Mices sent into hibernation

go into hibernation
D. Balasubramanian
U.S scientists have coaxed laboratory mice to go into a hibernation-like state by making them inhale air laced with the gas hydrogen sulphide.
ANIMALS SUCH as the polar bear cope with the severe Arctic winter by shutting down their activities for months on end.
During this period of hibernation, they cut down their breathing and metabolism to the basic minimum, and drop their body temperature from the usual 37 Celsius to 15 or below. On the other side of the coin are some desert animals, which too go on a similar shut-off mode as the summer heat scorches up to beyond 45 Celsius. This hot weather torpor behaviour is called aestivation.
Drop in metabolism
Either form of inactivity — hibernation or aestivation — is marked by drops in metabolism, breathing rate and body temperature. As the weather turns more agreeable, these animals return to normal biological activity.
Laboratory mice, born and bred in animal houses neither hibernate nor aestivate. They live in air-conditioned comfort round the year, with a steady supply of food and water. Now, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center at Seattle, Washington, USA have coaxed these laboratory mice to go into a hibernation- like state for about six hours! They did this by making these mice inhale air laced with about 80 parts per million (ppm) of the gas hydrogen sulphide or H{-2}S. Yes, the same gas that smells like rotten eggs!
Reporting in the the journal Science, Eric Blackstone, Mike Morrison and Mark Roth show that when exposed to hydrogen sulphide gas, the metabolic rate of these mice dropped by 90 per cent, their breathing rate by over 50 per cent, and their body temperature dropped from the usual 37 Celsius to 15 degrees.
After six hours of exposure, when the mice were returned to the usual room air and temperature, they returned to normal. The researchers conclude that hydrogen sulphide induces a suspended animation-like state in mice.
Medical benefits
These results are of interest since on-demand induction of such a lowered metabolic state may have some medical benefits. It could be used for improving the preservation of organs used for transplantation. It could also be useful in reducing physiological damage resulting from trauma, and improving outcomes after some forms of surgery.
What is it about hydrogen sulphide that evokes this hibernation-like response? This compound is known to be a potent, specific and reversible inhibitor of a key step in metabolic energy production. Biochemical molecules in cells and tissues transact their energy business in the form of a high-energy molecule called ATP.
ATP is thus often referred to as the energy currency of cells. Hydrogen sulphide appears to modulate the catalytic action of a key enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase, which produces ATP.
This inhibition of ATP production is believed to reduce metabolic activity. Hydrogen sulphide does this reversibly, so that when it is removed from the system, normalcy returns.
Transmitter of signals
Dr. Rui Wang of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada has been working on the biological effects of hydrogen sulphide, and considers this compound to be the third simple gas that acts as a transmitter of signals in cells.
The other two signal transmitter gases are nitric oxide or NO and carbon monoxide or CO. Both have well defined functions at physiologically relevant concentrations.
They help in relaxing blood vessels and modulating the central nervous system in specific ways. Wang catalogues (in his paper in FASEB Journal, 16, 1792, 2002) the role of hydrogen sulphide in similar terms. Importantly, all these three gases are also generated within cells through biochemical reactions.
They all have specific molecular targets on which they act and evoke responses. For example, NO and CO activate membrane channels through which calcium is allowed to pass.
Hydrogen sulphide is also produced within cells by certain enzymes, and appears to modulate ATP channels. Some have already started wondering whether humans too can go into hibernation through smelling hydrogen sulphide.
Poison at high doses
Let me point out right away that this gas is a poison at high doses and can even kill an organism. For mice, the optimal dose was worked out to be 80 ppm.
The Seattle researchers had also satisfied themselves that after six hours of the gas, when the mice returned to normal state, they had suffered no ill effects.
What the safe and effective dose in humans will be is yet to be worked out. Controlled and rigorous trials on volunteers need to be done before these results can be translated to humans.
And, one friend asked whether yogis and monks who experience suspended animation-like states might be inducing this gas in their body cells through some method or the other.
It is too premature to jump into conclusions; let us meditate first on the mice.
dbala@lvpei.org

Future crop for dry land cultivation - Hindu.com

Future crop for dry land cultivation
It is rich in lysine, iron, calcium, beta-carotene and folic acid.
GRAIN AMARANTH finds an important place among food crops, nutritionally possesses abundant quantity of lysine and sulphur containing amino acids, which are limiting in cereals.
It contains 16 per cent protein of which 6-8 per cent is lysine; hence it is popularly known as `lysine' rich crop. It is also rich in calcium, iron, phosphorus, beta-carotene and folic acid. The grain also contains 7-8 per cent edible oil composed of `squalene', which is an important ingredient in cosmetics and lubricants of computer discs.
The oil is relatively high in tocopherols (vitamin-E). Grain amaranth is also used as leafy vegetable. The white grains are used in different culinary preparations. For successful crop production, the choice of high yielding varieties is most important.
Popular varieties
Higher productivity of any crop can be achieved through a combination of ideal cultivars associated with proper environment and appropriate agronomic practices. Popular varieties like Suvarna and Annapurna require well-drained soils of sandy loam with an ideal pH of 6.
Studies have indicated that grain amaranth is more responsive to fertilizers than cereals. The recommended dose of fertilizers is 40:40:20 kg nitrogen:phosphorus:potassium (NPK).
Sowing period
The crop is generally sown in the first or second week of June just after the first monsoon. Traditionally, the seeds are broadcasted but better crop stand is achieved if seeding is done in rows.
A seed rate of 1.5 to 2 kg/ha is used for good grain yield. The depth of sowing should not be more than 2 to 3 cm. Optimising the plant density is an essential step in the introduction of new crop. A spacing of 45 cm x 15 cm is found to be optimum for better grain yields followed by 30 cm x 15 cm.
The grains mature much earlier and the plant dries up quite late. Hence crop is harvested as and when it reaches maturity. Else, grains will shatter which leads to heavy grain loss. Threshing is done by beating on tarpaulins. The produce is threshed and winnowed like other cereals.
M.R. Ananda & G.N. Dhanapal
University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore

Used clothing bins not all for charity TheStar

How cast-offs fuel global profitsUsed clothing bins not all for charity75 local companies part of $1.2B trade
PETER GORRIEFEATURE WRITERAt the edge of a Richmond Hill parking lot, Sami Jo Small hauls four well-stuffed garbage bags from her aging compact car and shoves them into a blue wooden bin.
The green bags are full of used clothes. "I'm hoping they're going to the less fortunate, someone that can use them," Small says.
The truth is far from Small's altruistic hopes. Much of the donated clothing never gets to local needy families. Increasingly, it makes its way to markets in the Third World, generating huge profits. And Toronto, home to more than 75 companies that sort and ship these cast-offs, is the capital of the $1.2-billion global trade.
Small had good reason to believe her donation will help needy people or will, in some way, support a worthy cause. Signs on two sides of the bin state: "Used clothing donations." Another, under the deposit chute, reads: "Thank you for your support in helping clothe the less fortunate through local non-profit organizations."
The bin is owned by Environmental Recyclers of Canada Inc. It's one of hundreds of blue or green boxes the company is said to operate in the GTA.
Environmental Recyclers is a registered Ontario business corporation. It is not a registered charity.
People in the used-clothing industry say Environmental Recyclers is a for-profit operation, and a big one, handling more donated clothing than any other collector in the GTA. They complain that the company — whose sole director, according to its Ontario corporate report, is Frank G. Genovese — undercuts a lucrative source of income for charities.
Industry insiders estimate that each week, donors stuff about 135,000 kilograms of clothes into the company's bins. Based on that assumption, they say, and after taking expenses into account, the operation could net roughly $24,000.
Small, a goaltender with Canada's Olympic women's hockey team, is surprised to hear that. She expected, she says, ``at a minimum, what's written on the sign. I assumed it was helping local people and local industry.
"It saddens me that I went to the time and effort to do what I thought was a good deed ... I'll just go to a different bin next time."
She'll have plenty of choice.
At least 12 organizations operate a total of more than 1,500 donation bins in the GTA. These drop-boxes are not regulated and competition is fierce.
Three years ago, Toronto Councillor Howard Moscoe — with backing from now-mayor David Miller — unsuccessfully proposed a bylaw that would require bins to be licensed. Moscoe hopes to revive the proposal next month.
Exact figures aren't known. But it's estimated that each week, across Ontario, 8,000 bins take in 1.8 million kilograms of donations — mostly clothes, along with furniture, books and small appliances.
The collections are part of a continent-wide phenomenon. The bins, along with door-to-door collections, raise tens of millions of dollars each year for charities.
As in almost every city across North America, some of the clothes donated in Toronto are put up for sale in charity thrift shops. Others are sold by the kilogram to for-profit stores.
Most, however, are sold to "graders" — businesses that sort and pack donated cast-offs for sale in Third World countries, or resell them to companies here that chop them into industrial wiping cloths.
This part of the trade is entirely for-profit. But it creates thousands of jobs here and, in poor countries, generates at least survival income for millions of people and is a source of cheap clothing for people who without it might dress in rags. Used clothing is Canada's leading export to 13 nations.
Toronto graders, operating in obscurity in scattered industrial parks, take in clothes from around the GTA and up to 2,000 truck-trailer loads each week from the United States.
Part of the income from the majority of bins does go to charities, through a variety of financial deals.
Some simply allow their name to be painted on bins provided and managed by a for-profit company.
The company sells the clothing to graders. The charity gets a small monthly payment for each bin or a portion — industry insiders say it's usually less than 5 per cent — of the proceeds. That's the arrangement between a company called KB Textiles and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation Canada.
The foundation's name is on 60 bins, and it gets "not more than $100,000" a year from the arrangement, says foundation spokesperson Zaheer Molu. "We're happy to have as many boxes out as possible. These things don't cost us any money and bring in revenue."
Other charities run their own bins and sell the clothes they receive to Value Village or, occasionally, directly to graders.
Value Village is owned by Seattle-based Savers Inc. The company, which began 51 years ago, operates strictly for profit.
`Competition has increased dramatically in the past five years. Everybody wants to get in the business.'
Dewayne Fry,
Salvation Army
Each of its 200 stores contracts a single charity to supply donated clothing. In Toronto, its biggest charity partners are the Canadian Diabetes Association (not related to the juvenile diabetes foundation) as well as the Ontario Federation for Cerebral Palsy and Community Living Ontario.
Value Village stores buy whatever comes in, unseen and unsorted, for 55 to 75 cents a kilogram — at least 20 cents more than other buyers pay.
The best items are put up for sale. Those that don't move within a few weeks, and lower-quality garments, go to graders for a few cents per kilogram
Since it's privately owned, Savers Inc. isn't required to reveal its financial statements. The company is believed to be very profitable.
Charities say they're happy with their portions. Value Village pays more for clothes than they'd get from graders.
And, they note, they get their cut even if donors deliver garments directly to a store.
In this complex landscape, Environmental Recyclers appears to be unique.
The company is listed in Yellow.ca, the online business phone directory, under "Foundations: educational, philanthropic and research." But it is registered in Ontario as a for-profit business and does not appear on listings of foundations or non-profit organizations.
"The charities would love to expose this guy but they fear it could put a bad taste in peoples' mouths," says John Luison, of Rangeview Fabricating, a Dundas, Ont. company that manufacturers donation bins. "They don't want to stir the pot, so they take it. The last thing they want is to start a war and nobody wins."
Toronto Councillor Moscoe is not so constrained.
For-profit bins are "a significant racket that really ought to be closed down," says Moscoe (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence).
"Environmental Recyclers are the most blatant and aggressive."
He says for-profit operations "play on people's desire to be helpful. The business should be restricted to legitimate charities."
In 2002, Moscoe proposed a bylaw that would have required licences for all bins. They'd only be issued to bins operated by registered charities and with written permission from the property owner.
City staff blocked the proposal, Moscoe says, claiming it would be outside the city's jurisdiction. He disagrees and, backed by Councillor Doug Holyday (Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre), has tabled a notice of motion to revisit it when council meets next month.
Several calls over the past two months to Environmental Recyclers' phone numbers, and to Genovese and his accountant, were not returned. Genovese also didn't respond to a written message left with the operator of a yard near Bolton, northwest of Toronto, where Environmental Recyclers rents space for its trailers.
For-profit collections are widespread across North America, says Ed Stubin, who runs a New York grading house and heads the used clothing section of the Baltimore-based Secondary Materials & Recycled Textiles Association.
"Today we have so many collectors in the business who don't represent legitimate charities. The public is led to believe they are legitimate."
While it's lucrative, managing bins can be a major headache.
"Competition has increased dramatically in the past five years," says Dewayne Fry, regional director of the Salvation Army's Central Ontario recycling centre, in Oakville. "Everybody wants to get in the business."
It's getting difficult to find good sites. Donations dropped outside create a mess and, when it rains, become worthless.
"In the last year, (operators) have gone through hell," Luison says. "People use bins as dumping grounds because the municipalities are tightening on the amount of garbage you can put out on the curb, or the increased cost of taking garbage to a landfill."
One of the original collectors, Goodwill Industries, waved the white flag about three years ago and now accepts donations mainly at their stores or supervised trucks and trailers.
Another old-timer, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, abandoned bins in the late 1980s. Instead, it has six trucks that set up for collections at churches each weekend.
"We had a lot of problems with contamination of merchandise and, in some cases, dumping," says Louise Coutu, executive-director of the society's central council.
Sales of bins, which cost about $600 each, have been quiet for about a year, says manufacturer Luison. "People are recouping their money, keeping an eye on things.''
Still, most groups say they plan to put out more.

Happiness, Hypermotivation by wireheading

Happiness, Hypermotivation
and the Meaning Of Life


http://www.wireheading.com/hypermotivation.html


HYPERMOTIVATION
Stepping on a strongly electrified grid is highly aversive. A desperately hungry rat - even a rat who hasn't eaten for 10 days - won't run across an electrified cage-floor to reach a food-source: the shocks are too painful. But a rat with electrodes implanted in its neural reward circuitry will cross the grid, repeatedly, to gain the chance to self-stimulate its pleasure centres. Direct electrical stimulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system is so overpoweringly delightful that the anticipated reward eclipses the immediate pain.
The brain's dopamine system has a dual psychological role: it regulates not just pleasure, but cue-induced craving. Cues such as seeing, smelling or tasting something potentially enjoyable - and the prospect of pressing a magic lever - heighten the desire for an anticipated reward without necessarily increasing the pleasure of the reward itself. An experienced rat with electrodes in its pleasure centers is very highly motivated. A mother will abandon her unweaned pups in order to self-stimulate indefinitely.

Euphoriant drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines activate the mesolimbic reward circuitry too. But they also activate the homeostatic mechanisms of the brain. These are control mechanisms that regulate our level of well-being (or commonly ill-being) analogous to the inhibitory feedback loops of, say, the thermoregulatory system. Psychostimulants activate not just the reward pathways, but neural "stress chemicals" such as corticotrophin-releasing factor(CRF); CRF-1 antagonists now in the pharmaceutical product-pipeline are promising anti-anxiety agents and antidepressants.

Our endogenous stress system serves to minimise, or act as a brake on, the amount of pleasure we can "naturally" obtain in a lifetime. This design-limitation is quietly satisfying to pharmacological Calvinists and religious fundamentalists alike. It is also the cause of immense suffering and malaise. Stress-induced overactivity of hypothalamic CRF/CRH neurons contributes to hyperactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system. Chronic HPA overactivity eventually demotivates and depresses its victims. HPA hyperdrive can lead to a spectrum of learned helplessness and behavioural despair characteristic of some forms of clinical depression.

By contrast, direct intracranial self-stimulation subverts these homeostatic mechanisms. Wireheading never ceases to feel sublime, regardless of how many times the subject self-stimulates the neural reward centres. Possibly - though this is controversial - tolerance to its hedonic effects is absent because electrical stimulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system activates the final common pathway of pleasure.

Experiments with electrified grids for self-stimulating humans to navigate are not imminent. So we can't prove just how powerfully motivating would be the implantation of optimally-located microelectrodes in normal human subjects. Even uncomplicated wireheading is currently considered unethical by medical orthodoxy. Thus the pioneering human experiments of controversial Tulane psychiatrist Robert Heath have not been repeated or refined - even to treat victims of refractory depression unresponsive to conventional antidepressants. Instead, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), ECT, and even (rarely) psychosurgery are medically sanctioned in extremis for "treatment-resistant" depressives. Their long-term clinical efficacy is uncertain.

Better drug-design is one option. Another is rewriting our own genetic code. Our genetically-enriched descendants may enjoy levels of incentive-motivation that are analogous to - and possibly far greater than - whatever drives a rat to cross an electrified grid as an ingredient of lifelong mental health. Decoding the human genome - and soon the proteome - opens up technical possibilities it would be unethical to ignore in an unspeakably pain-ridden world. For we can potentially amplify, modulate and redesign the architecture of our own neural reward mechanisms. Unlike our bodily thermostat, which can operate only within a narrow temperature range, the homeostatic mechanisms that govern human emotion and motivation can be radically recalibrated. Recalibrating the pleasure-pain axis may endow us with a far higher emotional "set-point" around which to oscillate than the dismal Darwinian norm.

Uniform happiness is no more educative or illuminating than uniform despair. A wholly emotionally stable subject - and in theory an entire civilisation - could get "stuck in a rut", whether that "rut" is a slough of despond or a sub-optimal plateau of bliss. But learning and personal development based on gradients of well-being can be both educative and powerfully motivating. A life animated by gradients of well-being is also personally more soul-enriching than learning based on gradients of pain.

On this scenario, bad hair days in any future post-Darwinian era of paradise-engineering may be merely wonderful rather than sublime. Centuries hence, the computational-functional analogs of traditional "painful lessons" will survive, but not their cruel Darwinian textures. Indeed the homeostatic baseline of even our own (un)happiness could potentially be reset at a level of sustainable well-being orders of magnitude higher than the norm adaptive for small social groups of naked apes on the African savannah.

What's the theoretical maximum? We don't know. Should the empirical methodology of science be used to find out? No research proposal with that aim has yet gained funding. How accurately can pleasure and pain be quantified on a single unidimensional scale? This is disputable, albeit more as a complication than a fundamental obstacle to the abolitionist project. What fail-safe genetic mechanisms can prevent - or today sometimes fail to prevent - extreme happiness spiralling off instead into psychotic mania? We're still not sure. This challenge must be met before we can safely explore germline therapy for hereditary mental superhealth.




THE MEANING OF LIFE?
In future, safer and more sophisticated analogs of wireheading may conceivably be on offer as an individual lifestyle choice. Implausibly, for sure, the freedom to wirehead might one day count as a basic human right. After all, an inalienable right to the "pursuit of happiness" was recognised by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in the American constitution. Yet the pursuit of wireheading or its analogs is not an evolutionarily stable strategy - whether for rodents, monkeys, or a future (post-)human civilization. In the era of mature genomic medicine, when the corrupt legacy code of our ancestors has been rewritten, our descendants may be animated by gradients of lifelong happiness far richer, multi-dimensional, and more profound than anything physiologically accessible at present. Globally, however, it's hard to envisage how individual well-being could be purely orgasmic, undirected at intentional objects. ["Intentionality" is the philosophers' term of art for the "object-directedness" or "aboutness" of thought.] Selection pressure doesn't favour higher vertebrates who neglect their pups.
Over the aeons, natural selection has favoured the "encephalisation of emotion". We've become brainier and (comparatively) more emotionally sophisticated. Raw feeling and emotion typically infuse neocortical representations of ourselves and our environment in ways tending to maximise the inclusive fitness of self-replicating DNA. Most recently, the rich generative syntax of human language enables us to be (un)happy "about" innumerably more notions than our hominid ancestors. Admittedly, the discontinuity represented by the imminent revolution in reproductive medicine - a major evolutionary transition in the development of life on earth - could in principle reverse this long-term trend to complexification. In the post-Darwinian era of "unnatural" selection based on premeditated design, we could, in theory, choose genes that make our children blissed out rather than blissful. But it's more likely our descendants will opt instead to enjoy a well-being for their children (and themselves) that is far more encephalised than our own. Posterity will be smarter. They may even be nicer. The tendency to encephalise feeling may accelerate, even as those feelings tend to become deeper, more intense and more beautiful. Our emotional palette may be expanded far beyond today's primitive Darwinian appetites and their crude sublimations. Thus our enriched well-being may be predominantly empathetic, sensual, psychedelic, cerebral, aesthetic, introspective, maternal, or forms of consciousness unimaginable to twenty-first century emotional primitives.

Our post-human successors presumably won't undergo the agonies of our laboratory rodents in pursuit of such exhilarating lives. In the new reproductive era, emotional well-being and prodigious will-power alike can potentially be genetically hardwired as a precondition of mental health. "Authentic happiness" doesn't need to be strived for. Like a sense of meaning and purpose, it can be innate.

Today, meanwhile, many people find it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Given the prevalence of chronic dysthymia, anhedonia and low-grade depression in even the "well" population at large, such inertia is scarcely surprising. Why bother to exert oneself if the payoff is so meagre? Depressive and unmotivated people are likely to find life "meaningless", "absurd", "futile". Nihilistic thoughts and angst-ridden mindsets are common. Feelings of inadequacy and failure can haunt the ostensibly successful. And the world is full of walking wounded whose spirit has been crushed.

Conversely (and for evolutionary reasons less commonly), hyperthymic or euphorically hypomanic people tend to find life intensely meaningful. A heightened sense of significance is part of the texture of their lives. If our happiness is taken care of - whether genetically, pharmacologically, or electrosurgically - then the meaning of life seems to take care of itself.

Depressives, philosophers and hard-nosed scientists may respond that "the meaning of life" is cognitively meaningless, a verbal placebo empty of propositional content. Happy and hypermotivated people, on the other hand, find the meaning of life self-intimating, written into the texture of the(ir) world.

Chronic apathy, weak will-power, depressive disorders, and the nastier poisonous modes of Darwinian consciousness can in principle be remedied by 1] drugs, 2] genes or 3] electrodes. These choices are not mutually exclusive. The abolitionist project and any post-Darwinian civilisation based on paradise-engineering could in theory take advantage of all three. But each option is still deeply controversial.







REFERENCES
and further reading


HOME
Ratbots
HedWeb
James Olds
Homeostasis
Future Opioids
Nootropics.com
Empathogens.com
The Orgasmic Brain
The Good Drug Guide
The Animal Rights FAQ
Utilitarianism On The Net
The Hedonistic Imperative
Electrical Brain Stimulation
Hedonism and Homeostasis
God and the Temporal Lobes
MDMA: Utopian Pharmacology
Critique of Huxley's Brave New World
Wireheads and Wireheading in Science Fiction
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS)
Pleasure Evoked by Electrical Stimulation of the Brain

Pharmacies offer 'behind the counter' service usatoday.com

In the back of this sprawling drugstore in a busy, nondescript suburban shopping center lies what many pharmacists hope represents the future of their profession
At the end of the over-the-counter products aisle, beneath a huge "Happy Harry's Pharmacy Care Center" sign, two rooms that bear a passing resemblance to a doctor's office offer customers the chance to meet privately with a pharmacist. Besides discussing their medicines, they can get their cholesterol checked for $25 and blood pressure for $10 for 16 readings. If they're diabetic, they can learn about blood sugar meters.
Currently, this type of service is about as common as a doctor who makes house calls. This Happy Harry's pharmacy is the only one of the 75-store chain that offers it. Rite Aid and Kerr Drug, a North Carolina-based chain, also have pilot programs.
Pharmacists, frustrated with being viewed as mere pill-pushers, are clamoring to become more involved in managing their customers' health care. Some professional groups have been pushing for a new category of non-prescription drugs, dubbed "behind-the-counter," that would require customers to talk to a pharmacist before buying them. The United Kingdom and Canada are among a number of other countries that have such a setup.
"None of us went into the profession to stand behind a counter and count by fives," says Janet Engle, a former president of the American Pharmacists Association and associate dean of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Pharmacy.
Engle and other pharmacists say that the time is right for behind-the-counter non-prescription drugs. For example:
• Some states have laws that allow Plan B, a prescription emergency contraception pill, to be sold without a prescription by pharmacists working collaboratively with doctors. Most women's health groups want it sold OTC nationally, but the Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) hasn't acted on the maker's request to do so.
• A growing number of states are moving non-prescription cold remedies such as Sudafed from store shelves to behind the counter. Pseudoephedrine, their active ingredient, can be ground up to make crystal methamphetamine, an illegal stimulant. Placing such drugs behind the counter enables pharmacists to limit the amount sold and keep track of buyers.
• Under the Medicare Modernization Act, the government might begin paying pharmacists next year to consult with Medicare patients who take several drugs for chronic diseases. If the program is a success, proponents say, private health plans eventually would begin paying for a similar service.
• Facing generic competition when prescription drugs go off patent, drug companies are looking to switch the drugs to OTC for three more years of exclusivity. If an FDA (news - web sites) advisory panel's vote last month was any indication, though, drugmakers might face resistance when trying to switch drugs for chronic conditions that have no symptoms, such as high cholesterol.
The panel voted 20-3 against Merck's plan to switch Mevacor, a prescription cholesterol-lowering statin drug, to OTC. But several members said they could see selling the drug without a prescription from behind the counter.
Most committee members weren't convinced that consumers could correctly decide on their own whether they needed medication to lower their cholesterol. After all, non-prescription drugs historically have been used to treat only short-lived ailments, such as a headache.
Zocor, another Merck statin, has been available in the United Kingdom without a prescription but behind the counter since last summer. "The behind-the-counter scenario would be a perfect solution" for OTC Mevacor, said FDA panel member Leslie Clapp, a pediatrician in Buffalo.
Convenience, at a price
Dan Taylor, 73, of Wilmington would agree. He has been getting his cholesterol tested at Happy Harry's for more than a year. "This is so much more convenient," says Taylor, who takes Zocor. "I can go in there any time I want."
Plus, Happy Harry's charges only $25 for the service. Even though he has to pay the full amount out of pocket, he says, it's still less than what he'd have to pay if he were tested through his doctor.
Pharmacists' costs are a major obstacle to establishing a behind-the-counter drugs category, says Steven Francesco, publisher of Switch, a newsletter about the OTC market. "In the U.S., the pharmacists think they might get extra business, but no one has sorted out how they are going to get paid for their effort," Francesco says.

James Owen, director of clinical services and professional development for the Happy Harry's chain, acknowledges that few customers have opted to pay the drugstore's $25 fee for a half-hour sit-down with a pharmacist. But Owen says Happy Harry's has plans to launch a pilot program in which insurance would cover pharmacy care for patients with high cholesterol.
Meanwhile, Taylor is satisfied with the service. "I've enjoyed talking to the young man who's the pharmacist there," he says. "He is very knowledgeable about this sort of thing. He then sends a copy of the test results to my doctor."
Happy Harry's pharmacist Michael Capka says the feeling is mutual. "One of the more rewarding things I find about this is you can actually see a patient's face start to light up when they understand" how to manage their condition. "It would help everybody, the public, pharmacists, if there was this third class of drugs."
Legal questions
It's not clear, though, whether the FDA has the authority to put non-prescription drugs behind the counter. Virginia Cox of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a trade group of non-prescription drugs and dietary supplements, says it would take an act of Congress. Cox's group opposes such a move, which would limit access to some of its members' products.
Charles Ganley, head of the FDA's OTC drugs division, says he needs to consult agency lawyers on the question. "It's an option we ought to look at," Ganley said after the Mevacor meeting.
Gary Stein, a government affairs specialist for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (news - web sites), says drugmakers might insist on it.
"If manufacturers see drugs they'd like to go to OTC status get rejected, that might encourage FDA to move to this," says Stein, whose group favors a third class of drugs. "Consumer groups might get behind this as well."
Merck spokesman Tony Plohoros says his company still hopes that the FDA will approve OTC Mevacor, so it's not considering behind-the-counter sales. The FDA, which usually goes along with its advisory committees, is expected to decide on OTC Mevacor by Feb. 24.
Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers, a New York-based advocacy organization, says he doesn't see the point of a third category of drugs.
"It doesn't surprise me that pharmacists would be grabbing onto this, because it gives them a new lease on life," Levin says. Increasingly, he says, patients are obtaining medications for chronic conditions through the mail, not in drugstores.
Besides, Levin says, "despite the illusion that pharmacists counsel patients, that doesn't happen very much in the hurly-burly of the retail establishment."
Vanderbilt University pharmacologist Alastair Wood, who chaired the FDA advisory committee meeting and voted for OTC Mevacor, says panelists put too much faith in behind-the-counter drugs.
"I've gone into the U.K. and bought something behind the counter," he says. Usually, he says, he's just handed the drug, no questions asked. "It's not that rigorous."
About half of non-prescription drugs in the United Kingdom can be sold only where pharmacists can supervise their sale, says Sheila Kelly, executive director of the Proprietary Association of Great Britain, the British counterpart to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
"In practice, of course, most sales are made to people who have bought the products many times before to treat self-recognized, self-limiting conditions where professional advice is not needed," Kelly says.
In Canada, the number of non-prescription drugs sold from behind the counter has shrunk to 176 of the 20,000 self-care products sold there, says David Skinner, president of the Nonprescription Drug Manufacturers Association of Canada. "I can't really recommend it," he says of the behind-the-counter category. "But we've had it for such a long time that we've come to live with it."
Skinner says his local drugstore has an enclosed area where customers can discuss sensitive matters with a pharmacist. "Some are good at it and will take the time, and others don't take the time."

Google news - copyright challenges

When users click on the links on Google News pages, they are taken directly to the publisher of the material, as they are when they click on thumbnails of photos. Glitches aside -- like when its computers misfire and Google News runs the wrong photo with an article, or it accidentally ignores an important breaking news story completely -- it's akin to browsing newspaper headlines, lead paragraphs and photos at a newsstand, and choosing which stories you want to read.
With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn't take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn't help but wonder why they shouldn't just imitate Google's model and pare their budgets to the bone.
As it turns out, however, Google has a problem that is nearly as complex as its algorithms. It can't make money from Google News.
So while other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.
The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.
What is fair use of a copyright work? According to New York University, where I teach, it covers comment, criticism, news reporting, research, scholarship and teaching, with several factors considered, including how much material is involved as a percentage of the entire work and whether use is of a commercial nature or strictly for nonprofit, educational purposes.
So if you are reviewing the latest Eminem CD and need to lift a few lyrics you're good to go. If you need to summarize a medical article on, say, arthritis, or a new study on the percentage of households with high-speed internet access, you can (within reason). But if you want to run a business of aggregating news content by running headlines and whole paragraphs of copyright work, you might run into trouble.
And it's not only in lawsuit-crazy America that Google's aggregate news model faces an uncertain legal future. Earlier this year, a court in Hamburg, Germany, ruled against Google's German news service when it found that thumbnail images were protected under German copyright law and could not be reproduced without permission. (Google has appealed.) A few weeks ago, half a world away, Chinese publishers Sing Tao electronic news service, Ming Pao newspaper and Radio Television Hong Kong, a government-owned radio station, greeted the launch of Google's Hong Kong news with a spate of letters alleging copyright infringement.
Which prompted Stanford Law School copyright guru Lawrence Lessig to wryly blog: "That'll teach us for teaching the Chinese about the importance of copyright law."
It's hard to feel sorry for Google, though. In April, lawyers for the billion-dollar search engine company that Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded sent their own cease-and-desist letter to Julian Bond, a British programmer who had created customized RSS feeds from Google News.
Ironically, the letter informed Bond that Google does not permit "webmasters to display Google News headlines on their sites."

Google Answers: Plan to make a Personal dating Website

Google Answers: PERSONALS QUESTION # 8: "Plan to Build a Personal Site


Phase 1: High Level Design

This phase is about thinking and writing. This business plan is the
beginning part of this phase. As more time and thought is put into
manifesting this blueprint for the site, details will come into focus
and some changes will no doubt be made. It�s important that the
project is thought out very thoroughly before actual construction
begins. Some of the things that need consideration include the
following. Many of these points are gone into further detail later in
this plan.

Name of the Site � This is a very important step. The name should be
very easy to remember. It should be broad enough to appeal to all. For
example, having the word �mates� in the title would not be appealing
to those looking for a more casual relationship. It would be best to
have either one word domain like Kiss.com or Match.com or a two word
phrase with good alliteration.

Target Audience � The site and advertisements for it should be broad
enough to appeal to all and at the same time target specific groups
(e.g. tech-savvy young professionals). The site and all marketing
should also be geared to some extent towards women as they are still
minority users on personals sites, although this is changing.

Questionnaire: Many people dislike having to fill out profile
information. For this reason, it is suggested to have 2-3 levels of
profile information. The first would be all of the basic profile
questions: age, height, location, interests etc. These are mandatory
and are mostly multiple choice with two essay questions to talk about
themselves and who they are looking for. After this, users would be
encouraged to fill out a detail"

TheStar.com - Lost bank accounts hold riches, but are tough to track

TheStar.com - Lost bank accounts hold riches, but are tough to track: "Lost bank accounts hold riches, but are tough to track

ELLEN ROSEMAN

My brother Doug heard a CBC radio interview about how to search for unclaimed bank balances.
He went to the Bank of Canada's website, http://www.bankofcan ada.ca, and put different family names into the database.
Eureka. Up popped my grandfather � maybe � with a substantial sum of $918.30 left unclaimed at an unnamed bank branch.
'Is this worth pursuing?' Doug asked me.
After checking the website, I had a few questions of my own. The bank warns to expect a six-week delay when making inquiries.
I called the Bank of Canada for an interview.
Harry Idey, operations manager of banking services, happily told me everything I wanted to know.
What if the first name is misspelled? (Moris instead of Morris.) Does that mean it's the wrong guy?
'A dropped R is not uncommon,' Idey said.
What if the last transaction date is Jan. 15, 1981? How can there be activity in that bank account if my grandfather died in 1972 and my grandmother in 1976?
'It's unusual,' Idey admitted. Bank accounts remain active a year or so after a death, because of security sales and interest payments, but not for five years.
What if we don't recognize the address as my grandfather's?
We have to do research, Idey said, to find any documents with my grandfather's name and the Montreal address listed at the website.
Question four: How do we as grandchildren claim the money?
We track down my grandfather's will and see who the executor was. The Bank of Canada then writes a cheque to the estate, which distributes "

TheStar.com - OPP targets auto erratics

TheStar.com - OPP targets auto erratics: "Of the 433,000 people in Ontario with suspended licences, about 40,000 lost their driving privileges for crimes such as dangerous or impaired driving. Many are on the road anyway.
'We have to do a better job of getting the bad guys off the highways,' Burns said.
Thousands of GTA motorists may be violating the law:
At least 90,000 Ontarians are driving without insurance; last year, the OPP charged 5,277. About 45 per cent of licence suspensions are because of unpaid fines. In 2004, the OPP charged 1,287 in the GTA with driving while suspended.
More than 80,000 parents are suspended because they failed to pay child support."

VideoHelp.com - DVD Player Compatibility List DVP642K/69 is the way to go - has Karaoke and 110-240V

VideoHelp.com - DVD Player Compatibility List: "rob from United States reported January 28, 2005:
Read features:Price:Time used: Rating:
CDR
CDRWDVD-R
DVD-RWDVD+R
DVD+RW
DVD+R DLVCD
XVCD?
XSVCD?SVCD
SVCDSubs?
SVCDTracks?
MP3 VBR
WMA
CVD?$8060 days9 of 10
MP3 long filename
MP3 ID3 TAG
Progressive scanning
DVD-VHS Combo
Multisystem PAL/NTSC Convert
Portable DVD Player
DVD-TV Combo
DVD Recorder


Comments:
having this player for 2 months, i would say that im over the 'honeymoon phase'. when i first got this player, it handled everything that this player claimed it could handle. i played files that ive encoded as well as files that were downloaded. eventually i started running into problems, partictularly with XviD files.

after a lot of research (previous posters on this site and google) and experiments i found out how to diagnose and fix a couple of problems people are having with this player. in no way am i saying this is the 'ultimate-end-all' way to play XviD files, it just works for me and hasn't failed yet.

Symptom: player displays a black screen, no audio, and incorrect playback time

Problem: Must use square pixels

Solution: change with Mpeg4 Modifier

Symptom: Horrible color and pixelation

Problem: using a custom quant. matrix. Must be H.263 or MPEG....not MPEG-custom or any other custom one.

Solution: Either reencode using one of those 2 matrices or press the System Menu button on the remote twice.

Symptom: file plays for a couple seconds and stops

Problem: File is using GMC warp points as found out through MPEG4 Modifier"

NRDC: Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?

NRDC: Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?: "Bottled Water
Pure Drink or Pure Hype? "

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Americans increasingly are turning to bottled water, making it a $4 billion-a-year business in the United States. [1] Millions of us are willing to pay 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water than we do for tap water -- though we probably rarely think of it that way. [2] However, some bottled water contains bacterial contaminants, and several brands of bottled water contain synthetic organic chemicals (such as industrial solvents, chemicals from plastic, or trihalomethanes -- the by-products of the chemical reaction between chlorine and organic matter in water) or inorganic contaminants (such as arsenic, a known carcinogen) in at least some bottles (see Chapter 3 and our accompanying Technical Report [print report only]).[1a] Moreover, as Chapter 4 documents, bottled water regulations have gaping holes, and both state and federal bottled water regulatory programs are severely underfunded. In Chapter 5 we present evidence that there is substantially misleading marketing of some bottled water, and in Chapter 6 we argue that consumers should be informed about the contaminants found in the water they purchase. NRDC's major findings and recommendations are summarized below.




Findings
1. Most bottled water apparently is of good quality, but some contains contamination; it should not automatically be assumed to be purer or safer than most tap water.
Based on available data and our testing, most bottled water is of good quality, and contamination posing immediate risks to healthy people is rare (see Chapter 3 and the Technical Report [print report only]). However, blanket reassurances from the bottled water industry that bottled water is totally safe and pure are false.

No one should assume that just because water comes from a bottle that it is necessarily any purer or safer than most tap water. Testing commissioned by NRDC and studies by previous investigators[3] show that bottled water is sometimes contaminated. NRDC contracted with three leading independent laboratories to do "snapshot" testing (testing one to three times for a subset of contaminants of concern) of bottled water.

We found after testing more than 1,000 bottles that about one fourth of the bottled water brands (23 of 103 waters, or 22 percent) were contaminated at levels violating strict enforceable state (California) limits for the state in which they were purchased, in at least one sample. We also found that almost one fifth of the waters we tested (18 of 103, or 17 percent) exceeded unenforceable sanitary guidelines for microbiological purity (heterotrophic-plate-count [HPC] bacteria guidelines, adopted in some states, the European Union (EU), and recommended by the bottled water industry) in at least one test. While HPC bacteria may be harmless themselves, they may mask the presence of pathogens; some states, the EU and the bottled water industry have adopted HPC guidelines to help ensure sanitary source water, processing, and bottling practices. In all, at least one sample of one third of the waters we tested (34 of 103, or 33 percent) exceeded a state enforceable standard for bacterial or chemical contamination, a nonenforceable microbiological-purity (HPC) guideline, or both.

The labs contracted by NRDC detected contaminants of potential concern (either microbes or chemicals regulated in tap or bottled water) in at least one sample of about half of the bottled waters we tested, though in the majority of the waters no standards were exceeded. While state or industry standards and guidelines were violated in at least one test for about one fourth of the bottled waters, just four waters (4 percent) exceeded the weak federal standards. Of these four waters, two violated the FDA coliform-bacteria rule (coliforms are bacteria that can be harmless themselves but may indicate the presence of fecal contamination and disease-carrying organisms in the water) in one test. When we retested another lot of the same waters for coliform bacteria, however, both of these waters tested clean. In addition, two other waters violated the FDA standard for fluoride in two sequential tests of samples from different lots of these two waters.

While our testing is the most comprehensive publicly available independent testing of U.S. bottled water, it must be viewed as incomplete. Only about half of the drinking water contaminants regulated by FDA and EPA were tested, due to cost constraints. There are, conservatively, more than 700 brands selling bottled water in the United States, yet we tested only 103 waters. Additionally, we generally tested just one to three lots of each water, whereas often thousands or even millions of bottles may be produced annually by a single bottler, with the potential for periodic (and undetected) contamination problems. Testing by other investigators generally has been consistent with our results. For example, as is discussed in detail in the accompanying Technical Report (print report only), a major survey of microbiological contamination of domestic and imported bottled water sold in Canada published in 1998 yielded results very similar to NRDC's. [4] We were not able to test for Cryptosporidium in bottled water (nor did the Canadian investigators) because the current EPA method for Cryptosporidium monitoring requires the filtration of many gallons of water and analysis of the filter using a method feasible for bottlers prior to bottling the water, but this was logistically and financially infeasible for us to use on finished product sold at stores.

Bottled water recalls and other contamination incidents -- whether bacterial, industrial-chemical, algae, excessive-chlorine, or other contamination problems -- have sometimes been quietly dealt with by bottlers, generally with little or no public fanfare. In other cases, violations of bottled water standards have been allowed to go on for months without a recall or formal enforcement action. Although most of the bottled water on the market seems to be of good quality, some of these products are not as absolutely pure and pristine as many of their consumers may expect.

Comparing the data for bottled water quality with those for tap water is not straightforward. Far more monitoring data are publicly available for tap water than for bottled water. EPA requires frequent monitoring of tap water and makes available on its Web site national compliance data for all tap water systems. [5] Additionally, numerous surveys of tap water quality (beyond simple compliance data) are available for tap water quality, [6] whereas no such comprehensive data are available for bottled water. Thus, direct comparison of tap water quality versus bottled water quality is not possible based on comparable databases. However, EPA recently reported that in 1996, almost 10 percent of community tap water systems (serving 14 percent of the U.S. population) violated federal EPA tap water treatment or contaminant standards, and 28 percent of these tap water systems violated significant water quality monitoring or reporting requirements. [7] While these tap water system compliance data are plagued by underreporting and likely understate the extent of the problem somewhat, [8] without question they are based on a far larger database than is publicly available for bottled water. Moreover, according to available data, nearly half of the U.S. population served by tap water systems gets legally allowable but from a health standpoint potentially significant levels of contaminants such as cancer-causing trihalomethanes, radon, and/or arsenic in their tap water. [9] Thus, while there definitely are problems with a substantial minority of the nation's tap water systems, based on the limited data available there is little basis to conclude that just because water is purchased in a bottle it is necessarily any better than most tap water.




2. Bottled water contamination with microbes may raise public health issues, particularly for people who are immunocompromised.
Millions of Americans use bottled water as their primary source of drinking water. Some of these people are immunocompromised (such as people undergoing cancer chemotherapy, organ-transplant recipients, the chronically ill elderly, some infants whose immune systems are not fully developed, and people with AIDS) and use bottled water at the recommendation of public health officials or health care providers, who suggest that tap water use may be too risky.[1b] In some cases, officials also may urge the general public to use bottled water during a tap water contamination crisis.

As discussed in Chapter 3 and our attached Technical Report (print report only), NRDC's testing and other published and unpublished data indicate that while most bottled water apparently is of high quality in terms of microbiological purity, a substantial minority of it may not be. As noted there, a small percentage of the bottled water we tested (about 3 percent) sometimes contained coliform bacteria -- a possible indicator of contamination with pathogenic bacteria -- and nearly one fifth of the waters we tested contained heterotrophic-plate-count (HPC) bacteria at levels exceeding state and industry guidelines in at least one test. Some bottled waters contain bacteria (sometimes naturally occurring), including species of Pseudomonas and others, some of which may be a health concern for immunocompromised people. [10]

In cases where there is known tap water microbial contamination, or where an individual suffers from specific health problems such as a compromised immune system, tap water can be boiled for one minute to kill all microbes. In the alternative, certain types of bottled water may be a temporary solution. To be cautious, however, an immunocompromised person should buy bottled water only if it is from a protected source, and is subjected to EPA-CDC-recommended treatment to kill Cryptosporidium, the intestinal parasite that sickened over 400,000 people and killed over 100 in a 1993 Milwaukee tap water incident. [11] For example, to remove or kill Cryptosporidium, water must be treated with "absolute one micron" membrane filtration or reverse osmosis, adequately high levels of ozone disinfection, or distillation, at a minimum.

Thus, NRDC recommends that seriously immunocompromised people boil their tap water for one minute before using it for consumption or washing food. If they choose to buy bottled water, they should consider purchasing only certified "sterile" bottled water. Most bottled water has not been independently certified to meet either the EPA-CDC standards for killing Cryptosporidium or the definition of "sterile" water, so vulnerable people must be especially careful in selecting a drinking water supply.[1c]




3. Government bottled water regulations and programs have serious deficiencies.
Chapter 4 outlines in detail the gaping holes in federal regulatory controls for bottled water, and the trivial FDA resources dedicated to protecting bottled water. FDA estimates that one half of a full-time FDA staff person is dedicated to bottled water regulation, and fewer than one FDA staff-person equivalent is spent on assuring compliance with FDA bottled water rules. [12] An estimated 60 to 70 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States, according to FDA interpretations, is exempted from FDA's contamination limits and specific bottled water standards because it is bottled and sold in the same state.

Thus, under FDA's interpretation, the regulation of most bottled water is left to ill-equipped and understaffed state governments. Yet 43 of 50 states have the equivalent of fewer than a single staff person dedicated to regulating bottled water, according to our 1998 state survey. Four states have adopted no regulations at all for bottled water, and the majority of states have simply republished FDA's deficient rules. About 40 states say they regulate "intrastate" waters, but most have dedicated virtually no resources to doing so.

FDA's rules also exempt many forms of what most of us would consider "bottled water" from all of its specific water-testing and contamination standards. If the product is declared on the ingredient label simply as "water," "carbonated water," "disinfected water," "filtered water," "seltzer water," "sparkling water," or "soda water," it is not considered "bottled water" by FDA, [13] nor, as noted in Chapter 4, do most states regulate this water as bottled water. For these products, the specific FDA contamination standards and water quality testing requirements for bottled water are not applicable. No contamination monitoring is required, and only a vague narrative legal standard applies, stating that the water cannot be "adulterated" -- a term not specifically defined and, to date, apparently never enforced against any of these products by FDA. Therefore, the generalized FDA "good manufacturing practice" requirements applicable to these waters[14] set no specific contamination standards. The same is true with most state regulations.

Even what FDA defines to be "bottled water" is exempt from many of the standards and testing requirements that apply to tap water. This appears to directly contradict the letter and the spirit of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA), which requires -- under a provision strengthened in 1996 -- that FDA's bottled water standards must be at least as stringent as tap water standards. [15] For example, EPA's rules clearly prohibit tap water from containing any confirmed E. coli or fecal coliform bacteria (bacteria that are indicators of possible fecal matter contamination often associated with waterborne disease). [16] FDA has no such prohibition for bottled water; instead, any type of coliform bacteria is allowed up to a certain level. [17] (See Table 1 for a comparison of EPA and FDA rules.)

Similarly, a big city has to test its tap water 100 times or more each month for coliform bacteria -- many times a day, on average -- yet bottled water (even at an enormous bottling plant) must be tested for coliform bacteria only once a week under FDA rules. Moreover, while high overall levels of bacteria (known as heterotrophic-plate-count [HPC] bacteria) can be counted toward bacteria violations for city tap water (in the absence of adequate disinfection), as described in Chapter 4, FDA bowed to bottled water industry arguments and decided to apply no standards for HPC bacteria in bottled water. HPC bacteria are commonly found in bottled water.

EPA's "information collection rule" generally requires big cities that use surface water (such as rivers or lakes) for tap water to test for common parasites such as viruses, Giardia, and Cryptosporidium. Under FDA rules, water bottlers are never required to do so. In the same vein, cities using surface water generally must disinfect their water and filter it to remove bacteria and certain parasites.[1d] Yet there are no FDA standards requiring bottled water to be disinfected or treated in any way to remove bacteria or parasites. Additionally, the FDA requirement that bottled water be derived from an "approved source" is no substitute for source water protection, filtration, or disinfection. This rule has been aptly characterized as a "regulatory mirage," since what is "approved" is left to state discretion with no meaningful federal requirements or oversight.

For chemical contaminants, the regulations for bottled water are also weak in many ways. While a city generally must test its tap water for scores of organic chemicals (such as industrial chemicals, some pesticides, and trihalomethanes) at least quarterly,[1e] bottlers generally need only test once a year under FDA's rules. These infrequent annual tests could miss serious problems, because levels of these contaminants sometimes vary substantially depending on when they are tested.

Also, phthalate[1f] -- a toxic chemical produced in plastic-making that tests show can leach from plastic into water under common conditions -- is regulated by EPA in tap water but FDA does not regulate it in bottled water. After some water bottlers and plastics manufacturers argued that phthalate controls would be inappropriate and burdensome for bottled water, FDA decided not to regulate it in bottled water, where it is sometimes found, particularly after long storage.

Furthermore, FDA currently has no enforceable standard or treatment requirement for three other contaminants regulated by EPA in tap water -- acrylamide, asbestos, and epichlorohydrin. Thus, while city water systems generally must test for all of these contaminants and must meet EPA standards for them, presently water bottlers need not.

EPA also requires city tap water suppliers to test for more than a dozen "unregulated" contaminants -- chemicals that are not currently subject to EPA standards but which, if present, may pose a health concern, such as a risk of cancer. Under EPA rules, states are to consider adding 15 additional named unregulated contaminants to this list for mandatory water system monitoring, if they are believed to be a potential problem in local tap water. [18] Bottlers face no monitoring requirements for any unregulated contaminants.

Even if bottled water is more contaminated than FDA's standards would otherwise allow, FDA rules explicitly allow the water to be sold, as long as it says on the label "contains excessive chemical substances" or "contains excessive bacteria" or includes a similar statement on the label. FDA says it may enforce against such labeled contaminated water if it finds that it is "adulterated" and "injurious to health." However, there is no requirement that water bottlers report such problems to FDA, and apparently there are no cases of FDA having taken any enforcement action against any such bottlers.

FDA has stated that bottled water regulation carries a low priority. [19] Because of this, water bottlers can expect to be FDA-inspected only about every four to five years, on average. [20] This is far too infrequent to detect certain possible problems, such as periodic contamination caused by occasional substandard plant operations or maintenance, bacteria from sewage overflows or leaks, pest infestations, or occasional spikes of pollution due to short-lived phenomena. In addition, bottlers are not required to keep records of their operations and testing for more than two years, making effective inspections difficult or impossible, since evidence of periodic or past problems can simply be discarded before it is ever reviewed by inspectors.

It also should be noted than in many cases FDA's rules are weaker than international standards. The European Union's (EU's) bottled water standards, for example, set limits for total bacteria count, [21] which, as noted above, FDA does not. Moreover, the EU's bottled mineral water rules ban all parasites and pathogenic microorganisms, E. coli or other coliform bacteria, fecal streptococci (e.g., Streptococcus faecalis, recently renamed Enterococcus faecalis), Pseudomonas aeruginosa, or sporulated sulphite-reducing anaerobes, whereas FDA's rules include no such bans. [22] Additionally, unlike the FDA rules, EU rules require natural mineral water's labels to state the waters' "analytical composition, giving its characteristic constituents" and the specific water source and name, and information on certain treatments used. [23] The EU mineral water rules further forbid use of more than one brand label per source of water[24] and generally prohibit labels from making any claims about the prevention, treatment or cure of human illness. [25] No such provisions are included in FDA rules. Similarly, the EU’s new general standards for all bottled water generally are far stricter than FDA’s rules, and FDA's standards for certain chemicals (such as arsenic) are weaker than World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for drinking water. [26]




4. Voluntary bottled water industry controls are commendable, but an inadequate substitute for strong government rules and programs.
The bottled water industry's trade association, the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), has sometimes been a progressive force in seeking to improve certain FDA controls (petitioning for stronger FDA rules in some areas, for example). Moreover, IBWA has adopted a voluntary state bottled water code -- somewhat stricter than the FDA rules -- which has been adopted in whole or in part by 16 states. However, IBWA sometimes has vigorously fought against tough FDA rules, such as possible controls on Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria, rules for heterotrophic bacteria, and right-to-know requirements for bottled water. The fight against right-to-know for bottled water is interesting in light of the bottled water industry's frequent references to tap water contamination problems. It also starkly contrasts with IBWA's admission that bottled water sales may have increased due to the requirement that diet soda labels disclose all ingredients, which IBWA said may have driven consumers concerned about diet soda's contents to use bottled water. [27]

IBWA has adopted a much-ballyhooed voluntary industry code and inspection program for its members. The association claims its members produce 85 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States. [28] But these voluntary IBWA standards are just that -- voluntary -- in the 34 states that have not adopted them, and there is no published reporting about compliance. Additionally, IBWA does not disclose the results of its inspections and testing to the public, so it is impossible to verify independently the effectiveness of these voluntary programs. Moreover, even by IBWA's count, many bottlers are not IBWA members and have never volunteered to comply with the association's standards. In fact, some of the problems with some bottled waters discussed in this report have occurred with IBWA members, suggesting the IBWA program is not foolproof. Finally, it should be noted that, as with FDA rules, IBWA standards do not apply to seltzer, soda water, carbonated water, or the many other waters exempt from FDA's bottled water rules. [29]




5. Bottled water marketing can be misleading.
Chapter 5 shows that despite recent FDA rules intended to reduce misleading marketing, some bottled water comes from sources that are vastly different from what the labels might lead consumers to believe. One brand of water discussed in this report was sold as "spring water" and its label showed a lake and mountains in the background -- with FDA's explicit blessing. But until recently the water actually came from a periodically contaminated well in an industrial facility's parking lot, near a waste dump (a state whistleblower informed the local media after years of internal struggles, finally putting an end to the use of this source).[30] Another brand of water sold with a label stating it is "pure glacier water" actually came from a public water supply, according to state records.[31] While FDA recently adopted rules intended to curb such practices, those rules include many weak spots and loopholes (including those that allowed the water taken from an industrial-park well to be sold as spring water with a label picturing mountains), and there are very few resources to enforce them.

Water with one brand name can come from numerous different sources, depending upon the time of year, location of sale, or other market factors. Moreover, water from one source (such as the industrial-parking-lot well noted above) can be used and labeled for a half-dozen or more different labels and brands. In addition, according to government and industry estimates, about one fourth or more of the bottled water sold in the United States [32] (and by some accounts 40 percent[33]) is taken from public water systems -- tap water, essentially. Sometimes this tap water is bottled after additional treatment (such as carbon filtration or ozonation), and sometimes it is bottled with little or no additional treatment.




6. The long-term solution to drinking water problems is to fix tap water -- not to switch to bottled water.

Flying start to Fifa World Cup sales for Germany 2006

http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/tickets/index.htmlFlying start to FIFA World Cup ticket sales: 500,000 tickets ordered1 February 2005by OC 2006 FIFA World Cup

Some 70,000 football fans around the world applied for no less than 500,000 match tickets in the first 16 hours after tickets went on sale on www.FIFAworldcup.com. Tickets sales for the 2006 FIFA World Cup™ commenced at midnight on 1 February 2005, triggering an anticipated stampede.
"The orders came flying in as soon as the starting whistle went at midnight. Fortunately, our technical system withstood the initial stampede and proved its reliability. We have achieved our objective of avoiding excessive pressure in the initial phase," claimed Horst R. Schmidt, who is responsible for ticketing among other matters in his role as senior vice-president of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Organising Committee.
Fans from the host country have proven the early pace-setters in the race for the 812,000 tickets available in the first phase of sales: 84% of the orders in the first twelve hours came from Germany. However, the 18th FIFA World Cup has already demonstrated its enormous global appeal. Orders from a total of 108 countries were recorded on the computers of the FIFA World Cup Ticketing Center, from nations as far and wide as Macao and Burkina Faso.
Applications have flooded in at an incredible pace since the bustling nocturnal start. Ticket requests in Europe were averaging 40,000 enquiries per hour between the start of work and midday.
The first phase of sales ends on 31 March 2005 at midnight. "Now we can watch the remaining sales period unfold in peace. I stress that all regular ticket applications we process in the first sales period have the same chance of success, irrespective of when they are received," insisted Horst R. Schmidt.

Hotscripts.com :: php_freelance allows anyone to run a professional site

Hotscripts.com :: Detailed Listing # 21555: "php_freelance allows anyone to run a professional site. How it works is that people looking for freelance work ('Providers') signup, and companies ('Buyers') looking for professionals post their projects on your site. Freelancers bid on the projects, the buyer picks the bid he likes, and the project begins. You can take any commission you want based on the bid amount. It's a lot like an auction, but the buyer has more control over it. All you have to do is promote the service. Absolutely everything else is done by the script, even money deposits. - NEW version 2.5 (completly programmed from scratch) "

Hotscripts.com :: Detailed Listing # 20487

Hotscripts.com :: Detailed Listing # 20487: "Description: php eBay List is an easy to configure script that grabs your ebay auctions on your own web site. Configure your header, footer, colors, your ebay account name, and upload the file. "

The Psychology of Navigation in Websites - DigitalWeb

The Psychology of Navigation
In: Articles
By Jesse James Garrett
Published on December 17, 2002
http://digital-web.com/articles/the_psychology_of_navigation/
So, what do you do?
When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I design Web sites. Let’s face it, most people who ask that question want an answer they can understand, not an indoctrination. That’s why I don’t often use the phrase “information architect” among the uninitiated. It causes too much trouble.
It causes trouble because it’s not always easy to explain the complexities of the work information architects do. They often have to fall back on vaguely defined metaphors such as “information spaces” to describe their area of specialization. These terms, naturally, make no sense to most people. Information spaces bear only the roughest resemblance to the physical spaces people encounter in the work of those “real world” architects.
At the very least, information spaces are different from physical spaces in one crucial regard. In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal.
Information architects are only able to give users a limited amount of information about the options available to them. Sure, a paragraph could be written about each navigation choice available, but stubborn users won’t read it. This puts the information architect between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Users don’t want to have to guess what’s around every corner, but they won’t sit still long enough for someone to tell them either.
Paper or plastic?
Information architects can better understand how to communicate navigational choices by examining how users make choices. A typical user, faced with a typical, freshly loaded Web page—her eyes bouncing around the page—takes in all the options available. Maybe she scrubs the pointer over a few navigation elements. Then, finally, she’s poised to click. In that moment, as her pointer hovers over the link and finger hovers over the mouse button, she has a picture in her mind of what is on the other end of that link. Where does that picture come from? What informs the details of the user’s imaginary result?
Every link makes a promise, but the creators of the link have little control over what that is. The promise exists entirely in the mind of the user. Information architects can hope to influence that image in users’ minds in a way that makes it more likely that what they actually see as a result of clicking the link will make them feel the promise has been fulfilled.
The navigation decision—whether or not to click—hinges on the mental image users create of the page they expect to see. Fortunately, a few tools are available to help influence the images in users’ minds: language, design, and the understanding of the expectations users bring to sites. In order to deploy these tools effectively, the information architect needs to understand the process of extrapolation going on in the user’s head in that moment before the mouse is clicked.
The most important factor in evaluating the link is its language. First and foremost, users will look for specific words that they would use to describe what they’re looking for. They aren’t mulling over interpretation and connotation. They’re looking for particular words, and finding those particular words will overwhelmingly cause them to click links. If they don’t see their own words, they’ll keep an eye out for words they would expect other people to use. A synonym will do just fine, but it won’t generate the level of interest that an exact match will.
Even if the link text is not an exact match or a synonym, users will still take note if it is in the same conceptual neighborhood as their target. Mentally flagging links that might be related to what they are seeking can help them in two ways. In some contexts, it can reassure them that they’re on the right track, keeping them looking for a closer match. In other cases, if the closer match doesn’t turn up, that close-but-not-quite link may turn out to be their best bet, bringing them back to click.
When presentation speaks
A couple of other factors in the presentation of the link will cause users to extrapolate meaning. The visual treatment of the link can communicate quite a bit about its content. Bold and red shout, “Look at me! I’m important!” while small and gray says, “I’m here if you come looking for me.” Conversely, using similar visual treatment for different links communicates conceptual similarity. Maybe the visual treatment is intended to communicate something to the user; maybe it’s just a stylistic choice. Whatever the case, users are going to try to get all the information out of the visual treatment that they can.
“ Every link makes a promise, but the creators of the link have little control over what that is.”
The link’s placement on the page can help inform users’ navigational decisions. Important or overarching concepts find placement near the top. Closer to the center, users expect to find options specific to the context of the page they’re currently viewing. Perhaps more important than absolute placement is the placement of the link relative to other navigational items. It’s not uncommon to see a navigation bar display a continuum of ideas, moving from general to specific or from common to obscure. Links that are visually clustered together are considered to be conceptually related. This clustering provides context for interpreting the link that the link lacks considered in isolation.
All the information users have to go on are the language of the link, its visual treatment, and its placement on the page. Yet, despite this extreme shortage of information, they somehow develop mental images of the result they’ll get when clicking a link. The mental image might not literally be a picture of the page in their minds—although if they’re visual thinkers, it may take exactly that form. They may have formed a mental impression of the content and the manner of its presentation. This impression isn’t derived solely from the information they have gleaned from the navigation design, though. They also take their own experience into account.
First, users have their experience with the rest of the Web to consider. They have grown accustomed to seeing certain terms used in consistent ways across Web sites—“search,” “about,” “privacy,” “site map”—and have picked up on some of the conventional ways navigation items are treated visually. This experience informs their interpretation of the navigation.
In addition, users may have some experience with a particular site as well. Maybe they have seen the site dozens of times, or maybe they are just a few pages into their first visit, but, in either case, they have a set of expectations about how this specific site works. Those expectations extend from the vocabulary the site uses to the style of presentation of its content and the design elements used throughout.
All of that experience, both general and specific, serves as a filter through which they process the information the page provides about the content behind each link. Out of that process, they’ll form a mental image, an expectation about the corresponding page. That mental image will be evaluated for the probability that the page will meet the criteria that make the page worth visiting.
What's the goal?
It doesn’t matter if they have a specific informational goal in mind or if they are “just browsing”—they will have some criteria against which they’ll be evaluating that mental image. If they have a specific goal, the mental image may not be required to meet the goal completely. Simply feeling that clicking the link will get them closer to their goal may well be enough. If they don’t have a specific goal, their criteria may be only vaguely defined, or difficult to articulate, but this process of navigation by extrapolation will still apply.
It’s important to note that users won’t bother to extrapolate images for every link on the page before making decisions to click. On the contrary, the very first link to catch their attention, tipping the scales of their evaluation criteria, will earn the click. If what they see falls short of their expectations, they’ll probably go back to where they started—perhaps a bit more discouraged. If they keep finding themselves disappointed, they’ll just leave.
Of course, that very disappointment is what information architects are in the business of preventing. It’s not just about categorization schemes and organizing principles. A rich understanding of the process of mental extrapolation users go through every time they decide to click a link is critical. In a very real sense, information architects have to try to get inside users’ heads to predict what they’ll be thinking.
Maybe I’ll adopt that as my new job description: mind reader.
Jesse James Garrett is one of the founders of Adaptive Path, author of The Elements of User Experience, and a recognized figure in the information architecture community. He created the Visual Vocabulary, an open notation system for IA development, and his personal site at jjg.net is one of the Web's most popular destinations for information architecture resources.

Open Source Biology

Open-Source Biology Evolves
By David Cohn Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next »
02:00 AM Jan. 17, 2005 PT
To push research forward, scientists need to draw from the best data and innovations in their field. Much of the work, however, is patented, leaving many academic and nonprofit researchers hamstrung. But an Australian organization advocating an open-source approach to biology hopes to free up biological data without violating intellectual property rights.
The battle lies between biotech companies like multinational Monsanto, who can grant or deny the legal use of biological information, and independent organizations like The Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS, and Science Commons. The indies want to give scientists free access to the latest methods in biotechnology through the web.

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BIOS will soon launch an open-source platform that promises to free up rights to patented DNA sequences and the methods needed to manipulate biological material. Users must only follow BIOS' "rules of engagement," which are similar to those used by the open-source software community.
"There are technologies you need to innovate and then there are the innovations themselves," said Richard Jefferson1, founder and director of BIOS in Canberra, Australia. "But those can only happen when there is fair access to the technologies."
Just like open-source software, open-source biology users own the patents to their creations, but cannot hinder others from using the original shared information to develop similar products. Any improvements of the shared methods of BIOS, the Science Commons or other open-source communities must be made public, as well as any health hazards that are discovered.
BIOS has called on Brian Behlendorf2, CTO of ColabNet, to create the web tools the open-source community platform will run on. Those should be up in the coming weeks.
Nipping at its heels is the Science Commons. The outgrowth project of Creative Commons will have a hand in all areas of science, not just the life sciences like BIOS, and is getting ready to launch its open-source community in the next two to three weeks, said John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons.
Wilbanks sees Science Commons and other open-source communities as a "neutral ground" for people to decide how much control over a patent they want to maintain or control. "Say you are a holder of patents and you want to make them available, you should be able to do that without having to call a lawyer," said Wilbanks.
While free access to biological information will benefit those doing research, companies who have invested millions in patents, on the other hand, won't perform expensive groundbreaking research without a guarantee that their intellectual property rights would be upheld. "Patents attract investors, providing the resources necessary to bring the product to market," said Brigid Quinn, deputy director of public affairs with the U.S. patent office. "Patents are and have always been an important part of this country's economic fabric."
On the contrary, Jefferson believes patent restrictions have compromised billions of people who should be benefiting from new diagnostic tests or improved genetically modified crops and medicines.

Yahoo! News - Bush Pushes Computerized Medical Records

Yahoo! News - Bush Pushes Computerized Medical Records

CLEVELAND - President Bush (news - web sites) returned to the state that helped seal his re-election victory to pitch his second-term health agenda, urging greater use of computerized medical records and electronic prescriptions.


AP Photo


Reuters
Slideshow: President Bush




"It can save money and save lives," Bush said Thursday at a forum at the Cleveland Clinic. He said medical record-keeping, where most prescriptions and many medical documents are still handwritten, lags that of other industries.


In Washington, the Department of Health and Human Services (news - web sites) announced steps to incorporate electronic prescribing into the new Medicare prescription drug program that begins in January 2006.


The regulations will require that e-prescribing is made available to participating seniors, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.


It was Bush's first trip of his second term, and he chose the state whose 20 electoral votes put him over the top on Election Day — a victory that triggered a wave of Democratic protests over voting irregularities.


The president plans a series of barnstorming trips to promote his domestic agenda, many to swing states that were critical in the 2004 race and will be battlegrounds in future elections.


"We've got the best medical system in the world. The role of the federal government is to keep it that way," the president told a hand-picked audience of doctors and other medical professionals.


Bush has issued a raft of proposals that would have Americans shoulder more financial responsibility for health care and retirement.


This includes medical savings accounts, which are tax-free investments that can be used for health expenses; allowing small businesses in different states to band to offer insurance to workers; and adding private investment accounts to Social Security (news - web sites).


"Most industries in America have used information technology to make their businesses more cost effective, more efficient and more productive — and the truth of the matter is health care hasn't," Bush said.


In the budget he will send Congress next month, Bush will propose spending $125 million to test computerization of health records, more than twice what is being spent in the budget year that ends Sept. 30.


Bush also said ways must be found to safeguard medical records to protect against "people prying into them."


Bush's pledge to do more to encourage wider use of electronic medical record-keeping — and allow pharmacies, hospitals, doctors' officers and insurers to share information — was praised as a good starting point by the health care industry.


"There has been a huge amount of pressure from across the health care field to have the federal government take an active role in the development of electronic health care records," said Scott Wallace, head of the National Alliance for Health Information Technology.


The Cleveland Clinic has been helping the government develop standards for medical computerization and Bush heard from doctors who showed him some of the technology and then joined him on the stage.


"Very impressive," Bush said.


Health and Human Services (news - web sites) Secretary Mike Levitt, on only his second day on the job, accompanied Bush. Levitt said wider use of computers for medical information brings "lower costs and fewer mistakes"





About a dozen protesters huddled outside in the bitter cold. An effigy of Bush was stuck into a snow pile.

Sarah Taylor, 62, held a sign that said "President Bush is a disgrace to the U.S.A."

"I think he's an appalling leader. He's trying to dismantle Social Security and he attacks and bombs other countries," Taylor said.

PHP Accessories ME - to set up an online store

PHP Affiliate Script: Features: "


The Accessories Me PHP Affiliate Script enables you to setup a fully stocked online store with detailed product information and consumer reviews to match any website theme. It's quick, easy and can be fully customised to include details about a single product in any webpage or developed as a complete self contained website. It's up to you. Available for US, UK, JP and DE.

The current version (v1.01) consists of 3 key files which enable webmasters to query Amazon Web Services ECS for product information. Once you have your associate id from Amazon it take less than ten minutes to download and install the script.

~ Requirements: PHP 4+ (earlier versions not tested). MySQL NOT required.

~ FREE! - GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

~ Query Amazon ECS by SearchIndex and browse node (categories) and display as much or as little information as you wish about individual products.

~ All the information available from each of the elements returned by the XML queries which power the script are available and can be outputted to screen to deliver unique, customised content.

~ Simple, intuitive scripting allows you to randomise your content by mixing the order in which products are displayed.

~ Includes built in caching script to speed the loading of pages (extremely fast).

~ Templates use language files for easy translation.

~ Huge potential for developing advanced applications.

~ On-going support and development means the list of features will continue to grow. In the meantime you can view the fully operational online demo at: http://ipod.accessories.me.uk.

When you download and install the script this is the default website you are presented with. By editing the appropriate files you can then custo"