Obama Speaks in Charlotte

Introduction

The editorial staff at The Week thought Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama gave great speeches at the Democratic National Convention, but President Obama himself did not give a speech that lived up to expectations. The article noted that Ezra Klein of the Washington Post tweeted that "This speech felt very safe to me" and "It’s a speech you give when you think you’re winning." Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast called the speech "dull and pedestrian." Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic bemoaned that the "easy swagger and rambunctiously playful enthusiasm" of Obama in 2008 isn’t there because he "will never be that man again." The pundits seem to agree that Obama was playing it safe in his acceptance speech, in spite of a known tidal wave of paid media attack coming from the Romney campaign.

Summarized from:

http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-dull-pedestrian-convention-speech-why-did-play-070500638--election.html

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Obama’s Acceptance Speech
Comments by the Blog Author

President Obama’s acceptance speech in Charlotte just escaped being a dud. Originally scheduled outdoors at a stadium that seats 80,000, it wound up indoors with a smaller audience, jilting some of the stadium ticket holders. The speech itself was designed to placate the attitudes and motivate the enthusiasm of voters as discovered in millions of dollars of focus group studies.

The speech warmed up with a paean to critical parts of the base – union workers and teachers. Then a nod was given to those faithful toward the global warming theory. Obama said nearly nothing about the record deficits, apparently embracing a view that they would magically shrivel once everything else was going well. He waffled on where cuts would come from except from ending the Afghanistan adventure in 2014. He added a flip-flop on coal, which he stated in 2008 was an industry he wanted to see go bankrupt. Four years later, he finds himself a supporter of clean coal.

Obama knitted his thoughts together under a philosophical umbrella of continental European communitarianism. We’re all in this together. Individualism is old-fashioned and doesn’t matter. Obama offered an open society welcoming all who agree that society comes first.

Which of his lines will make good sound bytes for the commercials in the fall campaign? Because his address did not speak effectively to the long term unemployed or blue-collar underemployed, it was nearly a dud.

Huge Alzheimer's Breakthrough

New treatment reduces a key Alzheimer’s Disease protein by a staggering 90 percent
By Robert Gonzales, io9.com, September 6, 2012

In recent years, some of the haze obscuring neuroscience's view of Aβ peptides and their role in Alzheimer's has lifted, as researchers uncover more and more evidence that these small protein chains play a causative, neurologically harmful role in the disease. They've been found to disrupt communication between neurons, and have been implicated in toxic cell-signaling events that can lead to everything from inflammation, to mitochondrial dysfunction, to cell death. Yet the various cellular mechanisms by which these peptides bring about such destructive outcomes remains muddled.

In today’s issue of Neuron, a team of researchers led by Ohio State University biochemist Sung Ok Yoon have opened a new therapeutic door for Alzheimer's research by shedding valuable light on the cell-signaling pathways of Aβ42, the form of Aβ-peptide most likely to clump into Alzheimer's hallmark plaques. In doing so, the researchers discovered that deleting an enzyme known as JNK3 from the genes of mice with a model form of Alzheimer's lowered Aβ-peptide production by 90 percent over the course of six months.

The molecular players involved in the pathway are numerous, and the details of their dance — while not overly complex — are too lengthy to include here, so here's a distilled version:

                                         JNK3 activation model via Yoon et al.

Yoon and her colleagues show that Aβ42 blocks the production of a variety of proteins, and that this "translational block" triggers a cellular stress reaction known as the unfolded protein response, or UFR. UFR gives rise to a whole mess of cellular activity, including the activation of JNK3.

JNK3's activity in the brain is typically low, but is thought to spike in response to things like stress and illness. One of JNK3's job is to label Amyloid Precursor Protein (which, as its name implies, is a precursor to Aβ42) for processing into Aβ42 and other Aβ-peptides; if this precursor isn't tagged, Aβ42 has a harder time getting made. It follows, then, that when JNK activity is high, Aβ-peptide production increases, too. Or, as Yoon writes:

"JNK3 activation, which is increased [in human cases of Alzheimer's disease] and [mouse models of Alzheimer's disease], is integral to perpetuating Aβ42 production."

This process, hypothesizes Yoon, leads to a destructive feedback loop. "Around and around and around it goes, ever more strongly," she explained in a press release. "These results suggest that JNK3 is the key perpetuating the cycle."

So what happens when you remove JNK3 from the picture? A few things. As we mentioned earlier, it led to a 90% drop in Aβ42 levels among disease-affected mice. But it also results in a dramatic reduction of overall plaque loads, increased total neuronal number and even improved cognition.

Alzheimer's mice with missing JNK3 reached cognitive functions 80% that of normal; in disease model mice, function was limited to 40% of normal.

According to Yoon, the mice used for the study are models for the most aggressive form of Alzheimer's Disease, producing the highest amount of Aβ-peptides; and the 90% drop is the biggest in Aβ-peptide levels "that has been reported so far by treating animal models with drugs or genetic manipulations."

"The fact that we found that protein synthesis is hugely affected by Alzheimer's disease opens up a door to let us try a variety of drugs that are already developed for other chronic progressive diseases that share this commonality of affected protein production," Yoon said.

The researchers' findings are published in the latest issue of Neuron.
　
　
http://io9.com/5940990/new-treatment-reduces-a-key-alzheimers-disease-protein-by-a-staggering-90-percent

Facebook Gets Graded

Facebook Earns a C- for
Respecting User
By Leslie Meredith, Senior Writer, TechNewsDaily, 31 August 2012

Clickwrapped, a new review company, has released its first report card that grades top websites on how well they protect users' privacy and their other user policies.

Despite pervasive criticism in the media, Facebook ranked near the top of the list, ahead of Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

The site's founder, attorney and technology entrepreneur Andrew Nicol, based ratings on answers to questions such as "Does the site get more rights to your content than it needs?" and "What can the site do with content you post?"

Websites are graded on four categories: Data Use, Data Disclosure, Amendment & Termination and Miscellaneous.  Each can be awarded up to 100 points — 25 points per category. Wikipedia had the highest score with 86 points, and was the only site to score a perfect 25, which it earned for appropriate use of data, meaning that Wikipedia only uses your data to support listings on the site. Craigslist ended up at the bottom of the list with an overall score of 45. Facebook ranked fourth.

The site's founder Andrew Nicol was himself surprised that Facebook ranked so high.

"Facebook, because it has more data about more of us, it just simply attracts more press just because it’s so big," Nicol said in a report from news site AllFacebook. "I don’t think a lot of people realize that it compares pretty well to a lot of other social networks in that there are actually a lot more restrictions on what it can do with your data."

While Facebook's score of 70 is a barely passing grade on a standard scale, it ranked high compared to other sites.

Facebook made high marks because it allows users to control their privacy, does not cancel an account unless the user is in clear violation of its terms and services agreement and promises to consult users prior to modifying the terms and services agreement.

"Its current terms of service (which it calls the "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities") is actually one of the most pro-user agreements in our survey," Nicols said.

However, the biggest social media network has areas it needs to work on, such as claiming ownership of user content — Facebook can sell your content to other companies, tracking its members’ visits to other websites and not commiting itself to tell you when it has released your data to law enforcement.

Nicol plans to add more websites to his lineup and categorize them by type, including social network, e-commerce and photo-sharing sites.

http://www.technewsdaily.com/4783-facebook-earns-a-c-for-respecting-user-rights.html

Progress in Bone Marrow Cell Research

UCLA scientists discover 'missing link' between blood stem cells, immune system
By Kim Irwin, UCLA Newsroom, September 02, 2012

UCLA researchers have discovered a type of cell that is the "missing link" between bone marrow stem cells and all the cells of the human immune system, a finding that will lead to a greater understanding of how a healthy immune system is produced and how disease can lead to poor immune function.

The research was done using human bone marrow, which contains all the stem cells that produce blood during post-natal life.

"We felt it was especially important to do these studies using human bone marrow, as most research into the development of the immune system has used mouse bone marrow," said the study's senior author, Dr. Gay Crooks, co-director of UCLA’s Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell
Research and a co-director of the cancer and stem-cell biology program at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "The few studies with human tissue have mostly used umbilical cord blood, which does not reflect the immune system of post-natal life."

The research team was "intrigued to find this particular bone marrow cell, because it opens up a lot of new possibilities in terms of understanding how human immunity is produced from stem cells throughout life," said Crooks, a professor of pathology and pediatrics.

Understanding the process of normal blood formation in human adults is a crucial step in shedding light on what goes wrong during the process that results in leukemias, cancers of the blood.

The findings appear Sept. 2 in the early online edition of the journal Nature Immunology.

Before this study, researchers had a fairly good idea of how to find and study the blood stem cells of the bone marrow. The stem cells live forever, reproduce themselves and give rise to all the cells of the blood. In the process, the stem cells divide and produce cells in intermediate stages of development called progenitors, which make various blood lineages, like red blood cells or platelets.

Crooks was most interested in the creation of the progenitors that form the entire immune system, which consists of many different cells called lymphocytes, each with a specialized function to fight infection.

"Like the stem cells, the progenitor cells are also very rare, so before we can study them, we needed to find the needle in the haystack," said Lisa Kohn, a member of the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program and first author of the study.

Previous work had found a fairly mature type of lymphocyte progenitor with a limited ability to differentiate, but the new work describes a more primitive type of progenitor primed to produce the entire immune system, Kohn said.

Once the lymphoid-primed progenitor had been identified, Crooks and her team studied how gene expression changed during the earliest stages of its production from stem cells.

"The gene expression data convinced us that we had found a unique stage of development in the immune system," Crooks said. "There was a set of genes that the lymphoid-primed cell shares with the bone marrow stem cells and a unique gene expression of its own once it becomes active. This data provided us with an understanding of what genes are important in creating all the cells of the immune system. The information could allow us to manipulate bone marrow to help create a stronger immune system."

As a bone-marrow transplant clinician who treats children with many diseases, including leukemia and immune deficiency, Crooks is keenly interested in how the immune system is made and, more specifically, in potential new ways to speed that process along in her patients, whose immune systems are wiped out prior to transplant.

"The identification of a progenitor in human bone marrow primed for full lymphoid differentiation will now permit delineation of the molecular regulation of the first stages of lymphoid commitment in human hematopoiesis," the study states. "It will also allow understanding of how these processes are affected during aberrant hematopoiesis in disease states."

The study was funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the National Institutes of Health (PO1 HL073140 and RO1 HL077912), the Broad Stem Cell Research Center at UCLA and UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-scientists-discover-missing-238096.aspx

Secrets of Denisovan DNA

Science Researchers Sequence the Genome of the Denisovans, A Close Relative of the Neandertals
by Kathy Wren and Natasha Pinol, Advanced Science Serving Society

August 30, 2012 -- Researchers have now described the complete sequence of the Denisovan genome, shedding light on the relationships between these archaic humans, who were closely related to Neandertals, and modern humans.

The research team, led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, generated a list of recent changes in the human genome that occurred after modern humans diverged from the Denisovans. This list will help scientists understand what sets modern humans apart from the Denisovans and Neandertals.

The results were published online by Science, in the 30 August edition of ScienceExpress.

Fossil evidence of the Denisovans is scanty; the existence of this group only came to light in 2010 when DNA from a piece of a finger bone and two molars that were excavated at Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia was studied.

"We’ve remarkably been able to extract DNA from the Neandertals and Denisovans to compare them to ourselves," said Laura Zahn, senior editor at the journal Science, during a 29 August press teleconference.

Because they had only a tiny sample of genetic material recovered from the finger bone, Pääbo and his research team developed a treatment that "unzipped" the ancient DNA so that each of its two strands could be used to generate molecules for sequencing. This method allowed the team to generate an extremely thorough genome sequence, similar in quality to what researchers can obtain for the modern human genome.

"We have very few errors in the sequences, even less errors than we often have when you sequence a person today," Pääbo said. "[This genome] now allows us to look across the whole genome on all the mutations that have happened since we separated from Denisovans... such mutations that happened very recently in human history and have spread to everybody or almost everybody today."

The researchers compared the Denisovan genome with the genomes of several modern humans from around the world. The Denisovans share more genes with populations from the islands of southeastern Asia, including Melanesia and Australian Aborigines, than with populations elsewhere in Asia.

"We can confirm... that relatives of a Denisovan individual in Denisova Cave contributed genes to the ancestors of present-day people from New Guinea, in a gene flow event that did not affect the rest of the people in mainland Eurasia," said David Reich of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute in Massachusetts. "We find no trace of Denisovan genetic material in mainland Eurasia, including in mainland Southeast Asia, to the limits of our resolution."

"However, it’s clear that Denisovan genetic material has contributed 3-5% of the genomes of people in Australia and New Guinea and Aboriginal people from the Philippines and some of the islands nearby," Reich noted, "so we are able to confirm that quite powerfully."

The research team, which published a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome in 2010, uncovered another surprise with the Denisova genome. "What seems to be the case is that people in the eastern parts of Eurasia, in Native Americans, have more Neandertal material than people in Europe, even though Neandertals mostly lived in Europe," Reich said, "which is really, really interesting, and we were not able to detect this before in our paper we published in 2010."

The researchers also concluded that the Denisovan individual whose genome was sequenced carried genetic variants that in present-day humans are associated with dark skin, brown hair, and brown eyes, and that the genetic diversity of the Denisovans themselves was extremely low.

"By doing some more sophisticated analysis, one could actually track back the genetic diversity through time, and it became apparent that the genetic diversity was low over the last few hundred thousand years of the Denisovan history," said Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Given the Denisovans’ wide geographic range over time, it’s likely that their population was initially quite small but grew quickly, without time for genetic diversity to increase.

If further research shows that the Neandertal population size changed over time in a similar way, that may suggest that a single population expanding out of Africa gave rise to both the Denisovans and Neandertals, the study authors say.

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/0830sp_denisova.shtml

What An Honest Stock Broker Does

Ex-Stock Broker: I Realized That Most Of What I Did Was Bad For Clients–So I Quit
By Henry Blodget, Daily Ticker – Fri, Aug 31, 2012

Many of those who work on Wall Street go through a process in which they gradually learn that what is perceived as "smart investing" is often unbelievably dumb.

Specifically, they learn that many of the recommendations that Wall Street makes--and the transactions that Wall Street gets paid to facilitate--are not in their clients' best interests.
And once they learn that, they face a choice between two options:

1. Continue to make the same bad recommendations and trades.
2. Change the way they do business, often in exchange for a lower initial salary.

One of those who changed is Josh Brown, a former stock broker who now writes a well-read financial blog called The Reformed Broker
[at http://www.thereformedbroker.com/about ].

He worked for 10 years in the retail broker industry during both boom and bust markets.

When times are good and people are making money, the inherent conflicts in the business are "masked," he says. But when the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked, Brown says, quoting Warren Buffett.

"As a retail broker, your job is to buy things with your clients money. That's it. When you are not doing that they pull the money," Brown tells The Daily Ticker in the accompanying interview. When times were bad and equities were not a good investment, he was forced to continue to buying, choosing the stocks that were the lesser of all evils.

After the market crash of 2008, he realized that he was hurting clients by selling them stocks he didn't think they should buy. Brown abandoned being a "broker" and became a financial adviser at Fusion Analytics. In this new job, Brown says, his interests and his client interests are more closely aligned.
Most people don't recognize that there's even a difference between a "stock broker" and a "financial adviser," but there is. And for clients, it's a critically important difference.

Stock brokers generally work for brokerage firms and do not have to recommend trades that they think are in their clients' best interests. Rather, they just have to recommend securities that are "suitable" (a much lower standard). Financial advisers, meanwhile, have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of their clients. Even though this standard is often violated (by financial advisers who don't understand the importance of low fees to investment returns, for example), it's a much higher standard. And, all else being equal, no one looking for sound financial advice should ever work with a stock broker over a financial adviser.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/ex-stock-broker-realized-most-did-bad-clients-134422604.html

Positive Quiddity: Lyricist Hal David

Harold Lane "Hal" David (May 25, 1921 – September 1, 2012) was an American lyricist. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He was best known for his collaborations with composer Burt Bacharach.

David was born in New York City, New York, and is credited with popular music lyrics beginning in the 1940s with material written for band leaders Sammy Kaye and Guy Lombardo. He worked with Morty Nevins of The Three Suns on four songs for the feature film Two Gals and a Guy (1951), starring Janis Paige and Robert Alda.

In 1957, David met composer Burt Bacharach at Famous Music in the Brill Building in New York. The two teamed up and wrote their first hit "The Story of My Life", recorded by MartyRobbins in 1957. Later that year Perry Como had a hit with their ""Magic Moments". Subsequently, Bacharach and David wrote some of the most enduring songs in American popular music, many for Dionne Warwick, but also for The Carpenters, Dusty Springfield, B.J. Thomas, Gene Pitney, Tom Jones, Jackie DeShannon, and others in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Bacharach and David hits included "Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head", "This Guy’s in Love with You", I’ll Never Fall in Love Again," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose", " Walk on By", "What the World Needs Now is Love", "I Say a Little Prayer", "[There’s] Always Something There to Remind Me", "One Less Bell to Answer", and "Anyone Who Had a Heart".

The duo's film work includes the Oscar-nominated title songs for "What’s New Pussycat?" and "Alfie"; "The Look of Love", from Casino Royale; and the Oscar-winning "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In addition, "Don’t Make Me Over", "[They Long to Be] Close to You", and "Walk on By" have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

David and Bacharach were awarded the 2011 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song bestowed by the Library of Congress, the first time a songwriting team was given the honor. David was recuperating from a recent illness and was unable to attend the Washington D.C. presentation ceremony in May 2012.

David's work with other composers included Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias' "To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before", with Albert Hammond; Sarah Vaughan's "Broken Hearted Melody", with Sherman Edwards; the 1962 Joanie Sommers hit "Johnny Get Angry", also with Edwards; and "We Have All the Time in the World", written with John Barry and sung by Louis Armstrong, for the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. David co-wrote with Paul Hampton the country standard "Sea of Heartbreak", a hit for Don Gibson and others.

David passed away in the morning hours of September 1, 2012 after complications from a stroke. He was 91.

Hal David's elder brother, Mack David, was also a lyricist and songwriter.

He was lyricist for the Tony-nominated 1968 Broadway musical Promises, Promises.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_David

Popular Hal David Songs:

24 Hours from Tulsa, A House is Not a Home, Alfie, America Is, American Beauty Rose, Anyone Who Had a Heart, Blue on Blue, Close to You, Do You Know the Way to San Jose, Don't Make Me Over, I Say a Little Prayer, It Was Almost Like a Song, Johnny Get Angry, Magic Moments, Make It Easy on Yourself, Message to Michael, My Heart is an Open Book, One Less Bell to Answer, Open Your Arms to the World, Promises Promises, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, Reach Out for Me, The April Fools, The Look of Love, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, There's Always Something There to Remind Me, This Guy's in Love With You, To All the Girls I've Loved Before, Trains and Boats and Planes, Walk on By, What the World Needs Now is Love, What's New Pussycat?, Wishin' and Hopin', Wives and Lovers, You'll Never Get to Heaven (If you Break My Heart)

From: http://www.haldavid.com/songs.htm

Complete list of over 700 Hal David songs at:

http://www.haldavid.com/catalog.htm

　
Note from the Blog Author

I haven’t heard every version of every Hal David song, but the most talented renditions of all may be the Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66 bossa nova version of The Look of Love, Dionne Warwick’s singing of The Windows of the World, and Sarah Vaughan’s version of Broken Hearted Melody.