Follow an email’s journey with Story of Send

Follow an email’s journey with Story of Send: If you’re anything like me, you send and receive a lot of emails every day. But have you ever wondered where your message goes after you hit “send?” How does an email travel from your computer to your friend’s smartphone across the country or around the world?



We’re answering those questions with Story of Send, a new site that gives you a behind-the-scenes look into how all that virtual information makes its journey through the real world—from your Internet service provider to our data centers and beyond. Along the way, you’ll discover everything from where we filter for spam and scan for viruses to how we’re minimizing our impact on the environment through energy efficiency and renewable power.







We’ve included videos and photos throughout the journey so you can explore certain areas more deeply. For example, if you’re curious what data center servers look like, we’ve included some photos. Or you can watch a video to learn about how we purchase clean energy from wind farms near our data centers. And because technology doesn’t always have to be serious, you might find a vampire or two lurking around or uncover other surprises on the journey.



In the past, Gmail fans have shown us how emails connect people across the world. Now we’re providing a glimpse into how those emails go from one place to another. So hit send and start the journey today.



Posted by Erin Reilly, Google Green team

Supporting Innovation in African News

Supporting Innovation in African News: Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog

We’re eager to see journalism flourish in the digital age, in all forms and on all continents. Today, with half a dozen other generous sponsors, we’re taking a big step forward with a new $1 million African News Innovation Challenge.


This initiative is the latest in a series of projects to spur innovation in African journalism. Since 2010 we’ve been working with newsrooms across the continent to show journalists how the Internet can help them be better reporter. In Ghana we’re helping journalists produce evidence-based reporting on the country’s new oil wealth; in Senegal we gave journalists training on election reporting, and in Kenya we helped pioneer Africa’s first data journalism boot camp. Participants produced eight separate data-driven stories or news apps, including a TV documentary that exposed the plight of rural schools and an analysis of government spending at county level that has been nominated for an international award.


Now, we’re looking for even more innovations aimed at strengthening and transforming African news media. The News Innovation Challenge will provide grants ranging from $12,500 to $100,000 for project proposals falling into four categories: news gathering, storytelling, audience engagement and the business of news. Proposals can include ideas that improve everything from data-based investigative journalism and crowdsourced citizen reporting, to new ways of distributing news on mobile platforms, or new revenue models that help wean media off a reliance on advertising. In addition to cash grants, winners will receive technical, business development and marketing advice.

The African Media Initiative, Africa’s largest association of media owners and operators, is running the Challenge. Other partners include Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the U.S. State Department, the Konrad Adenhauer Stiftung and the World Association of Newspapers & News Producers.


Entries must be submitted to this website by midnight Central African Time on July 10, 2012. While news pioneers from anywhere in the world are welcome, all entries must have an African partner that will help develop and test the innovation. Entries will be judged by an international jury, and finalists will get a chance to refine their proposals during one-on-one mentoring sessions at a “tech camp” in Zanzibar in August 2012.


The winners will be announced at the Africa’s largest gathering of media owners and executives, at the Africa Media Leaders Forum, in Ivory Coast in November 2012.


We’re also active in promoting digital journalism outside of Africa, such as supporting the Nordic News Hacker, the Global Editor Network’s data journalism prize and International Press Institute media innovation prizes. As media organizations continue to adapt to the new digital world, we’re committed to working with journalists to help them use technologies to gather and tell important stories.


Julie Taylor, Head of Communications, Sub Saharan Africa

New Diagnostic Criteria for Alzheimer's Disease: Abstract and Introduction

New Diagnostic Criteria for Alzheimer's Disease: Abstract and Introduction: New Diagnostic Criteria for Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment for the Practical Neurologist Four articles in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia in 2011 describe new criteria for Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to the AD pathophysiological process (MCI due to AD), as well as the underlying rationale for them. The new criteria also include preclinical AD criteria but these are intended purely for research purposes. The new criteria emphasise that the AD pathophysiological process starts years and perhaps decades before clinical symptoms, and that biomarkers can detect amyloid β deposition and the effects of neurodegeneration in the brain. The criteria are recommendations based upon consensus meetings and will require future validation. Nonetheless, the authors believe that they are immediately helpful to the practising clinician, providing more accurate and specific guidelines for the diagnosis of AD dementia and MCI due to AD. As new diagnostic tools and treatments for AD become available, diagnoses using these criteria will enable patients with AD dementia, MCI due to AD and eventually preclinical AD to receive the best possible care.

Doc’s website gives vital info on diseases

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=%2F2003%2F5%2F16%2Fnation%2Fdivadi&sec=nation#.T6t2yzdNp40.blogger

Doc’s website gives vital info on diseases


BY DALILAH IBRAHIM

PETALING JAYA: If you are looking for a website where significant information on major diseases can be found, check out Dr Muruga Vadivale’s personal website at http://www.vadscorner.com/

There you can find information on diseases that made the news headlines in the past six years, including the latest, SARS.

Dr Muruga, 45, a director of a pharmaceutical company, developed the website in 1995 and over the years has included the latest information on major diseases published by doctors, as well as news reports from all over the world.

He said the SARS page had links to the World Health Organisation and Communicable Disease Control sites, including the latest updates on the spread of the disease in other countries.

“There is also a forum in which members of the public can discuss the related subjects and I try to answer as many questions as I can,” he said, adding that the SARS page received more than 18,000 hits last month

Click link for more...

Freedom from the Tyranny of Choice — Teaching the End-of-Life Conversation — NEJM

Freedom from the Tyranny of Choice — Teaching the End-of-Life Conversation — NEJM

Thirty years ago, an intern had a conversation with a patient that he regrets to this day. The patient, a young man with widely metastatic lymphoma, unresponsive to chemotherapy, now had progressive dyspnea. The intern knew that even with intubation, his patient would soon die. Although the norm at that time was for physicians, including house staff, to make end-of-life decisions without involving the patient, the medical team, struck by the patient's youth, asked the intern to elicit his wishes. Uncertain and frightened, the patient said, “I want everything.” Intubation followed, and then multiorgan system failure; the patient died on the ventilator weeks later, never getting an opportunity to say goodbye to those he loved.




More recently, another resident made a decision he feared he would regret. A woman in her 30s with widely metastatic breast cancer presented with shortness of breath resulting from bilateral malignant effusions. The resident's job was to triage the patient to the appropriate level of care. Although her cancer had been diagnosed a decade earlier, no physician had discussed her end-of-life wishes. In the middle of the night, the patient was in respiratory extremis; intubation was imminent if her life was to be prolonged. The resident decided to make it clear to the patient that she was dying. Comfort measures were initiated. The resident feared he'd overstepped his bounds and that the patient's oncologist would be angry. Instead, when the patient died peacefully 3 days later, the oncologist and the family all expressed their gratitude.

...Click link above to read  more.

This is such an important duty not to be neglected.

Lecture Halls without Lectures — A Proposal for Medical Education — NEJM

Lecture Halls without Lectures — A Proposal for Medical Education — NEJM

The last substantive reform in medical student education followed the Flexner Report, which was written in 1910. In the ensuing 100 years, the volume of medical knowledge has exploded, the complexity of the health care system has grown, pedagogical methods have evolved, and unprecedented opportunities for technological support of learners have become available. Yet students are being taught roughly the same way they were taught when the Wright brothers were tinkering at Kitty Hawk....Click link above to read more.

TODAY — A Stark Glimpse of Tomorrow — NEJM

TODAY — A Stark Glimpse of Tomorrow — NEJM

Caloric intake that exceeds energy expended and its consequences, particularly development of type 2 diabetes mellitus, is emblematic of a climate change for modern medicine — a phenomenon so complex, embedded in culture and economics, and intertwined with conflicts between individual freedom and societal health that solutions are difficult to envision. Chronic caloric surplus (rather than obesity itself) is a central cause of epidemic type 2 diabetes,1 but differences in response to energy excess,2-4 disproportionately present among disadvantaged youth, increase susceptibility to type 2 diabetes in early life. Indeed, the percentage of type 2 diabetes in cases of new-onset diabetes in adolescence has increased from 3% a few decades ago to approximately 50% today.5 Because complications increase with the duration of diabetes, it is critical to improve prevention and treatment strategies for affected youth.


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