Okay so yeah, we can't actually do all of this time traveling in practice, but there's a lot of jumping around that physicist know would work in theory. And if they could just figure out how to create negative energy, also known as exotic matter for some reason, we could build spinning cylinders and wormholes to our collective heart's content. And as Minute Physics points out, don't forget the type of time travel we all do constantly. It's quotidian enough to be kind of annoying, but it's actually kind of great to remember that we're all moving through space-time all the . . . time.
Tablets shipments will blast ahead by 53 percent in 2013 as desktop and laptop shipments decline by 11 percent, research firm Gartner forecast last week.
The emergence of ultramobile devices, which marries a PC with the form factor of a tablet, will help ease the declines in other PCs, but not by much. When ultramobiles are included, the overall PC market will still decline 8.4 percent in 2013, Gartner said.
Gartner forecast that Android tablets of all brands will exceed iPads for all of 2013 for the first time, with 91.5 million (49.6 percent) Android tablets shipped compared with 89.6 million (48.6 percent) Apple iPads. Gartner said just over 3 million (1.7 percent) Windows tablets will ship.
Apple's iPads still had the largest share of the worldwide tablet market by manufacturer at 32 percent in the second quarter, according to IDC, followed by Samsung at 18 percent. Samsung builds its tablets primarily on the Android mobile operating system.
Small tablets or big smartphones?
Gartner and other analysts have found a strong trend toward smaller tablets, some as small as those with a 7-inch display. In a survey of 21,500 consumers in the U.S. and seven other countries, Gartner found 47 percent owned a tablet with a display of 8 inches or less.
"Continuing on the trend we saw last year, we expect this holiday season to be all about smaller tablets as even the long-term holiday favorite—the smartphone—loses its appeal," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi in a statement.
Mobile phones will reach 1.8 billion shipments in 2013, Gartner said, growing by 3.7 percent over 2012.
For all devices, including desktops, laptops, ultramobiles, tablets, and mobile phones, Android has 38 percent of the market, while the Windows OS is second at 4.3 percent due to a decline in traditional PC sales, Gartner said. The total shipments for all devices should reach 2.3 billion in 2013.
By device type, Gartner said shipments of desktops and laptops in 2013 will total 303 million units; ultramobiles, 18.5 million; tablets, 184 million; and mobile phones,1.8 billion. The total of all categories is 2.3 billion.
All products running iOS are third, at 1.2 percent. Gartner noted that Windows will return to growth in 2014, with OS shipments increasing nearly 10 percent to about 364 million that year.
Watch for wearables
Milanesi predicted that wearable computers such as smart watches and smart glasses will primarily remain a companion to mobile phones for years to come, even though vendors see the category as an important market opportunity. Fewer than 1 percent of consumers will replace their mobile phones with a combination of a wearable device and a tablet by 2017, Gartner said.
"In the short term, we expect consumers to look at wearables as nice to have rather than a 'must have,' leaving smartphones to play the role of our faithful companion throughout the day," Milanesi said.
Matt Hamblen , Computerworld
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. More by Matt Hamblen
A nurse treats a cholera patient in the Dominican Republic on Aug. 27, at the Juan Pablo Pina Hospital in San Cristobal. Health officials say that the strain of cholera circulating in the Dominican Republic — the same one that first appeared in Haiti three years ago — has also caused outbreaks in Cuba and now Mexico.
Erika Santelices/AFP/Getty Images
A nurse treats a cholera patient in the Dominican Republic on Aug. 27, at the Juan Pablo Pina Hospital in San Cristobal. Health officials say that the strain of cholera circulating in the Dominican Republic — the same one that first appeared in Haiti three years ago — has also caused outbreaks in Cuba and now Mexico.
Erika Santelices/AFP/Getty Images
A South Asian strain of cholera that was introduced into Haiti three years ago this month has now spread to this continent's mainland.
Mexico is the fourth Western Hemisphere country to experience the cholera outbreak. It's a disease that's very hard to stamp out once it gets into an area with poor water and sanitation.
Mexican health officials first picked up on the problem Sept. 9, through routine surveillance of hospital cases of severe diarrhea. Since then there've been 171 reported cases in Mexico City and states to the north and east. One victim has died.
Dr. Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, says it was all but inevitable that cholera would spread beyond the Caribbean. "It was always a major concern that it would be exported to other countries, as has recently happened in Mexico," he tells Shots.
Since it was introduced into Haiti — very likely by United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal who were billeted at a camp with poor sanitary facilities — cholera has sickened 715,000 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (which share the island of Hispaniola) and Cuba. Nearly 9,000 have died.
Andrus fully expects it will spread further. "We are advocating throughout the region for countries to be on their guard," he says.
Cholera is thought to have invaded Cuba via infected health personnel who work in Haiti and travel back and forth. Cuba has reported nearly 700 cholera cases and three deaths, although many are skeptical that that nation is fully reporting the extent of its outbreak.
Andrus says vacationers visiting Cuba — who probably got cholera from contaminated food — have exported the disease to Chile, Venezuela, Italy, Germany and Holland. So far those cases haven't touched off outbreaks. But as the Mexican epidemic shows, it can easily happen if an imported case contaminates water or food in an area with poor sanitation.
"You have those situations throughout Latin America," he notes. "We are the region of the greatest disparities."
The last time the Americas saw a major cholera epidemic was 22 years ago. It was allegedly brought by a ship that discharged its bilgewater in a Peruvian port. The disease spread all the way up the continent, sickening more than a million people and killing 10,000 or so, until it hit the U.S.-Mexican border. There it was stopped by modern water- and sewage-treatment facilities in the United States.
Andrus says PAHO is very worried this latest epidemic will have a similar impact.
"It's really, for us, a defining moment," he says. "To what extent are we concerned about spread? Well, it's really a regional threat and now a global threat to health."
It took Mexico more than 10 years to bring its last cholera epidemic under control. This time sanitary conditions are better, so it might not take that long. But Andrus says it won't be easy to stamp out.
"It won't be 10 years, (but) it won't be days or weeks," he says.
Dr. Maureen Birmingham, PAHO's representative in Mexico, writes in an email to NPR that authorities there are monitoring the population for spread of cholera and focusing on prompt treatment of affected people, along with providing clean water and sanitary facilities to vulnerable communities.
Birmingham says Mexico is not currently considering use of an oral cholera vaccine that was approved last year by the World Health Organization for use in outbreaks. The WHO has reportedly stockpiled about a million doses of the vaccine, which costs $1.85 a dose and requires two doses.
In any case, cholera vaccine is a stopgap measure. All public health authorities agree the only real solution is clean water and adequate sewage treatment. And many of them hope the current outbreak will stimulate major efforts to bring clean water and sanitation to the hemisphere's poorest communities.
Dr. Edward Ryan of the Massachusetts General Hospital is one of those. "Cholera's one of those infections that catches attention in a way that few infections do — plague, Ebola, pandemic influenza, cholera. It's one of those ones that everybody sort of sits up straight for. It is one of the ones that tests the system."
But Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti points out that the United Nations has found only 10 percent of the $2.4 billion it says it needs to rid Haiti and the Dominican Republic of cholera over the next 10 years.
"Right now 10 percent of the funding is probably not enough even to get started," Concannon tells Shots. "And so the U.N. needs to feel some serious pressure to do a more serious job of raising the money."
Concannon's group is trying to do just that. Earlier this month it filed suit against the U.N. in U.S. District Court for its alleged role in introducing cholera to Haiti. Filed on behalf of cholera victims, the action seeks, among other things, to force the U.N. to raise the money to stamp out cholera on Hispaniola.
From left to right, CGI Federal's Cheryl Campbell, Optum/QSSI's Andrew Slavitt, Equifax Workforce Solutions' Lynn Spellecy, and Serco's John Lau are sworn in during a hearing on implementation of the Affordable Care Act before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Oct. 24, 2013.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
At Thursday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on healthcare.gov, Cheryl Campbell of CGI Federal and Andrew Slavitt of Optum/QSSI provided few useful details about the site’s architecture or problems. Nor would they take much responsibility for the failure of the system. But there was one line of questioning they had no trouble answering. When Bill Cassidy, R-La., asked how much they’d been paid in their contracts, Campbell immediately gave a detailed rundown: CGI Federal, lead contractor on healthcare.gov, has received $112 million for this year, $196 million for this phase of the contract, and a Total Contract Value (TCV) of $293 million. Slavitt of QSSI, which built healthcare.gov’s data services hub, likewise gave his answer—$85 million—without hesitation.
Campbell and Slavitt, a senior vice president and an executive vice president, respectively, are not techies; they are not project managers. Their expertise is in extracting as much money as possible from the government in procurement contracts, and judging by the numbers, they are very good at it.
But if you place these kinds of managers on the critical communication chain of a software project, you immediately endanger its success. Project quality is sacrificed for the sake of appearances—meeting the letter of the contract with indifference toward the actual practical outcome. Even if you put “the best and the brightest” (to borrow the administration’s own phrase) on a project, the mere presence of such managers can make it impossible to do good work, because the lines of communication will be broken.
In terms of tech jobs I’d never want to have, I’d estimate that programming for a CGI-like contractor would be better than being a World of Warcraft gold farmer in China, but worse than working for Pax Dickinson. Campbell and Slavitt made many gaffes that would ensure that any programmer with common sense would never work under them. Let me debug their testimony a bit.
When asked about QSSI’s testimony at a Sept. 10 hearing that everything was fine and dandy, Slavitt replied, “We mentioned the data services hub would be ready. It indeed was ready.” Alas, minutes earlier, Slavitt had said, “We absolutely take accountability for those first days when our tool was part of the issue in terms of the volume. Today the data services hub and the EIDM tool”—the registration and access management tool—“are performing well.” In other words, it was “ready,” but it wasn’t ready—because Slavitt is defining “readiness” not in terms of the product actually working, but in terms of meeting contract demands. They handed something off and ticked all the boxes, so what’s the problem? This attitude goes some ways toward explaining the last few weeks.
There was a lot of talk Thursday about end-to-end testing. Slavitt and Campbell both claimed they weren’t responsible for it. As Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, pointed out, the Pre-Operational Readiness Review in their contracts “required end-to-end testing results.” Campbell declared, “We have not been the systems integrator and we have never been the systems integrator.” Campbell saying it doesn’t make it so—CGI clearly was in charge of integration.
Campbell’s stonewalling on this point became embarrassing. When CGI Federal said it owned the front-end, Campbell explained, it meant that the company owned the front of a building but not the front door—which, by the way, was broken, which was all QSSI’s fault. Slavitt unhelpfully added, “I think the front door is a bit of a term of art. We supply a tool.”
Let me explain how end-to-end testing works in integrating large systems owned by multiple vendors. Each vendor works out detailed specifications for how the systems should interact. These are made as clear as possible so that when something goes wrong—and it always does—you can point to the spec and say, “You weren’t supposed to do that and that’s why our component appeared to misbehave.” In order to meet the specs, each vendor simulates end-to-end testing by building a prototype of the larger system.
In the case of healthcare.gov, QSSI should have had test scaffolding that could simulate the functionality of what CGI Federal was building, and vice versa. Each vendor needed to know the broad definition of what the other was building, and it was their responsibility to make sure they knew it. Campbell and Slavitt’s refusal to acknowledge this basic fact is both frightening and mortifying, and accounts for their inability to give any clear answers as to exactly which portions of the system are failing. They don’t seem to understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable bugs, and worse, they don’t seem to know that there is a difference.
Historically, if you wanted to listen along to public safety radio frequencies during a local incident, you'd have had to have bought a radio scanner. Scanner Radio Pro has the advantage of providing preprogrammed, descriptively labeled public safety radio streams, sorted geographically and by genre. Scanner frequencies are sorted by distance to you, and you can add them to a Favorites list for quick access.
Fire season is upon us here in Southern California, and due to the lack of rain earlier in the year, we're seeing critically low live fuel moisture. The amount of residual moisture in grasses and brush is at levels lower than we've seen in years.
This means that those inhabiting the wildland-urban interface are on tenterhooks. That unease has many looking for tools to mitigate the danger, including ways to stay informed of fire activity.
One option is Gordon Edwards' Scanner Radio Pro Android, which provides live, Internet-streamed audio from 4,100 police and fire frequencies from around the globe.
Sorted by Distance
Historically, if you wanted to listen along to public safety radio frequencies during a local incident, you'd have had to have bought a radio scanner.
Media reports can be unreliable.
Radio Shack has always been a good source for scanners, and you can pick one up for under $100. Tuning them, though, is generally time-consuming, fiddly and prone to syntactical data-entry errors -- they come blank.
Edwards' app, Scanner Radio Pro, has the advantage of providing preprogrammed, descriptively labeled public safety radio streams, sorted geographically and by genre. Scanner frequencies are sorted by distance to you, and you can add them to a Favorites list for quick access.
The audio feeds are pumped onto the Internet by volunteers who work for Broadcastify.com using actual analog and digital radio scanners.
Edwards takes those Web-available streams and repurposes them for the app.
Added features included in the Pro version include notifications based on the number of people listening to a stream. Edwards reckons that this is an indication of something big happening -- like a brush fire, possibly.
Testing It Out
I had an excellent opportunity to test one of the app streams a few weeks ago, when a car fire had gotten into the brush near where I live. I subscribe to an email service from the local fire department that advises of such incidents.
Usually what I do when I get emails like that is grab a radio, select the appropriate fire department frequency and listen along in order to advise details to fellow members of my local volunteer emergency preparedness group -- it's my beat.
On this day, though, I was about 100 miles up the freeway on the wrong side of a mountain range. I wouldn't be able to hear the radio incident reports because of topographic challenges.
Instead, I just opened Scanner Radio Pro, selected the label and listened to the reports via my smartphone wireless 3G connection. The app audio worked just fine; the fire department got a handle on the fire; and I ultimately carried on my merry way. Good job, everyone.
You Need Redundancy
It's worth noting, though, that one disadvantage to Internet-based public safety radio, like that provided in this app, is that in the event of a utility service outage, you won't hear the audio stream. That's something you don't have to consider with old-fashioned, propagating radio waves.
That, in turn, brings me to one of the basics when it comes to emergency preparedness: You need to build in redundancy.
Scanner Radio Pro isn't the be-all and end-all because it's dependent on Broadcastify streams, which can sometimes be down, as is the case right now with a key Los Angeles County fire frequency Internet stream.
So, you could use a radio scanner in your kit too.
In fact, the best idea if you're in a regularly disaster-challenged part of the world is probably to join, or start, a neighborhood preparedness group, if you haven't already, and pool time and resources. Scanner Radio Pro, even with its point-of-failure, will make a fine contribution to your preparations.
Want to Suggest an Android App for Review?
Is there an Android app you'd like to suggest for review? Something you think other Android users would love to know about? Something you find intriguing but aren't sure it's worth your time or money?
Please send your ideas to me, and I'll consider them for a future Android app review.
Patrick Nelson has been a professional writer since 1992. He was editor and publisher of the music industry trade publication Producer Report and has written for a number of technology blogs. Nelson studied design at Hornsey Art School and wrote the cult-classic novel Sprawlism. His introduction to technology was as a nomadic talent scout in the eighties, where regular scrabbling around under hotel room beds was necessary to connect modems with alligator clips to hotel telephone wiring to get a fax out. He tasted down and dirty technology, and never looked back.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — Extremists from neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon are fighting in Nigeria's northeastern Islamic uprising, according to a man presented by Nigeria's military as a captured member of the Boko Haram terrorist network.
His account tallies with reports from politicians and survivors of attacks, and it reinforces fears that Boko Haram, once a machete-wielding gang, now poses the greatest security threat to Nigeria's unity and may be growing closer to al-Qaida affiliates in Africa.
It comes the same week Justice Minister Mohammed Adoke charged that Boko Haram is being influenced from abroad. "Nigeria is experiencing the impact of externally-induced internal security challenges, manifesting in the activities of militant insurgents and organized crime groups which has led to the violation of the human rights of many Nigerians," he said, defending the country's record at a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
An Associated Press report last week, based on mortuary records from Maiduguri's main hospital, supported Amnesty International charges that hundreds of detainees are dying in military detention, many taken out of their cells and shot.
The government has failed to respond to requests for comment, but on Thursday night, for the first time, presented an alleged Boko Haram detainee to journalists at a news conference in the northern city of Maiduguri.
The 22-year-old, walking on crutches because of a bullet wound suffered when he was captured in a recent attack, said he was forced to join Boko Haram but that the movement has many willing and educated members.
"We have qualified doctors who are active members . they were not forced to be in the group, they are more elderly than us," the 22-year-old told reporters at a news conference Friday night in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital that is the birthplace of Boko Haram.
"We have mechanics, we have welders, we have carpenters, we have professional drivers, we have butchers, security experts, gun instructors and so on," he said, displaying his lack of education by his poor use of Hausa, the local language most common in Maiduguri, where he used to live with his parents. He refused to give his name because he was afraid his former colleagues would target his family.
The young man shed an interesting light on life as a Nigerian Islamic warrior, saying religion had little to do with it and that his leaders "had never once preached Islam to us."
He said the name of Allah was invoked only when "we are running out of food supply in the bush. Our leaders will assemble us and declare that we would be embarking on a mission for God and Islam.
"I did not see any act of religion in there. We are just killing people, stealing and suffering in the bush," he added. The movement has been blamed for the killings of hundreds of civilians, mainly Muslims, in recent months.
The prisoner, who wore military fatigue pants exactly like those of his captors — many recent Boko Haram attacks have been perpetrated by fighters wearing Nigerian army uniforms — said foreigners fight in his group of 150 but did not say how many. "We have no members from Mali or Libya that I know of ... But we do have members from Chad, Niger and Cameroon who actively participate in most of our attacks."
He said he and many other fighters would like to surrender but are scared to do so.
"Each time they declare an attack, I feel sick and terrified, so were most of my younger colleagues, but we dare not resist our leaders: They are deadly, our punishment for betrayal is slaughtering of our necks."
According to him, Boko Haram had moved on from targeting security forces and politicians to attacks on soft targets such as school students, villagers and travelers because of the formation of vigilante groups "who now reveal our identities and even arrest us."
Analysts see a more nuanced evolution.
The latest brutal attacks on mainly Muslim civilians "offer vital and disturbing insights" that "not only confirm many of the group's earlier developments but also al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb's, or AQIM's, growing influence over it," Jonathan Hill, senior lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King's College, London, wrote in an analysis published online this month at africanarguments.org.
"These atrocities bear many striking similarities to those carried out by AQIM and its various forbears in Algeria," wrote Hill, who is the author of "Nigeria Since Independence: Forever Fragile?"
Nigeria's security forces claim to have won the upper hand in the northeast, saying they have driven Boko Haram out of most of the region's cities and towns since a May 14 military crackdown on three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the sprawling West African country that is Africa's largest oil producer.
But Hill noted that "despite the extraordinary efforts of the security forces, Boko Haram appears unbowed and its campaign undimmed."
Sonic Youth released its greatest record, Daydream Nation, 25 years ago in October 1988. And even after all of those years, the Led Zeppelin reference in the album's art is still puzzling.
An Afghan child writes on a blackboard at a school built by German troops in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif. The number of students enrolled in Afghan schools has skyrocketed since the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001.
Farshad Usyan/AFP/Getty Images
An Afghan child writes on a blackboard at a school built by German troops in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif. The number of students enrolled in Afghan schools has skyrocketed since the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001.
Farshad Usyan/AFP/Getty Images
It's one of the most touted "positive statistics" about Afghanistan: Today, there are 10 million Afghans enrolled in school, 40 percent of them female.
Under the Taliban, about 1 million boys and almost no girls were attending schools. Western officials routinely point to the revived education system as a sign of success and hope for the future.
The international community has spent billions on the construction of schools and programs ranging from teacher training to community-based education in remote villages to book distribution. The U.S. Agency for International Development alone has spent more than $850 million on education since the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001.
But the numbers tell only part of the story: While 10 million students might be enrolled in all levels of education, they aren't all attending classes, and there are questions about how many of those attending are actually learning.
Cultural And Economic Obstacles
Take the Neswan school in Parwan province, north of Kabul, for example. On a recent day, students shuffle to class in a two-story building. The school holds about 400 students at a time, and there are three daily sessions — a total of about 1,200 students are supposed to attend class each day.
But principal Fawzia Hakimi says average attendance is only a little more than 50 percent.
"Some boys can't attend school because they are working," she says. "When we ask them why they are late, some say, 'I was selling water, I was selling plastic bags.' "
Afghan children attend class in a tent in Bamiyan province, west of Kabul, on June 3. A shortage of buildings is just one of a host of problems the Afghan educational system faces.
Ahmad Massoud/Xinhua/Landov
Afghan children attend class in a tent in Bamiyan province, west of Kabul, on June 3. A shortage of buildings is just one of a host of problems the Afghan educational system faces.
Ahmad Massoud/Xinhua/Landov
As in most of Afghanistan, many of the families in the school district live in poverty. So they make their sons work for at least part of the day. The 48-year-old principal says looking at the attendance log is depressing.
And it's not just the boys who are often late or absent.
"We have a girl in sixth grade who is engaged," says Hakimi. "She is just a little girl. And there are others who are engaged, too."
Many girls in rural areas are forced into marriage once they reach puberty — and disappear from school.
"One of my classmates stopped attending school due to security issues, and another got married when we were in grade nine," says Mojdah, a 12th-grader at the Hora Jalali Girls High School in Parwan.
By ninth grade, classes are segregated, and female teachers must teach the girls. Even though Hora Jalali is a single-sex school, it's so conservative that girls like Mojdah have to wear a double headscarf to ensure not a single strand of hair is visible.
"Family issues, social issues, and also cultural and traditional customs prevent girls attending school in our society," says Mojdah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name.
But it's not just cultural practices that keep girls out of school, says Deputy Minister of Education Asif Nang.
"In more than 166 districts of Afghanistan out of 416, we don't have a single female teacher," he says. In about 200 districts, Nang adds, there is no secondary education for girls.
So even if families want to send their daughters to school, it's not always an option. Nang says there are roughly 5 million Afghan boys and girls attending primary school nationwide. But only about 1 million Afghans make it to grades 11 and 12.
Shortage Of Classrooms, Books
Parwan province is above average in the country. Officials there claim 95 percent of kids have access to school. But access doesn't necessarily translate into a quality education.
Sadeqi High School in Parwan consists of an old building, two newer ones and seven tents. Boys attend classes in the morning, girls in the afternoon.
Sadina Saqeb teaches history in one of those tents.
Afghan girls take classes at a refugee school in Afghanistan's Parwan province, on April 3. Under the Taliban, girls were forbidden from receiving an education. Now they account for 40 percent of the country's student enrollment.
Zhao Yishen/Xinhua/Landov
Afghan girls take classes at a refugee school in Afghanistan's Parwan province, on April 3. Under the Taliban, girls were forbidden from receiving an education. Now they account for 40 percent of the country's student enrollment.
Zhao Yishen/Xinhua/Landov
"Most of the students have sore throats during the summer because of the dust," she says. "And these tents can't block outside noise, so the students can't study their lessons properly."
Although some 4,000 schools have been built since the fall of the Taliban, some provinces are desperately in need of more. At the same time, there are other provinces where large numbers of schools are closed because of a lack of security or of teachers, or simply because not enough families want to send their children to school.
Classroom space isn't the only thing in short supply, says teacher Roshan Rasooli.
"We have a shortage of books," she says. "Seventeen of 55 students are present today, and we still don't have enough books."
Officials like Bashir Ahmad Abed, headmaster of the Sadeqi school, says even if a student has a book, there's no guarantee he or she can read it: Many books are too complicated for the students.
That's in large part because most kids aren't getting any kind of early childhood education, says Mindy Visser, the national education adviser for the Aga Khan Foundation in Afghanistan.
"Maybe their parents are illiterate so they haven't been exposed to reading material or even words very often before they enter school," says Visser.
Recruiting Qualified Teachers
While many students aren't getting much help from their parents, a lot of them aren't being well served by their teachers either, says Nang, the deputy education minister. He says that half the teachers in Afghanistan don't have the minimum required training, which is the equivalent of an associate degree.
"In the rural area[s], we have a huge shortage of professional teachers," he says, adding that many of them have not even finished 12th grade.
The government even had a program trying to encourage teachers to go to more rural schools by paying higher wages, says Visser, the education adviser. But even so, she says, qualified teachers still don't want to go to rural areas because of security concerns or because of the travel time and distance.
Visser gives the Ministry of Education good marks for its efforts to modernize the school curriculum and expand access at the primary level. She says long-term challenges include increasing the number of kids who stay in school beyond the primary level, and addressing the bottleneck in higher education.
About 300,000 people graduate from high school each year; they are competing for 60,000 openings in colleges as well as vocational and teacher training programs.
Even though many schools and teachers — or students, for that matter — are getting failing grades, the principal of the Hora Jalali High school in Parwan says that's not diminishing the appetite for education. She says in one case, a 35-year-old woman returned to school after a 15-year hiatus during the civil war and Taliban rule.
A Twitter app on an iPhone screen is shown in this photo, in New York, Friday, Oct. 18, 2013. The New York Stock Exchange isn't taking any chances with Twitter's initial public offering. The Big Board said Friday it would allow trading firms to conduct a dry run of their systems, Saturday Oct. 26, 2013 to prepare for Twitter's IPO. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
A Twitter app on an iPhone screen is shown in this photo, in New York, Friday, Oct. 18, 2013. The New York Stock Exchange isn't taking any chances with Twitter's initial public offering. The Big Board said Friday it would allow trading firms to conduct a dry run of their systems, Saturday Oct. 26, 2013 to prepare for Twitter's IPO. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The New York Stock Exchange says its test run of Twitter's initial public offering on Saturday was a success, as the exchange takes pains to avoid the technical problems that marred Facebook's debut.
While the NYSE frequently does testing on the weekend, this was the first time the exchange conducted a mock IPO. Early Saturday, traders from member firms gathered with NYSE staff to run simulated buy and sell orders, test the flow of those orders and open the stock.
"This morning's systems test was successful, and we're grateful to all the firms that chose to participate," NYSE spokeswoman Marissa Arnold said in a statement. "We are being very methodical in our planning for Twitter's IPO, and are working together with the industry to ensure a world class experience for Twitter, retail investors and all market participants."
Twitter will be the biggest technology IPO since Facebook went public in May 2012. While Nasdaq won Facebook's listing, one of the biggest IPOs in years, the debut was hit with trading delays and order failures. The Securities and Exchange Commission later fined Nasdaq $10 million, the largest sum ever levied against an exchange.
Twitter, which is expected to go public sometime before Thanksgiving, has chosen to list on the New York Stock Exchange. It plans to sell 70 million shares between $17 and $20 each for a possible take of $1.6 billion. Shares will trade under the ticker "TWTR."
This year has been a hot one for IPOs as sharp gains in the stock market have boosted demand for initial public offerings. Over 150 companies have gone public in the U.S. this year, up more than 50 percent from the same period in 2012, according to recent data from IPO tracking firm Renaissance Capital.
Happy to be back in the States, Jessica Simpson and Eric Johnson took their daughter Maxwell to grab Mexican food in Calabasas, California on Friday (October 25).
The Weight Watchers spokeswoman wore a white top, black jacket, and black jeans as she carried her 1-year-old on her hip.
As previously reported by GossipCenter, last week, the engaged couple headed to Capri, Italy to reportedly scout out a location for their wedding.
Accompanied by wedding planner Mindy Weiss, the pair focused on Capri as that's where they had their first getaway as a couple.
For 55 years, the legendary coach Eddie Robinson built Grambling State University's football program almost from nothing. Under Robinson's watch, the small school in northern Louisiana sent players to the NFL and broke the NCAA's record for wins. But Robinson is long gone and this year the Grambling State Tigers are winless. Last week, the team boycotted, forcing Grabling State to forfeit to Jackson State University. What's happened to Grambling? Melissa Block talks to Sports Illustrated senior writer George Dohrmann about the boycott.
Contact: Joshua Weisz jweisz@golinharris.com 202-585-2614 Kaiser Permanente
Complete Care, a collaborative approach to meeting patient needs, is improving outcomes for Kaiser Permanente patients. Results from the program are featured in the November 2013 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, and described in a journal editorial as, "a dramatic and impressive example of what is possible with a carefully designed and implemented system-level intervention."
"Complete Care leverages Kaiser Permanente's technology, our integrated system, and our dedicated care teams to ensure that patients with complex chronic conditions receive the proactive support, coordinated care, and follow up they need to maintain optimal health," said Michael Kanter, MD, regional medical director of quality and clinical analysis, Southern California Permanente Medical Group, and lead author for the article.
Kaiser Permanente is committed to improving the quality of care across all of its regions, and in 2005 the organization launched the Complete Care model in Southern California with the goal of transforming care for healthy members as well as members with chronic conditions and multiple health issues.
The design of Complete Care is based on the Chronic Care Model, which originated from a combination of scientific literature undertaken by The MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation in the 1990's. Complete Care is also rooted in an analysis of best practices in coordinated care for patients with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and hypertension and extends this model to prevention and wellness. Complete Care has helped Kaiser Permanente create rare disease programs for patients with Down Syndrome, spinal cord injuries, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease), and is flexible enough to allow for management of most conditions seen in an outpatient setting. It works in conjunction with care management programs, which promote exercise, obesity management, screen for aortic aneurysms, and alcohol overuse.
Bringing together the power of the electronic health record system, Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect, and the care management outreach approach that empowers clinicians and staff to better utilize the one-on-one time they have with each patient, Complete Care includes the practice of "Proactive Office Encounters (POE)."
"Proactive Office Encounters ensure that no matter where patients access care, we are able to address all of their health care needs through a personalized, evidence-based approach. Our goal is to help patients get and stay healthy," said Dr. Kanter.
The POE involves all health care team providersphysicians, receptionists, medical assistants, nurses and pharmacists -- to address patient needs. Using electronic checklists customized to each patient, support staff is able to proactively identify "care gaps" such as the needs for screenings and other preventive care. Caregivers proactively contact patients to encourage them to address these gaps.
During these conversations, clinicians help patients schedule preventive care screenings, provide medication adherence and health education information, and remind them to keep the follow up appointments that will help them achieve their own best health. Bringing the entire care team into this process has improved the consistency of preventive care, the quality of chronic conditions care, and reliability of staff support for physicians. It also motivates staff to respond while they have the attention of a receptive patient.
Over the past six years Kaiser Permanente has shown steady improvement in its quality scores as reported by the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (commonly referred to as HEDIS), a set of 51 publicly reported quality metrics. Specifically, in Southern California, Kaiser Permanente improved an average of 13 percent as compared to 5.5 percent for the average health plan, according to Quality Compass, a comprehensive national database for the National Committee for Quality Assurance. Across all of its regions, Kaiser Permanente ranked in the top 10th percentile for many of the measures tracked and leads the nation with the most number 1s in HEDIS Commercial and Medicare measures.
###
Authors of the article are Michael H Kanter, MD; Gail Lindsay, RN, MA; Jim Bellows, PhD; and Alide Chase, MS.
About Kaiser Permanente
Kaiser Permanente is committed to helping shape the future of health care. We are recognized as one of America's leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Founded in 1945, our mission is to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. We currently serve 9.1 million members in eight states and the District of Columbia. Care for members and patients is focused on their total health and guided by their personal physicians, specialists and team of caregivers. Our expert and caring medical teams are empowered and supported by industry-leading technology advances and tools for health promotion, disease prevention, state-of-the-art care delivery and world-class chronic disease management. Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to care innovations, clinical research, health education and the support of community health. For more information, go to: kp.org/share.
About the Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute
The Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute was established in 1997 to optimize care quality and to further the Kaiser Permanente mission in improving the health of our members. CMI spreads clinical best practices, develops integrated care delivery models with regional partners, and supports the national program by working with physicians, clinical experts and leaders throughout Kaiser Permanente. CMI seeks to transform care delivery throughout Kaiser Permanente by "Making the Right Thing Easy to Do."
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Complete care improves patient outcomes
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
23-Oct-2013
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Contact: Joshua Weisz jweisz@golinharris.com 202-585-2614 Kaiser Permanente
Complete Care, a collaborative approach to meeting patient needs, is improving outcomes for Kaiser Permanente patients. Results from the program are featured in the November 2013 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, and described in a journal editorial as, "a dramatic and impressive example of what is possible with a carefully designed and implemented system-level intervention."
"Complete Care leverages Kaiser Permanente's technology, our integrated system, and our dedicated care teams to ensure that patients with complex chronic conditions receive the proactive support, coordinated care, and follow up they need to maintain optimal health," said Michael Kanter, MD, regional medical director of quality and clinical analysis, Southern California Permanente Medical Group, and lead author for the article.
Kaiser Permanente is committed to improving the quality of care across all of its regions, and in 2005 the organization launched the Complete Care model in Southern California with the goal of transforming care for healthy members as well as members with chronic conditions and multiple health issues.
The design of Complete Care is based on the Chronic Care Model, which originated from a combination of scientific literature undertaken by The MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation in the 1990's. Complete Care is also rooted in an analysis of best practices in coordinated care for patients with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and hypertension and extends this model to prevention and wellness. Complete Care has helped Kaiser Permanente create rare disease programs for patients with Down Syndrome, spinal cord injuries, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease), and is flexible enough to allow for management of most conditions seen in an outpatient setting. It works in conjunction with care management programs, which promote exercise, obesity management, screen for aortic aneurysms, and alcohol overuse.
Bringing together the power of the electronic health record system, Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect, and the care management outreach approach that empowers clinicians and staff to better utilize the one-on-one time they have with each patient, Complete Care includes the practice of "Proactive Office Encounters (POE)."
"Proactive Office Encounters ensure that no matter where patients access care, we are able to address all of their health care needs through a personalized, evidence-based approach. Our goal is to help patients get and stay healthy," said Dr. Kanter.
The POE involves all health care team providersphysicians, receptionists, medical assistants, nurses and pharmacists -- to address patient needs. Using electronic checklists customized to each patient, support staff is able to proactively identify "care gaps" such as the needs for screenings and other preventive care. Caregivers proactively contact patients to encourage them to address these gaps.
During these conversations, clinicians help patients schedule preventive care screenings, provide medication adherence and health education information, and remind them to keep the follow up appointments that will help them achieve their own best health. Bringing the entire care team into this process has improved the consistency of preventive care, the quality of chronic conditions care, and reliability of staff support for physicians. It also motivates staff to respond while they have the attention of a receptive patient.
Over the past six years Kaiser Permanente has shown steady improvement in its quality scores as reported by the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (commonly referred to as HEDIS), a set of 51 publicly reported quality metrics. Specifically, in Southern California, Kaiser Permanente improved an average of 13 percent as compared to 5.5 percent for the average health plan, according to Quality Compass, a comprehensive national database for the National Committee for Quality Assurance. Across all of its regions, Kaiser Permanente ranked in the top 10th percentile for many of the measures tracked and leads the nation with the most number 1s in HEDIS Commercial and Medicare measures.
###
Authors of the article are Michael H Kanter, MD; Gail Lindsay, RN, MA; Jim Bellows, PhD; and Alide Chase, MS.
About Kaiser Permanente
Kaiser Permanente is committed to helping shape the future of health care. We are recognized as one of America's leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Founded in 1945, our mission is to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. We currently serve 9.1 million members in eight states and the District of Columbia. Care for members and patients is focused on their total health and guided by their personal physicians, specialists and team of caregivers. Our expert and caring medical teams are empowered and supported by industry-leading technology advances and tools for health promotion, disease prevention, state-of-the-art care delivery and world-class chronic disease management. Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to care innovations, clinical research, health education and the support of community health. For more information, go to: kp.org/share.
About the Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute
The Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute was established in 1997 to optimize care quality and to further the Kaiser Permanente mission in improving the health of our members. CMI spreads clinical best practices, develops integrated care delivery models with regional partners, and supports the national program by working with physicians, clinical experts and leaders throughout Kaiser Permanente. CMI seeks to transform care delivery throughout Kaiser Permanente by "Making the Right Thing Easy to Do."
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| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
LONDON (AP) — British director Antonia Bird, known for films such as "Face," ''Priest" and "Mad Love," has died. She was 54.
The BBC, citing Bird's agent, said Saturday the director had been suffering from anaplastic thyroid cancer and had died in her sleep.
Bird worked for several years at the Royal Court Theater before switching to TV in the mid-1980s. She racked up a string of credits on shows such as "Spooks" and "EastEnders."
Actor Robert Carlyle, who appeared in a number of Bird's films, tweeted Saturday that it's "such a sad day... farewell to my beautiful friend."
"Priest," Bird's 1994 debut feature about a traditional Catholic who begins questioning the church's values, won awards at the Toronto, Berlin and Edinburgh film festivals.
Although no timetable has been set for its release, an upgrade to the popular, Google-maintained AngularJS JavaScript framework promises modularity, coexistence with other frameworks, and improved dependency injection. But older browsers, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, will no longer be supported.
AngularJS 2.0 will include capabilities from the ECMAScript 6 JavaScript specification, including an improved syntax for classes, modular loading system for code, and annotations for declaratively describing the purpose of a class. "It just makes the programming easier," said Google's Misko Hevery, the founder of AngularJS.
Also, asynchronous dependency injection will allow applications to be broken up into smaller modules. This method allows for the removal of hard-coded dependencies, which instead can be changed at run time or compile time.
Another goal in AngularJS 2.0 is enabling developers to mix and match technologies from multiple development frameworks. "We really would love to get to a situation where, on a single Web page, you could have multiple frameworks actually cooperating together. In that situation, everyone wins," Hevery said. Developers, for example, could use both AngularJS and Backbone.js in the same project.
But AngularJS 2.0 will drop support for limited-capability, older browsers. Microsoft's IE8 is likely to be one of the browsers not supported. Hevery has not determined the final list of browsers to be left behind, but said those not supporting polyfills will be abandoned.
AngularJS has many fans because it converts static Web content into dynamic content. "It's very, very quick [for building Web applications] and it's quick prototyping as well," said Todd Motto, a developer at Appsbroker.
Amazon's known for not offering many specific details about its device sales or customers in its earnings reports, and this quarter's is no exception. The company did note, however, that it added "millions" of Prime users during the quarter, a number that's no doubt only set to grow further now that ...
Today, at Google’s San Francisco offices, Google introduced Maps Engine Pro, a utility that allows small businesses to use Google’s location tools to create maps out of location databases.
There will also be a mobile app available for Android initially to allow users to edit and create these maps on the fly. The app, called Google Maps Engine, will allow access to any level of GME service.
Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps, noted that there are still 1 billion monthly users of Google Maps but also over 1 million active sites and apps using the APIs.
McClendon says that Google is also after semantic data, including local location, imagery, Street View and base maps. Each of those layers must be collected separately and sometimes includes mistakes. Google has spent a lot of time creating what it calls a ‘canonical base map of the world.’ This map allows it to answer questions like ‘how do I get there?’
But on top of all of those data layers is something Google is calling the Knowledge Layer, which contributes to people’s ability to get questions with more complex parameters answered.
All of these layers service consumers and the enterprise on either end of the scale. Now, to service those in the middle, like small businesses, Google is introducing Maps Engine Pro. It’s a tool that allows businesses to create internal- and external-facing maps that utilize its data layers to make business decisions.
Among the decision-making tools will be the ability to optimize the locations of your people and company assets, engage your users and build apps that take advantage of all of Google’s layers.
Google’s Vinay Goel, Google Product Manager on Google Maps, detailed how professionals could use some of these tools to solve problems.
One example Goel gave is that an insurance underwriter should have easy access to your location and the canonical data surrounding the risk profile of your neighborhood in order to calculate your plan and premium.
The pricing of Maps Engine Pro is $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year depending on the license usages.
Heather Folsom, Product Manager of Google Maps Engine Pro, spoke about the capabilities of the new service. Basically, you’re able to upload a spreadsheet of data that you might have with locations or other mappable data and see it instantly visualized. You can then sort or filter it and use it to craft strategies.
Pure Fix Cycles has been one of the testers for the program and a video shown to press at the event noted that MEP was used to visualize where the customer service calls were coming from on the East Coast. This allowed them to see where the best locations might be to send those callers to get service, which stores had the most inventory of the parts that were needed to fulfill those orders and more.
A demo was also given of placing a downloadable database of publicly available San Francisco planning department data on a map. Once imported, it could be easily filtered by any of the criteria in the data columns in a ‘Google Docs’-style spreadsheet. Editing this spreadsheet in ‘live’ fashion results in the points changing on the map.
Though this might appear, at first glance, to be Google tooling its Maps Engine product down a bit, it’s actually more about boosting the consumer maps offerings to be more useful to small businesses or pros.
The consumer tools that allow users to build custom apps are all well and good, but entering data that an SMB might have in its databases is tedious and doesn’t have the flexibility needed to create custom reporting tools and analysis. And on the other end of the range, the full-blown Google Maps Engine product requires some fairly serious geographic information systems chops to craft useful tools for internal use.
Google Maps Engine Pro is about making those tools more friendly and accessible, letting small business owners and other ‘professionals’ visualize their mapping data, rather than trying to do so internally from a spreadsheet list of locations. The key is being able to easily import and filter that data by a variety of factors. Just going by the demos that we saw, this appears to be fairly quick and easy.
It should be an interesting additional layer of data that helps businesses make decisions based on location data. Just a couple of years ago this type of tool might have to be manually crafted by a developer or contractor, or cobbled together out of open-source mapping data and tools.
Goel says that Google hopes that GME Pro will sit alongside documents, spreadsheets and storage that businesses will use daily to make decisions and get things done.
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Amazon's known for not offering many specific details about its device sales or customers in its earnings reports, and this quarter's is no exception. The company did note, however, that it added "millions" of Prime users during the quarter, a number that's no doubt only set to grow further now that ...
