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GoPro Inc (GPRO): The Dark Side of Moore’s Law – Investorplace.com

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Study finds molecular explanation for struggles of obese asthmatics – Medical Xpress

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

July 17, 2017 by Emily Litvack Obese asthmatics have increased TNF-alpha levels, which, in part, leads to decreased SP-A secretion. Subsequently, these individuals have enhanced eosinophilia. Credit: University of Arizona

A large, bouquet-shaped molecule called surfactant protein A, or SP-A, may explain why obese asthma patients have harder-to-treat symptoms than their lean and overweight counterparts, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Arizona and Duke University. The results were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The study, titled "Obese Asthmatics Have Decreased Surfactant Protein-A Levels: Mechanisms and Implications," compared SP-A levels in lean and overweight asthmatics against SP-A levels in obese asthmatics (those with a body mass index, or BMI, over 30). Obese individuals had significantly less of the protein.

To understand why the lack of the protein is such a problem for those with asthma, one must first understand the function of SP-A, a powerhouse of a protein that helps curb the lungs' responses to environmental insults such as air pollution. It also regulates the numbers and locations of disease-fighting white blood cells called eosinophils. Without enough SP-A to rein them in, one ends up with too much of a good thing. The eosinophils collect in the lungs and wreak havoc.

The team included UA researchers Dave Francisco, Kenneth Addison, Akarsh Manne, William Pederson, Dr. Monica Kraft and Julie Ledford.

Kraft, department chair and professor of medicine, and Ledford, an assistant professor of medicine, are members of the UA's BIO5 Institute. They began this research in 2010, when Ledford was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and Kraft was chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine.

At that time, SP-A levels in asthmatic patients were relatively well studied, yet little understood. The literature was shaky. Some research showed that asthmatic patients have more SP-A than healthy individuals, others found they have less, and still others found they had the same amount. Using about 50 samples from the patients of medical doctors, including Kraft and Ledford, also got mixed results.

"I saw a really wide discrepancy in levels," Ledford said. "My results matched everything that had been published, so Monica and I looked at patient demographics to see if anything stood out."

There in the data, Ledford saw it plain as day: People with especially low levels of SP-A had especially high BMIs. It was the first time anyone had made the connection.

This latest study, with data from 55 individuals, shows the same connection Ledford made years ago. The study also provides insights on what is driving that stark difference in SP-A levels between obese individuals and others.

It starts with something called cytokines, little proteins made by cells in the immune system, giving other cells a signal to take some kind of action. By moving out of a cell, one cytokine called tumor necrosis alpha, or TNF-a, tells other cells to activate the immune system. Obese individuals often have increased amounts of TNF-a.

If you have enough of it, Ledford explained, TNF-a can actually suppress SP-A. And according to this study, in obese asthmatics, it does just that.

"These results are eye-opening in that we're finding out potentially why obese asthma patients don't respond as well to treatments as other asthmatic patients. It could be due to the lack of this important immunoregulatory protein," Ledford said. "I hope this study will lead to better patient care for this group of people.

"SP-A is well known to fight pathogens, so with pretty much any lung infection, someone with less SP-A would be at a higher risk for complications," she said, adding that across all demographics of asthmatic patients, SP-A doesn't work as well as it should to begin with.

Ledford and Kraft are working to translate this information into a new therapy.

"The active piece of surfactant protein A is, we think, 10 to 20 amino acids. We're putting that piece of it into an inhaler as a delivery," Ledford said.

They are working with Tech Launch Arizona, the UA office that commercializes inventions stemming from research, to develop and license the treatment for those with asthma and other respiratory diseases.

"Fundamentally, we do research to address grand challenges facing our society," said Kimberly Andrews Espy, the UA's senior vice president for research. "And by taking this groundbreaking discovery from the lab to the marketplace, Drs. Ledford and Kraft will improve the lives of patients with difficult-to-treat asthma. I am so proud of their work and of the impact it will have for so many. The University of Arizona is an international leader in research in airway diseases, and Dr. Ledford's and Dr. Kraft's work adds to our record of accomplishment."

Ledford and Kraft are now working to further understand what factors, beyond TNF-a, might lead to decreased levels of SP-A. They also would like to study SP-A levels in bariatric patients before and after their weight-loss surgeries.

Said Ledford: "I'm getting to see where and how my work in the lab can affect patient outcomes and, as a scientist, that's the best reward one can get."

Explore further: Researchers talk turkey: Native Americans raised classic holiday bird

More information: Njira Lugogo et al. Obese asthmatic patients have decreased surfactant protein A levels: Mechanisms and implications, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2017.05.028

(Medical Xpress)Research conducted at Boston Children's Hospital indicates that obesity might cause asthma via factors in the immune system and suggests a new way of treating asthma in obese peoplewho often respond ...

People with asthma are likely to have worse symptoms when they get the flu because they have weaker immune systems, new Southampton research has shown..

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Study finds molecular explanation for struggles of obese asthmatics - Medical Xpress

Silicon Valley’s Bonfire of the Vainglorious – lareviewofbooks

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

JULY 17, 2017

From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil Good Lord, deliver us.

Book of Common Prayer, 1928

NO MORE SEX! was the unexpected news that Londons Daily Herald brought its readers in February 1929. Those intrigued enough to continue reading found yet more startling information on WHAT HUMANS MAY BE LIKE ANOTHER DAY such as MEN WITH EARS UNDER LUNGS by the same scientifically pedigreed author. The source: John Desmond Bernal, a young Irishman whose daring new book, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, offered a PEEP INTO THE FUTURE.

A crystallographer and molecular biologist, Bernal was familiar to the denizens of Cambridge and Bloomsbury for his piercing eyes, rolling gait, and Marxist beliefs. He counted H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and C. P. Snow among his colleagues, and at least three Nobel Prize winners among his protges. As a scientific humanist, he believed that rational thought coupled with radical new technologies would enable modern society to confront the three enemies of the rational soul, as he called them.

First among these enemies was The World, by which he meant the limits of terrestrial resources and the sheer unpredictability of our planets environment. He proposed that people leave the planet, with its massive, unintelligent forces of nature, heat and cold, winds, rivers, matter and energy, and expand out into the cosmos, where they could establish permanent settlements with free communication and voluntary associations of interested persons. In this way, people would also free themselves from the shackles of earthly politics and societal mores.

But to thrive in these new environments, humans would have to overcome the limits of their bodies what he called The Flesh. For Bernal, this demanded radical surgery, the replacement of organs and tissues by mechanical substitutes, and the directed modification of humanitys genome. Eventually, these new and improved humans, if we could still call them that, would acquire a form of immortality, preserving their ideas and memories by capitalizing on the electronics and machines with which they were likely to be conjoined.

One problem remained, however. For all their technological wizardry, people were still, well, people. Could they overcome the obstacles placed before them by The Devil, Bernals third enemy? No matter how much science advanced, humanitys desires and fears [] imaginations and stupidities would likely remain a treacherous foe. To achieve their glorious future, people would have to transcend their greed, gullibility, and pretensions to godhood.

Bernals rough sketch resonated with an set of ideas circulating among British scientists in the 1920s. Just a few years earlier, Julian Huxley, a British evolutionary biologist whose brother Aldous would go on to author Brave New World, proposed the term transitional human to refer to a person who had deliberately modified and improved his or her own physical and biological architecture. In his 1927 book Religion Without Revelation, he imagined what would happen when humanity decided to transcend itself [] realizing new possibilities of and for [] human nature. By embracing the zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities, Huxley predicted humanity would finally be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. He termed this new secular faith in the future transhumanism.

Despite the tragic history of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century, the notion of an improved people and other such transhumanist ideas continued to percolate among futurists. Even before the cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard left the Earths atmosphere, medical researchers discussed avenues for altering human biology with chemicals and machines in order to enable long-term space travel, coining the word cyborg in the process. But this interest remained low-key until the late 1980s, when a small but creative cohort of future-leaning techno-hipsters in coastal California embraced transhumanisms flexible tenets. As cultural critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote in a classic 1995 essay critiquing the dot-com era, this Californian Ideology blended the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies with the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. The technology journalist Paulina Borsook characterized the ensuing attitude toward society and government as cyber-selfish.

From the Bay Area, for example, a slickly produced magazine called Mondo 2000 introduced readers to virtual reality, hacker culture, smart drugs, life extension, and nanotechnologies. Its debut issue derided the old future as being about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring! With the Cold War ending and cyberspace beckoning, theres a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species. But where Bernal and Huxley envisioned biological transformations that could potentially benefit society as a whole, this new cult of transhumanists, death defeaters, and allied techno-enthusiasts focused on the self: the perfection of body and mind as individual self-fulfillment. In California, the net and nanotechnology met Narcissus.

Mark OConnells open-minded new book To Be a Machine: Adventures Among the Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death offers an update on the desires, dreams, and delusions of late 20th- and early 21st-century technological optimists. With a practiced journalists sense of engagement and empathy leavened by healthy skepticism, OConnell describes the peculiar constellation of scientists, seekers, grifters, and con artists orbiting techno-optimist communities over the past half century. Hoping to become rich, famous, and/or immortal, this population encompasses a seemingly dizzying array of types and propositions that can, Id argue, be cleaved into three basic camps.

First, there are the cooks. Their approach to increasing peoples life spans is based on chemistry, genetics, medicine, and other tools of biotechnology. Prominent among them today is English biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Born in 1963, de Grey took a PhD in 2000 from Cambridge for research into how inhibiting damage to mitochondrial DNA could extend life spans. Three years later, he co-founded the Methuselah Foundation to shed light on the processes of aging and find ways to extend healthy life. Six years after that, he started the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence(SENS) Research Foundation. Based in Mountain View, California, a few miles from Googles HQ and Stanford University and adjacent to a Jehovahs Witnesses Hall, its fortunes were boosted by Silicon Valley investors and de Greys own multimillion dollar inheritance. Public appearances on shows like Good Morning America and popular books like his 2008 Ending Aging transformed de Grey into a highly visible spokesperson for the immortality movement, such as it is.

OConnell describes meeting de Grey at a bar in San Francisco, where the aging researcher the adjective works both ways was enjoying a breakfast beer. De Greys presentation of the current state of research into regenerative medicine was as much performative as it was perspicacious. For every day that I bring forward the defeat of aging, he claimed, Im saving a hundred thousand fucking lives! OConnell pushed de Grey on such statements, including whether it was possible for people to live a thousand years. Possible? Sure. But, the guru admitted, its very much dependent on the level of funding.

Ah, yes. The funding. A recent article in The New Yorker features a California living room, circa March 2017, teeming with celebrities, scientists, dot-com zillionaires, and venture capitalists. A tony Tupperware party for those anxious about aging, its attendees learn about and, more notably, market and sell their secrets of longevity. Sergey Brin, the fortysomething co-founder of Google and the 13th richest person on the planet, sadly acknowledges that, yes, he too is mortal, but at least hes planning to do something about it. In fact, Google has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the California Life Company (Calico) to combat aging. Even Town & Country is pushing the immortality movement right along with news of Pippa Middletons honeymoon and revelations about what your travel bag for the Hamptons says about you.

All this would be fine let the ber-rich pursue their batshit crazy schemes but, as OConnell suggests, these expensive, research-intensive solutions to the death problem may then crowd out other issues and approaches. We can already help people millions of them live longer and better lives. Its here! Hail the future! Ah forget about it. No one working on Silicon Valleys Sand Hill Road seems inclined to get super-stoked about pushing for universal health care, better public schools, sane gun laws, and a decent living wage. Why champion urban sanitation and clean drinking water when Bono and Leonardo DiCaprio are probably already on it? Todays transhumanism isnt about helping the masses. Its all about me the glorious, death-deferring me. And as my colleagues Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel have noted, the media isnt helping the situation either; its breathless coverage of high-profile, low-probability, pseudo-Ponzi schemes has downstream effects, encouraging young scientists and engineers to invest their energies in trying to solve the wrong problems. OConnells book places these quixotic efforts in context, offering much-needed critical analysis that never veers into condescension.

The cooks approach to augmenting humanity has found sympathetic communities in places far afield from Silicon Valley. One of OConnells best chapters is titled Biology and its Discontents. In it, he introduces us to a motley collection of practical transhumanists operating a small company called Grindhouse Wetware in Pittsburgh and describes these biohackers zeal for augmenting peoples bodies via implants. In 2013, as proof of concept, one of Grindhouses co-founders had a device implanted into his own body that wirelessly transmits biometric information to his smart phone. (One can only imagine the possibilities if it could be linked to Tinder.) However, as OConnell thoughtfully notes, biohackers enthusiasm for a techno-future where they possess the equivalent of superpowers is muted by something darker. Gesturing to his seemingly normal and well-functioning body, one such biohacker tells OConnell, Im trapped here. Transhumanism, at least in this version, appears less about liberation than self-annihilation. Like the ancient Gnostics, these people believe that our flesh is a prison trapping the soul our bodies, our burdens, as it were. But then, transhumanism has always had more than a whiff of eschatology about it.

This near-contempt for our mortal vessels takes us to a second faction lets call them the coders who are selling their own strategy for defeating or deferring death. Instead of augmenting the body with high-tech gadgets or through genetic and medical tweaks, they propose abandoning the Flesh altogether. The body as a machine to be maintained and augmented is old hat; they focus instead on the mind. Drawing on philosophical debates going back to Descartes, they imagine it as software a program or data file that can be copied indefinitely and remain useful, so long as an operating system exists to run it. Making a copy of a persons mind is the first step toward uploading it for storage and retrieval.

Accomplishing this feat, advocates say, will require a detailed understanding of what consciousness is and how it works, which, in turn, rests on a detailed physical understanding of the physical links and connections between neurons and other cells. Again, OConnell draws our attention to Silicon Valley, where small companies, some with transhumanists at their helm, are developing tools for more precise brain scans and mapping. Their agenda is of course predicated on the assumption that the essence of what makes you uniquely you can be reduced to physical terms: to bits and bytes of information.

Whether people are information, chemistry, or indeed spirit or soul has kept stoned undergraduates talking into the wee hours and philosophers employed, but theres now an undeniable commercial aspect to all of this. OConnell takes us on a detour into the world of robotics and autonomous vehicles, areas of research and development drawing vast sums of money and labor. We meet some of the real actors pulling the strings and bear witness to Silicon Valleys roots [] deep in the blood-rich soil of war. The technologies that companies like Google and Uber are developing for autonomous vehicles are dual-use and can readily be militarized. In fact, given the long history of funding by defense agencies like DARPA, we might as well speak of technologies like the autonomous vehicles prowling San Joses streets as civilianized.

Just as workers and labor unions are concerned about the effects of automation on jobs something OConnell addresses scenarios of mind-uploading easily invite questions of whether our machines will one day supplant us. In 1983, Omni published a short essay by SF writer Vernor Vinge describing a future in which technological change accelerates at an exponential rate. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, Vinge suggested, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. Sort of like when Trump was elected, but with robots.

Since Vinges essay appeared, people like Ray Kurzweil engineer, transhumanist, and, more recently, Google executive have made considerable money and headlines predicting how technological advances, especially in areas such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, will drive us to that world-altering moment when there is a rupture in the fabric of human history. In 2009, Kurzweil helped start the Singularity University, located just off interstate 101 in Mountain View. Students from around the world have competed for spots in the programs summer sessions while CEOs, inventors, and investors plunked down $12,000 or more for week-long executive programs on topics like exponential manufacturing and accelerating returns. What they would really benefit from, however, are a few classes at a local community college. In such places, they might learn that if your only model for how technologies develop over time is the cherry-picked exponentiality of examples tracking Moores Law, well, you probably should revise your business plan.

Meanwhile, celebrity technologists like Elon Musk have made headlines simply by expressing their fears about the growing power of artificial intelligence systems. In turn, celebrity interest has created a cottage industry of academic and nonprofit think tanks, many of them in California, devoted to studying existential risks. They are funded in part by technology companies and their executives. A cynic might be so bold as to suggest that the whole enterprise is a self-licking ice cream cone. A realist, at least one focused less on abstractions such as the future of humanity, might argue that the real problems Silicon Valley executives should address have less to do with tomorrows artificial intelligence than with the plain ol natural stupidity eroding and disrupting our civil society today.

The topic of stupidity, in all its many-splendored and undeniably human forms, leads us to the third community of people associated with this ideology. Meet the conned, who, alas, include the author of Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story. Alexandra Wolfe spins a tale of Silicon Valley absurdity masquerading as altruism, although shes unlikely to pitch it in these terms. Unfortunately, her book also peddles just about every possible stereotype cue the scrawny nerd with thick glasses, baggy jeans, and a T-shirt on page three who cant seem to get laid, and every other variant of the hoodie-clad technological disrupter, creatively destroying all in his path.

The conned in Wolfes superficial fly-through of Silicon Valley include select college-age recipients of fellowships. The deal is this: if accepted, you will receive $100,000. You will also agree to drop out of college for the length of the fellowship while you pursue your entrepreneurial dream. The pied piper peddling this bullshit is Peter Thiel, who announced the eponymous program in 2010. When George Packer profiled him in 2011, Thiel was just another dot-com tycoon professing a slew of contradictory ideas and beliefs. Packer provided an indelible image of Thiel the libertarian no rules! and yet a proponent of life extension live longer! blazing down a California highway in his Mercedes sans seat belt. Besides railing at the uselessness of a college education this from the man blessed with not one but two degrees from Stanford Thiel lambasted the political correctness he thought universities propagated. Such thoughts coming from a gay man whose rights are legally if thanklessly protected in the United States is an eccentricity Wolfe doesnt explore.

The cohort of those conned by Thiels munificence includes the young and oh-so-nave Jonathan Burnham. When we meet him, young Burnham has just received a Thiel fellowship. Asked How would you change the world? Burnham doesnt opt for curing malaria or improving inner cities. Nope. Not disruptive enough. He wants to mine asteroids. By the end of the book, Burnham has received a moon-sized helping of reality. As he told The New York Times, Its been really eye-opening for me to realize that just because you have a big idea doesnt mean thats all its going to take to make something happen. Isnt that the kind of advice that mentors what the Thiel program ostensibly provides are supposed to give their charges? Oh, right. Thats so quaint, so undisruptive.

Wolfe certainly benefited from access to a colorful class of characters, even if they are predominantly male and resolutely infantile. This said, a few women proto-entrepreneurs do appear in Valley of the Gods such as Laura Deming, who dropped out of MIT to pursue research on life extension but they are all too often characterized by what they wear rather than what they think. Wolfes reticence in offering critical analysis is a shame. Surely she could have said something about the deep structural and cultural biases women and people of color face in the tech world and STEM fields in general.

For example, not far away from where some of the Thiel Fellows lived and coded is there a difference? are the 27,000-plus undergraduates of San Jose State University. Many are first-generation college students for whom a college education offers a ladder to the middle class and a decent income. In contrast, Burnhams parents boast about how a Thiel Fellowship offered their kid a new kind of status symbol [] it said their son could get into Harvard but turned it down for something better. Its one thing to write about a group of young people who, after being accepted to Yale, Princeton, and MIT, decided not to attend. Thats their privilege. But when the message is that higher education is for chumps, worth neither time nor public investment well, thats a very different kind of privilege.

Adding insult to injury is Wolfes sometimes shaky understanding of how Silicon Valley got to be the valley of the gods. Even Thiel himself, in his 2016 address to the GOP convention, acknowledged the federal governments role in laying the foundations for the internet. (Uncle Sugar actually funded the engineers who built the infrastructure enabling Thiel to become fabulously wealthy, but, hey, lets not quibble.) Wolfe seems unaware or unwilling to address this inconvenient truth. Instead we get just-so history where Stanford academics and heroic businessmen not decades of massive Cold War defense spending created Silicon Valley. In this story, regulations and rules seem hardly to matter, which may explain why Santa Clara County has two dozen Superfund cleanup sites. And it may explain why, in Wolfes book, we get vignettes about a lobbyist who helped Uber shaft the employees who want to unionize while circumventing local regulations. Move fast and break things indeed!

One might dismiss both OConnell and Wolfes books for reporting about ideas, ideologies, and individuals who could easily be consigned to the margins. That would be a mistake. Peter Thiel matters. He has gone from being a billionaire with some odd ideas ignore, if you can, his interest in parabiosis (i.e., rejuvenation via blood transfusions from young people) to being a billionaire with influence in the White House. In addition, media attention and millions of dollars of private support from Silicon Valley moguls have nudged elements of the transhumanist movement closer to the mainstream. Like economic returns from Bay Area tech companies today, human enhancement technologies of the future will not be evenly distributed. If were now exercised over how the rich get privileged access to airline seats, imagine the reaction from le menu peuple when they see the callow Jared Kushners of tomorrow get brain upgrades while being infused with teenaged blood. Perhaps this explains why some of the United Statess wealthiest people are prepping for the day when the pitchforks come out a veritable bonfire of the vainglorious and they retreat to their converted ICBM silos and island compounds.

There are two futures, the future of desire, and the future of fate, J. D. Bernal said in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and mans reason has never learned to separate them. People use technologies to build the future. Visions of technological tomorrows proffered by cooks or coders matter. They matter a great deal. They are inherently political. And despite their pretentions to benefit humanity, they ignore vast swaths of the population. Not to take such visions seriously to treat them as no more than play or whimsy is to be conned.

W. Patrick McCray is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Certain passages in this essay have appeared before in The Visioneers and on the authors website.

Silicon Valley's Bonfire of the Vainglorious - lareviewofbooks

How to back up your data with Google’s new Backup and Sync feature – TechRepublic

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Image: iStockphoto/pixelparticle

In an effort to make it easier for users to back up files to Google Drive, Google recently launched its new Backup and Sync feature. According to a Google blog post, the feature allows users to continuously back up their files to Google Drive from any folder on their local machine.

Backup and Sync works for both Google Photos and Google Drive, replacing the previous Google Photos desktop uploader and Google Drive for Mac and PC, the post said.

In theory, the new tool operates much like the consumer version of Dropbox. Once installed, users simply point to which folder they wish to back up, and the program will continue to upload and sync new data as it is added to the connected folder.

SEE: Cloud Data Storage Policy Template (Tech Pro Research)

To get started using the service, it is important to first check the system requirements and make sure that your machine qualifies. If so, proceed to the Drive download page and/or the Photos download page to download Backup and Sync.

Once you have downloaded the program of your choosing, find the installer in your downloads window and double-click it. Follow the on-screen prompts to install the program for your Mac or PC.

Upon installation, find the application and open it. The, click the blue GET STARTED button at the bottom of the window. You'll be required to sign in with the Google account you wish to connect it to. After putting in your credentials, click the blue NEXT button.

Keep in mind that Google considers this a consumer product, and if you're an enterprise G Suite user, your admin may have blocked access to the Backup and Sync feature.

Once signed in, you will need to choose what folders you wish to sync. All of the folders will be selected by default, so you will need to deselect them if you wish for them not to sync.

Additionally, you will need to choose what quality of files you want to upload. The High quality option is a reduced file size that is uploadable for free. Original quality files will count against your available storage in Drive.

It's important to note that you may need to upgrade your Drive storage to properly use Backup and Sync, and the cost may be more expensive than comparable services as The Next Web noted. Once you've made your selections, click the blue NEXT Button at the bottom.

On the final page, you'll be given the option of whether or not you wish to sync your Drive account back to the machine you're working on, thereby making all of the files already there available locally on your machine. This option is selected by default, so be sure to deselect it if you don't want to sync older Drive data back to your computer. Once you have made your selection, click the blue START button to finish the setup.

Being that Backup and Sync is intended for the consumer audience, enterprise users should exercise caution before downloading it. Be sure to check your company's data policies to make sure that the use of such a tool is in line with company standards and compliance. If you need additional resources to develop a cloud storage policy, check out our templates on Tech Pro Research.

See the rest here:

How to back up your data with Google's new Backup and Sync feature - TechRepublic

Google Nest review: a shopper’s guide to the thoughtful smart home – The Australian Financial Review

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Alphabet's Nest Cam Outdoor (left) and Nest Cam Indoor.

Seeing as Nest has finally come to Australia, and seeing as the folks at Nest like to describe their products as "thoughtful" home technology, rather than "smart" home technology, we've found ourselves entertaining a dangerous notion.

What if, heaven forbid, that were actually true?

What if Nest, a company with all the resources in the world given it's owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, actually had thought long and hard about its smart-home products, its smoke detectors, its thermostats and its security cameras? What if those products really were more thoughtful than all the other stuff on the market, the stuff we've spent the last two years reviewing here in the Digital Life Labs, two years of our lives that we're never going to get back?

What would those products look like? Would they be any different from the indoor and outdoor smart-home security cameras and the smart smoke detector that Nest just launched in Australia? Being the thoughtful little gadget reviewers that we are (and what if that were actually true, too?) we've put together a shopping list for you, of some of the things that you should look for if ever you were crazy enough to buy into the shemozzle that is the so-called smart home.

It goes without saying that smart home equipment has to be easy to install. Not everyone is as smart as you are. And, on that front, Nest is as good as you could hope for. Once you've installed the Nest app on your phone and set up a Nest account on the internet, all you have to do is point your phone's camera at the QR code printed on the Nest device, and it's good to go.

And if you install, say, a Nest Cam Indoor security camera together with a Nest Protect smoke alarm, the basic rules governing the interaction between those devices are automatically set up for you, too. The camera automatically activates and starts recording whenever smoke is detected. Nest is good like that.

What needs to be said though is that simplicity shouldn't be bought at the cost of sophistication. If you want to geek out by setting up some peculiar rules for your smart home let's say you want the Nest security camera in your living room to activate and alert you the moment someone tunes the Foxtel box to some adult channel you should be able to program that too, even if it's a little tricky.

Nest isn't good like that. It doesn't expose its controls to other smart-home platforms in your house the way Linksys Wemo devices do and gaining access to those Nest controls outside the house, out in the cloud, is a right pain.

In a thoughtful home, would the connected devices run on batteries or on mains?

For its Nest Cam Indoor and Nest Cam Outdoor security cameras, Nest has opted for mains, which is an imperfect answer, but no more imperfect than opting for batteries the way, say, Netgear's Arlo has.

Particularly when you're installing them outdoors, mains-powered security cameras take a lot more installing, and doubly so with the Nest Cam Outdoor camera, which has a thick power cable that can't be unplugged, meaning you may have to cut and re-terminate it if you need to fit the power cable through a small hole in your brickwork.

But once they're in place, mains powered devices are definitely better. To save power, battery-powered security cameras tend to go to sleep, waking up when motion is detected but never waking up fast enough to actually capture all the motion. The Nest cameras, on the other hand, record all the time, so you never miss a frame of the burglar walking out your door with your TV.

A lot of smart-home equipment seems to have been designed with the US market in mind, where internet upload must be plentiful and fast.

But not everyone has fast broadband upload speeds. Some of us have to live in the world dreamt up by Malcolm Turnbull, where the internet isn't nearly as fast nor as symmetrical as it might be, and in that world a lot of smart-home equipment more or less breaks. Ring's smart doorbell, for instance, is almost completely useless without fast(ish) upload speeds.

Mercifully, Nest lets you tailor your upload speed requirements, lowering the video quality so it matches the quality of your broadband upload connection. Which, unless you are lucky enough to have fibre to the home, is often no more than a trickle.

The only thing more annoying than having a false alarm sent to your phone by your so-called smart home is coming home to discover that someone has walked out with your TV, and your security cameras have completely missed it. Getting the right balance between false positives and false negatives is rare in the smart-home world (Arlo cameras send alerts to your phone whenever a cloud passes in front of the sun, for instance), but Nest is pretty good at it.

For instance, you can set your Nest cameras so they only alert you when they see what they think is a person. In our tests, it worked surprisingly well, and has eliminated almost all the false positives from the system without yet creating any false negatives.

You can also set your Nest camera so it alerts you when it sees any type of motion, which will all-but eliminate the risk of false negatives, but will tend to give you more false positives. However, at least the false alarms will appear on your phone with a different message ("Your Kitchen camera has noticed some activity", as opposed to "Your Kitchen camera thinks that it saw someone"), so you're far less likely to have a heart attack when you see it.

You can also set the Nest cameras so they alert you when they hear noises, like people speaking or dogs barking, but in our tests that feature only works when people speak quite loudly very near the camera, which seems a little useless.

In an ideal, thoughtful world, smart-home equipment would function locally as well as in the cloud. Rules, such as "start recording whenever you see motion", would work even when there was no internet connection, and interactions between devices, even those from different manufacturers, would take place directly or via a local hub, without the need for a cloud service to act as the go between.

The trouble is, that doesn't mesh with the way the smart-home manufacturers operate. Most manufacturers want you to buy a monthly subscription to their services, and so they put things like file storage, image processing and device interactivity in the cloud where you have to pay for them.

Nest is more guilty of this than most. You can't connect a Nest camera to, say, a Philips Hue light globe without going into the cloud, which means it's too slow to be used for simple home automations, such as automatically turning lights on the moment the camera detects motion.

Worse still, you can't even connect two Nest devices together locally. In order to trigger Nest cameras to start videoing whenever it detects smoke, the Nest Protect smoke alarm has to notify the Nest cloud service of the alert, and get it to turn on the cameras.

What if the cloud service isn't available? What if the internet connection to the house is down because, you know, the house is on fire?

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Google Nest review: a shopper's guide to the thoughtful smart home - The Australian Financial Review

Three Reasons You Won’t Return After This Life – Big Think

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Many people are deeply invested in what happens when they die. Entire religions are constructed around theories of the afterlife. Christianity and Islam promise special places to go to while Buddhism prescribes breaking free from the hamster wheel of existence to leave the cycle of death and birth. Is any of this actually possible?

Stephen Batchelor is skeptical. In Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist the former monk points out that the Buddha avoided discussing body-mind dualism, which the notion of rebirth relies on, while refusing to speculate on metaphysics. The religion that formed after his death injected this rebirth problem into its theology despite the Buddhas insistence that it is not a meaningful question.

Batchelor cites many Buddhist thinkers that make rebirth the foundation of Buddhism. For example, the sixth/seventh century Indian philosopher Dharmakrti was a dualist who insisted the mind is immaterial and nothing material, such as a body, could give rise to cognition. When Batchelor expressed his skepticismDharmakrti never mentions the brain because he had no access to fMRI technologyhis teacher promised that the student would realize truth through meditation.

Thus the proof of rebirth rested on a subjective experience of a non-physical entity in a non-ordinary state of awareness. If you lack such an experience yourself, then you have to trust the word of meditators more accomplished than oneself.

Which is the same reason the Buddha left his two yoga teachers; he would not take their word for what he had to figure out for himself. When he did come to a conclusion it had nothing to do with the afterlife and everything with recognizing illusions we suffer during this lifetime. Batchelor compares this sort of blind faith with Christians mystics knowing God and people claiming to have been abducted by aliens. Theres no way to test their claims.

Anecdotes run into trouble because today we can measure consciousness. While we might not have discovered a mechanism that turns consciousness on (most consider it an emergent phenomenon) we do know it shuts off when the body dies. No body, no mindno dualism.

Which is the topic of Michael Shermers forthcoming book, Heavens to Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. In a recent column the Skeptic magazine founder lists three reasons you wont survive past death.

Your memory cannot be restored

Transmigration relies on the notion that you are a collection of memories that survives intact. But thats not how memory works. Every time you recall a memory it has changed from the original experience. Whatever has happened since has influenced your retelling of that moment. We are not static animals; were fluid processes continually remembering the past differently dependent upon the situation. You feel like the same person that woke up yesterday, but from a neurological perspective its not quite you. The continuum of identity is likely a survival trait that enables us to function within societies, but as the Buddha knew, identity is an illusion. A highly elaborate one that persists for decades (or even a century), but a ruse nonetheless.

Duplication doesnt work

Therefore theres no exact replica of you that survives beyond death. A twin brother or sister might be a copy of you, but its not you. Therefore making a copy of your brains connectome, which Shermer writes is a diagram of its neural connections, and putting it into another body flies in the face of basic biology. As Shermer concludes, Neither duplication nor resurrection can instantiate you in another plane of existence.

Youre more than your memories

Shermer notes that some researchers speculate that we each have a memory self and a point of view self. If you upload your memories (MEMself) into a computer your point of view (POVself) returns intact. But memory is not only dependent upon the experience itself, but also your current environment. We constantly change our point of view dependent upon audience. We recall differently depending on whos around and where we are. The notion that your entire point of view would survive intact is impossible. Death, he writes, is a permanent break in continuity.

Buddhist rebirth relies on karma, which is often treated as you get what you pay for. Yet this is disproven when good people needlessly suffer and criminals achieve lucrative positions in government and business. Ive heard it expressed that they must have done good deeds in a previous life or theyll suffer in the future. Such are the ridiculous lengths people go in trying to reason why someone suffers or succeeds due to this misguided idealization of karma.

Instead lets consider a seemingly benign example. In Los Angeles I often observe people stop two or three car lengths behind other cars at red lights because theyre consumed with whatever is on their phone. They often dont realize when the light changes because theyre not paying attention to the light or for the welfare of anyone else.

Karma is not going to get them, but their actions do have consequences, which is the intended meaning of the word karma. First off, cars stuck behind are left to wait until another light because that first car remained a few car lengths behind. Factor in the additional time that it takes for the texter to reorient to their surroundings and you have a perfect working definition of karma: your actions have consequences. Your inability to pay attention to your surroundings affects others negatively in this case. You might have made someone later for an important appointment, or you simply annoyed a line of people behind you because you had to know how well your latest selfie performed on Instagram.

Your actions and personality are truly what gets left behind. These are passed down from life to life: ideas, biases, diseases, religions, money. Just because youre not remembered later does not mean you didn't influence others; just because everyone remembers your name does not mean you benefited this planet. Your actions always have consequences, many of which youll never realize. Thats karma. It's nothing magical. Just put down your phone to look around and you'll see it everywhere.

In her book, How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett writes that it takes many brains to make a mind. This is true in a social species. I offload pieces of memory to my wife, who handles certain tasks in our marriage, just as she offloads to me. Thats why when a longtime partner dies the other half tends to feel a piece of them has perished. That might seem sad, but its quite beautiful to have such a strong connection to another.The residue of your life sticks to others and their consciousness.

Which is why the metaphysical idea of reincarnation is unnecessary and even distracting from what matters in life. Shermer concludes that some find his skepticism dispiriting, but he believes it to be the opposite.

Awareness of our mortality is uplifting because it means that every moment, every day and every relationship matters. Engaging deeply with the world and with other sentient beings brings meaning and purpose.

Derek's latest book,Whole Motion: Training Your Brain and Body For Optimal Health, is out now. He is based in Los Angeles. Stay in touch onFacebookandTwitter.

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Three Reasons You Won't Return After This Life - Big Think

Hack your commute: Watch a startup pitch – Marketing Week

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Whether youre on the lookout for ideas to add to your incubator, fancy pretending youre a judge on Dragons Den or are simply keen to understand the entrepreneurial mindset better, you dont have to be in a concrete-walled warehouse in Old Street to connect with startups.

Sites such as HumbleRise.com and TheStartupPitch.com offer platforms for entrepreneurs to upload video pitches that are publicly available and free to view.

Both sites are pretty basic, and the pitches themselves can be rough around the edges; but given they are relatively untapped resources compared to startup blogs such as TechCrunch, there is always a chance of happening across the next undiscovered Google or Airbnb.

Both sites are heavily focused on US-based pitches, though TheStartupPitch is UK-run. It posts website and social media details of the businesses featured.

Many of HumbleRises pitches come from applications made to the Y Combinator startup accelerator. Company founders can be contacted through the site, but only by giving your email address.

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Hack your commute: Watch a startup pitch - Marketing Week

Dr. Adam Kendall Renewed His Passion for Medicine with Music – NBCNews.com

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Dr. Adam Kendall playing the violin in front of a piano. In addition to his medical practice, Kendall performs music in public to help people heal. Lyd amd Mo Photography

Inspired by his trip, Kendall obtained a performers license and began regularly performing at Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. His first performance was New Year's Day 2012, a little over a month after his wife died.

Today, the physician-musician performs every Friday night outside of his apartment complex at the Monrovia Street Fair in Monrovia, California dressed in a full tuxedo and performing everything from Scott Joplin to film scores to classical concertos. Before each performance, Kendall also introduces his friend's dog, Barney, who sits next to him on the piano bench as he plays.

I found that he listened to me just as attentively as some of my well-seasoned classical listeners, Kendall said. The beauty of his locked-in gaze on my instruments as I played music for him was I think more powerful than the music itself.

Kendall has met people from all walks of life through his street performances. Many have come up to him after his performances and have shared their most intimate stories.

Ive had a gentleman recently imprisoned share that he had just gotten out of prison that week and being able to walk as a free man in his free country and listen to free music was just a beautiful experience I thought that was brave of him to share that, Kendall said.

Any of the money Kendall receives while playing, he gives back to charity. Along with his street performances, Kendall plays at charity concerts to benefit local organizations, including

Kendall says theres a tremendous amount of healing that is occurring through the act of performing or listening to music and that, to him, is worth playing another note.

To be able to play the violin or piano for individuals that lack the capacity to speak openly and to have that life with you is an area of healing that we are just beginning to appreciate how to provide non-verbal healing, Kendall said. I feel like in that regards, there is some neurologic feeling that is occurring that we just cant put a number on or put a measurement on.

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Dr. Adam Kendall Renewed His Passion for Medicine with Music - NBCNews.com

Being told I was a disappointment to medicine haunted me for years – The Guardian

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Constructive feedback means saying, You could do this better and here is how. Photograph: sturti/Getty Images

Many years ago, when I was a trainee physician, a formal feedback to track my progress never materialised. Instead, late one evening, with no prior notice, I was marched into a room and told by a clearly enraged consultant that he wished I had never been selected into the training program. I was stunned when the monologue ended in this dire pronouncement, Actually, Id say you are a disappointment to medicine.

Looking back, this ambit claim should have alerted me to muster my internal defences right there. It was only the beginning of my training; in the handful of years I had been a doctor, I had not presided over a string of unaccountable deaths nor had I bullied interns or abused patients. I was like every other trainee unexceptional but committed, aware of the difficult trek ahead but grateful for the opportunity. And while it may have been apparent to an experienced eye that I wasnt destined for high glory, it seemed a bit rich to foretell a doctors lifelong contribution to medicine by the first few unremarkable years.

But of course, none of this occurred to me at the time other than the sinking realisation that I wasnt just a disappointment to medicine but a certified failure. It didnt matter that the consultant had not got to know me; it didnt matter that his intemperance was common knowledge; all that mattered was that he had seen further into me than anyone else and proclaimed me an early failure. I wish I could say that the claim was so entirely unfounded and so wildly exaggerated that I banished it from my head but in fact, his words sank into my marrow and stayed there for years and years to come.

The ensuing years turned out to be far more interesting than I could have imagined. I became an oncologist and won a Fulbright award that transformed my life from a physician to a physician-writer and public speaker. Patients and colleagues complimented me but to me, those other skills felt like a feeble corrective to the unachievable goal, greatness in medicine. I felt like an imposter because someone in a position of knowledge and power had told me so.

Still, the experience didnt result in a crisis because I was shored up by good people for that one abusive encounter there were other constructive ones. I also came to recognise how the hospital is a hotbed of competition and politics and how one rotten relationship has a domino effect on other, utterly innocent, people.

Later, I learnt about the special irritation and impatience with others that comes from being the parent of children who wont sleep, fall ill, or cause more serious grief. And then there were my dying patients, who reminded me that life is short and that we should forgive people, not necessarily because they deserve it, but because we deserve it.

In other words, I came to intellectualise why a senior faculty might have behaved poorly. But what really puzzled me is how little this helped to erase the long shadow the diatribe cast over my career and why those ill-chosen words continued to play tricks with my self-esteem.

Eventually, I became a supervisor, borne out of an aspiration that no trainee should have to undergo a ritual of humiliation to somehow emerge the secure and well-adjusted doctor that society deserves. If doctors were to be genuine healers, they couldnt commence their career by licking their own wounds inflicted by their own colleagues. From the stories I still hear, we are not there yet.

Its a myth long perpetuated in medicine that trainees will only learn through tough love, but this tough love ignores constructive criticism, finding space to listen, providing room to grow, resting instead on public (or if youre lucky, private) shaming. I have seen plenty of doctors destroyed by it but have yet to meet someone who blossomed through such cruelty.

On the other hand, a veteran physician recently fretted that he had abandoned saying anything remotely critical for fear of being accused of harassment. In this heightened era of awareness of bullying and harassment in medicine, this is an observation worth pondering because a doctor who is given neither reason nor room to improve is being done a disservice. Most doctors strive to be better versions of themselves and are eager to find good role models. Being too quick to take offence will result in feedback crammed with platitudes and a piece of paper as meaningless as the encounter.

One solution might be to have an independent observer present at feedback but the real mentoring happens not at formal sessions but through countless corridor conversations, timely compliments, tactful rescues, and after-hour phone calls. Every doctor knows that these incidental things form the scaffolding of a career.

Many formal supervisors now undergo training which provides them a structure for giving feedback. This is one step towards being nuanced and sensitive to the changing face of medicine which boasts doctors who are pregnant women, young parents, former refugees, victims of war, as well as those tackling their own chronic illness or mental wellbeing.

But I think the key to feedback (and to trainee welfare in general) lies in every senior doctor taking the responsibility more seriously. Medicine is a lifelong apprenticeship where a young doctor learns from a cast of hundreds. We promote continuity of care for patients but it should apply equally to the care of doctors.

For far too long, feedback has been an automatic checklist and if you have not committed a grievous error, there is nothing to discuss. But constructive feedback means saying, You could do this better and here is how. It means showing vulnerability, I have made the same mistake, heres what I learnt. Above all, I have found it means reassuring a struggling trainee concerned for her future, I am here to support, not sink you.

But feedback isnt only about castigation but also commendation. Praise is largely a forgotten concept in medicine; we are quicker to laud an alcoholic for showing civility than applaud a doctor for resolving a crisis. The control of medicine by bureaucrats has resulted in the eye being on the bottom line more often than the workforce. I have seen doctors wearied by a lack of recognition, or worse, broken by criticism, but I cant immediately think of someone who went rogue after winning deserving praise.

Changing these ingrained habits is a responsibility that should not be shouldered by supervisors alone. Its a duty upon of all us to influence change. The doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct but no less important is the doctor-trainee relationship. If there is nothing good about a trainee, its the senior staff who must look harder. Because when doctors genuinely care about doctors, its good medicine for society.

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Being told I was a disappointment to medicine haunted me for years - The Guardian

Plasmon-powered devices for medicine, security, solar cells – Phys.Org

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

July 17, 2017 A Rice University professor has introduced a new method that takes advantage of plasmonic metals production of hot carriers to boost light to a higher frequency. An electron microscope image at bottom shows gold-capped quantum wells, each about 100 nanometers wide. Credit: Gururaj Naik/Rice University

A Rice University professor's method to "upconvert" light could make solar cells more efficient and disease-targeting nanoparticles more effective.

Experiments led by Gururaj Naik, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, combined plasmonic metals and semiconducting quantum wells to boost the frequency of light, changing its color.

In a nanoscale prototype Naik developed as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, custom-designed pylons that were struck by green light produced a higher-energy blue glow. "I'm taking low-energy photons and converting them to high-energy photons," he said.

Efficient upconversion of light could let solar cells turn otherwise-wasted infrared sunlight into electricity or help light-activated nanoparticles treat diseased cells, Naik said.

The work appears in the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters.

The magic happens inside tiny pylons that measure about 100 nanometers across. When excited by a specific wavelength of light, specks of gold on the tips of the pylons convert the light energy into plasmons, waves of energy that slosh rhythmically across the gold surface like ripples on a pond. Plasmons are short-lived, and when they decay, they give up their energy in one of two ways; they either emit a photon of light or produce heat by transferring their energy to a single electrona "hot" electron.

Naik's work at Stanford was inspired by the groundbreaking work of professors Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander at Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics, who had shown that exciting plasmonic materials also excited "hot carriers" electrons and holes within. (Electron holes are the vacancies created when an electron is excited into a higher state, giving its atom a positive charge.)

"Plasmonics is really great at squeezing light on the nanoscale," said Naik, who joined Rice's faculty a year ago. "But that always comes at the cost of something. Halas and Nordlander showed you can extract the optical losses in the form of electricity. My idea was to put them back to optical form."

He designed pylons using alternate layers of gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride that were topped with a thin layer of gold and surrounded by silver. Instead of letting the hot carriers slip away, Naik's strategy was to direct both hot electrons and hot holes toward the gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride bases that serve as electron-trapping quantum wells. These wells have an inherent bandgap that sequesters electrons and holes until they recombine at sufficient energy to leap the gap and release photons at a higher frequency.

Present-day upconverters used in on-chip communications, photodynamic therapy, security and data storage have efficiencies in the range of 5 to 10 percent, Naik said. Quantum theory offers a maximum 50 percent efficiency ("because we're absorbing two photons to emit one") but, he said, 25 percent is a practical goal for his method.

Naik noted his devices can be tuned by changing the size and shape of the particles and thickness of the layers. "Upconverters based on lanthanides and organic molecules emit and absorb light at set frequencies because they're fixed by atomic or molecular energy levels," he said. "We can design quantum wells and tune their bandgaps to emit photons in the frequency range we want and similarly design metal nanostructures to absorb at different frequencies. That means we can design absorption and emission almost independently, which was not possible before."

Naik built and tested a proof-of-concept prototype of the pylon array while working in the Stanford lab of Jennifer Dionne after co-authoring a theoretical paper with her that set the stage for the experiments.

"That's a solid-state device," Naik said of the prototype. "The next step is to make standalone particles by coating quantum dots with metal at just the right size and shape."

These show promise as medical contrast agents or drug-delivery vehicles, he said. "Infrared light penetrates deeper into tissues, and blue light can cause the reactions necessary for the delivery of medicine," Naik said. "People use upconverters with drugs, deliver them to the desired part of the body, and shine infrared light from the outside to deliver and activate the drug."

The particles would also make a mean invisible ink, he said. "You can write with an upconverter and nobody would know until you shine high-intensity infrared on it and it upconverts to visible light."

Explore further: Measurement of 'hot' electrons could have solar energy payoff

More information: Gururaj V. Naik et al. Hot-Carrier-Mediated Photon Upconversion in Metal-Decorated Quantum Wells, Nano Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b00900

Photon Upconversion with Hot Carriers in Plasmonic Systems. ArXiv. arxiv.org/pdf/1501.04159.pdf

Journal reference: Nano Letters arXiv

Provided by: Rice University

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It’s time to break down the wall between dentistry and medicine – STAT

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

ver since the first dental school was founded in the United States in 1840, dentistry and medicine have been taught as and viewed as two separate professions. That artificial division is bad for the publics health. Its time to bring the mouth back into the body.

In 1840, dentistry focused on extracting decayed teeth and plugging cavities. Today, dentists use sophisticated methods for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. We implant teeth, pinpoint oral cancers, use 3-D imaging to reshape a jaw, and can treat some dental decay medically, without a drill. Weve also discovered much more about the intimate connection between oral health and overall health. Periodontal disease, also known as gum disease, has been linked to the development of diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease. Pregnant women with periodontitis are more likely to develop pre-eclampsia, a potentially serious complication of pregnancy, and deliver low-birth-weight babies.

As taught in most schools today, dental education produces good clinicians who have a solid understanding of oral health, but often a more limited perspective on overall health. Few dental students are equipped to take a holistic view that may include taking a patients vital signs, evaluating their risk of heart disease or stroke, spotting early warning signs of disease, or even assessing their mental health or looking for signs of drug abuse.

Theres a better way to educate dentists so they can play larger roles in the management of their patients chronic diseases.

My school, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, was founded 150 years ago on July 17, 1867. It was the first American dental school affiliated with a university and its medical school, and the first to grant the doctor of dental medicine (D.M.D.) degree. The schools mission is to develop and foster a community of global leaders dedicated to improving human health by integrating dentistry and medicine at the forefront of education, research, and patient care. At commencement, dental graduates are welcomed into a demanding branch of medicine.

Harvard dental students have always spent more than a year of their education attending the same classes as their medical school peers. They learn just as much about whats going on in the chest cavity as the oral cavity. Under a new curriculum, in their second year they work in a primary care clinic in the dental school, side by side with fourth-year dental students, nurse practitioners, and primary care physicians to learn how to assess a patients overall health. In a collaboration with Northeastern Universitys Bouv School of Nursing, nurse practitioners and nursing students work with dental students and faculty members to manage chronic diseases and provide oral care.

Poor oral health is more than a tooth problem. We use our mouth to eat, to breathe, and to speak. Oral pain results in lost time from school and work and lowered self-esteem. Inflammation in the gums and mouth may help set the stage for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic conditions. Dental infection can lead to the potentially serious blood infection known as sepsis. In the case of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver, an infected tooth led to a fatal brain infection.

Writing in the Millbank Quarterly, John McDonough, professor of public health practice at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health asked, Might oral health be the next big thing? I believe that it needs to be and should be.

Just as dental and medical education are currently separate, so too are the ways care is delivered and how care is or isnt covered by insurance. That poses problems for access to care.

Today, 130 million Americans, most of them adults, have no dental coverage. Medicare has no dental benefits, and Medicaid has few benefits for adults. The high cost of dental care affects even those with coverage.

Its no wonder that the Centers for Disease Control estimates that the U.S. loses $6 billion in productivity each year due to oral health issues. Emergency department visits for oral pain cost nearly $2 billion a year and contribute to the epidemic of opioid addiction. And mounting evidence shows that poor oral health results in increased general medical costs.

To help break down barriers between medicine and dentistry, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine has created the Initiative to Integrate Oral Health and Medicine. In an effort to improve general health and lower medical costs, it brings together leaders in academia, health care, and industry to find innovative ways to integrate the two disciplines. Through the initiative, we seek to transform how dentistry is taught, practiced, financed, and evaluated so it becomes seamlessly integrated with the comprehensive health and social services required to keep individuals and communities healthy.

The school has also established the Oral Physician Program, a general practice dental residency program at the Cambridge Health Alliance, which integrates oral health, primary care, and family medicine training. We also plan to establish a new combined DMD/MD program with a hospital-based residency to train a new type of physician focused equally on oral health and primary care.

Other institutions are also expanding the concept of dental care and chipping away at the barriers between dental care and primary care. Kaiser Permanente Northwest, for example, has opened a truly integrated medical-dental practice in Eugene, Ore. The Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin is advancing the concept with integrated medical-dental electronic health records.

Heres what an integrated dental health/primary care visit might look like to a patient: When you go for a routine teeth cleaning, you would be cared for by a team of physicians, dentists, nurses, and physician and dental assistants. One or more of them would take your blood pressure, check your weight, update your medications, see if you are due for any preventive screenings or treatments, and clean your teeth. If you have an artificial heart valve or have previously had a heart infection, or you are taking a blood thinner, your clinicians will manage these conditions without multiple calls to referring doctors.

Finding the political will to integrate dentistry and primary care is a challenge. Various organizations including the DentaQuest Foundation, the Santa Fe Group, and Oral Health America have taken up the task. The majority of this work is designed to raise awareness of oral health, educate non-dental health care providers, and create political interest in promoting oral health. However, while interprofessional education has met with some success, interprofessional practice remains elusive.

The culture of the dental profession must change to promote closer connections between dentistry and primary care. The move from solo practice to small- and large-group practices may provide the impetus for such change. Recent editorials in the dental literature, including the Journal of the American Dental Association, talk about the need for integration, including the use of diagnostic codes, integrated medical and dental electronic records, and the potential for melding medical and dental practices.

Unfortunately, incentives for creating this practice of the future are minimal at this time. Dentistrys reliance on procedures for payment and separate insurance coverage presents a problem. The slow movement toward bundled payments for health care to create value based upon outcomes, rather than volume, could help.

In 2000, the surgeon generals report Oral Health in America drew attention to the gap in oral health in the U.S. In a 2016 update, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy strongly recommended integrating oral health and primary care. Closer collaboration between dentistry and primary care could change the culture of health care, close the access gap, and improve general health by providing primary care services during dental visits. It could also improve population health and chronic disease care.

We cannot drill, fill, and extract our way to better oral and overall health. We need a fundamentally different approach, one that accentuates disease prevention and health management using a multidisciplinary, integrated, and patient-centric approach to overall health. And that means breaking down the wall between dentistry and medicine.

Bruce Donoff, D.M.D. and M.D., is professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery and dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

R. Bruce Donoff can be reached at hsdm_dean@hsdm.harvard.edu Add Bruce on Facebook

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It's time to break down the wall between dentistry and medicine - STAT

Community Internal Medicine of Athens expands – Online Athens

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Community Internal Medicine of Athens is growing.

CIMA offers comprehensive outpatient care for adults from resident physicians and faculty.

CIMA has expanded into the entire lower floor of Building 200 in the Resource Medical Office Park at 1500 Oglethorpe Ave., just off the Athens Perimeter. The practices new suite number is 200-C.

In a corresponding move, Johnson & Murthy Family Medicine has relocated upstairs in the same building to Suite 200-A. Both practices are part of St. Marys Medical Group.

CIMA is expanding to accommodate new services and 12 new resident physicians, who began practicing with the Internal Medicine Residency Program on July 1.

The program is a collaborative effort between St. Marys and the Augusta University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership to address the shortage of physicians in Georgia.

Resident physicians are doctors who have graduated from medical school and are completing the final stage of their medical training. Fully capable physicians, they are working with physician faculty in an intensive three-year program to prepare them to become board-certified internal medicine physicians.

With the addition of the Class of 2020, the IMRP has now reached 33 resident physicians. Residents with the previous two classes already practice at CIMA on a rotating basis, coupling outpatient care at the practice with inpatient care at St. Marys Hospital.

The expansion of CIMA accommodates the additional residents by adding six patient exam rooms and a larger waiting area for patients. The expansion also allows CIMA to add a social worker to the staff and provide same-day appointments on most days.

Because care is provided by resident physicians under the direct supervision of physician faculty, patients typically receive more one-on-one time with their physician than is possible in a traditional primary care setting. For first-year residents, physician faculty not only review and approve clinical decisions but are often directly involved in evaluating patients side-by-side with the resident. As residents gain experience over the course of their residency, they assume greater responsibility and independence, though always with physician faculty supervision.

CIMA provides full internal medicine care for adults, including routine wellness visits, treatment of minor acute illnesses and injuries, and management of certain chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and diabetes. CIMA physicians can prescribe medications and order tests, including lab work and imaging.

While CIMA accepts some walk-in patients, most visits are by appointment. For more information or to make an appointment, call (706) 389-3875.

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Community Internal Medicine of Athens expands - Online Athens

How Ellis Medicine’s new vice president will focus on patient care – Albany Business Review

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Albany Business Review

How Ellis Medicine's new vice president will focus on patient care
Albany Business Review
... is the new vice president and chief nursing officer at Ellis Medicine more. Photo courtesy of Ellis Medicine. Leslyn Williamson will use her more than 25 years experience in nursing and management to enhance quality patient care at Ellis Medicine.

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How Ellis Medicine's new vice president will focus on patient care - Albany Business Review

Personalized medicine and cannabinoids deal inked – ISRAEL21c

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

Therapix Biosciences of Tel Aviv, a specialty clinical-stage pharmaceutical company developing cannabinoid-based drugs, last week signed a memorandum of understanding with California-based CURE Pharmaceutical to enter into a research collaboration with Israels Assuta Medical Centers.

The two biopharma companies will jointly advance, research, develop and commercialize potential therapeutic products in the fields of personalized medicine and cannabinoids. Assuta will support the early research and development of potential projects at its eight hospitals and medical centers.

Robert Davidson, CEO of CURE Pharmaceutical, noted that Israel is at the forefront of cannabinoid-based research in the world and therefore is the perfect place to start the development of these products.

As CURE focuses on targeting unmet needs in traditional pharmaceutical markets that could be disrupted by cannabinoid-based options, we are continuously looking to help bring new therapeutic cannabinoid-based products to market and further efforts toward the creation of personalized medicine, Davidson said.

Therapix Biosciences lead compound, THX-TS01, is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials for Tourettes syndrome. The company intends to initiate a Phase 1 clinical study of another compound, THX-ULD01, for the treatment of mild cognitive impairment, for which no FDA-approved therapies currently exist. Approvals for these indications may lead to other applications including pain, cancer, anti-inammatory, dermatology, and psychiatric disorders.

Both compounds repurpose an FDA-approved synthetic THC, the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis.

Therapix also is developing unique cannabinoid delivery technologies to improve drug administration, including nasal and sublingual delivery methods for THC, with formulations designed to increase efficacy compared with standard oral administration.

Personalized medicine and cannabinoids deal inked - ISRAEL21c

Leadership void hangs over first day of UNLV medical school – Las Vegas Review-Journal

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

A major health scare will keep the key leader and visionary behind the new UNLV School of Medicine from being on hand for a monumental moment Monday the first day of class for the first class of students.

Founding Dean Barbara Atkinson, who has ushered the school through countless deadlines and challenges to arrive at this point, recently suffered a ruptured intestine that triggered a serious infection. She remains hospitalized at University Medical Center in Las Vegas as UNLV officials weigh their options for an interim replacement to oversee the schools first weeks or months of operation.

Schools do face this on occasion, when the leader of the academic institution falls ill, or theres some sort of serious event that has occurred, and theyre no longer able to fulfill their duties, said Dr. John Prescott, chief academic officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, who has reached out to school leadership to offer assistance. In most cases, theres been a succession plan that has been worked out. But since shes been with it since the founding, I dont know if thats happened.

Silence from UNLV

While university officials said this week that they are discussing the potential of hiring an acting dean to lead the fledgling school in Atkinsons absence, who that may be and when that person might step in are unclear. The university has communicated nothing to the Board of Regents, according to Regent Trevor Hayes, and has not responded to requests from the Review-Journal for interviews and information.

According to Prescott, its common in situations where a leader suddenly departs for university leaders to assess internal leaders to see if someone could temporarily step in.

Other times, he said, a school will tap a recently retired dean who can assist in the time of transition. He said schools typically seek someone with the same skill set as the person they are replacing, in this case someone who understands academic medicine.

Dr. Mark Doubrava, a physician and a member of the Board of Regents, who also chairs the Health Sciences System Committee, agreed that will be a key consideration.

It should be an individual who is in the field of medicine, and preferably has experience in medical education, Doubrava said.

Regardless of who is chosen, he or she will have big shoes to fill.

Atkinson is an accomplished educational leader, clinician and researcher who, after being appointed as planning dean in 2014, created the vision and education program for the school, while also garnering regional and legislative support. Prior to arriving in Las Vegas, she was elected to the prestigious Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997, and also served as dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine, where she refocused the school to better serve regional needs.

Potential candidates in the ranks

The UNLV Medical Schools senior leadership includes several members who could potentially be tabbed to temporarily fill in, including:

Senior Associate Dean Dr. Parvesh Kumar, whose background includes experience as a researcher, clinician and academic. He has experience in building academic departments of radiation oncology and clinical research programs.

Vice Dean Dr. Ellen Cosgrove, an academic whose expertise lies in shaping and forming medical school programs.

Senior Associate Dean Dr. Samuel Parrish, whose background is primarily academic.

A clue on the succession could come as soon as Monday.

Since the dean usually greets medical students on their first day of classes, Prescott said UNLV will likely have someone step into Atkinsons place to provide reassurances to students.

But Regent Jason Geddes indicated that will not happen, saying he believes UNLV President Len Jessup will be on hand to greet the students.

At this time, student Sarah Grimley is feeling only excitement not nerves or concern about Atkinsons absence about the first day.

She set up everything perfectly for us, Grimley, 22, of Las Vegas said of Atkinson. Dr. Parrish and all of those people who worked right alongside her, they know everything that she wanted to happen.

They know what they have to do

Doubrava said that while Atkinson will miss the historic moment, UNLV supporters can take some comfort in the fact that she did not have teaching on her to-do list.

The curriculum, schedule has been set, he said. They know what they have to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

In addition to providing reassurances, the acting dean will have to help address any issues that come up with the new students coming on board; continue faculty recruitment and fundraising efforts; and handle day-to-day operations and budgeting.

Over and above those duties, however, Prescott said the replacement should understand the schools mission, and commit to following it.

I have great faith the right leader will be found soon to assist until Dean Atkinson comes back, he said.

Jannah Hodges, president and managing partner of Hodges Partners Executive Search in Dallas said it is critical that a school of medicine have a strong, permanent leader at the helm. In the event Atkinsons return is delayed for some reason, UNLV could be forced to quickly mount a search for a permanent successor.

While a search for a new dean often takes up to a year, Hodges holds the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas as a shining example of how the process can be accelerated. By establishing a search committee led by a strong chairman, seeking help from an executive search firm and following a strict timeline, she said the school was able to name a new president after a relatively quick five-month search in 2010.

It was do or die for Baylor, said Hodges, whose firm assisted the school in its search. They are where they are today because of the CEO and excellent departmental leadership. You have to have someone with a vision, who carries it forward into the future.

Contact Natalie Bruzda at nbruzda@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3897. Follow @NatalieBruzda on Twitter.

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Leadership void hangs over first day of UNLV medical school - Las Vegas Review-Journal

One medical school architect to receive prestigious award – Scranton Times-Tribune

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

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TRACY

Dr. Gerald Tracy joined his colleagues and stared into the yawning pit that was Scrantons sinking tech and medical sectors and resolved that they must close it.

The consortium of 18 area business and medical leaders, about 13 years ago, set out to build a medical school a sure-fire fix, they believed, for what the Pennsylvania Medical Society said in 2005 would be a severe physician shortage across Pennsylvania.

We really had to prove that we could deliver a product. That was the hardest thing I ever did, Tracy said.

In October, the cardiologist will receive the medical societys Distinguished Service Award, a prestigious honor first given to polio vaccine inventor Dr. Jonas Salk in 1956. The Lackawanna County Medical Society nominated Tracy mostly for his efforts to found the Commonwealth Medical College, now the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

The Pennsylvania Medical Society has bestowed its highest award only 28 other times in the last 61 years.

At 75, Tracy, a 40-year medical society member, continues to work at the school with students as a clinical professor and in other administrative departments.

Dr. Tracy and other visionaries associated with bringing a medical college to northeastern Pennsylvania demonstrated an innovative way to increase access to care in an area of the state that needed a boost, PAMED President Dr. Charles Cutler

said in a statement.

Jerry Joyce, a Scranton developer and one of the original Northeast Pennsylvania Medical Education Development Consortium members, applauded Tracys award, and said the accolade shines a light on the advances taking place in the region.

Right in the incipient stages, he brought a real high energy and a great deal of commitment of his time, Joyce said of Tracy. Theres a period of time in the beginning where youre selling a story, and you have to get people to buy into that.

Tracy, who shunned the extra attention the service award has brought him, said by the time they were ready to start recruiting students, they had ironed out all the kinks in their pitch.

Im not bragging, I think we had our act together, he said.

They had area medical education heavyweights, like himself, Dr. Charles Bannon and Dr. Robert Wright, as founding consortium members who had been teaching for decades. They also had business leaders in Joyce and consortium president Robert Naismith, a local entrepreneur, among others

Then-Gov. Ed Rendell had reservations about Scrantons medical school, but another consortium member, former state Sen. Robert Mellow, had the governors ear.

The college subsequently received $35 million

in state funding, the first major cash infusion toward its initial $75 million

construction goal.

Mellow has been friends with Tracy for 40 years or more, he said. And the doctor cared diligently for Mellows daughter in 1992 after she was hit by a drunk driver, he said.

He deserves it for everything that he has done, for everything that he stands for and for everything that he will continue to do while the good Lord has him on this earth, he said, applauding Tracys award.

Despite his admiration for Tracy, Mellow, an enthusiastic New York Yankees fan, said he will forever needle the doctor, who likes the Boston Red Sox.

Contact the writer:

joconnell@timesshamrock.com;

570-348-9131;

@jon_oc on Twitter

Harvard School of Dental Medicine to fte 150 years – Harvard Gazette

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

The Boston City Council has passed a resolution in honor of Harvard School of Dental Medicines (HSDM) 150th anniversary.

Councilors Ayanna Pressley and Josh Zakim presented the resolution to the Schools dean, R. Bruce Donoff, D.M.D. 67, M.D. 73, at a session in Bostons historic Faneuil Hall.

The Harvard School of Dental Medicine is a special place, said Donoff. As the first dental school of its kind, weve led the way in dental education, research, and patient care, and we are committed to integrating oral health and general health.

As we reflect on all that has been accomplished, we give thanks to our friends, alumni, faculty, students, and staff who continue to make the HSDM such an exceptional place, he said. We give a special thanks today to the Boston City Council for its ongoing support and for joining us in celebrating this momentous occasion.

HSDM was founded on July 17, 1867, and was the first dental school in the United States connected to a university and its medical school. It was also the first U.S. dental school to confer the Dentariae Medicinae Doctoris degree.

The Harvard School of Dental Medicine has long been a place of firsts, a place for pioneers who devote themselves to the deeply humane work of caring for people through the creation and application of knowledge, said Harvard President Drew Faust. That work is visible today in the education of students, in the work of clinicians and researchers, and in the impact of efforts to promote oral health in communities both down the street and around the world.

The School was an early advocate for diversity only four years after the Civil War, Robert Tanner Freeman, D.M.D. 1869, a son of former slaves, was in its inaugural class. He is widely believed to be the first black graduate in the United States to earn a degree in dentistry. George Franklin Grant, D.M.D. 1870, graduated from the School and went on to become the first black faculty member at Harvard University.

Its really something to be assembled here in this august venue, said Pressley, an at-large councilor. In this room today we see democracy that is truly representative of our city. And when we think about liberty and freedom, you certainly cant think about that without also thinking about equality.

Today we are honoring an institution that is celebrating 150 years of commitment to equality, she said. We thank them for their earliest commitment to diversity and inclusion, and their continued efforts to ensure access to preventative dental care and treatment, because we know that that equal access to health care is so critical to every other outcome in life.

HSDM leads research in skeletal biology, where it is at the forefront of research seeking cures for diseases of bone and craniofacial tissues, with a focus on discoveries with implications that reach far beyond dentistry. A large component of the Schools mission is to expand access to oral health care to underserved populations. The Harvard Dental Center, which is part of HSDM, provides comprehensive care to thousands of residents throughout the Greater Boston region every year.

The Harvard Dental Center Teaching Practices offers the community a range of dental care at an on-site clinic and through a wide variety of community-based affiliation agreements. Services are provided at a cost that is significantly lower than that charged at a private dental practice. Some services may even be free as a result of several on-going community based efforts. Over the past five years the Harvard Dental Center Teaching Practices has provided more than $3 million in care each year for the community in and around the Longwood Medical Area.

Providing access to care and reducing disparities has been and will continue to be an important part of our work, continued Donoff.

The School was originally in downtown Boston, close to Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1909, it moved to 188 Longwood Ave., and today is part of the Longwood Medical Area a hub of teaching hospitals, medical education, patient care, and research.

We are extremely fortunate to have the Harvard School of Dental Medicine right here in Boston, said Zakim, who represents the district that includes the medical area. The School offers a wide range of programs for the community, including free clinics for both adults and children, free mouth guards for athletes through community programs, and free educational programs to promote oral health. We couldnt be more grateful for their continued commitment to the people of Boston, and we wish them the very best on the 150th anniversary.

HSDM is hosting a Founding Day Celebration and Open House today from 3 to 5 p.m. at 190 Longwood Ave., Boston. All are invited to attend.

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Harvard School of Dental Medicine to fte 150 years - Harvard Gazette

TPG Growth & Liberty Global Launch Indie TV Studio Run By Katie O’Connell Marsh, Will Absorb Slingshot – Deadline

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

TPG Growth, whose parent TPG owns a majority stake in CAA, and John Malones Liberty Global have teamed to launch a global television production and distribution studio dubbed Platform One Media. The studio will be majority owned by Evolution Media, TPG Growths investment partnership with CAA and Participant Media, with Liberty Global taking a minority equity stake via Liberty Global Group in its first major foray into TV production and distribution.

Platform One, which has tapped former Gaumont Television CEO Katie OConnell Marsh as CEO, will absorb TPG GrowthsSlingshot Global Media, including its portfolio and development projects.Courtney Conte, who was appointed as new President of Slingshot Global Media in January, will be Chief Operating Officer and President of Platform One. Also coming over from Slingshot is head of Business Affairs Neil Strum. Launched in 2014, Slingshot put a slew of high-profile series in development though none has gone into production.

OConnell Marsh in 2015 was tapped by DreamWorks Animation to run a new live-action TV unit, though the companys plans in the area changed when it was subsequently acquired by NBCUniversal. OConnell Marsh is bringing with her to Platform One Elisa Ellis, who served as the Head of Creative at DreamWorks live-action division and also worked for OConnell Marsh at Gaumont, as well as another Gaumont alum, Erik Pack. Additionally, producer Julia Franz, former head of creative at ABC Studios, has joined the company as a consultant.

TPG Growth has a history of identifying and building companies, such as STX Entertainment, that can redefine their categories, said Bill McGlashan, founder and managing partner of TPG Growth and co-founder and CEO of The Rise Fund. Working with our partners at Evolution Media, we look forward to leveraging our collective experiences and networks in the entertainment space to build this business with Katie and her team.

Added Bruce Mann, Chief Programming Officer at Liberty Global,Platform One Media has the key ingredients Liberty Global values in a strategic asset: great leadership, a clear vision and aligned, well capitalized partners. It also gives us the opportunity to work with world-class talent creating high-quality scripted programming which could potentially feature on Liberty Globals pay-TV platforms in Europe.

The indie TV production companies landscape has been very challenging in the last few years as U.S. TV networks have upped their push for ownership, with Gaumont under OConnell Marsh as one of few success stories.

OConnell Marsh spent five years as CEOatGaumont Television, where she launched and built up the indie studio operation with such series as NBCsHannibal, NetflixsNarcos,Hemlock GroveandF Is For Family. Before that, she served as head of drama for NBC and was a development executive at Imagine TV.

The explosion of original content globally is creating an opportunity fornew, innovative, and diverse ways to engage audiences beyond the series itself, said OConnell Marsh. WithPlatform One Media, and our partners TPG Growth and Liberty Global, we are perfectly positioned to develop and distribute compellingnarratives that are artistic, meaningful and addictive by working closelywith innovative, inspiring talent to bring to life their creative visions.

Here is more info on the other appointments to the Platform One Media executive team:

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TPG Growth & Liberty Global Launch Indie TV Studio Run By Katie O'Connell Marsh, Will Absorb Slingshot - Deadline

Hartley, Rodgers lead Liberty to 85-55 win over Mystics – Glens Falls Post-Star

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

NEW YORK After seeing his team struggle to score lately, Liberty coach Bill Laimbeer wanted to try and get a more uptempo offense.

So he inserted Bria Hartley back into the starting lineup for Sugar Rodgers. The move worked.

Hartley scored 15 points to help New York beat the short-handed Washington Mystics 85-55 on Sunday.

Weve been kicking it around for the last two games, Laimbeer said about the lineup switch. We felt we needed to get more easy baskets because we were struggling offensively. ... Positive reinforcement is a great thing. It worked.

Rodgers added 14 points coming off the bench for the Liberty (9-9), who jumped out to a 16-point lead at the end of the first quarter. The Mystics, who were missing star Elena Delle Donne because of right ankle injury, couldnt get into a flow offensively.

We missed a lot of open looks, Mystics coach Mike Thibault said. We just couldnt knock them down today for whatever reason.

Hartley, who had just 13 points combined the previous five games, hit six of her 10 shots against her former team. The Mystics traded Hartley and Kia Vaughn to the Liberty before the season started.

Everyone says when you playy our old team you have to play really well or show out a little bit, Hartley said with a smile.

Wings 112, Sky 106

ARLINGTON, Texas Skylar Diggins-Smith had 26 points, Kaela Davis added a career-high 23 and the Dallas Wings overcame an 11-point deficit to beat the Chicago Sky in double overtime. Karima Christmas-Kelly scored 17 points, Glory Johnson had 12 points and nine rebounds, and Kayla Thornton added 11 points all in the fourth quarter and overtime for Dallas (10-11).

SUN 89, STARS 75

UNCASVILLE, Conn. Courtney Williams scored 15 points to lead a balanced Connecticut offense and the Sun beat San Antonio.

Jasmine Thomas, Jonquel Jones and Alyssa Thomas added 13 points apiece, Alyssa Thomas had nine rebounds for the Sun (12-8). They have won 11 of their last 14 after losing five of six to open the season.

Lynx 81, Mercury 66

ST. PAUL, Minn. Sylvia Fowles scored 18 points and the Minnesota Lynx used an 18-0 run in the third quarter to beat the Phoenix Mercury.

Minnesota (15-2), off to the best start in franchise history, beat the Mercury 88-71 in Phoenix on Friday night.

Jia Perkins scored a season-high 13 points, Rebekkah Brunson added 11 and Plenette Pierson and Renee Montgomery had 10 points apiece for the Lynx.

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Hartley, Rodgers lead Liberty to 85-55 win over Mystics - Glens Falls Post-Star

Police release sketch of man accused of murdering Delphi teens Liberty German and Abigail Williams – Fox 59

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Danzig

DELPHI, Ind. More than five months after the disappearance of 14-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams, Indiana State Police released a composite sketch of the suspect in the Delphi murder investigation.

Police say they hope the sketchwill help clarify some of the pictures that were previously released regarding the investigation and the man on the bridge. Police say the sketch of the suspect is based off witness tips, including one woman who told police she saw this man near the Delphi Historic Trails the day Abby Williams and Libby German were murdered.

We feel this is very important because it actually gives a better view of the person in the picture that you see down below, Sgt. Kim Riley said at a press conference on Monday morning. It shows a little more facial features it gives you a little more information on what were looking at, who the suspect might be, and thats why we feel that its very important that this picture is out there at this time. Police say its very important for the public to focus on the facial features.

(Left) Sketch of Delphi suspect; (Right) Picture of suspect

Police say the person depicted in the composite sketch is described as a white male between 56 to 510, weighing 180 to 220 pounds, with reddish brown hair. The eye color is unknown, but according to one witness, his eyes are not blue. Additionally, this sketch depicts a hat that may not be accurate.

Weve got the information out there, the pictures out there, now weve got this composite that we feel it is the same person and we just want to make sure that people realize this picture is this person , Riley said.

According to police, there are no arrests at this time, and Riley could not comment as to whether they are close to making an arrest. But he assured everyone this is not a cold case, and theyre still getting around five to 10 tips every day. Weve always felt that were going to solve this case, Riley said.

The investigation into the murder of German and Williams began February 13 when family members reported them missing. Their bodies were found near the Delphi Historic Trails on February 14.

Police later released a photo of a man walking on the bridge and a recording of a suspect saying down the hill.

Just last weekend, a softball tournament was held in Battle Ground, Indiana in memory of the girls. Proceeds from the tournament are going toward a new sports complex in their honor.

If you have any information regarding the investigation, police are encouraging you to call the tip line at 844-459-5786. Callers can remain anonymous.

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Police release sketch of man accused of murdering Delphi teens Liberty German and Abigail Williams - Fox 59

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