Monthly Archives: August 2011
Don’t believe everything you read about Steve Jobs!
RIP webOS. What is the takeaway?
This week (at least when this was written), on 18 August, HP killed webOS, as well as the the Pre phones and the Touchpad tablet that ran on them. The question is there anything we can learn from this situation?
Coming soon- to your mailbox (US Postal or eMail)
You know that despite all the hoopla, lawsuits, demonstrations, whatever, most people have already begun to benefit from the Health Insurance Reform (Patient Protection &Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590) and the Health Care & Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872) passed in 2009. It would have been nice to have a real health reform bill, but given the first sentence, it’s not surprising that the half-a-loaf logic obtained.
Continue reading Coming soon- to your mailbox (US Postal or eMail)
Let’s stem the STEM problem
The President’s Job Council is meeting right before the start of the college year (very soon) in Portland (OR). The desire is to hear from America’s top engineering colleges to discern issues affecting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curricula. The goal (this is business, as well as political) is to get colleges and universities to produce the world’s brightest workers.
Taxes? Now? It’s only August!
Another installment in the changes coming about- or, why I am discussing taxes in August.
First- if you filed an extension, the clock is ticking- much louder now. 15 October is the absolute drop dead date for individuals (15 September for corporations). And, that is only for the filing. Your taxes IN FULL were due way back in April (or March for corporations). Filing an extension really only helps if you don’t owe money. If you do owe money, you can expect to pay penalties and interest, too. Someone is going to pay that deficit down.
Whither? Wither?
If you thought our education problems did not have any simple answers, why would you expect turning economies around to have one? We’ve heard the pronouncements of would-be economists: The World is Flat! China is the future ! (Sort of reminds me of the advice given to Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate”: Plastics!)
Obesity buster?
Dr. Suraj Unniappan, along with Drs. Gonzalez,Perry, Ceddia, Reingold, Gao, Gaidhu, and Tsushima from York University (Canada) have been expanding their research on nefstatin-1, a brain protein. This protein was first described in Nature (2006) by Dr. Mori (along with 14 other researchers from Japan), where it was found to interact with receptors in the nucleus and hypothalamus.
Leaving Facebook? Why would a drug company do that?
One of my friends (Lynn Brown) wrote about defending your reputation in the age of social media, last week. [Sorry- Lynn removed the actual blog from circulation sometime during the past decade (30June2021)] The same time that big pharma was pulling back from their Facebook efforts.
Continue reading Leaving Facebook? Why would a drug company do that?
Bye, Bye, Viri!
Drs. Rider, Zook, Boettcher, Wick, Pancoast, and Zusman took my breath away today (11 August 2011). These MIT researchers may have developed a “broad-spectrum” anti-viral and published the results in PLoSOne. That’s right- it kills many different kind of viri. Just like penicillin was able to do against bacteria.