June 2009

Monthly Archive

Dell: Putting on stickers is costly

Posted by admin on 08 Jun 2009 | Tagged as: House Of Hardware

Buying a new computer is an exciting event for most people. Many consumers find it fun to unpack and put together their new PC, expecting it to look clean and flawless. But many are disappointed when they find tacky Microsoft and Intel stickers cluttering an otherwise sleek design.

The stickers either fade and peel themselves off over time-making the computer look even worse-or the consumer has to delicately and painstakingly peel off the stickers by hand in order to make the obtrusive logos disappear.

Finally a company with some influence is doing something about it. Dell, the PC giant, is having talks with both Microsoft and Intel about omitting vicarious advertising from its machines.

Dell doesn’t care that other companies’ logos are seen on their computers as much as it cares about saving some extra dough. For them, putting the stickers on each computer takes a lot of time, and therefore money, especially considering Dell is the world’s largest PC maker, currently supplying more than 16 percent of the worldwide PC market. As the Chinese and Latin American markets continue to grow, putting those pesky stickers on each machine becomes what Dell has called “a significant bottleneck.”

Certainly Intel and Microsoft are going to fight to keep their logos on every machine they power-including Dell’s-so stay tuned. But perhaps our days of picking off pesky logo stickers are numbered.

Jonathan Munk writes articles for major Logo Design companies such as LogoDesign.com and LogoWorks.com.

Visit LogoDesign.com, an excellent resource for Logo Design news, articles, tips and information.

Read what USA Today says about LogoWorks

Dr. Walter Freeman’s Frontal Lobotomies at Athens (Ohio) State Hospital

Posted by admin on 07 Jun 2009 | Tagged as: Living History

Few chapters in the medical history of Athens County, Ohio, are more notorious or fascinating than that concerning Walter Freeman, M.D., and the more than 200 frontal lobotomies he performed at the Athens State Hospital in seven visits between 1953 and 1957.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, treatment for most inpatients in large state hospitals, like that in Athens, was limited to providing a safe and humane environment. Effective drugs for mental illnesses did not become available until the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1936 Egas Moniz, M.D., a Portugese physician who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work, reported the results of his earliest frontal lobotomies in a French medical journal. Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who had met Dr. Moniz a year earlier, was impressed with the report. Within the same year Dr. Freeman teamed with a neurosurgeon to perform the operation, and over the next decade the partners operated on many more cases. However, Freeman became frustrated with the operation’s limitations. In 1946 he developed an alternative procedure that could be done more quickly, outside an operating room, and without anesthetic drugs.

He used electroconvulsive therapy to produce drugless anesthesia. After the patient’s convulsive movements subsided, Dr. Freeman operated.

Lifting an upper eyelid, he inserted a long, metal pick between the eyeball and the eyelid until it reached the bony roof of the eye-socket. He pounded the pick through the bone into the braincase where it entered a frontal lobe of the brain. He repeated the insertion procedure on the opposite side. Then, using the outer ends of the picks as handles, he made sweeping movements which severed and destroyed the frontal lobes. He finished before the patient awoke from the after-effects of the induced seizure.

Dr. Freeman performed this procedure in state hospitals nationwide that were understaffed, overflowing with patients, and very receptive to any new treatment that held promise. Every state hospital of that era could give electroconvulsive treatment, and the hospital did not have to provide an operating room. A minor procedure room sufficed.

Freeman met with families of patients, explained the risks and benefits of the procedure, and answered questions. Some families consented and others didn’t. Assisted by the local medical staff, and with a succession of patients filing into and out of the procedure room, Freeman typically operated on his entire case-load in just one day. Charging $25 per patient for his services, he departed within a few days for his next destination.

Freeman visited the Athens State Hospital more times than any of the other state hospitals in Ohio. On his first visit in 1953 he was treated as a minor celebrity. The Athens Messenger of November 16 reported his arrival with the headline “Lobotomies to be performed: surgery may relieve mental illness of many patients at state hospital.” A follow-up article on November 20–entitled “Dr. Freeman, pioneer in trans-orbital technique, demonstrates method: lobotomies are performed on 31 Athens State Hospital patients”–
showed pictures of Freeman with the local staff, including Superintendent Charles Creed, Assistant Superintendent Hubert Fockler and Drs. Beatrice Postle Fockler, Wayne Dutton and Genevieve Garrett Dutton.

The surgeries were performed in the Receiving Hospital, a separate building constructed in 1950 which is now the eastern-most portion of the main building.

Wolfhard Baumgaertel, M.D., longtime general practitioner in Albany, Ohio, was present for Freeman’s third visit to Athens in October 1954. Dr. Baumgaertel watched the procedure on the day’s first patient, and then
provided after-care for this patient and all the others who followed.

Despite his familiarity with surgery, Dr. Baumgaertel recalled being surprised by the procedure, saying, “I do not remember which made me more aghast while watching this–the hammering of the picks into the brain or the simultaneous movement of the picks’ handles in the doctor’s hands.”

Describing his after-care of Freeman’s patients, Dr. Baumgaertel said, “At regular intervals the patients arrived in the recovery room, my domain during this, to me, unknown and incomprehensible event. My main equipment consisted of several suction machines and oxygen, the latter being somewhat unnecessary. Vital signs were monitored until the patient woke up. We had no major complications. Some nasal drainage of cerebral liquor was not considered a problem.

“I do not remember any immediate or late post-operative deaths in the patients I attended to. Most returned to their floors in the asylum within one to two weeks. Of course, none of them were able to recall the event, but there were also no questions. I remember having been surprised to the point of being shaken when I discovered a total absence of wonder on the part of the patients as to what happened to them.”

Geneva Riley, R.N., who was director of nursing at the Athens State Hospital 1975-1993, witnessed the same procedure at another facility. She likened the noise made by the picks to the sound of cloth tearing.

In the mid-1990s the author encountered one of Dr. Freeman’s former patients at Doctors Hospital of Nelsonville in Nelsonville, Ohio. His computed tomographic (CT) scan showed large areas of damage to the frontal lobes. The radiologist, unaware of the patient’s prior history, interpreted the abnormalities as due to strokes.

But the patient and his wife had a different story to tell. Emotionally traumatized by combat in World War II, the man was an inpatient at Athens State Hospital in the 1950s when Dr. Freeman came to town. The patient was functioning at a low level, dropping to the ground at any sudden noise and smoking cigarettes beneath a blanket. His wife agreed to the procedure which was complicated by hemorrhage. Even so, he improved and was discharged from the hospital after three months. For many years he operated heavy equipment without difficulty except for an occasional seizure.

Asked if she had regrets, the patient’s wife said, “No. I still think I made the right decision.”

To see pictures related to this article visit: http://www.cordingleyneurology.com/lobotomiespictures.html

(C) 2005 by Gary Cordingley

Gary Cordingley, MD, PhD, is a clinical neurologist, teacher and researcher who works in Athens, Ohio. For more health-related articles see his websites at: www.cordingleyneurology.com and www.neurologyarticles.com

A Massive Amount of Players Every Week Prefer to Use the Same Lotto Numbers for Their Entries; Which in a Lot of Countries Will Only Cover a Part of Any Potential Lottery Selection

Posted by admin on 07 Jun 2009 | Tagged as: Gambler Den, Lotto, Bets, Wagers

Is it Possible to crack the code implementing your own particular strategy or trust on an e-lottery syndicate to select them on your behalf? We unrealistically believe that if we do not do anything or do it the wrong way that something bad may happen, in this event; if we miss doing our numbers they are sure to come up!

A staggering amount of players every week prefer to use the same lotto numbers; invariably these are memorable dates, which in many countries will only cover a part of any possible lotto selections.

Being the one to pick the winning lottery numbers is of course something every committed lotto player wants to do and as human beings, we possess an acquired bias against anything random, we like some form of control and conventions that make sense to us all.

Just because a lottery number seems to come up more frequently; why should it come up again? its practically impossible to choose any set of lotto numbers that are likely to win. Lotteries are a game of pure chance and every lottery number picked is merely at random. So the bottom line is - no number is more random than the next.

If you take a look at the chances of probability, as one lottery number is drawn the likelihood of your chosen number being picked next is slightly increased simply because the possible selection is less.

If you choose the same lotto numbers each week, remember they are however random lottery numbers and you stand just as much an opportunity of winning with those same numbers as with a lucky-dip option. All The Same, if you use birthday numbers in a lotto draw your individual chances of winning the lottery jackpot still remain the same but also your individual chance of keeping the lottery jackpot to yourself is significantly reduced because so many other players employ birthday numbers in their choices.

Using the same numbers will mean you would have to play 135,000 times to even get an evens chance of winning. Unfortunately, to win the lottery jackpot you just have more or less a 1 in 14 million chance of being successful; nevertheless we all reckon it could be us. Does that sound like a good chance; would you be better off joining a lotto syndicate?

Blu-Ray set to take the world by storm!

Posted by admin on 05 Jun 2009 | Tagged as: House Of Hardware

The Blu-ray Disc belongs to a new generation of optical discs capable of staging high density data. Blu-Ray technology is based on a blue-violet coloured laser. The blue laser operates at a wave length of 405 nm, while older technology such as DVDs and CDs are based on red and infrared lasers that works at 650 and 780 nm. Since the wave length is shorter with a blue laser, the new Blu-ray technology makes is possible to store much more information

The advantage with the Blu-ray technology is that the laser beam can be focused much more tightly at the surface of the disc. Tight focus means that a smaller spot will be produced on the surface on the disc, and when the spots become smaller there will naturally be room for more information on each disc. The minimum spot size of any laser depends on a naturally accruing phenomenon called diffraction. The narrow beam of light sent out from a laser will always diverge into a wider beam eventually, due to the natural diffraction of waves. Diffraction will also occur the waves meet an obstruction. By reducing the wavelength of a laser, we can affect the diffraction.

In Blu-ray technology, the diffractions is also affected by the fact that the lens used to focus the light has a higher numerical aperture than the lenses found in ordinary DVDs - 0.85 instead of 0.6. Blu-ray technology based appliances are also equipped with a dual-lens system of supreme quality, and the cover layer has been made thinner in order to prevent unwanted optical effects. All this makes it possible for a Blu-ray laser to focus on much smaller spots. The optical improvements are accompanied with a new method for encoding data which makes it possible to store even more data on the Blu-ray disc.

The standard for Blu-ray technology has been developed as a joint venture between several major manufacturers of PCs and consumer electronics, including Sony and Philips. The group is called the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). The first Blu-ray recorder was launched in Japan in 2003, by Sony. Today, Samsung, JVC, Matsushita (Panasonic) and LG Electronics are all examples of companies using Blu-ray technology in their products. Hewlett Packard has announced that they will release desktop PCs equipped with Blu-ray technology in late 2005.

The main competitor for the Blu-ray technology is the HD DVD format which is also capable of storing more information than a normal DVD. The Blu-ray technology does however allow for more information per layer than the HD DVD format - 25 GB compared to 15 GB. The Blu-ray technology will on the other hand most likely be more expensive to support, at least initially, which can make the HD DVD a tempting alternative. In a Blu-ray disc, the data is stored extremely close to the surface. This made the first Blu-ray discs extremely vulnerable to scratching and many users preferred the tougher HD DVD discs. Since 2004, all Blu-ray discs are coated with a clear polymer called “Durabis” which makes them much more durable. According to the developers of Durabis, the TDK Corporation, a coated Blu-ray disc will work even after being attacked with a screwdriver.

Paul Colbert of Blu Ray World is an author of various articles relating to new technology and innovations. All content may be used freely but may not be altered in anyway without prior written consent by webcashflow LLC and a link back to Blu-Ray-World.com must be given.

Is Being Bald the Current Most Recent Fad?

Posted by admin on 02 Jun 2009 | Tagged as: Universe Of Self Improvement

Men have constantly been self conscious about going bald, nonetheless these days being bald is fast becoming a fashion fad. Plentiful of this generation’s male stars are having bald heads. People will find many of the trendiest younger celebs with bald heads, by decision. There are also many elder stars that are not covering up the fact that they are becoming bald. These trends are wonderful for men, that do not want to care about being bald. The additional wonderful news for men that are losing their hair, is that there are lots of advanced hair solutions, then ever before.

Should you need reassurance that being bald is attractive just look at Vin Diesel, Howie Mandel, Bruce Willis & Andre Agassi. All of these men are some of the most attractive men in America, & they are all bald. Whether bald by choice or by nature, baldness could make one look extremely distinguished and trendy. When men are bald and bold, they are particularly appealing. Just like any fashion, being bald is all about attitude. When you are bald you need to own a positive attitude, then you can have no doubt engaging girls.

If you are going bald, but you are not yet hopeful with your new feature, there are many remedies out there. Several hair loss treatments, assist you grow back your own natural hair. When you grow back your own hair, it will look and feel effectively natural. Growing back your own hair will help you look and feel younger, and can often aid you feel even more confidant. Growing back one’s own hair is a great opportunity, for the reason that you can continue to look like yourself, only younger. Check out the latest hair loss treatments at Advanced Hair Studio.

For the reason that growing your own hair again is not an option, there are also many advanced hair remedy that will aid you get a full head of hair back. No matter what sort of baldness issues you are experiencing, rest assured that there is a hair loss cure that will work for you. Some of the advanced hair therapies are more sophisticated, and it will take a longer period before you enjoy a full head of hair. Various men worry, about their hair looking natural after they use these advanced hair remedies. Be sure to communicate to the doctor or the person doing the hair treatments, to make sure you completely understand the outcome.

The most crucial thing about hair loss, is that you feel natural and comfortable. If you feel gorgeous bald, don’t care about getting hair loss remedies. If you are self conscious about your thinning hair, you are not alone. If you do your comparison, and get the leading hair loss treatment for you, you are sure to feel great with your hair.

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