dai-adi100112.php

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Sharp starts production of 5-inch smartphone displays with 1080p resolution

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's most senior military commander has promised better training and more modern weaponry for the army in an apparent effort to satisfy officers' demands for change, which have multiplied after an uprising last year. Commander-in-Chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is also the defence minister, was appointed by the country's first Islamist president Mohamed Mursi only last month and is under pressure to shake up a military which until recently had held the balance of power in Egypt for decades. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sharp-starts-production-5-inch-smartphone-displays-1080p-140544698.html

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Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite is the new king of e-readers

11 hrs.

Until now, I was convinced the e-reader was a goner. After all, that black-on-gray "e-ink" display technology has peaked and cheap tablets are eating up what's left of buyer interest. Then I fell in love with Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite. It solves two of e-ink's biggest problems ? lousy contrast and lack of integrated lighting ??while preserving the e-reader's core advantages: readability, affordability and insanely long battery life.

E-ink is opaque ??unlike see-through?LCD ? and because of that, it's a lot harder to light it.?There's no way to "back light" the thing;?you have to light it from the side. When Sony tried to do this in 2008, it destroyed the value of the e-ink screen with oppressive glare, even when the light was off. Nobody bought that product, and Sony doesn't sell a light-up e-reader now. This past April, Barnes & Noble introduced its Nook SimpleTouch with GlowLight, and while that reader does a far better job of preserving the e-ink's readability, the lighting looks uneven.

Amazon stayed away from e-ink?lighting tricks until this fall, and the wait has paid off. The technology used to light-up the new Kindle is more advanced than anything I've seen previously: Despite the limitation of an LED array ? in this case, four tiny?lights?buried at the bottom of the screen ? the entire screen glows with near-perfect evenness, no matter how bright or dim you set it.

What surprised me about the Paperwhite wasn't that Amazon finally cracked the lighting problem. It's that the lighting actually solves the other big e-ink?problem: contrast. E-readers have long suffered the criticism that their pictures aren't really black-on-white, but black-on-gray. The reading experience falls short of greatness, no matter how "easy on the eyes" the technology is supposed to be.

By some color-temperature trickery, the Paperwhite's light system turns gray into white. Not only do you leave the light on all the time, but it is ideally kept?at its brightest in all but direct sunlight (where you can't see the lighting). And speaking of direct sunlight, let me assure you that the Paperwhite retains the?outdoor virtue of e-ink?despite the lighting system and the capacitive touch sensor layer.

The other thing e-readers will continue to lord over tablets is battery life. Amazon says the Paperwhite gets up to eight weeks on a single charge, but that's only under certain conditions: that the wireless is turned off, the light intensity is set to 10 (max is 24) and you read just half an hour each day. Odds are, your habits won't align with this perfectly, so you may have to charge it more than every two months. But I will say that since I do most of my leisure reading at night after we turn the lights out, I have had the lighting set near the bottom.?

So, do I have any gripes? Sure. On the technical side, it's a little annoying that there's no ambient light sensor ? you have to mess with the lighting yourself every time you change environments. But it's easy to do it, so that's not a true concern.

In the box you find a USB cable but no charger, nothing you can plug in the wall. Chances are, you already have something like this from a phone, iPad or previous Kindle, but if you need one, it's $10 extra. Alternatively, you can just charge it every so often by plugging it into your computer.

Previous Kindles have had speakers, and advanced functions like MP3 playback and text-to-speech narration ? this Kindle is more streamlined, though it does have the "experimental browser" that we've seen on Kindles from the start.?

A much more serious nuisance is that, for the starting price of $119, you have to put up with ads on the lock screen and at the bottom of the home screen. Even when you pay the $20 bounty to opt out of Amazon's "special offers," you still get a stream of recommended titles on your home screen, and those never go away. (Seriously, Amazon, how is that not an ad?)

Barnes & Noble has retaliated, dropping the price of its ad-free (and incredibly long-named) Nook SimpleTouch with GlowLight from $139 to $119. And Barnes & Noble wants to ensure that shoppers know that the Nook does in fact come with a wall charger. If all things were equal, this would be a compelling proposal, but things are not equal. If you don't live inside a Barnes & Noble, the Nook's advantages fall short of the Paperwhite's superior technology.?

If you are a frequent Amazon shopper with a $79-per-year Prime membership, then a Kindle gets you one additional benefit: One free "lending library" book per month, including the Harry Potter series, "Hunger Games" and a ton of other bestsellers.

So if you don't care about ads, then the Paperwhite's $119 starting price is a bargain. Eliminate the ads and buy a charger and you get to about $150, still not bad. If you don't have Wi-Fi, you'll have to get the 3G version, which is $179 with ads, $199 without ? a bit more steep, perhaps, but not a terrible one-time payment, especially for someone who doesn't have home broadband.

Amazon's growing less abashed about trying to get you to spend more money ? and I think there'll be a point where it backfires. But for now, the Paperwhite's virtues outweigh any of the tacky marketing, and it can be declared hands down the best e-reader yet, without any need for qualifiers.

Wilson Rothman is the Technology & Science?editor at NBC News Digital. Catch up with him on Twitter at @wjrothman, and join our conversation on Facebook.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/gadgetbox/amazons-kindle-paperwhite-new-king-e-readers-6191170

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Skydiver aims to break sound barrier in free fall

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) ? His blood could boil. His lungs could overinflate. The vessels in his brain could burst. His eyes could hemorrhage.

And, yes, he could break his neck while jumping from a mind-boggling altitude of 23 miles.

But the risk of a gruesome death has never stopped "Fearless Felix" Baumgartner in all his years of skydiving and skyscraper leaping, and it's not about to now.

Next Monday over New Mexico, he will attempt the highest, fastest free fall in history and try to become the first skydiver to break the sound barrier.

"So many unknowns," Baumgartner says, "but we have solutions to survive."

The 43-year-old former military parachutist from Austria is hoping to reach 690 mph, or Mach 1, after leaping from his balloon-hoisted capsule over the desert near Roswell.

He will have only a pressurized suit and helmet for protection as he tries to go supersonic 65 years after Chuck Yeager, flying an experimental rocket plane, became the first human to go faster than the speed of sound.

Doctors, engineers and others on Baumgartner's Red Bull-sponsored team have spent as much as five years studying the risks and believe they have done everything possible to bring him back alive. He has tested out his suit and capsule in two dress rehearsals, jumping from 15 miles in March and 18 miles in July.

Baumgartner will be more than three times higher than the cruising altitude of jetliners when he hops, bunny-style, out of the capsule and into a near-vacuum where there is barely any oxygen and less than 1 percent of the air pressure on Earth.

If all goes well, he will reach the speed of sound in about half a minute at an altitude of around 100,000 feet. Then he will start to slow as the atmosphere gets denser, and after five minutes of free fall, he will pull his main parachute. The entire descent should last 15 to 20 minutes.

He will be rigged with cameras that will provide a live broadcast of the jump via the Internet, meaning countless viewers could end up witnessing a horrific accident.

Baumgartner is insistent on going live with his flight.

"We want to share that with the world," he says. "It's like landing on the moon. Why was that live?"

His team of experts ? including the current record-holder from a half-century ago, Joe Kittinger, now 84 ? will convene inside a NASA-style Mission Control in the wee hours Monday for the liftoff of the helium balloon at sunrise.

"All the things that can happen are varying degrees of bad," offers Baumgartner's top medical man, Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon.

Clark was married to space shuttle astronaut Laurel Clark, who was killed aboard Columbia while it was returning to Earth in 2003, and he has dedicated himself to improving astronauts' chances of survival in a high-altitude disaster.

NASA is paying close attention, eager to improve its spacecraft and spacesuits for emergency escape, but is merely an observer; the energy drink maker is footing the bill and will not say how much it is costing.

The No. 1 fear is a breach of Baumgartner's suit.

If it breaks open ? if, say, he bangs into the capsule while jumping or supersonic shock waves batter him ? potentially lethal bubbles could form in his bodily fluids. That's what's known as boiling blood. A Soviet military officer died in 1962 after jumping from a balloon at 86,000 feet; the visor of his helmet hit the gondola and cracked.

During the descent, the temperature could be as low as minus 70. Baumgartner's suit will be all he has between his body and the extreme cold.

Then there's the risk of a flat spin, in which Baumgartner loses control of his body during the free fall and starts spinning. A long, fast spin, if left unchecked, could turn his eyeballs into blood-soaked, reddish-purple orbs, and he could be left temporarily blind. Also, a massive blood clot could form in his brain.

A small stabilizing chute will automatically deploy if he goes into a flat spin and blacks out or otherwise becomes incapacitated. He also has an emergency chute that will automatically deploy if he is unable to pull the cord on his main chute.

Baumgartner's team has a plan for every contingency but one: If the balloon ruptures shortly after liftoff because of a gust of wind or something else, the capsule will come crashing down with him inside. He won't have time to blow the hatch and bail out.

"I have every expectation that he'll come through this successfully based on our analysis," Clark says, "but you know, it still is an unknown."

Kittinger leapt from an open gondola on Aug. 16, 1960, from an altitude of 19.5 miles and reached 614 mph, or Mach 0.9 ? records that stand to this day. He was a captain in the Air Force, and the military's Excelsior project was a test bed for the nation's young space program.

Kittinger has been Baumgartner's mentor, signing on with this new project after decades of refusing others' requests.

Fearless Felix insists he would not attempt the jump if the odds were against him.

"I think they underestimate the skills of a skydiver," says Baumgartner, who has made more than 2,500 jumps from planes, helicopters, landmarks and skyscrapers, with no serious injuries.

If he makes it back in one piece, Baumgartner plans on settling down with his girlfriend and flying helicopters in the U.S. and Austria, performing mountain rescues and firefighting.

"After this," he promises, "I'm going to retire because I've been successfully doing things for the last 25 years and I'm still alive."

___

Online:

Red Bull Stratos: http://www.redbullstratos.com

National Museum of the U.S. Air Force: http://tinyurl.com/2dsnn6

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/skydiver-aims-break-sound-barrier-free-fall-184340527.html

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Monday, October 1, 2012

Online Gaming Group bwin.party Sells Poker Network Ongame To Amaya For Up To $32.2M

ongame-network-logoCanada's Amaya Gaming is to buy bwin.party's B2B poker network Ongame in a deal worth up to ?25 million ($32.2 million). An initial payment of ?15 million ($19.3 million) is payable in cash on completion -- expected during the fourth quarter of 2012 but subject to standard conditions including regulatory approval. Additional payments of up to ?10 million ($12.9 million) become payable if regulated online gaming arrives in the U.S. in the next five years.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dcelRNhHwjA/

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Samsung Galaxy Express specs

Samsung Galaxy Express

  • 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display (480 x 800)
  • Android 4.0 (ICS)
  • 4G LTE smartphone
  • 1.5GHz dual-core processor
  • 2000mAh battery
  • 3.5mm headphone jack
  • 5-megapixel (rear) camera
  • MicroSD/HC expansion slot
  • Bluetooth v4.0
  • MicroUSB connectivity


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/7Y9Y7UUXwek/story01.htm

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Backpacking travel & Outdoor adventure: Backpacking to Perth day 4

Backpacking to Perth
Cape to Cape of Margaret River Valley
07 Sep. to 18 Sep. 2012


Day 04 Mon. (10.09.2012) Day 1: Polglass Way, Ardross is 247km to Dunsborough driving south passing by Mandurah, Bunbury and Busselton

We started the day early and by 7.30am we were on the Kwinana Freeway/State Route 2 heading south to Mandurah a 63km away. At about 9am we visited Dave?s step grandfather, Alf Garden who is 84. He is still very healthy and has been cycling 40km at times. Alf Garden stays alone in a very cozy house nearby the sea in Mandurah.

At 10am Dave hired a 8 seater runabouts boat (A$50) from Blue Manna, 13 Dolphin Drive, Mandurah, (http://www.bluemannaboathire.com.au) for an hour boat drive along the man-made canal. Dave drove us through the scenic Peel Inlet and the Mandurah Estuary viewing the luxury canal side homes.

At 11am we had the best fish and chips for lunch at Cicerello, (http://www.cicerellos.com.au) no.73 Mandurah Terrace overlooking the beautiful Mandjar Bay.

At 12noon we continued another 160km road journey south passing by Bunbury and arriving at Busselton at 2.25pm on Forrest Hwy and Bussell Hwy. From here we continued 24km on Caves Rd. to Dunsborough arriving at 2.52pm to pick up the Pelican Cottage keys from Cape Executive Holiday Properties office at 4a Dunn Bay Centre, 31-33 Dunn Bay Rd. which was pre-booked online by Monica. The cottage was very clean and pleasant with all facilities available. The weblink: http://www.capeexec.com.au

After checking-in to the cottage, we headed out to explore the town and did some shopping for dinner at Coles supermarket. Dave went and bought some wine for the ladies from another bottle shop. Dinner was awfully fantastic; Dave prepared grilled salmon bought at Coles with plenty of wine to go with.

Sleeping: "Pelican Cottage" Lecaille Court, Dunsborough - a night for 8pax @ A$161
Temperature: Sunny 22?C/14?C




































we are at Cape Executive Holiday Properties office to pick the Pelican Cottage keys























Backpacking to Perth day 1, 2
Backpacking to Perth day 3
Backpacking to Perth day 4
Backpacking to Perth day 5
Backpacking to Perth day 6
Backpacking to Perth day 7
Backpacking to Perth day 8
Backpacking to Perth day 9
Backpacking to Perth day 10,11,12


Source: http://chingnengbin.blogspot.com/2012/09/backpacking-to-perth-day-4.html

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