An acute-care hospital in Arizona was found to be giving a patient there the wrong kind of insulin AND the wrong dose. This caused her to have hypoglycemia and go into respiratory failure.
A Mayo Clinic research study reported that people with hypoglycemia had a doubled risk of mortality than those without the problem, even when the low blood sugars were deemed only as "mild" or "moderate" cases.
Arizona is cutting medical expenses for its poor and needy families by getting rid of "optional" medical devices such as prosthetics, insulin pumps, and transplants. And for those who wanted to tax soda and candy to pay for these "options," you can forget it. Read more about the ACCHS cuts here.
I've been reading Barbara Demick'sNothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. One thing that has stayed with me is about the extreme lack of food that caused so many people to die there during the 90s. She was talking about all the outside aid organizations that had started pulling out of North Korea because they weren't allowed to help or even see the neediest people, and how by 1998, the worst of the famine was over. However, the worst had passed not because anything had gotten any better, but because, in the words of a North Korean woman who lived through these desperate times, "Everybody who was going to die was already dead." (p. 146) The famine had effectively eliminated the neediest.
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has just sent me its Emerging Technologies newsletter for the month. In it is an article called "Early Artificial Pancreas Trials Show Overnight Benefits for Kids, Teenagers with Diabetes." Now, I know, of course, that these companies have to prove things like this in order to get approval to market a closed-loop system. But for myself and every other type 1 diabetic out there who is working with an insulin pump and continuous glucose device systems, I have to say that this isn't even news. It's just common sense. Learn more about the Artificial Pancreas Project here.
I saw this article posted over at Library Stuff about British libraries having lost 13 million books over the past 6 years. It ties the loss to budget cuts and the credit crunch that's affecting everyone across the world. This brought to mind two things. One is that my area libraries have been featured in local newspaper articles about their budget losses and how that's going to affect staffing and building hours, but I have yet to see any that explicitly list what materials and databases are being cut. In times like this when more people are using the library than average, you'd think patrons would be interested in knowing exactly how they are losing access to information. It seems like this would be a good time to rouse patron interest and call on them, not just librarians, to contact their local lawmakers about these losses. The other thing this article brought to my mind was a trend in some of the libraries in my area away from library collections that have depth in terms of lots of books on all kinds of things and towards what's often called a "browsing" collection. If your local library looks more like a bookstore than it used to with lots of pretty books on popular topics instead of a meaty often ratty-looking collection full of more items than anyone would ever want to read, it's probably a victim of this trend. The idea is to "give the customer what they want" and the bottom line is to increase circulation statistics. Why? Because people who control library budgets often want hard numbers to justify the funds that go to the public library, and how many times a book is checked out per year is one way to get such numbers. So that often means books that do not get checked out, no matter how much they are used by the community within the building or in ways that aren't measured, are likely to lose their place in the collection to make way for another copy of the latest bestseller. In summary, I'd advise anyone who is worried about the state of their local library collection to dig deeper - are budget cuts really the reason there aren't as many books on the shelf or has there been a change in philosophy about what should be on the shelf at all?
I found this article about how long various email sites keep inactive accounts a good one to take note of. This happened to me when I switched from a Yahoo account to a gmail account as my primary a few years ago. After not visiting my Yahoo account for a few months, I went back and found everything had been deleted. It was not fun.
The last few weekends have been an adventure in trying to put together Ikea furniture, which I've been assured time and again is the simplest thing ever. Their product instructions don't even contain words - who needs words when you have cartoon drawings, right? Ever since I saw this, I've been re-living it again and again:
It's funny because it's true. I'm in the process of trying to find out why I've been given the wrong 4 metal brackets for my new dining room table twice now. Even their customer service department couldn't look up details on how far apart the holes on the brackets were supposed to be - those details were not available to the woman I spoke with. Which is why I still have brackets that are for holes spaced 4 inches apart instead of 2.5 inches apart, like the holes that were pre-drilled into my table top. Oh well, at least the chairs were easy to put together. And I suppose I should take some comfort in knowing that the guy who sold us his Malm bed didn't understand the directions either - we found that out while trying to re-assemble it.
This story about an iPhone application that allows people to browse for the best bookstore price is interesting.
I love reading about all the latest uses and tools that come up for Twitter. Here's one for twittering your books with LibraryThing. And my other new favorite Twitter site: Retweetradar. It uses a tag cloud to show you what people have been tweeting about during the past day.
I guess that's all for now. There's much out there I want to be blogging about, but time is just getting away from me. I was listening to a podcast the other day - I think it was TWiT - and the hosts were discussing how blogs seem to be falling away as more people are moving to microblogging tools like Twitter and aggregators like FriendFeed. This is starting to be my personal experience as well.
I recently volunteered to post events for a local organization across various event websites. In the process, I started thinking about how no particular event site really seems to be standing out at this point in time. You can find events listings everywhere: MySpace, Facebook, your local newspaper sites, Eventful, Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendars, etc. But you either have to check them all frequently to stay on top of what's posted on each, or subscribe to rss feeds for your interests at all of them and wade through them in your reader, which may speed up the process but doesn't lend itself to spontaneous browsing. To make it easier on those looking for events, most of these events sites have ways for the user to export the event to a calendar, email, and/or social networking site. As an event creator, though, what I really need is a tool that will allow me to create an event once and then post it to all these other sites without having to re-create it on each.
I've spent the last 3 days looking for such a tool and can't find one. I did find a good summary of my problem posted on Microformats, so at least I know I'm not the only one noticing a lack of options for this situation. If I knew more programming, it seems like it'd be easy for me to create something that would do this for me. After all, if users can push information to their many online profiles and accounts, how can there not be an event aggregator publishing tool? Plus, it looks like most of the sites use the hcalendar markup standard. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Perhpas there is a for-fee service somewhere. Mashable's list of 35 tools for events had a few for businesses that hinted at being able to do such a thing, for a fee.
I'm investigating Microsoft/Windows Live to see if there's anything there that might help. I will continue to do more research to see if there's already a freely available tool for this out there. In the meantime, maybe the best I can do is customize a startup page for myself that includes all the sites where I will post events listings.
This campaign has made me wonder what the "do not call" registry really means. I am pretty sure I'm on it. And I've been getting an average of 6 messages a day over the past week from politicians asking for my vote. I wouldn't be as annoyed if half of them were coming from people I'd actually vote for. At least there'd be equal coverage that way. Instead, I'm being phone-spammed by one of the two major parties. And they're talking to the wrong answering machine. I've already voted and their phone calls wouldn't have swayed me one bit. The reason I have an unlisted number, which I pay for monthly, is to avoid calls like this. It's enough to make me get rid of my land line altogether. But I've found out that the regular "do not call" registry pretty much only covers for-profit telemarketing calls. If you want to stop receiving campaign calls, you can add your phone number to the Stop Political Phone Calls Now registry. There's no guarantee that it'll work, but it's worth a shot.
I read another great, timely, article about how citizens are using social media to monitor the elections tomorrow. Written by Simon Owens for PBS, it covers the background of the "Video Your Vote" movement and provides further insight into the Twitter Your Vote movement. It also talks about the Voter Suppression Wiki, a site that is dedicated to educating the public about voter suppression and providing a space for voters to tell their stories. The Incident Tracker page conveniently lists problems encountered by state so you can see what's happening near you. So now, everyone can tweet, video, blog, and wikify their voting experience. This is documentation on a scale that has never been seen before in an American election.
I don't know how anyone is going to be able to work tomorrow. Which is why it makes even more sense for the United States, in my opinion, to follow all the other countries who vote on the weekends or holidays. The entire nation is distracted by what's going on; we might as well just take the day off and focus on what is most important.
Rachel Maddow calls these long lines the new poll tax:
According to the Arizona Republic, the votes in Maricopa County may take days to count up because of all the early ballots that will be walked in on election day.
