Look, we've all had that instant in which we realize we forgot to get a gift for someone, the deadlines for online orders have passed, and all the stores are closed because Christmas is practically here. It's a particularly?miserable moment, but there's help?? so don't sigh and order yet another digital gift card just yet.
While digital gift cards can be what people want, they tend to scream, "I forgot about you, so here's a token that took about as much thought as pouring myself a glass of wine."
So what can you do? Why, you go for the last-second gifts that haven't become as cliche as those things.
If you've got a gamer on your hands, you?top off his or her Xbox Live Gold?subscription. It's a simple, yet thoughtful?gesture. Extra credit if you throw in some Microsoft Points. Does your gamer favor the PlayStation? Not to worry, Amazon sells PSN points with digital download codes.?But if you are not sure what the recipient is into, consider browsing through Steam for some games to gift him or her. The selection is huge and there are plenty of popular titles mere clicks away.
For the music lover in your life, a Spotify?or Rdio?subscription is the way to go. With unlimited Web and mobile?streaming music of most back catalog and?newly released albums for $10 a month, these services have become favorites among the NBC News tech reporters. They're a?great way to avoid buying any music you'll be sick of in two months. The only downside is, you might get your friend so hooked that you will have to keep paying for the subscription, year after year!
If you happen to be dealing with a particularly social media savvy pal, you might get away with sending him or her a Facebook Gift. You can select a real physical gift?? ranging from silly toys to cosmetics to food???for which the recipient will instantly receive a notification. Just practice smiling convincingly and telling your friend that you thought Facebook Gifts are the trendy way to celebrate Christmas and that you absolutely did not put shopping off until the last minute, no siree!
Now, we did slam digital gift cards, but there are a few exceptions. One is Amazon.?We wish there was a way to give someone the gift of an?Amazon Prime membership since?any online shopper would appreciate the year of?free two-day shipping, and would probably enjoy the streaming movies and TV shows, too. As of now, Amazon won't let you give someone Prime, though, so your alternative is a $79 Amazon?digital gift card.
Lucky for you, Amazon has taken digital gift carding to never-before-seen heights. By partnering with JibJab, the company lets you star in a goofy video that plays when the recipient receives the email notification. If you aren't ready for stage and screen, maybe you want to upload a picture of yourself instead. A third non-lame option is suggesting a gift ? it's a little like the Facebook Gifts, where you select a real genuine object, but?recipients?can spend their Amazon credit on something else if they?think your judgment is flawed.
Speaking of Amazon Prime's streaming?flicks and TV shows, there two other services that do?let you gift subscriptions, Netflix and Hulu. Netflix has a huge selection of movies (and older?TV shows) while Hulu's premium Plus lineup gets the latest TV?shows much sooner.
What about last-second gifts that aren't digital in nature?
For those lucky enough to have a local florist who isn't completely slammed for the holidays, a pretty bouquet or center piece may be the way to go. Just be sure to triple-check that the order will be delivered on time?? and maybe throw in some balloons or candy if available.
What if none of these last-second gifts fit your almost-forgotten friends and family? Well, then consider going old-school: Write. Folks are so unaccustomed to receiving touching, handwritten (perhaps even handmade)?holiday cards and letters that they sometimes value them more than random one-size-fits-almost-all gifts. The thought still matters,?so you can use this as an opportunity to remind your loved ones of?how much you care about them ? even if you did almost forget about them during this crazy?holiday season.
Want more tech news?or interesting?links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts,?or circling her?on?Google+.
Big transfusions add risk for heart attack patients with anemiaPublic release date: 24-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
Practice may elevate chance of death, second heart attack
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] When heart attack patients present in the emergency department with some degree of anemia, or anemic patients have a heart attack, physicians have a tendency, but not much guidance, about whether to provide a blood transfusion. The idea is that a transfusion could help more oxygen get to the heart. Recent national guidelines suggested that there simply isn't good evidence to encourage or discourage the common practice, but a new meta-analysis of 10 studies involving more than 203,000 such patients comes down on the side of it increasing the risk of death.
The next step for determining when the practice could be appropriate needs rigorous randomized trials that will generate more decisive, high-quality data, said lead author Dr. Saurav Chatterjee, a cardiology fellow at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Providence VA Medical Center.
For the analysis published Dec. 24 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Chatterjee and his co-authors combined and analyzed data from studies in which anemia patients with heart attacks either received "liberal" transfusions or received more restricted versions of the treatment or no transfusions at all. Liberal transfusions were defined as cases in which patients either received two units of blood or more or had a transfusion even with a hematocrit reading (a measure of red blood cell concentration) higher than 30 percent (normal is in the low 40s).
What the researchers found, after statistical adjustments to control for important medical factors, was that the risk of death was 12 percent higher for people who received the liberal transfusions than those who did not. Moreover, the group that received liberal transfusions had twice the odds of having another heart attack.
"What we found is that the possibility of real harm exists with transfusion," Chatterjee said. "It is practiced in emergency departments all across the United States. I think it is high time that we need to answer the question definitively with a randomized trial."
Of the 10 papers that Chatterjee and his co-authors reviewed, all but one were observational studies. The only randomized trial was a small pilot experiment.
Searching for an answer
Chatterjee began the study when he was a resident at Maimonides Medical Center in New York. He noticed a paper by the AABB (formerly the American Association of Blood Banks) in which the association said there was not enough clinical evidence for or against transfusions in heart attack patients.
For clinicians, the practice has always been a tough judgment call. Some transfusions are clearly necessary, for example when a patient's troubles include not just a heart attack but also severe ongoing bleeding, Chatterjee said. But transfusions also create health risks, such as an increase in potential clotting because platelets may clump together more, or from an inflammatory immune response to the introduction of blood of a "foreign" source into the body.
Chatterjee and his co-authors decided to comb the literature to determine whether, if properly combined and analyzed, existing data could provide some insight. They found 729 potentially relevant studies, but only 10 that had the right data to help answer the question.
Few as they were, Chatterjee said, the studies all told much the same story.
"One of the things that struck us is that there were very few studies in evidence of transfusion at all," Chatterjee said. "In our case, though, we found that the effect was pretty consistently harmful across the spectrum of studies, spectrum of time, and spectrum of patients that were enrolled in the individual studies."
Chatterjee said the study should not be taken to mean that transfusions should be stopped altogether for anemic heart attack patients. Instead, he said, doctors must continue exercising their clinical judgment, at least until results from a large, well-designed randomized trial can be produced. Mindful of the risk his study found, however, they might just want to shift their thinking about where the border is among borderline cases.
"Before a definitive trial is out there, we should be conservative, especially considering the high risk of harm," he said.
###
In addition to Chatterjee, the paper's other authors are Jorn Wetterslev of the Centre for Clinical Intervention Research in Copenhagen, Denmark; Abhishek Sharma and Edgar Lichstein of Maimonedes Medical Center; and Debabrata Mukherjee of Texas Tech University.
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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.
Big transfusions add risk for heart attack patients with anemiaPublic release date: 24-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
Practice may elevate chance of death, second heart attack
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] When heart attack patients present in the emergency department with some degree of anemia, or anemic patients have a heart attack, physicians have a tendency, but not much guidance, about whether to provide a blood transfusion. The idea is that a transfusion could help more oxygen get to the heart. Recent national guidelines suggested that there simply isn't good evidence to encourage or discourage the common practice, but a new meta-analysis of 10 studies involving more than 203,000 such patients comes down on the side of it increasing the risk of death.
The next step for determining when the practice could be appropriate needs rigorous randomized trials that will generate more decisive, high-quality data, said lead author Dr. Saurav Chatterjee, a cardiology fellow at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Providence VA Medical Center.
For the analysis published Dec. 24 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Chatterjee and his co-authors combined and analyzed data from studies in which anemia patients with heart attacks either received "liberal" transfusions or received more restricted versions of the treatment or no transfusions at all. Liberal transfusions were defined as cases in which patients either received two units of blood or more or had a transfusion even with a hematocrit reading (a measure of red blood cell concentration) higher than 30 percent (normal is in the low 40s).
What the researchers found, after statistical adjustments to control for important medical factors, was that the risk of death was 12 percent higher for people who received the liberal transfusions than those who did not. Moreover, the group that received liberal transfusions had twice the odds of having another heart attack.
"What we found is that the possibility of real harm exists with transfusion," Chatterjee said. "It is practiced in emergency departments all across the United States. I think it is high time that we need to answer the question definitively with a randomized trial."
Of the 10 papers that Chatterjee and his co-authors reviewed, all but one were observational studies. The only randomized trial was a small pilot experiment.
Searching for an answer
Chatterjee began the study when he was a resident at Maimonides Medical Center in New York. He noticed a paper by the AABB (formerly the American Association of Blood Banks) in which the association said there was not enough clinical evidence for or against transfusions in heart attack patients.
For clinicians, the practice has always been a tough judgment call. Some transfusions are clearly necessary, for example when a patient's troubles include not just a heart attack but also severe ongoing bleeding, Chatterjee said. But transfusions also create health risks, such as an increase in potential clotting because platelets may clump together more, or from an inflammatory immune response to the introduction of blood of a "foreign" source into the body.
Chatterjee and his co-authors decided to comb the literature to determine whether, if properly combined and analyzed, existing data could provide some insight. They found 729 potentially relevant studies, but only 10 that had the right data to help answer the question.
Few as they were, Chatterjee said, the studies all told much the same story.
"One of the things that struck us is that there were very few studies in evidence of transfusion at all," Chatterjee said. "In our case, though, we found that the effect was pretty consistently harmful across the spectrum of studies, spectrum of time, and spectrum of patients that were enrolled in the individual studies."
Chatterjee said the study should not be taken to mean that transfusions should be stopped altogether for anemic heart attack patients. Instead, he said, doctors must continue exercising their clinical judgment, at least until results from a large, well-designed randomized trial can be produced. Mindful of the risk his study found, however, they might just want to shift their thinking about where the border is among borderline cases.
"Before a definitive trial is out there, we should be conservative, especially considering the high risk of harm," he said.
###
In addition to Chatterjee, the paper's other authors are Jorn Wetterslev of the Centre for Clinical Intervention Research in Copenhagen, Denmark; Abhishek Sharma and Edgar Lichstein of Maimonedes Medical Center; and Debabrata Mukherjee of Texas Tech University.
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?
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.
This undated photo provided by the U.S. Navy shows Navy SEAL Cdr. Job W. Price. U.S. military officials are investigating the apparent suicide of Price, 42, of Pottstown, Pa., who died Saturday of a non-combat-related injury while supporting stability operations in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy)
This undated photo provided by the U.S. Navy shows Navy SEAL Cdr. Job W. Price. U.S. military officials are investigating the apparent suicide of Price, 42, of Pottstown, Pa., who died Saturday of a non-combat-related injury while supporting stability operations in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? U.S. military officials are investigating the apparent suicide of a Navy SEAL commander in Afghanistan.
Navy SEAL Cdr. Job W. Price, 42, of Pottstown, Pa., died Saturday of a non-combat-related injury while supporting stability operations in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan.
A U.S. military official said the death "appears to be the result of suicide." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the death is still being investigated.
"The Naval Special Warfare family is deeply saddened by the loss of our teammate," said Capt. Robert Smith, Commander of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, which manages all Virginia-based Navy SEAL teams. "We extend our condolences, thoughts and prayers to the family, friends, and NSW community during this time of grieving."
"As we mourn the loss and honor the memory of our fallen teammate, those he served with will continue to carry out the mission," Smith added Sunday.
A U.S. military official confirmed Price was from Virginia Beach, Va.-based SEAL Team 4, which is part of the mission to train Afghan local police to stave off the Taliban in remote parts of Afghanistan. Price is survived by a wife and a daughter.
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) ? A mob in southern Pakistan stormed a police station to seize a mentally unstable Muslim man accused of burning a copy of Islam's holy book, beat him to death, and then set his body afire, police said Saturday.
The case is likely to raise further concerns about the country's harsh blasphemy laws, which can result in a death sentence or life in prison to anyone found guilty. Critics say an accusation or investigation alone can lead to deaths, as people take the law into their own hands and kill those accused of violating it. Police stations and even courts have been attacked by mobs.
Local police official Bihar-ud-Din said police arrested the man on Friday after being informed by residents that he had burned a Quran inside a mosque where he had been staying for a night.
An angry mob of more than 200 people then broke into the police station in the southern town of Dadu and took the accused man, who they say was under questioning. Din said police tried their best to save the man's life but were unable to stop the furious crowd.
He said that police had arrested 30 people for suspected involvement in the attack, while the head of the local police station and seven officers had been suspended.
Past attempts by governments in predominantly Muslim Pakistan to review these laws have met with violent opposition from hardline Islamist parties.
Michael Phelps' 12,000-calorie-a-day training diet and Beyonce's maple syrup cleanse may top Google's list of the 10 most-searched diets of 2012, but the popular website Diets in Review.com found that when people want to get serious about weight loss, ? See all stories on this topic ?
Colorado asbestos contractors typically don?t have too many choices for insuring their companies for workers compensation insurance due to the type of risk involved in their operations.? Some of the best ways to save money on workmans compensation insurance is through the following actions:
Frequent safety meetings with your employees will reduce the possibility of a claim.? At least weekly, but daily reminders about your companies policy and procedures will go a long way toward preventing claims.
Have your best practices in writing for employees to follow.? They need to know what are considered safe and proper procedures for the remediation of asbestos.
Safety equipment is critical when handling asbestos.? Trying to save money is not in your best interest when it comes to protecting your employees.
Implement a cost containment program offered by the State of Colorado for employers who adhere to certain standards of safety they will be entitled to save money on their insurance premiums.? Certification takes a minimum of 1 year in order to be granted the discount on your insurance premium.
If you?ve had any claims be sure to review them with your insurance brokers to verify the accuracy and legitimacy of the claim.
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Online radio is an innovation that has changed the way the world entertains and does business. Radio stations worldwide can be enjoyed over the internet. It also gives businesses? marketing strategy a new dimension.
With internet technology taking over the communication industry, traditional radio has taken a new avatar?radio on internet. Developers are now busy finding new and more efficient ways for integrating the radio to the internet. Radio streaming on the net has produced a number of audiences that conventional radio has never enjoyed before.
Radio on Internet: What It Is?
Audio stream is transmitted to listeners via a continuous stream over the World Wide Web. This enables users all across the world download radio software programs and listen to worldwide streaming of internet music stations, right in the comfort of their homes. This is different from podcasting as people are not required to download individual radio stations of their choice. The radio broadcasts streams freely sans any media device.
Radio on Internet: Entertainment Value
Online music stations are basically local music radio stations from different parts of the world. This enables you to listen to music according to your taste. The easy-to-use control panel, upon installation of the streaming software, enables users to quickly access worldwide radio stations with a clear reception. You can now find the radio station you prefer just by choosing either the particular region or the music genre. When you choose a region or music genre, you will get a list of radio stations broadcasting specifically on the genre.
Online radio music is also executable in a USB flash drive. The device allows the user to download the radio software straight to the flash drive. With this device, you can listen to your favorite programs anywhere in the world. The device is compact and can be easily carried, letting you entertain yourself anytime you want.
Radio on Internet: Business Value
Businesses can rope in radio on internet for their marketing strategy. They can partner with internet radio stations to promote their brand and message out to their consumers. Talk programs are the best way for creating a buzz about products. You can get experts or guests talking about the utility, benefits of your product, thus highlighting it.
Many online radio stations bear close resemblance to social media outlets. They invite the end users to comment or share what they think about related topics with the hosts and participants. This helps business managers to determine what the general public thinks about their products or services. After all, feedback carries great importance for every business. This feedback can be used for the betterment of the products.
Catchy infomercials are the key to captivate people on the internet. An intelligently produced commercial would drive people to the website or business, taking up the volumes in tandem. As the medium is not limited to any particular geographical or demographic region, advertising on internet radio would give the business an international audience base.
For enjoying radio on internet, you can use the services of several communications convergence technology providers. This would enhance your experience of online entertainment.
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Public release date: 24-Dec-2012
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