Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health – Page 439

For decades, India has relied on female sterilization as its primary mode of contraception, funding about four million tubal ligations every year, more than any other country. This year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will take a major step toward modernizing that system, introducing injectable contraceptives free of charge in government facilities. The World Health Organization recommends their use without restriction for women of childbearing age.

New birth control options have long been advocated by international organizations, among them the United States Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They say Indian women — often worn out, anemic and at higher risk of death because they bear children young and often — urgently need methods to delay or space pregnancies.

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At Vanderbilt University scientists are building an artificial kidney that they envision will one day will be a standard of care over dialysis. The device consists of a silicon nanotechnology filter chip and embedded living kidney cells that would work together to mimic the functionality of a healthy kidney. The end result is expected to be about the size of a natural kidney, small enough to be implantable and powered by the body’s own blood flow.

The filter component has tiny pores that can be individually shaped to perform a specific task. These filters would sit in a series, each one performing a different filtration step. Between the filter slices there would be living kidney cells that perform tasks that the man made components are not very good at, including reabsorption of nutrients and getting rid of accumulated waste.

Here’s video with Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Dr. William Fissell, the lead scientist on the research:

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One thing that will remain with tech for many years is jobs in cyber security — even with the layer of security that Quantum technology brings in the next 10 years; there is always a migration and retirement state that can (depending on the business and systems involved) could go on for years after Quantum platforms and networks are installed.

Then in December, aided and abetted by a Republican-controlled Congress, he eradicated those minor restrictions and replaced mindless austerity with clueless profligacy.

It proposes lifting the limits entirely from 2018. “It adheres to last year’s bipartisan budget agreement, it drives down the deficit, and includes smart savigs on health care, immigration and tax reform”.

Even with the increased taxes, Obama’s budget projects sharply higher deficits in coming years, totaling $9.8 trillion over the next decade.

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Big Blue is cool again according to investors.

NEW YORK: Here’s a vexing question for artificial mega-brain Watson: Why is IBM stock surging? Big Blue’s market value rose about $6 billion after the computer giant agreed on Thursday to buy Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion. Giving IBM’s artificial-intelligence platform more data to chew on is useful, but investors’ glee over an opaque addition to an enigmatic business effort is confusing.

Big Blue’s top line has been shrinking steadily for nearly four years. In the fourth quarter of 2015, all major divisions had declining sales, with overall revenue falling 8.5 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Clients need less of IBM’s hardware, and its software and consulting businesses are faltering in competition with rivals’ cloud-based versions.

The upshot is a falling share price. It has dropped about 25 percent in the past four years, while the S&P 500 has risen about 40 percent.

Continue reading “Why is IBM surging?” | >

Like the idea of using Google to vote online for the best airline, steamed dumpling or health app?

What about using Google to vote for governor or president? That seems to be Google’s plan.

The search giant received a U.S. patent for a voting user interface (VUI). The interface would appear along with search results and would allow the user to vote for one or more contestants competing in a campaign.

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Interesting read mostly about the SV income divide. Bottom line, is that we need technology in many ways to save humanity. I know many are questioning that remark. However, since technology has been existence, many have gained through medical treatments, research, and accessibilities to connect with people like we never did in the past. The future of tech holds great promise as a tool to help researchers and medical teams to eliminate cancer, neurological diseases and disorders, enabling the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk. The good does outweigh the bad.

Editor’s note: Income equality — a hot-button political issue — is not going to improve; technology is about to make things much worse. It will, over the next decade, begin to disrupt almost every industry, wipe out millions of jobs, and make the rich even richer. Even though everyone will be able to live better and healthier lives and benefit from the technology advances, the widening gap will cause greater resentment and create a larger cauldron of dissent. This is something we need to be prepared for, writes former Triangle tech entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa.

SAN FRANCISCO - There are very few issues that Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton all agree on. One of them is the growing problem of inequality in income and wealth. From the extreme left to the extreme right, everyone is angry about the one percent who have the majority of the wealth. There has always been an income and wealth gap, but the divide between average worker and the very wealthy has not been so great since the Roaring Twenties. This is fueling the rise of both the Tea Party and the socialists.

Income equality is not going to improve; technology is about to make things much worse. It will, over the next decade, begin to disrupt almost every industry, wipe out millions of jobs, and make the rich even richer. Even though everyone will be able to live better and healthier lives and benefit from the technology advances, the widening gap will cause greater resentment and create a larger cauldron of dissent. This is something we need to be prepared for.

Continue reading “Vivek Wadhwa: Tech industry must lead smart, civil conversation on inequality” | >

I was waiting for this HIPAA’s new guidelines for mobile apps (focuses a lot on IAM); this is only the first wave. We will see more when more AI is launched.

Federal regulators have issued new guidance, including material to clarify for healthcare entities and software developers various scenarios where HIPAA regulations might apply to mobile health applications, including situations when patients use smartphones to collect or transmit personal health data.

See Also: 2015 Breach Preparedness and Response Study: The Results

Some privacy and security experts say the new mobile application guidance material from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights addresses a topic that is not only a current source of confusion for many covered entities and business associates, but also is likely to become increasingly complex as more consumers use smartphones and other devices to help manage chronic illnesses and other health issues.

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Good news and hope for Parkinson disease patients.

Erika Jucumin, a physician assistant at Neurology Associates in Ormond Beach, programs and monitors a deep brain stimulator for patients with Parkinson’s disease, dystonia and other neurological disorders.

As a result, Jacumin said she has seen many amazing turn-arounds in patients’ health. She spoke to The News-Journal about the device.

NAME: Erika Jacumin.

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A group of scientists are calling on the WHO to classify aging as a disease, asserting that we need to create a better classification for what happens to our bodies as we get older.

A new controversy is brewing, as one group of scientists is recommending that aging be considered a disease.

Scientists from Insilico Medicine are highlighting the need to create a more granular and applied classification for what happens to our bodies when we age. Their work is outlined in a recent paper published in Frontiers in Genetics. The classification that they argue for is based on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), which is expected to be finalized in 2018.

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