Storybird Aims To Attack The Last Bastion Of The Printed Word, The Kids? Bookshelf

If paper books are going to survive anywhere for the next few years, it's in our schools and on our kids' bookshelves. However a company called Storybird has built a platform for kids and adults to build and share picture books in a few minutes. The books use pre-rendered artwork and allow authors to drag and drop pictures and text right into their work. Think of it as fanfic for the Poky Little Puppy set.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/yIgN6d894Rk/

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Islamic summit urges dialogue in Syria

CAIRO (AP) ? An Islamic organization on Thursday urged Syrian opposition forces and members of President Bashar Assad's regime whose hands are not tainted by violence to hold talks to try to resolve the nation's bloody civil war.

At the end of a two-day summit in Cairo, the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation said that such talks could help achieve the "aspirations of the Syrian people for democratic reforms and change."

The statement did not call on Assad to step down, but the summit exposed conflicting views among Muslim and Arab nations about the Syrian civil war. In the past, many nations at the summit, including Egypt, have demanded that the Syrian leader step aside.

Egypt's Islamist president sharply criticized Assad's embattled regime in his address to the summit, but did not directly call for the Syrian leader to leave as he had in past comments.

The Syrian government, he said, "must read history and grasp its immortal message: It is the people who remain and those who put their personal interests before those of their people will inevitably go."

The summit also witnessed the first visit of an Iranian president to Egypt in more than three years, as Egypt's Islamist government aimed for warmer relations with Iran.

In a goodwill gesture, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in remarks carried by Egypt's official news agency that Iran will cancel visa requirements for Egyptian tourists and merchants.

"Lifting visas for merchants and tourists coming from Egypt to Iran, will be announced," he was quoted by MENA as saying. "Every day we will take steps forward."

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Cairo reflected Egypt's attempts to strike an independent foreign policy and reassert Egypt's historic regional leadership role following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, a close U.S. ally who shared Washington's deep suspicions of Tehran.

Meanwhile, Iran seeks warmer relations with Egypt as a way to break its international isolation and win a heavyweight ally.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/islamic-summit-urges-dialogue-syria-121723036.html

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Retirees irked by pricey insurance for speedy carts

Martha C. White , NBC News contributor ? ? ? 12 hrs.

Go greased lightning? Not exactly, and Florida retirement community residents aren?t too happy about paying up to $1,000 to insure ?hot rods? that have a top speed of only 25 miles per hour.

Now, state lawmakers are taking action to help seniors avoid pricey premiums on their LSVs, an acronym that stands for ?low-speed vehicle.? In plain English, it?s a souped-up, street legal golf cart that can be driven on roads with speed limits of 35 miles per hour or lower.

The important difference is that golf carts are identified with serial numbers, while LSVs are assigned vehicle identification numbers. ?They think their homeowner?s policy is going to take over... but a homeowner?s policy does not insure it as a vehicle,? said Tony Colangelo Sr., owner of The Villages Golf Cart Man.

The Villages in central Florida is the state?s biggest golf-cart community. It?s home to about 87,000 on- and off-road versions ? and plenty of angry residents are up in arms at insurance bills that range from $600 up to $1,000 for LSVs.

?They come in here all upset because their insurance is so high,? Colangelo said.

Lawmakers in Florida?s House of Representatives and Senate have proposed concurrent bills that would offer a way to avoid premium sticker shock. They would let LSV owners mechanically convert their vehicles to golf carts by installing ?governors,? speed limiting devices that would lower the vehicle?s top speed to the 20 miles per hour approved for golf carts and making some other modifications.

In addition, ?The owner of the converted vehicle must contact the regional office of the department to verify the conversion, surrender the registration license plate and the current certificate of title,? and pay a $40 fee, according to the proposed legislation. The sponsors are pushing the state government to take up their bills when it reconvenes next month so the law could go into effect July 1.

But Colangelo said even the proposed fix has some drawbacks. The prospect of slowing down a higher-end LSV to effectively turn it into a golf cart wouldn?t appeal to customers who had spent more to get those features in the first place. And for owners who can?t afford to insure their LSVs, ?I?d probably say the modifications would cost them anywhere from $600 to $1,000,? he said.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/pricey-insurance-speedy-golf-carts-has-retirees-outraged-1B8287043

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Video: Tsunami debris washes up in Oregon

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50724772/

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Psychology of Medicine: Aging Poorly: Another Act Of Baby Boomer ...

Baby boomers have a reputation for being addicted to exercise and obsessed with eating well.

But that story didn't jibe with what physician Dana E. King and his colleagues see walking through the door of their family practice every day in Morgantown, W.Va.

"The perception is that the baby boomers are very active ? they are, you know, climbing up mountains, and they are a very healthy bunch," says King, a professor in the department of family medicine at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. "We actually see people that are burdened with diabetes, hypertension, obesity, [and] who are taking an awful lot of medication."

So King and his colleagues mined data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a big federal survey, to compare baby boomers ? those who are now in their late 40s to 60s ? with people from two decades ago who were in that age bracket.

There were some surprises, says King, who, along with his colleagues, reports the results in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Baby boomers are healthier in some important ways. They are much less likely to smoke, have emphysema or get heart attacks. But in lots of other ways, the picture's not so great.

"The proportion of people with diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity [is] increasing. And perhaps even more disturbing, the proportion of people who are disabled increased substantially," King says.

Double the percentage of baby boomers, as compared with the previous generation, need a cane or a walker to get around. And even more have problems so bad that they can't work.

"Only 13 percent of people said they were in excellent health compared with 33 percent a generation ago, and twice as many said they were in poor health," King says. "And that's by their own admission."

King says the reasons are pretty clear: big increases in obesity and big decreases in exercise.

"About half of people 20 years ago said they exercised regularly, which meant three times a week, and that rate now is only about 18 percent," he says. "That's an astonishing change in just one generation."

The impact could be far-reaching if millions of baby boomers are already in such bad shape just as they're starting to grow old.

"The implications for health care costs in the next decade are astounding," King says. "The baby boomers are going into those high medical-use years in much worse condition than their forefathers."

The report comes at a time when the baby boomers are starting to enter old age in large numbers. "There are ... something like 10,000 a day reaching 65," says Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging. "It doesn't look good."

Part of the reported decline in health may be that baby boomers look sicker. They're getting diagnosed and treated for health problems their parents never knew they had.

But there may also be something else going on. "I'm part of the leading edge of the baby boom, and I know from personal experience that we have high expectations of life," saysLinda Martin, who studies health trends at the Rand Corp. "And so it could be that the decline in reports of excellent health could simply be that we have [a] higher expectation of what excellent health is."

Despite all this, baby boomers are living longer than their parents. But along the way, they're having a lot more knee operations and taking a lot more pills for blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/05/171008686/aging-poorly-another-act-of-baby-boomer-rebellion

Source: http://psychologyofmedicine.blogspot.com/2013/02/aging-poorly-another-act-of-baby-boomer.html

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Rihanna gives Chris Brown support in court

By Linda Deutsch, The Associated Press

Getty Images fiile

LOS ANGELES -- With the woman he assaulted throwing him a kiss, Chris Brown walked into court Wednesday to face allegations he failed to complete his community labor sentence for Rihanna's 2009 beating.

A judge asked for more information and scheduled another hearing in two months.?

Rihanna, the glamorous singer whose bruised face became a tabloid fixture after she was beaten by her then-boyfriend on the way to the Grammys, has been dating Brown again.?

She arrived with the R&B star, his mother and two other women and blew him a kiss as he entered the courtroom. They left together after the short proceeding in which Superior Court Judge James Brandlin set the next hearing for April 5.?

Brown's lawyer, Mark Geragos, said he was disturbed about the way the district attorney handled the matter and said he would be filing a motion opposing the prosecution's move to modify Brown's fulfillment of his community labor sentence.?

Prosecutors, who said they could find no credible evidence that Brown had completed his community labor in his home state of Virginia, asked that he start all over and put in 180 days in Los Angeles County.?

Prosecutors have suggested there was either sloppy record keeping or fraudulent reporting.?

The judge noted during the brief court session that a prosecution filing did not request revocation of Brown's probation and he, therefore, would not revoke it.?

A motion filed Tuesday also raised for the first time in Brown's felony assault case several incidents that prosecutors said demonstrate Brown has ongoing anger management issues.?

The motion cited a Jan. 27 fight between Brown and fellow R&B star Frank Ocean, and a 2011 outburst in which Brown threw a chair through a window after he was asked about the Rihanna attack on "Good Morning America."?

The filing represents a dramatic shift in the case against Brown, who was repeatedly praised by the judge overseeing his case for his completion of domestic violence courses and his community service work in his home state of Virginia.?

That changed in September, when prosecutors raised concerns about Brown's community service after he logged 701 hours in seven months ? an amount that had previously taken him more than two years to achieve.?

Los Angeles investigators traveled to Richmond, Va., to investigate Brown's service, which was only described in broad strokes by Richmond Police Chief Bryan Norwood, who was overseeing the singer's community labor.?

"This inquiry provided no credible, competent or verifiable evidence that defendant Brown performed his community labor as presented to this court," Deputy District Attorney Mary Murray wrote.?

Brown's attorney Geragos blasted the court filing, saying the prosecutor ignored interviews "where sworn peace officers stated unequivocally that Mr. Brown was supervised and did all of the community service."?

"I plan on asking for sanctions from the DA's office for filing a frivolous, scurrilous and frankly defamatory motion," he said Tuesday.?

Brown's case was transferred to Brandlin after a recent shuffling of judicial assignments.?

After pleading guilty to the Rihanna attack, Brown was given permission to serve 180 days of community labor in his home state of Virginia, but only as long as he performed manual labor such as graffiti removal and roadside cleanup.?

Given problems with documentation and statements from some witnesses who contradict Brown's claims of work, prosecutors asked Brandlin to order Brown to repeat his service in Los Angeles.?

Brown spent one-third of the hours he logged in Virginia working night shifts at a day care center in rural Virginia where his mother once served as director and where the singer spent time as a child.?

A detective who checked on Brown's work nine times at the Tappahannock Children's Center found the singer, his mother and a bodyguard at the center on each visit.?

The records said Brown waxed floors or performed general cleaning at the center.?

A professional floor cleaner contracted to work at the daycare center told investigators he had been cleaning the floors during the months Brown reported working at the facility.?

"Claims that the defendant cleaned, stripped and waxed floors at that location have been credibly contradicted," prosecutors said in the filing.?

Brown's mother, Joyce Hawkins, no longer had a formal role at the day care center but had her own set of keys and coordinated her son's work at the facility, prosecutors said.?

Murray stated in her filing that Norwood's report on Brown's service was "at best sloppy documentation and at worst fraudulent reporting."?

Richmond police spokesman Gene Lepley declined to discuss the allegations.?

"We believe it would inappropriate to comment on a matter that's before the court," Lepley said.?

According to the motion, officials with Virginia's probation office told investigators that Brown's arrangement to be supervised by Norwood was "extremely unusual" and had not been approved by the agency. No one from Virginia's probation department oversaw Brown's hours, prosecutors said.?

The motion noted that the only records the department has to indicate Brown was supervised were officers' overtime sheets. Five of 21 days that officers logged overtime for Brown were spent providing security for the singer's concerts.?

The allegations are the latest pre-Grammy controversy for Brown, who was arrested shortly after the 2009 ceremony for his attack on Rihanna. He has since returned to the awards show by performing and winning an award in 2011 for his album "F.A.M.E."?

Brown and Ocean are competing against one other for the Best Urban Contemporary Album category at Sunday's Grammys.?

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Source: http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2013/02/06/16875035-rihanna-attends-chris-browns-court-date-to-support-him?lite

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Drug makers step up search for hearing loss medicines ? Business ...

ZURICH/LONDON ? When Swiss biotech firm Auris Medical wanted to recruit patients to test its experimental hearing loss drug, it decided to enlist partygoers deafened by firecrackers on New Year?s Eve.

In the weeks leading up to Dec. 31, 2005 it advertised in the subway and on radio stations in Munich and Berlin, urging victims of sudden firecracker-induced hearing loss to turn up at designated clinics for treatment on January 1.

?We had just one single day of enrolment, we didn?t know how many people would show up,? Thomas Meyer, managing director of Auris, told Reuters.

Luckily, his gamble paid off and the small private company is now one of the leaders in what has been an empty space for the pharmaceutical industry.

Auris managed to recruit enough people to show that its compound AM-111 posed no safety risk and has since successfully completed a mid-stage trial in acute sensorineural hearing loss, or sudden deafness, involving 210 patients.

While there is no guarantee that its drug, which is injected through the eardrum, will pass muster in final-stage tests, the progress by Auris and a clutch of rival biotech firms is making large pharmaceutical companies sit up and take notice.

There are currently no approved disease-modifying drugs for hearing loss, which affects nearly a third of people aged 65 to 74 and half of those over 75.

But the science is developing and investor interest is growing, piqued by the huge commercial success of recent new treatments for sight loss, such as Lucentis from Novartis and Roche and Eylea from Regeneron and Bayer.

British charity Action on Hearing Loss conservatively puts the potential Western market for new drugs at $4.6 billion a year ? a figure that could grow quickly as ageing populations swell the ranks of those with hearing problems.

NEGLECTED FIELD

?It?s one of the few areas that, as yet, hasn?t really been tackled by the drugs industry,? said Kate Bingham, managing partner at SV Life Sciences Advisers, a venture capital firm with investments in new drugs for both eyes and ears.

Bingham sits on the board of Autifony Therapeutics ? a hearing loss firm spun out of GlaxoSmithKline in which the British drugmaker retains a stake.

Historically, hearing loss has received little attention from Big Pharma, given the lack of obvious targets for drug intervention, the difficulties of running clinical trials and a widespread belief that most deafness could not be reversed.

Now the big companies are getting involved, although the work is early-stage.

?A drug that is therapeutic and priced right could be quite a blockbuster. That?s why they?ve put their toe in the water,? said Jonathan Kil, chief medical officer at Seattle-based Sound Pharmaceuticals, which is enrolling young iPod users in a trial of an oral drug for noise-induced hearing loss.

U.S. giant Pfizer is arguably the most advanced of the big players, with a drug in initial Phase I clinical testing trial for age-related sensorineural hearing loss that looks to enhance the function of existing hair cells.

Some of its biggest rivals are laying bets, too. Last year French drugmaker Sanofi inked a two-year research deal with privately held Dutch biotech firm Audion Therapeutics to develop small molecule drugs to improve hearing.

In October, Roche joined forces with venture capital firm Versant Ventures and biotech Inception Sciences to find molecules targeting ear hair cell protection and regeneration in the cochlea, the spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear.

Cross-town competitor Novartis, meanwhile, struck a 2010 deal potentially worth more than $213 million with U.S. biotech GenVec to develop gene-based treatments to replace hair cells in the ear that transmit sound.

?We?re looking at restoration as our main line of work and we?re interested in whether there are chemicals that might also play this role instead of having to introduce a gene,? said Novartis research head Mark Fishman.

?This is an area that?s a bit more futuristic and ultimately restoring the hair cells will be the cure.?

EYES AND EARS

Unlike new eye drugs, which work by inhibiting an unwanted process, hearing drugs will need to restore damaged function ? a more difficult proposition.

Experts say the first drugs will target niche areas, such as damage caused by loud noise or as a result of chemotherapy.

?Hearing loss is not just one condition. It?s like cancer ? there are lots of different types and there is work to be done to segment the market,? said Ralph Holme, head of biomedical research at Action on Hearing Loss.

Heading the field for noise-induced hearing loss is South Illinois University, which has launched a late-stage trial with the U.S. military for a drug to increase protection for people exposed to very noisy environments like soldiers.

Canada?s Adherex also has a late-stage trial to test a drug that may protect against hearing loss caused by platinum-based anti-cancer agents in children.

While protective treatments could become available within the next few years, regenerative approaches ? such as injecting stem cells into the ear or chemically intervening to switch on genes that control cell growth ? are much further off.

Despite recent promising tests in gerbils, the potential to replicate this in humans is still uncertain, said Pascal Senn, an ear specialist at the University of Berne.

?If something grows inside the ear, you must be sure that it doesn?t grow excessively or form tumours. There are a lot of roadblocks that need to be overcome in this field. It?s highly risky, but I think it?s also the hottest area,? he said.

One intriguing possibility for the future is the convergence of future drugs and devices. Hearing aid manufacturers have certainly not been deaf to the noises from the pharma sector.

Sonova, the world?s largest maker of hearing aids, has invested in two start-up companies ? one in the United States for drugs to protect hearing and another Swiss biotech working on a treatment for acute tinnitus.

It bought U.S. cochlear implant manufacturer Advanced Bionics in 2009 in a bid to increase its focus on the inner ear and understand how drug treatments could work with implants.

?It will be interesting whether the innovation will be driven by pharma companies moving in or whether the hearing aid companies will branch out,? said Auris? Meyer.

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Source: http://bangordailynews.com/2012/12/03/health/drug-makers-step-up-search-for-hearing-loss-medicines/

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