Stop the presses. A new Facebook for iOS update hit iTunes today, and it brings with it a handful of relatively minor features. Now, you can edit your posts and comments through the app to fix any egregious mistakes you might make, after which a label indicating that the post has been edited will ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/pPGn5Q_ixPg/Never mind the Balkans.
London Film Festival screening, October 10
Mark Cousins
Made for around $16,000 on a cheap hand-held camera, Here Be Dragons is the latest highly personal “essay film” from Mark Cousins, a former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival turned globe-trotting micro-budget auteur. Shot last year during a short working holiday in Albania, this free-associating documentary initially promises to illuminate a mysterious Balkan backwater rarely seen on screen. Instead, it reveals rather too much about its author, his brainy reading habits, his airline meals, and his random thoughts on culture and politics. Cousins may even have invented a new cinematic form here: film as a series of Facebook status updates.
The film’s austere visual grammar will be familiar to anyone who saw the director’s previous idiosyncratic but scholarly documentaries on cinema, most notably his epic 2011 TV series The Story of Film: An Odyssey and this year’s well-received Cannes entry, A Story of Children on Film. Over a slow-moving montage of mostly static single-shot tableaux, Cousins waxes philosophically in his sleepy, melodious, softly undulating Northern Irish brogue. The effect is hypnotic and soothing, but not enough to sustain a thin piece of work like this. Here Be Dragons has just premiered at the London Film Festival, where it is competing in the documentary section. The director’s track record should ensure interest from further festivals and niche TV networks.
PHOTOS: Top 10: Indies at the Box Office
Here Be Dragons does not include naked shots of Cousins like last year’s navel-gazing travelogue What Is This Film Called Love? But it does feature him splashing around in a Scottish loch in a kilt, for no clear reason. Later, wandering randomly around Tirana, he becomes mildly fixated with Albania’s former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and the crumbling concrete pyramid built as his intended mausoleum. He even reads a scathing poem about Hoxha over an interminable shot of industrial wasteland, which reverses midway through. The impact of such cut-price arty flourishes will depend how seriously you take Cousins getting slightly cross about a dead tyrant’s human rights abuses 30 years too late.
Cousins repeatedly reminds us he is in Tirana to see every Albanian movie made in the last five years, and he makes politely anxious noises about the imperilled state of the national film archive, which he finds rotting away in a fungus-ridden basement. And yet he includes just a tiny handful of brief snippets from the archive, with barely any historical or biographical context, before promptly returning to his own navel-gazing tourist musings. Given free rein by producer Don Boyd, who previously worked with the legendary British arthouse director Derek Jarman, Cousins simply rambles away like a man with no unpublished thoughts.
Frustratingly, a more conventional documentary about Enver Hoxha could have been genuinely fascinating, as could a well-researched film about Albania’s impact on global cinema. After all, this tiny nation’s diaspora includes John and James Belushi, Eliza Dushku and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Tom Perrotta. Even during the deep freeze of Cold War isolation, the British screen comic Norman Wisdom enjoyed cult fame in Albania, beloved for his proletarian everyman roles. Since the fall of Communism, the local film scene has witnessed a minor renaissance with domestic hits like Slogans and Amnesty. Hoxha’s speeches even featured as a decoy device in Spike Lee’s 2006 heist thriller Inside Man.
Does any of this basic movie-fan trivia figure in Here Be Dragons? Of course not. The director is far too busy serving up his own learned, loopy and unashamedly self-absorbed observations. There are worthy blueprints for this kind of discursive documentary essay, of course, particularly the work of the late French pioneer Chris Marker and – more recently – Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy. But those films have a formal rigor and intellectual vigor that Cousins is either unable or unwilling to deliver in this lightweight jumble of holiday snapshots. Curious viewers will learn more about Albania by spending an hour on Wikipedia.
Production companies: HiBrow Productions, Ska-Ndal
Producer: Don Boyd
Director: Mark Cousins
Writer: Mark Cousins
Cinematographer: Mark Cousins
Editor: Mark Cousins
Sales company: HiBrow Productions
Unrated, 73 minutes
Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma
Obama Gets Firsthand Look at a Tornado Damage
Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
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ShareContact: John Lazarou
jlazaro1@jhmi.edu
410-502-8902
Johns Hopkins Medicine
A study of 69,000 Medicare patient records led by Johns Hopkins researchers shows that people with spine compression fractures who undergo operations to strengthen back bones with cement survive longer and have shorter overall hospital stays than those who stick with bed rest, pain control and physical therapy.
Although so-called interventional augmentation procedures were initially more expensive than conservative medical management of the fractures, the researchers say the former were associated with lower in-hospital mortality and increased survival compared with non-operative management.
"Our results suggest that the beneficial impact of minimally invasive surgery for vertebral compression fractures reaches beyond the acute phase and improves post-discharge survival and morbidity," says Richard L. Skolasky Jr., Sc.D., associate professor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Spine Outcomes Research Center.
Osteoporosis, which mostly affects the elderly, is responsible for more than 700,000 vertebral compression fractures and an estimated 150,000 hospitalizations annually in the United States, Skolasky notes, and can cause significant pain and disability in the elderly. Traditional medical treatment is almost always tried first, while interventional procedures known as vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty consist of injecting bone cement through a small hole in the skin into a fractured vertebra. Skolasky noted that vertebral compression fractures are associated with a substantial economic burden, a medical management cost estimated at $13.8 billion in 2001.
In a report on the new study, published in the October edition of The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, the researchers said that vertebral augmentation procedures not only appear to be associated with greater patient survival than non-operative management, but also that kyphoplasty which uses balloon inflation to create an opening for the cement tends to have a more striking association with survival than vertebroplasty.
"Treating vertebral compression fractures with vertebral augmentation procedures is associated with acute pain relief and improved mobility, but direct comparisons are limited," said Skolasky.
For the study, Skolasky and his colleagues conducted a "post-hoc" analysis and comparison of information on some 69,000 patients sorted into three categories of fracture care: non-operative, vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty. The team examined differences in survival at six months, one year, two years and three years along with complications, length of hospital stay, charges assessed by the discharging hospital and/or the health care provider delivering services, 30-day readmission rates and repeat procedures.
Results showed that the overall survival rate for the entire study population was 77.8 percent at one year and 49.6 percent at three years. The kyphoplasty group had the highest survival rates at one and three years, at 85.2 percent and 59.9 percent, respectively. When examined by age, individuals in the kyphoplasty group consistently had higher survival rates. The study also discovered that patients treated non-operatively on average were hospitalized approximately eight days longer. The total charges for kyphoplasty and vertebroplasty were $12,032 and $7,805 more than those treated non-operatively.
Skolasky said that the study showed that there was no statistically significant difference in postoperative infections and neurologic complications between surgical and non-operative patients. Surgically treated patients were less likely to be diagnosed with pneumonia or a decubitus ulcer, probably owing to shorter hospital stays. Those undergoing kyphoplasty were least likely to have those complications.
Skolasky also noted that other studies have examined differences in mortality associated with these three treatment methods, but that theirs is believed to be the first to examine those elements along with morbidity and costs associated with care.
Skolasky added that their findings may reflect "selection bias," and lack of racial and ethnic diversity, and such further prospective studies are needed to affirm them.
"Despite these limitations, our study did capture a large percentage of the elderly population that was acutely hospitalized for treatment and also assessed long-term complications and survival," he concluded.
###
The research team included Andrew T. Chen, M.P.H., from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and David B. Cohen, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Related Web site:
The Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Johns Hopkins
http://www.hopkinsortho.org/index.html
Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM), headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, is a $6.7 billion integrated global health enterprise and one of the leading health care systems in the United States. JHM unites physicians and scientists of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with the organizations, health professionals and facilities of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System. JHM's vision, "Together, we will deliver the promise of medicine," is supported by its mission to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and clinical care. Diverse and inclusive, JHM educates medical students, scientists, health care professionals and the public; conducts biomedical research; and provides patient-centered medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat human illness. JHM operates six academic and community hospitals, four suburban health care and surgery centers, and more than 30 primary health care outpatient sites. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in 1889, was ranked number one in the nation for 21 years in a row by U.S. News & World Report.
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.
ShareContact: John Lazarou
jlazaro1@jhmi.edu
410-502-8902
Johns Hopkins Medicine
A study of 69,000 Medicare patient records led by Johns Hopkins researchers shows that people with spine compression fractures who undergo operations to strengthen back bones with cement survive longer and have shorter overall hospital stays than those who stick with bed rest, pain control and physical therapy.
Although so-called interventional augmentation procedures were initially more expensive than conservative medical management of the fractures, the researchers say the former were associated with lower in-hospital mortality and increased survival compared with non-operative management.
"Our results suggest that the beneficial impact of minimally invasive surgery for vertebral compression fractures reaches beyond the acute phase and improves post-discharge survival and morbidity," says Richard L. Skolasky Jr., Sc.D., associate professor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Spine Outcomes Research Center.
Osteoporosis, which mostly affects the elderly, is responsible for more than 700,000 vertebral compression fractures and an estimated 150,000 hospitalizations annually in the United States, Skolasky notes, and can cause significant pain and disability in the elderly. Traditional medical treatment is almost always tried first, while interventional procedures known as vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty consist of injecting bone cement through a small hole in the skin into a fractured vertebra. Skolasky noted that vertebral compression fractures are associated with a substantial economic burden, a medical management cost estimated at $13.8 billion in 2001.
In a report on the new study, published in the October edition of The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, the researchers said that vertebral augmentation procedures not only appear to be associated with greater patient survival than non-operative management, but also that kyphoplasty which uses balloon inflation to create an opening for the cement tends to have a more striking association with survival than vertebroplasty.
"Treating vertebral compression fractures with vertebral augmentation procedures is associated with acute pain relief and improved mobility, but direct comparisons are limited," said Skolasky.
For the study, Skolasky and his colleagues conducted a "post-hoc" analysis and comparison of information on some 69,000 patients sorted into three categories of fracture care: non-operative, vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty. The team examined differences in survival at six months, one year, two years and three years along with complications, length of hospital stay, charges assessed by the discharging hospital and/or the health care provider delivering services, 30-day readmission rates and repeat procedures.
Results showed that the overall survival rate for the entire study population was 77.8 percent at one year and 49.6 percent at three years. The kyphoplasty group had the highest survival rates at one and three years, at 85.2 percent and 59.9 percent, respectively. When examined by age, individuals in the kyphoplasty group consistently had higher survival rates. The study also discovered that patients treated non-operatively on average were hospitalized approximately eight days longer. The total charges for kyphoplasty and vertebroplasty were $12,032 and $7,805 more than those treated non-operatively.
Skolasky said that the study showed that there was no statistically significant difference in postoperative infections and neurologic complications between surgical and non-operative patients. Surgically treated patients were less likely to be diagnosed with pneumonia or a decubitus ulcer, probably owing to shorter hospital stays. Those undergoing kyphoplasty were least likely to have those complications.
Skolasky also noted that other studies have examined differences in mortality associated with these three treatment methods, but that theirs is believed to be the first to examine those elements along with morbidity and costs associated with care.
Skolasky added that their findings may reflect "selection bias," and lack of racial and ethnic diversity, and such further prospective studies are needed to affirm them.
"Despite these limitations, our study did capture a large percentage of the elderly population that was acutely hospitalized for treatment and also assessed long-term complications and survival," he concluded.
###
The research team included Andrew T. Chen, M.P.H., from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and David B. Cohen, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Related Web site:
The Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Johns Hopkins
http://www.hopkinsortho.org/index.html
Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM), headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, is a $6.7 billion integrated global health enterprise and one of the leading health care systems in the United States. JHM unites physicians and scientists of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with the organizations, health professionals and facilities of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System. JHM's vision, "Together, we will deliver the promise of medicine," is supported by its mission to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and clinical care. Diverse and inclusive, JHM educates medical students, scientists, health care professionals and the public; conducts biomedical research; and provides patient-centered medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat human illness. JHM operates six academic and community hospitals, four suburban health care and surgery centers, and more than 30 primary health care outpatient sites. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in 1889, was ranked number one in the nation for 21 years in a row by U.S. News & World Report.
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.
Yesterday, we welcomed into the world the Miix2, Lenovo's fresh entrant into the eight-inch Windows 8.1 tablet market. So when we spotted this newborn slate at a recent Pepcom event in San Francisco, we decided to take it for a spin. Our initial impressions veer positive. We admired the colorful 1,200 x 800 HD display and the 178-degree viewing angle certainly seemed sufficient to our eyes. There might be little too much bezel at the top and bottom for some, but that's a minor quibble. Measuring 8.5 inches x 1.6 inches x 0.32 inch, the Mixx2's all-plastic build doesn't feel quite as premium as metal, but its glossy front and smooth rear finish prevents it from feeling cheap.
Baked inside the Miix2 are Intel's quad-core Bay Trail-T Atom processor -- the same chip you'll find in the current wave of similarly sized Dells and Acers -- along with integrated Intel HD graphics. There wasn't too much lag when swiping through the tiled Start screen or the app menu, but we did detect a bit of a delay when launching apps and snapping pics. Though it's difficult to tell from such a short experience, photos from the 2-megapixel front-facing camera appeared rather grainy and we weren't exactly blown away by the low-light performance of the 5-megapixel rear shooter (That said, we're guessing most people don't choose tablets based solely on the camera). As for the Miix2's optional cover case or capacitive stylus, they were unavailable for us to test. Still, at first blush, the Miix2 seems like a decent offering if you want full fat Windows 8.1 tucked in a slim package for a not unreasonable price. For a closer look at the Miix2, check out our hands-on gallery below or simply wait until later this month to pick one up for a starting price of $299 each.
Thousands of students apply to college each year using the online Common Application. But a flawed overhaul of the system has left many students and parents frustrated.
Thousands of students apply to college each year using the online Common Application. But a flawed overhaul of the system has left many students and parents frustrated.
For many high school students this year, the already stressful process of applying to college has been made far worse by major technical malfunctions with the Common Application, an online application portal used by hundreds of colleges and universities.
"It's been stressful, to be honest," says Freya James, a senior in Atlanta applying to five schools — all early admissions. The Common App has been a nightmare, the 17-year-old says.
"No one likes applying to college anyway, and this is supposed to help and it's made it worse," she says. "I have spent a good number of hours just sitting there refreshing the page, doing nothing terribly productive except for trying to get this thing to work. ... It's not useful; it's not doing what it's meant to do."
The Common Application has been around for more than 30 years and has long made the application process easier for students and schools. With one common form, students are able to apply to dozens of schools at once.
But the number of schools using the form has more than doubled over the past decade. What was once used mainly by small liberal arts schools is now accepted by more than 500 institutions.
The nonprofit that runs the form, also called Common Application, had touted a major upgrade of software and applications as a way to streamline the process even more. Instead, the digital makeover has been a bust and a big mess for many students and higher education officials.
"Application Armageddon"
"There have been issues with being able to import the application itself, with receiving the supplemental materials like the transcripts or letters of recommendations, those kinds of things," says Lisa Meyer, dean for enrollment at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.
“ We did test the system. But what we couldn't test was tens of thousands of people hitting the system at the same time using multiple kinds of browsers.
"Those are very big things. It's very hard to read an application when you don't have a transcript to look at. ... So I think the colleges have been scrambling a bit," she says.
Other serious technical problems include payments that take days to register or registering duplicate payments. Other students complain they simply couldn't log in, while others were repeatedly logged off for inactivity after waiting hours to submit their applications.
Then there's the personal essay, a key part of the admissions process. A formatting glitch left many students' essays looking like a giant stream-of-consciousness blur with no spaces, paragraphs or indentations.
Many high-schoolers are ranting against the Common App on Twitter. Some of the kinder comments: "I'm freaking out, the common app isn't working"; "The common app is kind of the worst thing ever"; "The common app is broken ... so we're all just not gonna go to college, ok."
Irena Smith, a college admissions consultant based in the San Francisco area, says the problems are adding more stress for her student clients. "It's starting to look like application Armageddon," she says. And an official with the National Association for College Admission Counseling says, "There is a bit of panic in the community."
Schools Look For Backup Plans
A growing number of colleges and universities are now rolling back early admissions deadlines or trying to reassure students that they won't be penalized for technical failures of the Common App. As Columbia University, which has extended its early admission deadline, put it on its website, "We hope this announcement helps to relieve some of the stress and anxiety you might be feeling as the application deadline approaches."
In a statement, Common Application says it's "committed to resolving these issues promptly." Scott Anderson, the company's senior director for policy, says some of the problems have been resolved, but he concedes that others persist.
"We did test the system. But what we couldn't test was tens of thousands of people hitting the system at the same time using multiple kinds of browsers," Anderson says.
Many parents and school administrators, however, are frustrated and angry. "I think this has been a debacle, and the Common App board and leadership should be ashamed," says Valerie Weber, chairwoman of the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Commonwealth Medical College in Pennsylvania — and mother of a high school senior currently applying to college.
"How they have handled the mess will be a case study in business schools for years to come about how not to handle a PR catastrophe — hunker down, ignore and refuse to answer questions," Weber says.
A Lesson For Procrastinators?
Some in higher education are cautiously hopeful that the technical problems will be resolved by Nov. 1, the early admissions deadline for many schools, but others are getting nervous. Some schools are starting to make backup plans that include email, snail mail — even dusting off the fax machine. "That is certainly one of the things we are considering doing," says Meyer of Lewis and Clark College.
Mary Beth Fry, director of college counseling at Savannah Country Day School in Georgia, cautions students and parents to take a deep breath. "Everyone at the Common App and the colleges is doing his best, and — as some colleges' extensions of early action or early decision deadlines will attest — colleges are going to do what's best for everyone."
Admissions consultant Smith sees a "teaching moment" in all this: Some teenagers prone to procrastination may now be prodded into getting their applications done — early.
"In some ways it's nice to learn, as we do as adults, that you can't always anticipate that everything will go smoothly," she says. "It's nice to plan for contingencies and to get things done a little bit ahead of time."
But when that lesson comes with potentially crippling anxiety, she adds, maybe it's not such a great way to teach it.
They split up awhile back, but it seems Demi Lovato and Wilmer Valderrama are still on great terms with each other.
The “Skyscraper” songstress showed up at Pinz Bowling Center in Studio City last night (October 15) where she met up with her “That 70s Show” ex-boyfriend, sporting a black leather jacket, Ramones t-shirt, and distressed black trousers.
Of her fashion tastes, Lovato told press, “I wear a lot of leather, a lot of black. I like to describe it as rocker chic- sophisticated and glamorous in my own way.”
Demi also named a few lovely ladies she looks up to- “My style icons- I love Kirsten Stewart, I think she has incredible style. I also love Kate Moss.”
