Health Care: Consultants Boyd & Nicholas acquired

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Simione Healthcare Consultants, a Conn.-based consulting firm in home health and hospice care, announced that it acquired Boyd & Nicholas, Inc. itself a health care consulting firm based in Rohnert Park that was co-founded by Thomas Boyd and Thomas Nicholas.

The acquisition combines the two teams and opens a formal West Coast operation for Simione, which focuses on operations, finance, compliance, sales and marketing, technology and mergers and acquisitions.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

We are delighted to welcome the Boyd & Nicholas team to further improve clinical and financial performance for our nations home health and hospice providers, Robert Simione, managing principal at Simione, said in a statement. Cost reporting remains a cornerstone on which Simione was founded, and our joining together will enhance access to expertise as challenges continue to increase for home health and hospice organizations. We believe this partnership will help more health providers minimize risk and eliminate barriers to financial success at a time when increasing demands threaten the livelihood of so many home care and hospice organizations.

Boyd & Nicholas has specialized in cost report preparation, a requirement for home health agencies receiving Medicare reimbursements, financial analysis, accounting and due diligence since 1993. Mr. Boyd will join Simione as vice president of reimbursable services, with nearly four decades of Medicare reimbursement expertise, including 12 years with a Medicare intermediary for home health providers. A frequent national and state speaker, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 2013 National Association for Home Care and Hospice Financial Managers Conference. He is a member of the Home Care and Hospice Financial Managers Association.

Simione Healthcare Consultants, founded in 1966 and based in Hamden, operates in 23 states, providing business solutions for the home health and hospice industry. It includes performance improvement across the health care landscape, ranging from hospitals, health networks and agencies for more effective delivery of home health and hospice care. More than 1,000 organizations use Simiones services, the company said.

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Santa Rosa-based Oakmont Senior Living is highlighting the recent opening of The Terraces, which it said creates new care options for regional families with loved ones afflicted by Alzheimers and other forms of dementia.

The 33-unit community in Santa Rosa, located on the recently opened, $52 million Fountaingrove Lodge retirement campus, offers a continuum of specialized memory care services designed to meet the physical, emotional, cognitive and social needs of individuals with early to advanced stages of memory loss, according to Oakmont.

Oakmont Senior Living said the number of individuals with memory loss disorders continues to escalate each year, creating demand for specialized care that effectively handles patients conditions as memory, judgment and reasoning skills decline. Many forms of dementia are degenerative; and as symptoms become more severe, drastic behavioral changes set in and the ability to perform daily living activities deteriorates, according to Oakmont.

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Health Care: Consultants Boyd & Nicholas acquired

The American Chestnut's Genetic Rebirth

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A foreign fungus nearly wiped out North America's once vast chestnut forests. Genetic engineering can revive them

In 1876 Samuel B. Parsons received a shipment of chestnut seeds from Japan and decided to grow and sell the trees to orchards. Unbeknownst to him, his shipment likely harbored a stowaway that caused one of the greatest ecological disasters ever to befall eastern North America. The trees probably concealed spores of a pathogenic fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, to which Asian chestnut treesbut not their American cousinshad evolved resistance. C. parasitica effectively strangles a susceptible tree to death by forming cankerssunken areas of dead plant tissuein its bark that encircle the trunk and cut off the flow of water and nutrients between the roots and leaves. Within 50 years this one fungus killed more than three billion American chestnut trees.

Before the early 1900s the American chestnut constituted about 25 percent of hardwood trees within its range in the eastern deciduous forests of the U.S. and a sliver of Canadadeciduous forests being those composed mostly of trees that shed their leaves in the autumn. Today only a handful of fully grown chestnuts remain, along with millions of root stumps. Now and then these living stumps manage to send up a few nubile shoots that may survive for 10 years or longer. But the trees rarely live long enough to produce seeds because the fungus almost always beats them back down again.

2014 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

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The American Chestnut's Genetic Rebirth

Rose scent in poplar trees? University turns to genetic engineering

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WSU staff scientist Barri Herman, who oversees the field trials, holds a tray of genetically engineered poplar cuttings, Jan. 13, 2014. (Greg Gilbert/Seattle Times/MCT)

Under USDA regulations, every genetically engineered tree is tagged and its GPS coordinates noted, as seen, Jan. 13, 2014, in Washington State. (Greg Gilbert/Seattle Times/MCT)

SEATTLE _ Sniff the air around Norman Lewis' experimental poplars, and you won't pick up the scent of roses.

But inside the saplings' leaves and stems, cells are hard at work producing the chemical called 2-phenylethanol _ which by any other name would smell as sweet.

Sweeter still is the fact that perfume and cosmetics companies will pay as much as $30 an ounce for the compound that gives roses their characteristic aroma. Because what Lewis and his colleagues at Washington State University are really chasing is the smell of money.

Born out of the frustrating quest to wring biofuels from woody plants, the WSU project takes a different tack. Instead of grinding up trees to produce commercial quantities of so-called cellulosic ethanol, their goal is to turn poplars into living factories that churn out modest levels of chemicals with premium price tags.

The potential market for specialty chemicals _ many of which are now synthesized from petroleum _ is big, said Lewis, director of WSU's Institute of Biological Chemistry. He's already patented some of the technology, which relies on genetic engineering, and created a spinoff company called Elasid.

In the longer term, the profits from high-end products could boost the struggling biofuel industry by helping companies survive what's called the "valley of death" _ the point where firms need to scale up production, but money is hard to come by.

The ideal operation would combine the two product lines, extracting valuable chemicals and using the waste for biofuel. But that's a long way off, Lewis said.

"Biofuels don't provide a compelling economic case at this point in time," he said. "We've been trying for many decades to understand how plants make these special chemicals that can be used in flavorings, fuels and medicinals, and that seemed like the obvious first place to target."

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Rose scent in poplar trees? University turns to genetic engineering

Why speed cameras don't work as well as we think they do

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Speed cameras have been put in at various intersections across the globe. Depending on who you ask, they were put in to bring in money or to reduce accidents. But here's one reason why they don't reduce accidents as much as we think they do.

In the past we've talked about how extraordinary results cause people to believe that their "luck" is going one way or another. There is The Gambler's Fallacy, which causes people to think that, if a coin has landed on one side an unusual number of times it is "due" to land on the other side on the next flip. Conversely, there's the hot hand's fallacy, which causes people to think that a person who has shot dice successfully a few times is on a hot streak and will keep shooting well. In fact, both hot streaks and cold streaks are part of the normal course of events. A coin flipped many times will have long streaks of heads or tails. A die thrown enough times will come up lucky for long streaks in a row.

In the more superstitious days of gambling, casinos would literally have "coolers." They are incarnations of good luck, who will sit near a lucky gambler and cool their hot streak. Some people say that professional coolers are just an urban legend, but there are a few gamblers who believe in amateur coolers. A person sits next to them at a table, and their luck turns. What's really happening is regression to the mean. Every hot streak is a slight blip caused by chance, a temporary break away from regular casino results. Keep flipping that coin long enough and no matter how many heads you once got in a row, you'll get an even distribution between heads and tails. Keep playing roulette long enough and no matter how much you win in the first hour, you'll lose in the long run because the odds are in the casino's favor.

What does this have to do with speed cameras? For the most part, they're placed at intersections that are "hot" and have an unusually high number of accidents. Some of those intersections are legitimately more dangerous and need the cameras, but even if all the intersections in every city were equally dangerous, some would have a strangely high number of accidents in a year. The next year it would most likely regress to the average number of accidents per year, even if nothing were done, for the same reason that a streak of red in roulette will eventually turn black. Because both the dangerous intersection and the non-dangerous intersection will most likely have a reduction in the accident rate the year after the speed camera is put in, it would take a careful analysis to distinguish which reduction was due to extra caution on the part of thrifty drivers, and which was just the result of chance.

In fact, this problem is the same for all safety measures. An unusually high number of deaths or accidents will cause people to demand something be done. Safety measures walls, speed limits, laws, overseeing agencies are put in, and the problem is reduced. But was there a real problem, or was there simply the occasional chance increase in numbers we'd expect to see in everything from average rainfall to lotto winners? And did the safety measure really help, or did things just go back to what we think of as normal?

[Via The Improbability Principle]

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Why speed cameras don't work as well as we think they do

Voltage Studios Records Tech House 2014 – Eduardo Santos – Freedom & Groupies – Video

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Voltage Studios Records Tech House 2014 - Eduardo Santos - Freedom Groupies
Musica nueva tech house de nuestro dj residente Eduardo Santos - Freedom groupies ya en tiendad digitales. Somos una compaa mexicana dedicada a la msica...

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Voltage Studios Records Tech House 2014 - Eduardo Santos - Freedom & Groupies - Video

Freedom Academy Mastermind – How To Talk To Prospects and Move Them To a Close! – Video

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Freedom Academy Mastermind - How To Talk To Prospects and Move Them To a Close!
In this hangout, our own JennBen will share with you some awesome knowledge about talking to people for your business! This training is geared to people wh...

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Freedom Academy Mastermind - How To Talk To Prospects and Move Them To a Close! - Video

Freedom campers make city 'shabby'

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MARTIN DE RUYTER/FAIRFAX NZ

UPSET: Claire Fleming, of River Kitchen Cafe at Millers Acre, is concerned at the impact of freedom campers in the adjoining car park.

Freedom camping in central Nelson car parks is making the city look "cheap and shabby", says MP Nick Smith.

Business owners are also concerned at the impact of tourists using city car parks as makeshift campsites.

Smith is urging the Nelson City Council to tighten up its freedom camping bylaws which he says are "too liberal" and have led to camping getting "out of control" this summer.

Since September last year, the council has allowed freedom camping for certified self contained campers (with toilet and washing facilities) on council land, except in residential areas and on public parks and reserves.

Camper vehicles without toilet facilities can camp close to public toilets. That has seen an upsurge in freedom campers in the Buxton and Montgomery squares car park, and at Millers Acre.

Smith, who is also Conservation Minister, said freedom camping at sites like Millers Acre had "gotten completely out of control this summer."

"This is a prime central city site for which ratepayers and taxpayers have spent millions on a world-class DOC and information centre. We should not allow it to descend into a free-for-all campground for hundreds of travellers who refuse to pay the basic cost of staying in our purpose-built campgrounds," Dr Smith said.

"This liberal approach to freedom camping is not doing anything for Nelson's visitor industry and our reputation. I'm getting complaints from visitors who love our city but say this is making us look cheap and shabby."

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Freedom campers make city 'shabby'

Report: Press freedom in US drops sharply

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Published February 17, 2014

FoxNews.com

An increased focus on cracking down on whistleblowers has significantly dropped the United States press freedom ranking in the world, a new report says.

Reporters Without Borders annual Freedom Index report ranked the United States 46th in the world regarding freedom of information, a drop of 13 spots from 2012. The report cited the trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning, the pursuit of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and the Justice Departments seizure of Associated Press phone records in an effort to find the source of a CIA leak, among other cases.

A federal shield law to help journalists protect sources is an urgent need in the United States, said the report, which also blasted the United Kingdom for its detention of the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke Snowdens bombshell NSA revelations.

Both the U.S. and U.K. authorities seem obsessed with hunting down whistleblowers instead of adopting legislation to rein in abusive surveillance practices that negate privacy, a democratic value cherished in both countries, the report said.

David Cuillier, the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, told FoxNews.com on Monday he agreed with the reports findings and believes the journalism climate in the United States continues to get worse. Part of the problem, he said, is a public that, to a large extent, no longer trusts journalists and believes it's acceptable for the government to intimidate reporters, hide information and threaten journalists with jail time for doing their jobs.

If the people didnt like that, then the government wouldnt do it, Cuillier said. (The government) will do as much as they can get away with. If the public lets them do it, or cheers them on, then theyll do everything they can to control their message.

Finland, the Netherlands and Norway topped the list, while Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan were considered the most hostile nations in the world for press freedom.

The report, which ranks 180 countries, reflects the degree of freedom that journalists, news organizations and (internet users) enjoy in each country, and the efforts made by the authorities to respect and ensure respect for this freedom, according to the studys methodology.

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Report: Press freedom in US drops sharply