Kathleen Sebelius: Health care site will be better by end of month
Kathleen Sebelius: Healthcare.gov will be better by end of month.
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Obama ally got $340 million to set up health care co-ops
A health insurance company headed by an old friend from President Obama #39;s days as a community organizer got a $340 million federal loan to establish Obamacar...
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Obama ally got $340 million to set up health care co-ops - Video
19.02.14 - Question 2: Hon Annette King to the Minister of Health
What recent reports has he seen on inadequate standards of health care in New Zealand? Provided by http://www.inthehouse.co.nz Produced by Tandem Studios.
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19.02.14 - Question 2: Hon Annette King to the Minister of Health - Video
Health care overhaul: How marketplaces work
Health care overhaul: How marketplaces work.
By: The Washington Examiner
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Health News: Health Care Financing In Nigeria
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KZN launches mobile health care programme
For more on this and other stories please visit http://www.enca.com/ Durban -- Health authorities in KwaZulu-Natal have launched a mobile health care program...
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Health Care REIT Inc. ( HCN ), a real estate investment trust (REIT), reported fourth-quarter 2013 normalized funds from operations (FFO) of 99 cents per share, 2 cents ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate and up 14 cents year over year.
The 16.5% year-over-year increase is primarily attributable to robust revenue growth, decent same-store cash NOI (net operating income) and notable portfolio restructuring activity.
Normalized Funds available for distribution (FAD) in the reported quarter stood at 86 cents per share, up from 74 cents per share in the year-ago period.
Total revenue reached $788.6 million, escalating 58.7% year over year. The figure also comfortably exceeded the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $784 million.
For full-year 2013, Healthcare REIT reported normalized FFO per share of $3.81 on revenues of $2.88 billion. Results were substantially higher than the prior-year normalized FFO per share of $3.52 on revenues of $1.81 billion. Additionally, normalized FAD for 2013 was $3.36 per share, up from $3.11 per share in 2012.
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Total same-store cash NOI in the fourth quarter increased 3.1% from the year-ago period. This included a 6.2% rise in the seniors housing operating portfolio.
During the quarter, Health Care REIT bought 12 properties for about $277.5 million. Also, the company completed 6 asset developments and 2 expansions for $89 million (at a blended yield of 8.0%) during the said quarter.
Additionally, Health Care REIT sold 5 seniors housing triple-net properties and 12 medical office buildings for $112 million. The dispositions also included a loan payoff.
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Babies who develop leukemia during the first year of life appear to inherit an unfortunate combination of genetic variations that can make the infants highly susceptible to the disease, according to a new study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota.
The research is available online in the journal Leukemia.
Doctors have long puzzled over why it is that babies just a few months old sometimes develop cancer. As infants, they have not lived long enough to accumulate a critical number of cancer-causing mutations.
Parents always ask why their child has developed leukemia, and unfortunately we have had few answers, said senior author Todd Druley, MD, PhD, a Washington University pediatric oncologist who treats patients at St. Louis Childrens Hospital. Our study suggests that babies with leukemia inherit a strong genetic predisposition to the disease.
The babies appear to have inherited rare genetic variants from both parents that by themselves would not cause problems, but in combination put the infants at high risk of leukemia. These variants most often occurred in genes known to be linked to leukemia in children, said Druley, an assistant professor of pediatrics.
Leukemia occurs rarely in infants, with only about 160 cases diagnosed annually in the United States. But unlike leukemia in children, which most often can be cured, about half of infants who develop leukemia die of the disease.
The researchers sequenced all the genes in the DNA of healthy cells from 23 infants with leukemia and their mothers. Looking at genes in the healthy cells helped the researchers understand which genetic variations were passed from a mother to her child, and by process of elimination, the scientists could determine the fathers contribution to a babys DNA.
Among the families studied, there was no history of pediatric cancers. The scientists also sequenced the DNA of 25 healthy children as a comparison.
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Genetic testing can help doctors choose the most effective and economical drugs to prevent blood clots in the half a million patients in the U.S. who receive coronary stents each year, according to a new study led by a UC San Francisco researcher.
The work, reported in the February 18, 2014 Annals of Internal Medicine, demonstrates that genetically guided personalized medicine, often perceived as pricier than traditional approaches, can both lower costs and increase the quality of health care.
Dhruv Kazi, MD, MSc, MS
Our results counter the general perception that personalized medicine is expensive, said Dhruv Kazi, MD, MSc, MS, assistant professor of medicine at UCSF and first author of the new study. What we have shown is that individualizing care based on genotype may in fact be very cost-effective in some settings, because it allows us to target the use of newer, more expensive drugs to the patients who are most likely to benefit from them.
According to the American Heart Association, about 500,000 patients per year in the U.S. receive stents to open up coronary arteries after experiencing unstable angina or a heart attack. These patients routinely begin a one-year regimen of aspirin taken daily in combination with a prescription antiplatelet medication, a dual therapy that can significantly reduce the risk of stent-clogging clots by preventing blood cells known as platelets from sticking together.
Historically, most patients have taken aspirin in combination with clopidogrel (trade name Plavix), but the effectiveness of that drug in preventing clotting and recurrent cardiovascular problems varies considerably among patients. One cause of this variability is that clopidogrel is a pro-drug: to work it must first be activated by a liver enzyme known as CYP2C19, and it is therefore less effective in patients who carry genetic variations that reduce the activity of the CYP2C19 gene. Approximately 28 percent of the population carries these genetic variations, which are known as loss-of-function alleles.
Two newer drugs, prasugrel (Effient) and ticagrelor (Brilinta), prevent clotting more reliably than clopidogrel in most patients, but they are considerably more expensive, and they can have troublesome side effects. Prasugrel can cause fatal bleeding in some patients, and ticagrelor can cause uncomfortable shortness of breath.
Juggling these variables of effectiveness, expense, side effects, and genetic factors has made it challenging for doctors to choose the right drug for their patients, particularly since neither the benefit of genetic testing for CYP2C19 variants nor the relative advantages of prasugrel versus ticagrelor have been tested in randomized clinical trials.
In the new research, Kazi and colleagues built a computer simulation based on 100,000 hypothetical 65-year-old patients receiving stents for heart problems. The model incorporated more than 100 quantitative parameters that might affect the choice of anti-platelet therapy, including clinical data from the medical literature and Medicare claims, procedure and hospitalization costs from national datasets, as well as actuarial information from published life tables.
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Personalized Medicine a Cost-Effective Way to Tailor Drug Therapy After Stents
February 19, 2014
Image Credit: Christof Angst, Biberfachstelle
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online
Long-prized for their thick fur, the cuddly Eurasian beaver has been hunted by humans for thousands of years and a new genetic study from a large group of international researchers has found that predation by humans has significantly cut down the genetic diversity of these animals.
While beaver populations have been growing rapidly since the late 19th century when conservation efforts began, genetic diversity within modern beaver populations remains considerably reduced to what was present prior to the period of human hunting and habitat reduction, said study author Michi Hofreiter, a biology professor from the University of York in the United Kingdom.
In the study, which was published in the journal Molecular Ecology, the research team found that the Eurasian beaver can be divided into three different groups. The two predominant ones are in western and Eastern Europe and a now extinct, and previously unknown, third group inhabiting the Danube river basin. This population was around at least 6,000 years ago but vanished during the transition to modern society.
The rapid loss of diversity prior to conservation efforts appears to have established a very strong pattern for the geographic distribution of genetic diversity among present-day beaver populations, Hofreiter said.
After centuries of being hunted by humans, the Eurasian beaver had faded from the majority of its original range at the end of the 1800s, with approximately 1,200 beavers remaining. The researchers said they wanted to see if the lack of genetic diversity and strong distribution of genetic diversity seen today are caused by hunting or had already existed before the beavers range was diminished.
To reach their conclusion, the team analyzed DNA from 48 ancient beaver samples, ranging in age from a few hundred to about 11,000 years old, and over 150 modern beavers. The analytical work was performed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
We found that overall there was more genetic diversity in the past, said study author Susanne Horn, from the institute. Apparently, already in ancient times an ancient contact zone existed between the eastern and western populations of beavers in the Oder River area. This is close to a present-day contact zone in Germany and Poland.
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Genetic Diversity Of The European Beaver In Peril Due To Human Predation
PHILADELPHIA A newly developed, more specific approach to classifying tumors by molecular type can help cancer researchers to determine tumor characteristics and guide treatment strategies. A team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Wistar Institute have created the first isoform-level assay for stratifying tumors at a molecular level, in patients with glioblastoma, the most common and most aggressive type of malignant primary brain tumor. This new classifier is more efficient and replicable in a laboratory setting than existing diagnostic tools, and can provide more accurate predictions for survival and how glioblastoma patients may respond to different treatments.
"Current tests can help classify tumor types to a lesser degree. This new classifying system improves both the diagnostic accuracy and the efficiency of the testing process," said Donald O'Rourke, MD, associate professor of Neurosurgery with Penn's Abramson Cancer Center and director of the Penn Brain Tumor Tissue Bank. "The more detailed information we have about the tumor, at a molecular level, the better we can target new immunotherapies and other treatments for our patients with glioblastoma."
Penn Medicine's Center for Personalized Diagnostics (CPD) currently analyzes all brain tumors to determine the best treatment approach for a given tumor type. This new approach would be complementary to the work of the CPD on brain tumor specimens and enhance the overall effort of molecular sub typing of GBM tumors.
This new isoform-based classifier, which looks at variations within cellular RNA, improves prediction accuracy and requires half the variables for the analysis than the genetic-based analysis. The isoform classifier glioblastoma tumor noted the correct subtype with 92 percent accuracy, according to the study, published in Nucleic Acids Research.
The study was completed in collaboration with Ramana Davuluri, PhD, formerly at The Wistar Institute and now at Northwestern University and colleagues. For more details on the study, please see the Wistar Institute press release.
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Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of theRaymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania(founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and theUniversity of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according toU.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals byU.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; Chester County Hospital; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Chestnut Hill Hospital and Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided$827million to benefit our community.
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Penn Medicine and Wistar Scientists Create Precise Tumor Classifier for Glioblastoma
Duke researchers use gene therapy to direct stem cells into becoming new cartilage on a synthetic scaffold even after implantation into a living body
By Ken Kingery
By combining a synthetic scaffolding material with gene delivery techniques, researchers at Duke University are getting closer to being able to generate replacement cartilage where it's needed in the body.
Performing tissue repair with stem cells typically requires applying copious amounts of growth factor proteinsa task that is very expensive and becomes challenging once the developing material is implanted within a body. In a new study, however, Duke researchers found a way around this limitation by genetically altering the stem cells to make the necessary growth factors all on their own.
They incorporated viruses used to deliver gene therapy to the stem cells into a synthetic material that serves as a template for tissue growth. The resulting material is like a computer; the scaffold provides the hardware and the virus provides the software that programs the stem cells to produce the desired tissue.
The study appears online the week of Feb. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An artistic rendering of human stem cells on the polymer scaffolds. Photo courtesy of Charles Gersbach and Farshid Guilak, Duke University
The traditional approach has been to introduce growth factor proteins, which signal the stem cells to differentiate into cartilage. Once the process is under way, the growing cartilage can be implanted where needed.
But a major limitation in engineering tissue replacements has been the difficulty in delivering growth factors to the stem cells once they are implanted in the body, said Guilak, who is also a professor in Dukes Department of Biomedical Engineering. Theres a limited amount of growth factor that you can put into the scaffolding, and once its released, its all gone. We need a method for long-term delivery of growth factors, and thats where the gene therapy comes in.
A microscopic view using electron microscopy of human stem cells and viral gene carriers adhering to the fibers of a polymer scaffold. Photo courtesy of Charles Gersbach and Farshid Guilak, Duke University
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Injections of a normally silent gene sparked recovery in pigs induced to have heart attacks
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When a heart attack brings blood flow to a screeching halt, thats only the first assault on our fist-size organ. Among survivors, the recovery itself fuels more permanent damage to the heart. Scar tissue can harden once-flexible heart muscle, making it less elastic. And as tentacles of this tissue creep over the aorta the heart muscle can no longer fully contract. This long-term damage can minimize the amount of oxygen-rich blood sent throughout the body, which can send patients spiraling into heart failure. Heart transplants are one way to circumvent these scar tissue issues, but donor hearts are always in short supply. Devising other truly effective solutions has long eluded researchers. A form of gene therapy, however, is now showing promise in pigs. It turns out that a normally silent gene called Cyclin A2, or CCNA2, can be coaxed into action to combat the formation of scar tissue in pigs that suffer a heart attack. This treatment sparked regeneration of heart muscle cells in pigs as well as improvements in the volume of blood pushed out with every beat. The finding is published in the February 19 issue of Science Translational Medicine. Gene therapy, the authors hope, may one day join stem cell treatments as a contender for transforming the way doctors treat heart failure. Stem cellbased therapies have already resulted in more healthy tissue and decreased scar mass in human clinical trials as well as small improvements in how much blood the heart can pump from one chamber to another. But as Scientific American reported in April 2013, many questions remain about which stem cells to use and how to prepare them. For this study, researchers randomly assigned 18 pigs recovering from heart attacks to either receive injections of the gene expressed under a promoter (which would force it to be expressed) or the same solution without the gene. Pigs treated with the gene had greater success pushing out blood with each heartbeat, but also produced a greater number of heart muscle cells. These findings echo the teams earlier heart regeneration successes in mice and rats. The researchers replicated their findings in a petri dish and watched adult porcine heart muscle cells treated with the same regimen of gene therapy undergo complete cell division in the dishdemonstrating under a microscope how the heart cells were dividing and thriving with the gene therapy. This new approach mimics the kind of regeneration we see in the newt and zebra fish, says lead author Hina Chaudhry, the director of cardiovascular regenerative medicine at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. If the technique proves successful in humans, it could boost patient recovery rates by helping strengthen heart muscles and improving blood flow, all while giving a needed lift to gene therapy research, which has been slow to gain momentum in the U.S. In 1999 Jesse Gelsinger, 18, died after a gene therapy experiment cost him his life. The virus used to deliver a gene that would potentially control his rare digestive disorder fueled a massive and fatal immune reaction. That highly publicized case, along with other gene therapy missteps, put a pall on the field. Chaudhry says that her team is proceeding with caution and plans to be careful when administering this treatment to patient populations. For patients who have a large heart attack who are at risk of heart failure, I think the therapy is going to be very beneficial, she says. If you have a small heart attack, it probably wont make as much of a difference in overall survival because of advances with todays medicines. As more researchers look to gene therapy for previously intractable human conditions, a success with heart attack treatments could send ripples throughout the field.
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Gene Therapy Shows Promise for Treating Heart Attack Victims
By combining a synthetic scaffolding material with gene delivery techniques, researchers at Duke University are getting closer to being able to generate replacement cartilage where it's needed in the body.
Performing tissue repair with stem cells typically requires applying copious amounts of growth factor proteins -- a task that is very expensive and becomes challenging once the developing material is implanted within a body. In a new study, however, Duke researchers found a way around this limitation by genetically altering the stem cells to make the necessary growth factors all on their own.
They incorporated viruses used to deliver gene therapy to the stem cells into a synthetic material that serves as a template for tissue growth. The resulting material is like a computer; the scaffold provides the hardware and the virus provides the software that programs the stem cells to produce the desired tissue.
The study appears online the week of Feb. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Farshid Guilak, director of orthopaedic research at Duke University Medical Center, has spent years developing biodegradable synthetic scaffolding that mimics the mechanical properties of cartilage. One challenge he and all biomedical researchers face is getting stem cells to form cartilage within and around the scaffolding, especially after it is implanted into a living being.
The traditional approach has been to introduce growth factor proteins, which signal the stem cells to differentiate into cartilage. Once the process is under way, the growing cartilage can be implanted where needed.
"But a major limitation in engineering tissue replacements has been the difficulty in delivering growth factors to the stem cells once they are implanted in the body," said Guilak, who is also a professor in Duke's Department of Biomedical Engineering. "There's a limited amount of growth factor that you can put into the scaffolding, and once it's released, it's all gone. We need a method for long-term delivery of growth factors, and that's where the gene therapy comes in."
For ideas on how to solve this problem, Guilak turned to his colleague Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and an expert in gene therapy. Gersbach proposed introducing new genes into the stem cells so that they produce the necessary growth factors themselves.
But the conventional methods for gene therapy are complex and difficult to translate into a strategy that would be feasible as a commercial product.
This type of gene therapy generally requires gathering stem cells, modifying them with a virus that transfers the new genes, culturing the resulting genetically altered stem cells until they reach a critical mass, applying them to the synthetic cartilage scaffolding and, finally, implanting it into the body.
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Fishtown Futurist T-Shirt
http://9nl.de/fishtownfuture Show your support for Philadelphia #39;s own Fishtown wit dis limited edition t-shirt.
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Business as usual is dead: a short summary by Futurist Speaker Gerd Leonhard
Thanks for stopping by! Gerd Leonhard Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker Basel / Switzerland http://www.futuristgerd.com Please note: audio-only versions o...
By: Gerd Leonhard
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Business as usual is dead: a short summary by Futurist Speaker Gerd Leonhard - Video
RETRO FUTURIST avec Mr LIBERTY au CLUB 40
By: Vido Quarante
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Posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2014 by Angie Han
If Spike Jonzes Her left you yearning for a virtual Scarlett Johansson of your very own, we have some good news. According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, who spends a lot of time pondering such things, a Samantha-like A.I. could be available as early as 2029.Other aspects of the movie, like the foul-mouthed video game character, could be available even sooner, around 2020.
Kurzweil made his predictions in his review of the sci-fi romance, which he regarded as more realistic than other cinematic depictions of A.I. Still, he had a few bones to pick with Jonzes movie, including its ending. Find out why after the jump.
The scientist was quite taken withHer as a movie, praising its well-crafted script, excellent directing, and outstanding performances. But any film critic couldve told you that.Where Kurzweils writeup gets interesting is when he delves into the science of it all, and puts it alongsideThe Matrix andBeing John Malkovich as a realistic vision of a future technology.
I would place some of the elements in Jonzes depiction at around 2020, give or take a couple of years, such as the diffident and insulting videogame character he interacts with, and the pin-sized cameras that one can place like a freckle on ones face. Other elements seem more like 2014, such as the flat-panel displays, notebooks and mobile devices.
He continues, Samantha herself I would place at 2029, when the leap to human-level AI would be reasonably believable. But he didnt find everything about Jonzes movie to be completely believable.
As I mentioned, a lot of the dramatic tension is provided by the fact that Theodores love interest does not have a body. But this is an unrealistic notion. It would be technically trivial in the future to provide her a virtual visual presence to match her virtual auditory presence, using, lens-mounted displays, for example, that display images onto Theodores retinas.
Additionally, in Kurzweils view, the ending doesnt make much sense. (Spoilers follow from here on out.) Not only does Samantha evolve much more quickly than Kurzweil thinks is plausible, theres really no need for her and the other A.I.s to leave the humans behind.
If they are progressing in this way, it means that they can continue their relationships with the unenhanced humans using an increasingly small portion of their cognitive ability, he points out.
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil Believes Spike Jonzes Her Could Be a Reality by 2029
"This is what the East Bay looks like." The Seshen
GOLDIES "What was the latest? Afro-futurism? Afro-futurism," says Lalin St. Juste, songwriter and lead singer in the East Bay band The Seshen, of how the somewhat un-categorizable band has been categorized by critics most recently. "Which we're kind of OK with. It makes me think of, like, a silver afro."
"Or, you know, like we trade in afro futures," says keyboardist Mahesh Rao, between bites of chips and salsa, eliciting a burst of laughter from his bandmates. "Electro-soul is OK too. We were calling ourselves electro-pop for a while, but then Paris Hilton came out with a record a while back that she was calling electro-pop, and I was like, Lalin, we gotta take that off our business cards."
Call them what you will. The sounds this seven-piece band makes are captivating, layering the soulful, Erykah Badu-reminiscent vocals of St. Juste and the musical theater-trained Akasha Orr whose smile you can hear in her voice with precise electronic samples, dub sounds, R&B guitar grooves, bass lines that beg to be bumped out your car window at a stoplight, and percussion that seems to borrow from at least three continents.
It's both sexy and a little nerdy: immersive, inviting, warmer than your weirdest Radiohead, but with a chilled-out, dreamy, late-night sensibility and spirituality. It'd be just at home on an indie-rock mix as, say, Beach House, but it's hardly background music there's just too damn much going on. Live, the Seshen is committed to a specific blend of electronic elements and "humanity...I think we have something really human and warm, because of the vocals, live drums, other human elements," says percussionist Mirza Kopelman. Regardless, the band's setup is far from straightforward; St. Juste's custom pedal board looks like it could power a small plane. "Sound guys hate us," offers synchronizer-sampler Kumar Butler.
People often don't quite know what to do with them, Seshen members are the first to admit. They've been labeled "world music" in the past simply because, as far as they can tell, they're seven people representing a wide range of ethnicities. But especially following the release of last summer's spaced-out, sped-up trip-hoppy, drum-and-keyboard-driven single "2000 Seasons," which revealed a more upbeat sound than The Seshen's self-titled 2012 debut, hip-shaking seems to be a common reaction.
Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover
"Some songs are meant for sitting and relaxing," says St. Juste, "but in general, we want people to dance." Bigger crowds and stages have followed. Playing Oakland's Hiero Day last year, band members were overwhelmed to hear that some of their local childhood hip-hop heroes were Seshen fans, too.
It's a rehearsal evening, which means members are sprawled around their studio the tricked-out den of an El Cerrito house that St. Juste, producer-bassist Aki Ehara, and Orr all share with snacks and beers and their notes about the most recent mixes of their upcoming EP, due out this spring. There's a dartboard in one corner; a campy poster featuring the winged angel version of Michael Jackson dominates another, while D'Angelo stares across the room from an LP cover.
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Do You Really Have Time Freedom?
http://www.InspiringU2Success.com in most cases we think we have time freedom but we really don #39;t.
By: Kay Ready
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