Watts Witit

A cheap, portable device may be able to pick up signs of consciousness in patients who have been diagnosed to be in an unresponsive, vegetative state.

Researchers from the University of Western Ontario in Canada measured meaningful brain activity, suggesting full awareness, in three patients who had been previously diagnosed as vegetative and not conscious. The study, which included a total of 16 patients in a persistent vegetative state and 12 healthy controls, used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity in response to verbal commands.

Participants were asked to imagine, at the sound of a tone, making a fist with their right hand. They were also asked to imagine wiggling their toes. In response to each command, the healthy controls showed distinct patterns of activity in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain involved with planning movement. The researchers found that three of the vegetative patients showed the same responses.

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These patients ranged in age from 20 to 45 years and had different types of injuries. One of the patients had been in a vegetative state for almost two years and yet he was able to understand what we were trying to do and show he was aware, study co-author Adrian Owen said in a news briefing.

If the finding holds up in future studies, it could potentially change the standards for diagnosing and treating vegetative patients. It could also open a vital channel for two-way communication between patients and caregivers. Reported New Scientist:

Using EEG to ask questions of these patients is the next step. By assigning thought processes to simple answers — for example, imagining clenching a fist means yes and wiggling toes means no — the team hopes their work can result in better clinical treatment. There are some interesting questions that one should get on to right away, Owen says. One is, Are you in pain?

This isnt the first time Owens team has detected awareness in patients who were thought to have none. Previously, they used functional MRI to show consciousness in such patients, but given the high cost and relative inaccessibility of fMRI scanners, the researchers sought a cheaper way to make diagnoses at the bedside. EEG uses electrodes attached to the head to pick up electrical activity in the brain.

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Further study is needed before researchers can be sure that the brain activity seen in these studies was made consciously. Notably, three of the healthy controls failed to register the proper brain activity in response to the verbal commands, even though they were fully aware, which suggests that EEG cant reliably identify the absence of consciousness.

However, the authors said, it could help identify awareness in patients who would otherwise be missed by standard physical tests, which gauge consciousness by asking people to track moving objects with their eyes or to respond to verbal commands by blinking or twitching a finger. Such tests may lead to misdiagnoses of zero consciousness in people, especially those who have periods of awareness.

Alongside behavioral assessment and other functional neuroimaging approaches, many testing sessions for several days with this EEG technique will provide each patient with an increased opportunity to show their covert awareness, if it exists, the researchers wrote.

MORE: Siblings of Autistic Kids Show Similar Brain Activity

The study was published online by The Lancet.

Meredith Melnick is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeredithCM. You can also continue the discussion on TIMEs Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

I was a sports doctor even before I became a health columnist and I had the opportunity to treat the best Filipino athletes from Lydia de Vega to Onyok Velasco, and from Paeng Nepomuceno to Robert Jaworski. Injuries, of course, are much more common with athletes involved in intense training and competitive sports, than in most of us who only do moderate exercises for health reasons.

But injuries do occur among us weekend warriors many are preventable, most are mild, and the majority will respond nicely to simple treatments at home. Here is what you should know about common musculoskeletal injuries and how to manage them.

General principles

bull; Prevention. Its always the best treatment. Here are a few key tips:

1) Work yourself into shape slowly. Its the most important element of prevention. Dont be tempted to go all out without preparing yourself properly. Its a growing problem, particularly for the baby boom generation; in fact, doctors have coined a new diagnosis, boomeritis, for the phenomenon. Use a graded exercise program to get into shape gradually, and then stay in shape the year round.

2) Warm up before each exercise session and cool down afterwards.

3) Stretch regularly; exercise makes muscles strong, but they also get tight and short stretching preserves flexibility and reduces the risk of injury.

4) Use good equipment; its particularly important to have supportive well-fitting shoes for weight-bearing activities.

5) Use good technique; a few lessons or a little coaching can improve your mechanics as well as your performance.

6) Dont overdo it. Fatigue and dehydration impair concentration, often leading to a misstep or fall. Overuse is the major cause of injuries; give your body a chance to rest and recover after workouts, particularly when youre first getting into shape. Alternate hard sessions with easier ones. Vary your routine so that you use different parts of your body; some people, for example, might walk one day, play tennis the next, and garden the third. A day off now and then doesnt hurt either.

bull; Recognition. If prevention fails, early detection is the next line of defense. Be alert for symptoms. A bit of soreness and stiffness are normal but pain, swelling, diminished strength or mobility, and discoloration of the skin are not. Spot small problems before they become big ones. If your problem seems small, treat it yourself. But if you dont improve or if you have a major injury, get medical help.

Common injuries: An exercisers guide

Many injuries feel the same, but there are important differences among them. Here is a glossary of some common injuries:

bull; Sprains. Injuries to ligaments, the fibrous connective tissues that connect one bone to another. In first-degree sprains, the ligament is stretched; in second-degree sprains, some fibers are torn; in third-degree sprains, most or all of the fibers are torn. Pain, swelling, tenderness, bluish discoloration due to bleeding, weakness, and decreased mobility may occur.

We all have to deal with the common SEO mistakes, such as a robots.txt moved from a staging server to the production site that blocks the entire site and duplicate meta tags. But from time to time in our daily work, we also see some Strange Encounters of the SEO Kind.

A panel at SES Chicago 2011 yesterday specifically looked at some extraordinary SEO situations that myself and the other panelists Angie Schottmuller, Bob Tripathi (and moderated by Chris Boggs) had encountered, how they figured out what the heck was going on, and how they fixed it.

One case study I talked about was a client who owned a shopping site. This shopping site had been monitoring their indexed pages and saw that theyd suddenly had a huge drop in indexed pages in Google only.

To figure out what happened, I found myself using the following six-step investigation process.

Step 1: Identify the Problem

Identify the problem as granularly as possible so you know the right questions to ask. This could be for anything from an unexpected drop in traffic and/or rankings, to an unexpected increase in traffic and/or rankings, to a seemingly random selection of pages not appearing in the index.

Upon examination it looked as though most of the product pages had vanished from Google, but were still in Bing and Yahoo. So now we knew the problem we could start to investigate.

Step 2: Rule Out Basic Causes First

Make sure that common SEO mistakes arent present. In our example case, the robots.txt was clean, allowing what it should allow, and blocking what it should block, there was nothing specifically related to Googles crawler Googlebot.

The source code was examined to see if a noindex tag had been added in. It hadnt.

The team looked to ensure that the missing pages were linked on the site, and were listed in a valid sitemap. Again, they all looked good.

Step 3: Look at Your Data

See if your data explains the issue. Has there been a huge shift in traffic from month A to month B.

Compare the search engines to see if its across the board or just one specific engine. Then compare the keywords, to see whats changed there.

Step 4: Use All Available Tools

We started by going into Google Webmaster Tools to see if Google was reporting any particular types of errors for the product pages. Again, no issues detected in our case study.

The team then looked more deeply at the product pages themselves. They were being ingested from a third party, so perhaps there was some kind of issue with the feed. What if they were pushing the content in an iFrame, which would block the crawlers? They werent.

Had they pushed a cross-domain canonical tag in the code to point to their own pages, thus preventing the clients pages from being indexed? No, they hadnt.

The feeds were being used by other shopping sites, so maybe the site was getting hit by a duplicate content filter? That was a possibility, but the pages would then most likely still be in the index, just not ranking.

After several days of looking at this issue, and not really coming any closer to solving the issue, one of the team used the Fetch as Googlebot tool in Google Webmaster Tools, and suddenly a noindex could be seen in the code. The third party vendors feed was inserting a noindex when the requestor was Googlebot. It wasnt intentional, it was just some testing code that had been forgotten about and pushed to the live site, but it cost the client a good few weeks of potential revenue, as it took them time to get the site re-indexed and ranking after the code fix was published.

Doh.And yes, that probably should have been one of the first tools used, given that the problem was specifically centered around that single search engine, but at least it was eventually run.

Step 5: Ask Others for Opinions

An extra set of eyes may be all that you need. There have been many other instances that I and the others on the panel have run up against, strange instances that weve had to root around to find out the answers to, and in some cases strange instances that we havent been able to figure out.

In those case where youve come up with a variety of potential answers, sometimes its a good idea to reach out to the SEO community and get that extra pair of eyes looking at the problem. Sometimes all it takes is explaining it to someone else for you to figure it out.

Step 6: Ask the Search Engines

If all else fails, in rare cases weve had to reach out to the search engines themselves to ask for assistance. Sometimes they answer, sometimes their answer is helpful and on at least one occasion Ive had a search engine admit that there was an error in their algorithm that was preventing a client site from ranking in their organic search, even though those same pages were ranking in Google News.

The truth (and the solution) is out there. You just have to know where to look.

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

When Connie Funkhouser saw the fresh bear track heading into the Caribou-Targhee National Forest on her recent run, she turned around.

Grizzly bear encounters are up dramatically this year in Island Park, along the Snake River near the boundary with Yellowstone National Park. Funkhouser, who lives in a subdivision on the Henrys Lake flats below Sawtelle Peak, takes no chances.

A few years ago she came upon a grizzly sow and cub on her favorite trail. Her neighbor, Richard Paini, was bitten by a grizzly bear in September while hunting.

#x93;I always wear my bear spray on my hip and carry my gun in my hand,#x94; Funkhouser said. #x93;I always go running with my two German shepherds.#x94;

The spray is for a charging bear, she said. The gun is to call for help.

Funkhouser is among the growing number of Idahoans finding grizzly bears as neighbors. The bears are increasingly filling Idaho#x92;s backcountry habitat, thanks to the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act. They are spreading south from the Selkirk and Cabinet Mountains, and west from Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks into eastern Idaho.

As the bears expand their range, state and federal scientists say it is only a matter of time before grizzlies move back into Central Idaho #x97; in places such as the Sawtooths where Treasure Valley residents spend weekends camping, hiking and recreating.

#x93;It#x92;s inevitable,#x94; said Jim Unsworth, Fish and Game deputy director, who serves on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee that works with federal authorities to manage the bears in the lower 48 states.

This also means more people in and around Idaho are getting into conflicts with the powerful predators #x97; and not just hunters far in the backcountry.

GRIZZLIES IN THE NEWS

Jeremy Hill, who lives near the Canadian border, made national headlines when his confrontation with three grizzly bears raiding his pigs turned into a federal case.

Debra Halloway had to pedal full speed to escape a charging grizzly sow by a subdivision near the Tetons.

Outfitter Erin Bolster ran her horse at a charging grizzly to save a trail-riding client in Montana#x92;s Flathead National Forest.

A grizzly was photographed this summer on the South Fork of the Snake River, 15 miles north of Idaho Falls.

This #x93;new normal#x94; is forcing people on the edges of grizzly country to become more aware and take steps to reduce conflicts #x97; not only when they go deep in the woods but in some cases just outside their doors, said Steve Schmidt, Idaho Department of Fish and Game regional supervisor in Idaho Falls.

#x93;We didn#x92;t used to have to prepare for this possibility and now we all have to prepare for it,#x94; he said.

STATE WANTS FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OUT

When an adult male grizzly bear was mistakenly killed by a black bear hunter in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in September 2007, state and federal officials tried to find more grizzlies but couldn#x92;t. If a female with cubs is verified in the area, it will force both state and federal officials to take special actions to protect grizzlies in the entire ecosystem.

That#x92;s a challenge Unsworth doesn#x92;t look foward to, in light of the state#x92;s experience with wolves.

Even though bear numbers are increasing in the Selkirk and Cabinet ranges surrounding Boundary County, grizzlies are nowhere near the population levels where they would be considered #x93;recovered#x94; and taken off the protection list.

#x93;As it is now, when they#x92;re still listed as threatened, it#x92;s like managing with one arm tied behind your back,#x94; Unsworth said.

Grizzly populations throughout the Northern Rockies have grown enough that Unsworth would like them all delisted. He thinks the states are better equipped to protect bears, since the main issue now is which bears can live and which have to be killed.

#x93;We#x92;re the only ones who have a game warden in every county with the confidence of the local people,#x94; he said.

And he#x92;s confident that if the northern Rockies grizzly population was delisted, Idaho would successfully manage the inevitable recolonization of central Idaho.

WHERE THE BEARS BELONG

Grizzly advocates such as Louisa Willcox of the Natural Resources Defense Council still think bears need federal protection and funding. But she#x92;s ready to begin a conversation about where Idahoans want grizzlies, and where we don#x92;t.

The place to work out those issues is in the revision of the state and federal recovery plans for the bear, she said.

The lines around grizzly habitat were drawn in 1983, when grizzly numbers were near an all-time low. Now grizzlies have spread south to the Wyoming Range and the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming and east to the plains beyond the Rocky Mountain Front. The lines and plans haven#x92;t kept up with the growing bear population.

#x93;We need locally driven conservation conversations about where we can anticipate problems and solve them, and where it is too much to ask,#x94; said Willcox, of Livingston, Mont.

Funkhouser, who owns the Island Park Lodge with her husband, Jim, says many of her friends are unhappy with the number of wolves in the area and their impact on game herds.

But most can live with the grizzlies, she said, despite the danger.

#x93;We are living in the bear#x92;s country #x97; they aren#x92;t living in ours,#x94; she said. #x93;They have every right to this area, more than humans.#x94;

Rocky Barker: 377-6484

Foreclosure activity in October was down 11 percent in the metro area and just over 13 percent statewide compared with September. The state had 10,010 properties with foreclosure filings, or one in every 406 housing units. Atlanta metro had 7,400 filings, or one in 293.

The total includes default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions.

The October 2011 total is down nearly 33 percent both for the metro area and for Georgia from October 2010.

Atlanta ranked 27th in foreclosure rate among metro areas while Georgia ranked sixth among states.

The states with a higher foreclosure rate than Georgia during October were Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida and Michigan.

Stockton, Calif., had the highest foreclosure rate among metro areas, with four other California cities in the top 10. Las Vegas, which had the highest rate for 22 consecutive months, dropped to fifth.

Nationwide, foreclosure filings increased 7 percent in October. One in every 563 housing units had a filing. That is still down more than 30 percent from October 2010.

RealtyTrac said the backlog of foreclosure properties must be cleared out in order for true market recovery to occur.

The October foreclosure numbers continue to show strong signs that foreclosure activity is coming out of the rain delay weve been in for the past year as lenders corrected foreclosure paperwork and processing problems, said James Saccacio, CEO of RealtyTrac, speaking of the nationwide increase.

ALBANY, NEW YORK
(WXXI) -

Deliberations over drawing new legislative and congressional districts continue in Albany, as legislators have hit a new hurdle in the complex process.

Lawmakers have decided where to count the prisoners, in the homes they were living before their incarceration, a change that benefits the districts of many Democrats at the expense of Republicans. But they are still arguing about how to count the prisoners, and what kind of computer software and database to use. Task force Co Chair, Assemblyman Jack McEneny, a Democrat, offered an amendment, but it was rejected by GOP lawmakers .

Unfortunately, we are still in disagreement, said McEneny, a Democrat from Albany.

Senate Co Chair Mike Nozzolio, a Republican from the Finger Lakes, says Republicans are concerned that the Democrats want to use software that results in the state using a different census counting method than used in the federal census.

I have objections and Im going to continue to have them, said Nozzolio.

McEneny says there are around 20,000 state inmates whose home address cant be determined, and talks continue about how to count them.

Further complicating matters- because of court action, no date for next years primaries has been set yet, and Governor Cuomo is threatening to veto the legislatures new district lines. McEneny says the legislature and governor have agreed to disagree on the veto threat, and the Assemblyman repeated his request that Cuomo first see the new district maps before deciding whether or not to sign the legislation.

Senator Nozzolio says the task force is moving ahead, as required under law, despite Cuomos veto warnings.

Those decisions are not ours, Nozzolio said.

McEneny says the new maps likely wont made public until at least January.

copy; Copyright 2011, WXXI

(CBS News)

If you want to go whale watching, you normally have to head out a few miles in order to get a glimpse of the majestic animals. But this year, a pod of humpback whales near Santa Cruz, Calif. is swimming closer to the shore than they have for years. CBS News correspondent John Blackstone headed to the Pacific coast to see the humpbacks face-to-face.

According to Santa Cruz whale watching captain Ken Stagnaro, this years whales have come so close to shore that people can literally see them from the beach.

This also means that theres been some dangerous close encounters with surfers and kayakers. At 40 feet long and more than 30 tons, humpback whales present a clear risk since they feed on anchovies. But so far, the whales seem to be more interesting in observing us than eating us, Stagnaro explained.

Humpback whales shock kayakers, surfer

Humpback whales: Close-up and on cam

For the safety of both whales and humans, the Marine Mammal Act makes it a crime to get within 100 yards of a whale, but, theres no law against whales coming close to people, said naturalist Maureen Gilbert.

Sometimes it seems like theyre as intrigued with us as we are with them, she said.

That is certainly how it seemed to those on an Oceanic Society whale watching trip off San Francisco. Four humpback whales just kept circling the boat, lifting their fins so close they could be touched.

We dont know what affect these close encounters have on the whale. but Gilbert knows for sure what they do to humans.

You are never the same after you see a whale in the wild, she said.

Former adopters of the voice command service of Apple has questioned whether the feature has been released earlier than it was supposed to be, as Siri exhibits another technical outage.

On Wednesday, a group of Siri users started posting to the Siri page of the Twitter complaining that the voice-command service wasn’t functioning properly. This malfunctioning has been attributedto the network connectivity trouble.

Siri builds its connections through Apple’s servers with a view to processing each and every request. This leads many individual requests to be speculated that the servers are not currently capable of coping with the heavy traffic. Siri had previously suffered its first technical drawback immediately upon the release of iPhone 4S. However, the new trouble seems to be adding strength to the arguments that, Siri must not overlook all of its outages if it wants to competewith the upcoming Nexus Prime.

Episode 08 | Aired Nov 17, 2011
Community recap: Encounters at the End ofSanity
Dean Pelton fashions himself a DeMille-style film director, complete with riding crop. Terrible unhappiness follows
By Christian Blauvelt | Published Nov 18, 2011

In anticipation of Sundays mega clash at Stamford Bridge, GMF takes a look back at some classic encounters between Chelsea and Liverpool.

Liverpool 7-4 Chelsea (First Division, September 7, 1946)

This is one of Liverpools most illustrious results against Chelsea.

It was the Anfield feast that introduced Billy Liddell. The Preachers son ran riot, orchestrating the game and scoring two as Liverpool ran out 7-4 victors.

One of Liddells goals was scored straight from a corner.

A near 50,000 Anfield crowd also saw Billy Jones and Willie Fagan both score a brace each with Jack Balmer settling for a solitary strike.

Chelsea 0-1 Liverpool (First Division, May 3, 1986)

Liverpool came to Stamford Bridge on a run of 10 wins in 11. Jim Beglins clever assist provided a moment of vintage Kenny Dalglish as Liverpools greatest ever player controlled the ball on his chest, and cleanly poked past Tony Godden to seal the League Championship for Liverpool and the first half of the only League and Cup Double of the decade.

Chelsea 2-1 Liverpool (Barclays Premier League, May 11, 2003)

Jesper Gronkjaer scored what will be hailed as one of the most important goals in Chelseas entire history.

His winning goal after Marcel Desailly had equalised Sami Hyppias opener ensured Chelseas entry into the Champions League for the very first time.

Despite the euphoria, Ken Bates Chelsea was in deep financial mire, with the clubs debt nearing the pound;100 million mark. Analysts predicted another Peter Ridsdale style Leeds United collapse. However, during the close season the club were bought by an unknown Russian oligarch called Roman Abramovich.

Stamford Bridge and Chelsea Football club will never be the same again.

Liverpool 1-0 Chelsea (Champions League semi-final, May 3, 2005)

Both teams have been involved in gargantuan Champions League tussles in recent years.

The game had it all; end to end football, Luis Garcias phantom goal and a second half Chelsea onslaught that left every Liverpool fan thinking that the clocks had stopped.

Liverpools defence was outstanding and resolute. An astonishing miss from Eidur Gudjohnsen 5 minutes into the 6 added for injury time sealed Chelseas fate.

It was the perfect run up to the miracle of Istanbul and Liverpools magnificent 5th Champions League trophy.

Chelsea 3-2 Liverpool (2004-05 League Cup Final, 27 February 2005)

The Millenium Stadium had become a fortress for Liverpool and the Reds were confident of another trophy to add to the burgeoning cabinet at Anfield. Normal service resumed as John Arne Riise scored the fastest goal in League Cup final history.

Chelseas pressure and dominance in possession paid off when Steven Gerrard headed into his own net. Jose Mourinhos celebrations led to the Chelsea manager being sent to the stands hushing the Liverpool fans with the finger on lip routine as the Portugeezer gleefully trudged off.

Mourinhos jubilation met elation as Didier Drogba and Stamford Bridge flop Mateja Kezman added a further two goals to give the West Londoners a commanding lead. A late Antonio Núñez goal was to no avail as Chelsea held on for a 3-2 win.