ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Tired of the corporate rat-race? Escape the City, based in London, aims to “liberate talented people from corporate jobs that don’t excite them.” The opportunity that really caught my eye was the Fiji island caretaker. But it was closed.

Nicholas Carlson, writing for Business Insider, reports that Twitter turned down an informal acquisition offer from Google of US$2.5 billion and US$4 billion from another, unidentified, company. Ev’s already been to this dance, so I’m sure he knows what he’s doing, but dang; I’d have bit on the US$2.5 billion and laughed my ass off all the way to the bank.

ESRD

Teabagger anesthesiologist Andy Harris (R-Maryland) campaigned hard to unseat his conservative opponent who voted twice against the Obama healthcare reforms. Harris repeatedly chastised his opponent for refusing to commit to repeal healthcare reform and pledged to never vote to raise taxes, fight to repeal healthcare reform, and work to balance the budget. Harris’s first act as a US Congresscritter? Demand to know why his government-subsidized health insurance didn’t take effect for a month after he was sworn in. Hypocritical? Not according to his spokeswoman Anna Nix, who Glenn Thrush, writing for Politico, quotes as saying, “he was just pointing out the inefficiency of government-run health care.

Current dialysis techniques are capable of replacing only 15-20 percent of normal kidney function. That may be changing for the better thanks to researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and the University Medical Center Groningen. The researchers have successfully cultured a layer of kidney cells capable of maintaining their functional properties in laboratory conditions. ScienceDaily reports “The ultimate aim of the scientists is to be able to grow whole biological artificial kidneys using autologous cells.” The key is a bioactive synthetic membrane that resembles that of a human kidney.

Forty-three percent of dialysis patient deaths are attributable to cardiac disease and 27 percent of those are due to sudden cardiac death, according to cardiologist Rod Passman cited in a Medical News Today article. Dialysis patients are excluded from clinical trials examining sudden cardiac death and the subsequent lack of research complicates the situation. Passman called for the medical community to stop excluding dialysis patients from these studies at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions held this week. Sudden cardiac death is usually caused because of unexpected abnormal heart rhythms with death occurring less than an hour from the onset of symptoms. Passman says “risk of cardiac arrest in dialysis patients is related to age and dialysis duration… and that data also leads us to believe that end-stage renal disease is a primary promoter of cardiac disease and increased risk for sudden cardiac death.” Data from the United States Renal Disease Data System (USRDS) also indicates that dialysis patients on a low-potassium dialysate were twice as likely to suffer cardiac arrest during dialysis than those on higher levels of potassium.

A small study of 101 dialysis patients in Israel found that patients who drank pomegranate juice at the start of each dialysis session for a year “showed a reduction in both inflammation and damage caused by free radicals,” according to Bill Hendrick, writing for WebMD. Other research indicates that “patients who drank pomegranate juice showed an improvement in cardiovascular risk factors, such as reduced blood pressure and fewer cardiovascular events.” Careful with that pomegranate juice, Eugene; eight ounces contains 430mg of potassium (a medium baked potato has about 1,081mg of potassium).

Part of Minnesota’s 2008 Health Reform Law mandated the Department of Health to establish standard metrics to determine the quality of care of healthcare providers across the state. The first report, for 2010, has been published. One of the downsides of the law precludes insurers from requiring any data from providers outside of the metrics established by the Department of Health. As a result, the healthcare quality report doesn’t include dialysis facilities. Never mind that dialysis is the most invasive procedure taking place outside of a hospital operating room. Nonetheless, Minnesota’s annual healthcare quality report is a good start.

As little as 3mg of melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate sleep cycles, can improve sleep in hemodialysis patients over the short term, up to 12 weeks, according to a new study in the Netherlands.

Doubling the frequency of dialysis—from the standard three treatments a week to six—improves heart function and overall health including lowered blood pressure and blood phosphorous levels according to a long-term research study. I dialyze twice a week, remaining chronically underdialyzed, because it’s the only way I can continue to work full-time.

Media

Bo Peabody has written an exemplary takedown of Demand Media for Business Insider. Demand Media, one of the largest of the internet “content farms,” is “running a giant arbitrage of the Google ecosystem,” according to Peabody. Demand Media hires freelance typists to produce hundreds of thousands of pieces of extremely low-quality content based solely on their Google search value. Google search results drive traffic to the Demand Media websites, which Google runs its AdSense against for a split of the advertising revenue. As Peabody writes, “Demand creates the content cheaply; Google then sends free traffic to those pages; and then Google sells ads to those same users. Arbitrage defined.” The problem is that Google’s algorithm favors quantity over quality. The remedy is just as simple: Google needs to rework (not tweak) its algorithm to favor quality over quantity. Until then, Peabody deftly outlines why Google risks irrelevance in the long term: The arbitrage “actually relies on Demand creating low-quality content. The worse the content the cheaper it is for Demand to produce and the more likely a visitor to that content is to click on a Google AdSense link as that is often the most compelling thing on the page.” There’s a whole lot more that’s disturbing about Demand Media’s business model, as Peabody explains.

Sustainability

Michael O’Gorman, an organic farmer for 40 years, founded the Farmer Veteran Coalition to offer training and healing places for US veterans. Nancy Roberts, writing for Care2 make a difference, reports “returning veterans need employment and often, a calm place to go, while the older generation of farmers are retiring, leaving the land unworked.” The Farmer Veteran Coalition connects veterans with agricultural training and farm employment opportunities. “We thought, not only can we help them find jobs, new ways to farm and rejuvenate the income of real America, we could also help solve America’s need for more farmers and food security,” O’Gorman tells Roberts.

Technology

Business Insider surveyed 500 iPad owners, and published some interesting findings. I’m skeptical of surveys like this—respondents tend to be, um, more enthusiastic than the general population—but it’s still interesting. More than anything else, the iPad is used for web browsing. Safari is the iPad’s most important app. Most of the respondents say they’re using the iPad more now than when they first got it. Half of the iPads have 3G wireless, but only half of those are on a data plan. Almost three quarters of the respondents use the devices between one and five hours each day, and almost one third say the Ipad is their primary computer. More than half of the respondents have downloaded more than 20 apps, and almost 40 percent have purchased ten or more apps, but most use fewer than 10 apps regularly. A whopping 75 percent use their iPads to read books and Kindle books are the most popular (50 percent) compared to iBooks (42.4 percent) and other (7.6 percent).

User experience

A Book Apart‘s second title, CSS3 for Web Designers, by Dan Cederholm (an ace front-end developer to be sure, but probably better known for Dribble) has been published. I expect it to be just as good as Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. An excerpt of Chapter 2 of Cederholm’s book is available on A List Apart as “Understanding CSS3 Transitions.”

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox, “Mega-Menus Gone Wrong,” examines large two-dimensional drop-down menu structures for navigation on websites. Mega-menus, according to Nielsen, offer structured and illustrated choices. “Menus must focus on enabling users’ choices and on guiding them as rapidly as possible to their desired destination,” writes Nielsen.