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Kansas lawmakers of both parties are in a race to correctly ban concealed guns from college campuses before a 2013 law can allow that dangerous outcome starting July 1.
Monthly Archives: January 2017
Jay Ashcroft flunks his first ethics test in Missouri
Last March, Jay Ashcroft was running for Missouri secretary of state, claiming he heartily supported strong ethical behavior in Jefferson City.
Sam Brownback says give Donald Trump a chance. Yeah, that's not happening
It's popular these days for Donald Trump's supporters and some even-handed Americans to say it's time to let him lead America as — cough — president.
Update: No charges will be filed in ugly online threat against Kansas lawmaker
The online threat made last week against Kansas Rep. Stephanie Clayton of Overland Park was extremely offensive but not illegal.
Best part of KC Women's Rally? The signs — and the passion to fight Trump
The KC Women's Rally on Saturday was a solid event in many ways.
Kansas lawmaker deftly deals with threat: 'This bitch needs to swing by a tree'
Kansas Rep. Stephanie Clayton earlier this week introduced a much-needed bill to allow public universities and community colleges to continue to ban guns from their campuses.
Donald Trump's critics aren't sore losers. They are Americans
Millions of Donald Trump's fans may have enjoyed the zenith of his administration on Friday when he was sworn in as president. Time will tell.
New jobs report debunks Sam Brownback's stubborn tax-cut fantasies
Kansas lawmakers heard anecdotal evidence Thursday that Gov. Sam Brownback's reckless 2012 income tax cuts are creating jobs in the state. On Friday, the latest factual proof arrived that such claims are wrong.
KanCare debacle Part II: It's not 'political' or a 'surprise'
Please don't underestimate just how badly Gov. Sam Brownback's administration has bungled the KanCare Medicaid program — serving more than 400,000 Kansans — with the complicity of too many state legislators.
KC's vital Saturday rally is pro-women — and anti-Donald Trump
Too many women let America down on Nov. 8 when Donald Trump was unfortunately elected president.
KanCare bombshell: Patients suffer as clueless Brownback and Colyer claim victory
UPDATED 2 PM THURSDAY: Kansas lawmakers are furious Thursday after the feds dropped a bombshell on Kansas' privatized Medicaid program known as KanCare. But legislators are a big part of the problem, too.
Eric Greitens misfires on 'bloated' state workforce but hits target on tax credits
Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens gave a subdued and tepidly received State of the State address this week.


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- Ski
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- Ski
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Water and wind resistant winter jacket in a bit longer model. Equipped with all the features required for the ski slopes or other winter activities. Padded with polyester filling that has similar properties to a down filling is a good choice for animal lovers.
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David Blumenthal MD
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Health IT's Billion-Dollar Man
MIT Technology Review, November/December 2009, by David Talbot — By one estimate, only 17 percent of U.S. doctors use electronic records. But the federal government has ambitious plans to create a network in which patient information is shared electronically among medical institutions. As National Coördinator for Health Information Technology, David Blumenthal is writing the rules under which the federal government will spend more than $21 billion in stimulus funds to get the job done. Blumenthal, previously a practicing physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, spoke with David Talbot, Technology Review's chief correspondent.
TR: How long will it take to create a national health-information network?
David Blumenthal: The president has said that everyone will have an electronic health record by 2014. That is the goal we are working toward right now. We are trying to make the network available as fast as we can.
TR: Can health IT reduce the skyrocketing U.S. health-care costs?
DB: The Congressional Budget Office projected dollar savings from the [stimulus] legislation at about $12 billion over 10 years. I expect that the actual savings will far exceed that amount.
TR: How do we get around the potential problems with electronic systems–such as overwhelming physicians with data or actually causing medical errors?
DB: Electronic health records and other forms of health IT can certainly be improved, and there are examples of bad implementation and other problems. I still think that on the whole, across the country we'd be better off with universal availability of electronic health records. We'd have fewer errors, fewer missed diagnoses, less duplication of tests, and fewer adverse drug events.
TR: If health-IT systems reduce such errors and lead to fewer needless procedures, why haven't the insurance companies stampeded to get them installed?
DB: The insurance companies have been able to pass along the costs of waste in our health-care system to their clients.
TR: You are setting the definitions of "meaningful use"–the criteria hospitals and physicians must meet to collect their cash incentives for installing IT. What will be in these definitions?
DB: I can't speak to the specific criteria at this point. We are in the middle of writing the regulations, and the initial release is anticipated in December.
TR: You're giving out $564 million for states to form health-information exchanges among medical providers. Why don't even the most electronically progressive hospitals–including your own Mass General–already share their data?
DB: There has never been a business case for health-information exchange. As a matter of fact, there has been a negative case: if you give away your information, you may lose it. You may lose the patient.
'Scaffolding' to regenerate lost or damaged bones and tissues, even stop age clock
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ZDNet.com, November 1, 2009, by Chris Jablonski — Implantable organ and tissue "scaffolds" are currently in the spotlight for regenerative medicine, and may allow for the replacement of most body parts that flounder with age within 30-50 years, according to a report from BBC.
That means future centenarians born today could have a "physical" age of 50 at a calendar age of 100.
A "scaffolding" technique developed at Leeds University allows for transplantable tissues, and eventually organs, that the body can make its own. Once the scaffold has been transplanted, the body takes over and repopulates it with cells without any fear of rejection – the main reason why normal transplants wear out and fail .
Using this technique, a research team at Leeds has managed to make fully functioning heart valves, which involves taking a healthy donor heart valve – from a human or a suitable animal, such as a pig – and gently stripping away its cells using a cocktail of enzymes and detergents. The inert scaffold left can be transplanted into the patient, writes the BBC. According to Eileen Ingha, a professor at the university's Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, trials in animals and on 40 patients in Brazil have shown promising results.
Across the continent, another approach to scaffolding is underway at Tel Aviv University's Department of Biomedical Engineering. There, professor Meital Zilberman has developed an artificial biologically active scaffold made from soluble fibers, which may help humans replace lost or missing bone.
Her flexible scaffolding connects tissues together as it releases growth-stimulating drugs to the place where new bone or tissue is needed – like the scaffolding that surrounds an existing building when additions to that building are made.
"The bioactive agents that spur bone and tissue to regenerate are available to us. The problem is that no technology has been able to effectively deliver them to the tissue surrounding that missing bone," says Zilberman.
The invention could be used to restore missing bone in a limb lost in an accident, or repair receded jawbones necessary to secure dental implants, says Zilberman. (Recently, Columbia University researchers used adult stem cells to create a jaw bone.) The scaffold can be shaped so the bone will grow into the proper form. After a period of time, the fibers can be programmed to dissolve, leaving no trace.
Composite drug-releasing fibers used as basic elements of scaffolding for tissue and bone regeneration. (Credit: AFTAU)
"The fibers not only support body parts like bones and arteries. They're also specially developed to release drugs and proteins in a controlled manner. Our special 3-D matrix can hold together drugs that are particularly vulnerable to breaking down easily. The matrix gives the body shape and form, coaxing it to re-grow and strengthen missing parts," she says.
According to Zilberman, until now in vitro results on bone have been good, and some basic unpublished results from animal models have shown excellent promise for bone regeneration. "It sounds simple, but it's not. It's quite difficult to develop a process for scaffold formation for bone growth. It's a delicate balance to apply only mild conditions that will not destroy the activity of the growth factor molecules," she says.
With more research, Zilberman says, it could also serve as the basic technology for regenerating other types of human tissues, including muscle, arteries, and skin.
Visions of the Future
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After the Singularity: A Talk with Ray Kurzweil
by Ray Kurzweil
John Brockman, editor of Edge.org, recently interviewed Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity and its ramifications. According to Ray, "We are entering a new era. I call it 'the Singularity.' It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that–to think human beings are fine the way they are–is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology."
Originally published on Edge.com.
RAY KURZWEIL: My interest in the future really stems from my interest in being an inventor. I've had the idea of being an inventor since I was five years old, and I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you're going to succeed as an inventor. It's a little bit like surfing; you have to catch a wave at the right time. I quickly realized the world quickly becomes a different place than it was when you started by the time you finally get something done. Most inventors fail not because they can't get something to work, but because all the market's enabling forces are not in place at the right time.
So I became a student of technology trends, and have developed mathematical models about how technology evolves in different areas like computers, electronics in general, communication storage devices, biological technologies like genetic scanning, reverse engineering of the human brain, miniaturization, the size of technology, and the pace of paradigm shifts. This helped guide me as an entrepreneur and as a technology creator so that I could catch the wave at the right time.
This interest in technology trends took on a life of its own, and I began to project some of them using what I call the law of accelerating returns, which I believe underlies technology evolution to future periods. I did that in a book I wrote in the 1980s, which had a road map of what the 1990s and the early 2000's would be like, and that worked out quite well. I've now refined these mathematical models, and have begun to really examine what the 21st century would be like. It allows me to be inventive with the technologies of the 21st century, because I have a conception of what technology, communications, the size of technology, and our knowledge of the human brain will be like in 2010, 2020, or 2030. If I can come up with scenarios using those technologies, I can be inventive with the technologies of the future. I can't actually create these technologies yet, but I can write about them.
One thing I'd say is that if anything the future will be more remarkable than any of us can imagine, because although any of us can only apply so much imagination, there'll be thousands or millions of people using their imaginations to create new capabilities with these future technology powers. I've come to a view of the future that really doesn't stem from a preconceived notion, but really falls out of these models, which I believe are valid both for theoretical reasons and because they also match the empirical data of the 20th century.
One thing that observers don't fully recognize, and that a lot of otherwise thoughtful people fail to take into consideration adequately, is the fact that the pace of change itself has accelerated. Centuries ago people didn't think that the world was changing at all. Their grandparents had the same lives that they did, and they expected their grandchildren would do the same, and that expectation was largely fulfilled.
Today it's an axiom that life is changing and that technology is affecting the nature of society. But what's not fully understood is that the pace of change is itself accelerating, and the last 20 years are not a good guide to the next 20 years. We're doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade. So this will actually match the amount of progress we made in the whole 20th century, because we've been accelerating up to this point. The 20th century was like 25 years of change at today's rate of change. In the next 25 years we'll make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And we'll make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century.
Specifically, computation is growing exponentially. The one exponential trend that people are aware of is called Moore's Law. But Moore's Law itself is just one method for bringing exponential growth to computers. People are aware that we're doubling the power of computation every 12 months because we can put twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every two years. But in fact, they run twice as fast and double both the capacity and the speed, which means that the power quadruples.
What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first but the fifth paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electro-mechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam another took over. For a while there were shrinking vacuum tubes, and finally they couldn't make them any smaller and still keep the vacuum, so a whole different method came along. They weren't just tiny vacuum tubes, but transistors, which constitute a whole different approach. There's been a lot of discussion about Moore's Law running out of steam in about 12 years because by that time the transistors will only be a few atoms in width and we won't be able to shrink them any more. And that's true, so that particular paradigm will run out of steam.
We'll then go to the sixth paradigm, which is massively parallel computing in three dimensions. We live in a 3-dimensional world, and our brains organize in three dimensions, so we might as well compute in three dimensions. The brain processes information using an electrochemical method that's ten million times slower than electronics. But it makes up for this by being three-dimensional. Every intra-neural connection computes simultaneously, so you have a hundred trillion things going on at the same time. And that's the direction we're going to go in. Right now, chips, even though they're very dense, are flat. Fifteen or twenty years from now computers will be massively parallel and will be based on biologically inspired models, which we will devise largely by understanding how the brain works.
We're already being significantly influenced by it. It's generally recognized, or at least accepted by a lot of observers, that we'll have the hardware to manipulate human intelligence within a brief period of time – I'd say about twenty years. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 20 million billion calculations per second of the human brain. What's more controversial is whether or not we will have the software. People acknowledge that we'll have very fast computers that could in theory emulate the human brain, but we don't really know how the brain works, and we won't have the software, the methods, or the knowledge to create a human level of intelligence. Without this you just have an extremely fast calculator.
But our knowledge of how the brain works is also growing exponentially. The brain is not of infinite complexity. It's a very complex entity, and we're not going to achieve a total understanding through one simple breakthrough, but we're further along in understanding the principles of operation of the human brain than most people realize. The technology for scanning the human brain is growing exponentially, our ability to actually see the internal connection patterns is growing, and we're developing more and more detailed mathematical models of biological neurons. We actually have very detailed mathematical models of several dozen regions of the human brain and how they work, and have recreated their methodologies using conventional computation. The results of those re-engineered or re-implemented synthetic models of those brain regions match the human brain very closely.
We're also literally replacing sections of the brain that are degraded or don't work any more because of disabilities or disease. There are neural implants for Parkinson's Disease and well-known cochlear implants for deafness. There's a new generation of those that are coming out now that provide a thousand points of frequency resolution and will allow deaf people to hear music for the first time. The Parkinson's implant actually replaces the cortical neurons themselves that are destroyed by that disease. So we've shown that it's feasible to understand regions of the human brain, and reimplement those regions in conventional electronics computation that will actually interact with the brain and perform those functions.
If you follow this work and work out the mathematics of it. It's a conservative scenario to say that within 30 years – possibly much sooner – we will have a complete map of the human brain, we will have complete mathematical models of how each region works, and we will be able to re-implement the methods of the human brain, which are quite different than many of the methods used in contemporary artificial intelligence.
But these are actually similar to methods that I use in my own field – pattern recognition – which is the fundamental capability of the human brain. We can't think fast enough to logically analyze situations very quickly, so we rely on our powers of pattern recognition. Within 30 years we'll be able to create non-biological intelligence that's comparable to human intelligence. Just like a biological system, we'll have to provide it an education, but here we can bring to bear some of the advantages of machine intelligence: Machines are much faster, and much more accurate. A thousand-dollar computer can remember billions of things accurately – we're hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers.
Once they learn something, machines can also share their knowledge with other machines. We don't have quick downloading ports at the level of our intra-neuronal connection patterns and our concentrations of neurotransmitters, so we can't just download knowledge. I can't just take my knowledge of French and download it to you, but machines can. So we can educate machines through a process that can be hundreds or thousands of times faster than the comparable process in humans. It can provide a 20-year education to a human-level machine in maybe a few weeks or a few days and then these machines can share their knowledge.
The primary implication of all this will be to enhance our own human intelligence. We're going to be putting these machines inside our own brains. We're starting to do that now with people who have severe medical problems and disabilities, but ultimately we'll all be doing this. Without surgery, we'll be able to introduce calculating machines into the blood stream that will be able to pass through the capillaries of the brain. These intelligent, blood-cell-sized nanobots will actually be able to go to the brain and interact with biological neurons. The basic feasibility of this has already been demonstrated in animals.
One application of sending billions of nanobots into the brain is full-immersion virtual reality. If you want to be in real reality, the nanobots sit there and do nothing, but if you want to go into virtual reality, the nanobots shut down the signals coming from my real senses, replace them with the signals I would be receiving if I were in the virtual environment, and then my brain feels as if it's in the virtual environment. And you can go there yourself – or, more interestingly you can go there with other people – and you can have everything from sexual and sensual encounters to business negotiations, in full-immersion virtual reality environments that incorporate all of the senses.
People will beam their own flow of sensory experiences and the neurological correlates of their emotions out into the Web, the way people now beam images from web cams in their living rooms and bedrooms. This will enable you to plug in and actually experience what it's like to be someone else, including their emotional reactions, a´ la the plot concept of Being John Malkovich. In virtual reality you don't have to be the same person. You can be someone else, and can project yourself as a different person.
Most importantly, we'll be able to enhance our biological intelligence with non-biological intelligence through intimate connections. This won't mean just having one thin pipe between the brain and a non-biological system, but actually having non-biological intelligence in billions of different places in the brain. I don't know about you, but there are lots of books I'd like to read and Web sites I'd like to go to, and I find my bandwidth limiting. So instead of having a mere hundred trillion connections, we'll have a hundred trillion times a million. We'll be able to enhance our cognitive pattern recognition capabilities greatly, think faster, and download knowledge.
If you follow these trends further, you get to a point where change is happening so rapidly that there appears to be a rupture in the fabric of human history. Some people have referred to this as the "Singularity." There are many different definitions of the Singularity, a term borrowed from physics, which means an actual point of infinite density and energy that's kind of a rupture in the fabric of space-time.
Here, that concept is applied by analogy to human history, where we see a point where this rate of technological progress will be so rapid that it appears to be a rupture in the fabric of human history. It's impossible in physics to see beyond a Singularity, which creates an event boundary, and some people have hypothesized that it will be impossible to characterize human life after the Singularity. My question is, what will human life be like after the Singularity, which I predict will occur somewhere right before the middle of the 21st century?
A lot of the concepts we have of the nature of human life – such as longevity – suggest a limited capability as biological, thinking entities. All of these concepts are going to undergo significant change as we basically merge with our technology. It's taken me a while to get my own mental arms around these issues. In the book I wrote in the 1980s, The Age of Intelligent Machines, I ended with the specter of machines matching human intelligence somewhere between 2020 and 2050, and I basically have not changed my view on that time frame, although I left behind my view that this is a final specter. In the book I wrote ten years later, The Age of Spiritual Machines, I began to consider what life would be like past the point where machines could compete with us. Now I'm trying to consider what that will mean for human society.
One thing that we should keep in mind is that innate biological intelligence is fixed. We have 1026 calculations per second in the whole human race and there are ten billion human minds. Fifty years from now, the biological intelligence of humanity will still be at that same order of magnitude. On the other hand, machine intelligence is growing exponentially, and today it's a million times less than that biological figure. So although it still seems that human intelligence is dominating, which it is, the crossover point is around 2030 and non-biological intelligence will continue its exponential rise.
EDGE: This reminds me of a conversation I once had with John Lilly about dolphins. I asked him, "How do you know they're more intelligent than we are?" Isn't knowledge tautological? How can we know more than we do know? Who would know it, except us?
KURZWEIL: That's actually a very good point, because one response is not to want to be enhanced, not to have nanobots. A lot of people say that they just want to stay a biological person. But what will the Singularity look like to people who want to remain biological? The answer is that they really won't notice it, except for the fact that machine intelligence will appear to biological humanity to be their transcendent servants. It will appear that these machines are very friendly are taking care of all of our needs, and are really our transcendent servants. But providing that service of meeting all of the material and emotional needs of biological humanity will comprise a very tiny fraction of the mental output of the non-biological component of our civilization. So there's a lot that, in fact, biological humanity won't actually notice.
There are two levels of consideration here. On the economic level, mental output will be the primary criterion. We're already getting close to the point that the only thing that has value is information. Information has value to the extent that it really reflects knowledge, not just raw data. There are a few products on this table – a clock, a camera, tape recorder – that are physical objects, but really the value of them is in the information that went into their design: the design of their chips and the software that's used to invent and manufacture them. The actual raw materials – a bunch of sand and some metals and so on – is worth a few pennies, but these products have value because of all the knowledge that went into creating them.
And the knowledge component of products and services is asymptoting towards 100 percent. By the time we get to 2030 it will be basically 100 percent. With a combination of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, we'll be able to create virtually any physical product and meet all of our material needs. When everything is software and information, it'll be a matter of just downloading the right software, and we're already getting pretty close to that.
On a spiritual level, the issue of what is consciousness is another important aspect of this, because we will have entities by 2030 that seem to be conscious, and that will claim to have feelings. We have entities today, like characters in your kids' video games, that can make that claim, but they are not very convincing. If you run into a character in a video game and it talks about its feelings, you know it's just a machine simulation; you're not convinced that it's a real person there. This is because that entity, which is a software entity, is still a million times simpler than the human brain.
In 2030, that won't be the case. Say you encounter another person in virtual reality that looks just like a human but there's actually no biological human behind it – it's completely an AI projecting a human-like figure in virtual reality, or even a human-like image in real reality using an android robotic technology. These entities will seem human. They won't be a million times simpler than humans. They'll be as complex as humans. They'll have all the subtle cues of being humans. They'll be able to sit here and be interviewed and be just as convincing as a human, just as complex, just as interesting. And when they claim to have been angry or happy it'll be just as convincing as when another human makes those claims.
At this point, it becomes a really deeply philosophical issue. Is that just a very clever simulation that's good enough to trick you, or is it really conscious in the way that we assume other people are? In my view there's no real way to test that scientifically. There's no machine you can slide the entity into where a green light goes on and says okay, this entity's conscious, but no, this one's not. You could make a machine, but it will have philosophical assumptions built into it. Some philosophers will say that unless it's squirting impulses through biological neurotransmitters, it's not conscious, or that unless it's a biological human with a biological mother and father it's not conscious. But it becomes a matter of philosophical debate. It's not scientifically resolvable.
The next big revolution that's going to affect us right away is biological technology, because we've merged biological knowledge with information processing. We are in the early stages of understanding life processes and disease processes by understanding the genome and how the genome expresses itself in protein. And we're going to find – and this has been apparent all along – that there's a slippery slope and no clear definition of where life begins. Both sides of the abortion debate have been afraid to get off the edges of that debate: that life starts at conception on the one hand or it starts literally at birth on the other. They don't want to get off those edges, because they realize it's just a completely slippery slope from one end to the other.
But we're going to make it even more slippery. We'll be able to create stem cells without ever actually going through the fertilized egg. What's the difference between a skin cell, which has all the genes, and a fertilized egg? The only differences are some proteins in the eggs and some signaling factors that we don't fully understand, yet that are basically proteins. We will get to the point where we'll be able to take some protein mix, which is just a bunch of chemicals and clearly not a human being, and add it to a skin cell to create a fertilized egg that we can then immediately differentiate into any cell of the body. When I go like this and brush off thousands of skin cells, I will be destroying thousands of potential people. There's not going to be any clear boundary.
This is another way of saying also that science and technology are going to find a way around the controversy. In the future, we'll be able to do therapeutic cloning, which is a very important technology that completely avoids the concept of the fetus. We'll be able to take skin cells and create, pretty directly without ever going through a fetus, all the cells we need.
We're not that far away from being able to create new cells. For example, I'm 53 but with my DNA, I'll be able to create the heart cells of a 25-year-old man, and I can replace my heart with those cells without surgery just by sending them through my blood stream. They'll take up residence in the heart, so at first I'll have a heart that's one percent young cells and 99 percent older ones. But if I keep doing this every day, a year later, my heart is 99 percent young cells. With that kind of therapy we can ultimately replenish all the cell tissues and the organs in the body. This is not something that will happen tomorrow, but these are the kinds of revolutionary processes we're on the verge of.
If you look at human longevity – which is another one of these exponential trends – you'll notice that we added a few days every year to the human life expectancy in the 18th century. In the 19th century we added a few weeks every year, and now we're now adding over a hundred days a year, through all of these developments, which are going to continue to accelerate. Many knowledgeable observers, including myself, feel that within ten years we'll be adding more than a year every year to life expectancy.
As we get older, human life expectancy will actually move out at a faster rate than we're actually progressing in age, so if we can hang in there, our generation is right on the edge. We have to watch our health the old-fashioned way for a while longer so we're not the last generation to die prematurely. But if you look at our kids, by the time they're 20, 30, 40 years old, these technologies will be so advanced that human life expectancy will be pushed way out.
There is also the more fundamental issue of whether or not ethical debates are going to stop the developments that I'm talking about. It's all very good to have these mathematical models and these trends, but the question is if they going to hit a wall because people, for one reason or another – through war or ethical debates such as the stem cell issue controversy – thwart this ongoing exponential development.
I strongly believe that's not the case. These ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any of these biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates. To some extent, they may have to find some other ways around some of the limitations, but there are so many developments going on. There are dozens of very exciting ideas about how to use genomic information and proteomic information. Although the controversies may attach themselves to one idea here or there, there's such a river of advances. The concept of technological advance is so deeply ingrained in our society that it's an enormous imperative. Bill Joy has gotten around – correctly – talking about the dangers, and I agree that the dangers are there, but you can't stop ongoing development.
The kinds of scenarios I'm talking about 20 or 30 years from now are not being developed because there's one laboratory that's sitting there creating a human-level intelligence in a machine. They're happening because it's the inevitable end result of thousands of little steps. Each little step is conservative, not radical, and makes perfect sense. Each one is just the next generation of some company's products. If you take thousands of those little steps – which are getting faster and faster – you end up with some remarkable changes 10, 20, or 30 years from now. You don't see Sun Microsystems saying the future implication of these technologies is so dangerous that they're going to stop creating more intelligent networks and more powerful computers. Sun can't do that. No company can do that because it would be out of business. There's enormous economic imperative.
There is also a tremendous moral imperative. We still have not millions but billions of people who are suffering from disease and poverty, and we have the opportunity to overcome those problems through these technological advances. You can't tell the millions of people who are suffering from cancer that we're really on the verge of great breakthroughs that will save millions of lives from cancer, but we're canceling all that because the terrorists might use that same knowledge to create a bioengineered pathogen.
This is a true and valid concern, but we're not going to do that. There's a tremendous belief in society in the benefits of continued economic and technological advance. Still, it does raise the question of the dangers of these technologies, and we can talk about that as well, because that's also a valid concern.
Another aspect of all of these changes is that they force us to re-evaluate our concept of what it means to be human. There is a common viewpoint that reacts against the advance of technology and its implications for humanity. The objection goes like this: we'll have very powerful computers but we haven't solved the software problem. And because the software's so incredibly complex, we can't manage it.
I address this objection by saying that the software required to emulate human intelligence is actually not beyond our current capability. We have to use different techniques – different self-organizing methods – that are biologically inspired. The brain is complicated but it's not that complicated. You have to keep in mind that it is characterized by a genome of only 23 million bytes. The genome is six billion bits – that's eight hundred million bytes – and there are massive redundancies. One pretty long sequence called ALU is repeated 300 thousand times. If you use conventional data compression on the genomes (at 23 million bytes, a small fraction of the size of Microsoft Word), it's a level of complexity that we can handle. But we don't have that information yet.
You might wonder how something with 23 million bytes can create a human brain that's a million times more complicated than itself. That's not hard to understand. The genome creates a process of wiring a region of the human brain involving a lot of randomness. Then, when the fetus becomes a baby and interacts with a very complicated world, there's an evolutionary process within the brain in which a lot of the connections die out, others get reinforced, and it self-organizes to represent knowledge about the brain. It's a very clever system, and we don't understand it yet, but we will, because it's not a level of complexity beyond what we're capable of engineering.
In my view there is something special about human beings that's different from what we see in any of the other animals. By happenstance of evolution we were the first species to be able to create technology. Actually there were others, but we are the only one that survived in this ecological niche. But we combined a rational faculty, the ability to think logically, to create abstractions, to create models of the world in our own minds, and to manipulate the world. We have opposable thumbs so that we can create technology, but technology is not just tools. Other animals have used primitive tools, but the difference is actually a body of knowledge that changes and evolves itself from generation to generation. The knowledge that the human species has is another one of those exponential trends.
We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power. Today, for example, a computer designer has these tremendously powerful computer system design tools to create computers, so in a couple of days they can create a very complex system and it can all be worked out very quickly. The first computer designers had to actually draw them all out in pen on paper. Each generation of tools creates the power to create the next generation.
So technology itself is an exponential, evolutionary process that is a continuation of the biological evolution that created humanity in the first place. Biological evolution itself evolved in an exponential manner. Each stage created more powerful tools for the next, so when biological evolution created DNA it now had a means of keeping records of its experiments so evolution could proceed more quickly. Because of this, the Cambrian explosion only lasted a few tens of millions of years, whereas the first stage of creating DNA and primitive cells took billions of years. Finally, biological evolution created a species that could manipulate its environment and had some rational faculties, and now the cutting edge of evolution actually changed from biological evolution into something carried out by one of its own creations, Homo sapiens, and is represented by technology. In the next epoch this species that ushered in its own evolutionary process – that is, its own cultural and technological evolution, as no other species has – will combine with its own creation and will merge with its technology. At some level that's already happening, even if most of us don't necessarily have them yet inside our bodies and brains, since we're very intimate with the technology-it's in our pockets. We've certainly expanded the power of the mind of the human civilization through the power of its technology.
We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that – to think human beings are fine the way they are – is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology.
What is unique about human beings is our ability to create abstract models and to use these mental models to understand the world and do something about it. These mental models have become more and more sophisticated, and by becoming embedded in technology, they have become very elaborate and very powerful. Now we can actually understand our own minds. This ability to scale up the power of our own civilization is what's unique about human beings.
Patterns are the fundamental ontological reality, because they are what persists, not anything physical. Take myself, Ray Kurzweil. What is Ray Kurzweil? Is it this stuff here? Well, this stuff changes very quickly. Some of our cells turn over in a matter of days. Even our skeleton, which you think probably lasts forever because we find skeletons that are centuries old, changes over within a year. Many of our neurons change over. But more importantly, the particles making up the cells change over even more quickly, so even if a particular cell is still there the particles are different. So I'm not the same stuff, the same collection of atoms and molecules that I was a year ago.
But what does persist is that pattern. The pattern evolves slowly, but the pattern persists. So we're kind of like the pattern that water makes in a stream; you put a rock in there and you'll see a little pattern. The water is changing every few milliseconds; if you come a second later, it's completely different water molecules, but the pattern persists. Patterns are what have resonance. Ideas are patterns, technology is patterns. Even our basic existence as people is nothing but a pattern. Pattern recognition is the heart of human intelligence. Ninety-nine percent of our intelligence is our ability to recognize patterns.
There's been a sea change just in the last several years in the public understanding of the acceleration of change and the potential impact of all of these technologies – computer technology, communications, biological technology – on human society. There's really been tremendous change in popular public perception in the past three years because of the onslaught of stories and news developments that document and support this vision. There are now several stories every day that are significant developments and that show the escalating power of these technologies.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ kurzweil_singularity/kurzweil_singularity_index.html
ZDNet.com, November 1, 2009, by Chris Jablonski — Software vulnerabilities that take days or weeks to fix may one day be a thing of the past. A team of researchers have presented new software, called ClearView, that automatically patches errors in deployed software in a matter of minutes.
As Technology Review reports, ClearView works without assistance from humans and without access to a program's underlying source code. Instead, it monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer's hardware.
A paper, Automatically Patching Errors in Deployed Software, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, explains how ClearView works as five sequential steps:
- It observes normal executions to learn invariants that characterize the application's normal behavior
- Uses error detectors to distinguish normal executions from erroneous executions
- Identifies violations of learned invariants that occur during erroneous executions
- Generates candidate repair patches that enforce selected invariants by changing the state or flow of control to make the invariant true, and;
- Observes the continued execution of patched applications to select the most successful patch
In other words, by observing a program's normal behavior and assigning a set of rules, ClearView detects certain types of errors, particularly those caused when an attacker injects malicious input into a program. So when something goes amiss, ClearView detects the anomaly and identifies the rules that have been violated. And then it comes up with several potential patches that are applied directly to the binary (rather than access the source code) to force the software to follow the violated rules. ClearView analyzes these possibilities to decide which are most likely to work, then installs the top candidates and tests their effectiveness. And If additional rules are violated, or if a patch causes the system to crash, ClearView rejects it and tries another. The process is illustrated below:
With this approach, ClearView can detect errors and provide for an automatic fix that doesn't require restart nor interrupt the execution, making it well-suited to correct errors in software with high availability requirements.
According to Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, ClearView could be used to fix programs without requiring the cooperation of the company that made the software, or to repair programs that are no longer being maintained. He hopes the system could extend the life of older versions of software, created by companies that have gone out of business, in addition to protecting current software, writes TR.
To test the system, the researchers (most from MIT) brought in an independent team to attack a group of computers running Firefox. The team developed ten code injection exploits and used these exploits to repeatedly attack an application protected by ClearView. ClearView successfully detected and fended off the would-be attacks. For seven of the ten exploits, ClearView automatically generated patches that corrected the error, enabling the application to survive the attacks and continue on to successfully process subsequent inputs.
Finally, the independent team attempted to make Clear-View apply an undesirable patch, but ClearView's patch evaluation mechanism enabled ClearView to identify and discard both ineffective patches and damaging patches.
The work was presented earlier this month at the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.
For more technical information consult the PDF and slides presented.


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text:
"I was just so happy that the pictures of the Congressman's weiner showed up and blew the photos of my housekeeper with the big boobies off the news."
-Arnold Schwarzenegger
A note from our attorneys: This is not a real quote.
I'm almost praying that some deranged Congresswoman or female Senator would sext a photo of her bare bosoms so that we don't have to image Weiner's junk anymore.
Not me. I shudder to think of who it would wind up being.
What is this country coming to when weiner trumps boobs?
Joke, no offense to the females in the audience.
The Merkel cracks were worse.


text:
Larson L. Lee is the Navajo Native American artist of this attractive handcrafted bracelet of #8 Turquoise and sterling silver.
This is truly a feminine bracelet that will make a great impression! Larson Lee, a Navajo Native American artist handcrafted this traditional Navajo cuff bracelet with Number 8 Turquoise. This beautiful stone is the color of the Caribbean Ocean with warm brown matrix, mounted on a hand-carved platform and hand-twisted sterling silver rope design. the double split sterling silver bands form the cuff that come together to form one band for style, comfort and a look of southwest perfection.


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May 5, 2017
Volume 61, Issue 18
The Rural Wisconsin Initiative, which includes Assembly Bill
222, Assembly Bill
224, Assembly Bill 227 and
Assembly Bill
255, will now move forward to a vote in the Assembly Committee on Rural Development and Mining.
Top of page (5/5/17)
U.S. House Passes American Health Care Act
Wisconsin legislators split on party lines
On May 4 the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly approved HR 1628, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), by a vote of 217-213. All but 20 House Republicans voted in favor and all Democrats voted against the bill. Wisconsin's House Members split on party lines with Republicans Sean Duffy, Mike Gallagher, Glenn Grothman, Jim Sensenbrenner and Paul Ryan voting in favor while Democrats Ron Kind, Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan voted against.
"Wisconsin's hospitals are the safety net of our health care system, where the uninsured turn to, and receive, care when they are unable to obtain needed care anywhere else. This is why WHA's top priority, top ACA-related concern, has been sustaining the coverage gains, the 38 percent reduction in our uninsured we have achieved since 2014 under our hybrid model of coverage," said WHA President/CEO Eric Borgerding. "While the ACA certainly has flaws and needs repair, we remain very concerned with the impact the AHCA will have on our uninsured rate and the success of the highly-touted 'Wisconsin Model' in expanding coverage to our most vulnerable low income and aging populations."
An earlier vote scheduled in late March was canceled due to lack of votes. While there were various issues in play at that time, the disagreement boiled down to moderate Republicans expressing concerns with various AHCA provisions impacting coverage options and costs for individuals versus "Freedom Caucus" conservatives who wanted the bill to go even further, such as rolling back the Affordable Care Act's insurance requirements. Various amendments popped up over the course of the last month, including several in the last week, which allowed Republican leadership to cobble together just enough votes to pass the bill.
The House-passed amendments allow for states to waive insurance coverage requirements, such as essential health benefits and community rating, as well as to provide an additional $8 billion in funding for high risk pools to help individuals with pre-existing conditions. WHA does not believe the AHCA nor these amendments adequately address or protect Wisconsin's unique coverage model.
While the bill now moves to the U.S. Senate for action, many Republican senators have already gone on record expressing concerns with the House legislation. With no Democratic senators expected to vote in favor of the AHCA, Senate Republicans can only lose two votes, which makes prospects in the Senate that much more difficult.
"WHA will continue to work with both state and federal lawmakers to protect the Wisconsin Model as debate now shifts to the U.S. Senate," Borgerding said. "In fact, I am heading to the airport right now bound for Washington, D.C."
The Wisconsin Hospital Association will continue to advocate to both U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin that necessary improvements to the AHCA are needed. In particular, WHA and our members continue to be concerned with ensuring affordable coverage for low-income and high-risk populations.
Top of page (5/5/17)
Panel Ponders Medicaid Waivers, AHCA, Funding Impacts to Providers, Patients
Borgerding: "We have to be smart about how Medicaid premiums are collected, levied"
As Congress debated the American Health Care Act (AHCA) in Washington, several health care leaders participated in a panel discussion in Madison May 4 sponsored by WisPolitics on the impact the AHCA and Wisconsin's Medicaid waiver request would have on hospitals and patients here.
WHA President/CEO Eric Borgerding was joined by John Russell, president/CEO, Columbus Community Hospital; Jon Peacock, research director, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families; and, Wisconsin Medicaid Director Michael Heifetz. WisPolitics President Jeff Mayers moderated the discussion.
Responding to what is working in Wisconsin with Medicaid reform, Russell said covering people who are at or below 100 percent FPL is definitely positive; however, Medicaid reimbursing hospitals at 65 percent of cost is a serious issue.
Borgerding said a recent study by the Business Group on Health estimated one-third of the price of health care in southeastern Wisconsin is cost shifted due to Medicaid and Medicare underpayments.
Medicaid is not perfect; reimbursement should be higher in some areas, according to Peacock, but it is a "cornerstone" of our health care system because it serves 1.2 million people. Without it, there would be a surge in uncompensated care, he said.
Heifetz said Medicaid is working. No other state has achieved the coverage that Wisconsin has with its expansion model, according to Heifetz, and the program is in a good financial place and is stable.
On the AHCA, Borgerding said any plan that Congress puts forward should recognize the Wisconsin Model that expanded coverage to 100 percent FPL, but did not receive any additional funding to cover that population. Russell said Wisconsin lawmakers should work together on a bipartisan plan to access the additional funding.
If the AHCA passes, in the short term, Heifetz does not see any challenges for Wisconsin. Longer term, the Governor has supported the per capita model that caps spending per enrollee vs. block granting the program, he said.
"It's not the draconian cuts that many have predicted for years, but it will require a more aggressive management of the budget line," Heifetz said. "We are a low-spend, high-quality state, and that does not always get rewarded."
Borgerding said reforms being discussed in the AHCA could punish non-expansion states like Wisconsin. Some populations must be carved out, such as those who are blind, disabled or elderly, which should be subject to a different, higher cap. Then, there is an issue of funding, and as Heifetz pointed out, Wisconsin is a low-spend state, which would set a lower base.
WHA is monitoring very closely how subsidies would be paid out because "income-based subsidies are critical to Wisconsin because it allowed us to reject expansion because there was a more affordable option in the exchanges," according to Borgerding.
While Peacock worries that a change in how Medicaid is funded could lower spending in the program and trigger rationing at the state level, Heifetz disagreed. He said the AHCA is not rationing care, but rather, is managing it or shifting the payment model in ways that are necessary.
"Let's move forward on payment reform and things of that nature that improve quality where WHA and others have led on these things," Heifetz said. "Wisconsin leads on this and we can expand on that and help other states manage this problem."
On the Medicaid waivers and eligibility requirements, Borgerding said it is important that the proposals be soundly implemented.
"We have to be very smart and realistic about how premiums are collected and levied," Borgerding said. "The same is true for co-pays. These folks are making less than $12,000 a year, so the likelihood of collecting a co-pay in the ER is unlikely. We suggest the co-pay be collected by the State, not taken as a cut in reimbursement to our providers."
Russell said people do not always fit the resource if they see an ER when a primary care clinic would have been more appropriate.
"If people lose their eligibility, they will continue to seek treatment, and hospitals will not 'steer them away from care,'" Russell said.
Top of page (5/5/17)
Reminder: Register by June 7 for the 2017 Wisconsin Rural Health Conference
Glacier Canyon Lodge at The Wilderness Resort, Wisconsin Dells June 21-23, 2017
**Make your hotel reservations today. Room block will soon be full.**
More information and online registration available at
Top of page (5/5/17)
Jacobson Joins Health Care Leaders to Discuss Medicaid, ACA, Health Reform
Rakowski on Medicaid program: "Providers are pulling more than their fair share"
Changes to the Medicaid program "won't be easy," but Department of Health Services Secretary Linda Seemeyer said implementing nominal premiums, drug testing and other elements included in Wisconsin's childless adults waiver will give recipients "a little skin in the game."
Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the Public Policy Forum, Inc. in Milwaukee May 3, Seemeyer said the 48-month limit on Medicaid eligibility for childless adults has been among the most controversial aspects of the waiver. However, she emphasized that if the person is working or is training for a job, they would not lose their Medicaid coverage. Seemeyer cited a Marquette poll that found 79 percent of the people who participated generally did not view a work requirement negatively.
Following Seemeyer, Forum President Rob Henken moderated a panel discussion on the ACA and the implications health reform could have on patients, providers and payers in metro Milwaukee. The panelists included: Catherine Jacobson, CEO, Froedtert Health and WHA Board Chair; Bevan Baker, commissioner, City of Milwaukee Health Department; Mark Rakowski, vice president, Children's Community Health Plan; and, Julie Schuller, MD, president/CEO, Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers.
The ACA was not about cost, but was about coverage, and Jacobson said that was a "phenomenal benefit" across the state. Both Baker and Jacobson emphasized the importance of helping people access the right care at the right time in the right place and in addressing the social determinants of health that are often barriers to getting that care.
Jacobson noted though that before we can get to the social determinants, and "before you can have access to care, you must first have coverage."
She added that federal health reform efforts must recognize and reward Wisconsin's model for Medicaid expansion. About 130,000 more childless adults with income below poverty now have Medicaid coverage, and about 240,000 people in Wisconsin signed up for coverage in the insurance exchange in 2017.
On the Medicaid waiver, Jacobson and Schuller shared their concerns about the impact of eligibility changes. Schuller said even very small changes in program requirements and payments can have very large impacts on the population they serve.
Jacobson said WHA has spent a lot of time reviewing the impact of the waiver, and she emphasized that as a health care leader and employer she fully understands the goal to engage patients in the cost of their care and in their overall health. For the Medicaid population, however, she remains concerned about the significant ramifications of not paying a small premium—losing coverage. They will still need care and will seek it in the emergency room. She also expressed the concern of the ramifications to providers of uncollected co-payments, which will simply resolve as a reimbursement cut to providers.
Related to the requirement for drug screening and testing, Baker noted the significant time and resources that are pouring into the opioid epidemic. He is concerned hurdles are being put in place for people with drug addiction to stay on Medicaid and get the care they need.
From the Medicaid managed care perspective, Rakowski described the significant participation by health plans, with 15 health plans participating in managed care plans in Wisconsin, as being far different from other states. He added the strength in southeast Wisconsin is on the provider side—all the health systems and FQHCs participate in Medicaid. While there is not much money for providers in the program, "there is a commitment to that population."
"Providers are pulling more than their fair share on this," Rakowski said. "We also have a really strong relationship with the Department of Health Services…and we have 700,000 individuals in the BadgerCare program and our outcomes continue to improve every year."
Rakowski said unlike insurers in other states, the provider-sponsored health plans in Wisconsin are staying in the exchange. While the exchanges are not a "profit center," it is a way for their patients and their families to access affordable health care.
Jacobson said Wisconsin started in a better place on premium rates, not that rates have not increased, but the provider-sponsored plans can balance that, take some losses and provide coverage with their members. "That is the heart of Wisconsin's success," Jacobson said.
Sixteenth Street Clinic is on the frontlines of caring for the "poorest of the poor." Schuller said Milwaukee has made great strides over the past five to ten years in the health care system as a whole in leveraging the strengths of the system.
The community health care centers fill in the gaps, and Schuller said they are very appreciative of the help they receive from health care systems and Medicaid HMOs, but "it is a fragile system."
All of the panelists voiced concerns about workforce shortages. Jacobson said the aging of the population in Wisconsin is significant for what it will mean for health care needs and workforce needs.
In addition to workforce, panelists also seemed to agree on the need to address health care costs in the long term, particularly the need for more resources for prevention and care management up front as a way to address long-term health care costs.
Link to Milwaukee Public Policy Forum: www.wiseye.org/Video-Archive/Event-Detail/evhdid/11508
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Grassroots Spotlight: Ministry Health Care Leaders Meet with Rep. Shankland
Rep. Katrina Shankland (D-Stevens Point), a member of the Legislature's budget-writing committee, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC), met with local hospital leaders at Ministry St. Michael's Hospital in Stevens Point to discuss Medicaid funding. Shankland also serves as the Assistant Minority Leader for Democrats in the State Assembly.
During their meeting, participants discussed the need to address in the state budget bill inadequate Medicaid reimbursements. Those reimbursements resulted in over $1 billion statewide that went unpaid to Wisconsin hospitals for treating Medicaid patients. Hospital leaders highlighted the importance of increasing funding to the Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital program, one of the smallest Medicaid DSH programs in the country, among other Medicaid funding improvements.
The JFC completed its round of public hearings on the state budget and has now begun the task of voting provision-by-provision on the items in the biennial budget bill. This process is expected to continue through the month of May.
Top of page (5/5/17)
WHA's Borgerding Featured at WMGMA 2017 Annual Conference
Leaders working in medical practice management throughout Wisconsin will gather May 24-26 in Elkhart Lake for the Wisconsin Medical Group Management Association (WMGMA) 2017 Annual Conference. WHA President/CEO Eric Borgerding will be one of the featured speakers, presenting a state and federal health care policy update to attendees during the luncheon on May 25.
The 2017 conference is focused on the theme of managing the velocity and density of health care change. In addition to Borgerding, the agenda includes featured speakers Suzanne Falk, associate director of government affairs for the national Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), and Brian Gittens, EdD, SPHR, associate dean of HR, equity and inclusion for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. The conference will also include 14 concurrent session topics of interest to medical practice management professionals.
The WMGMA 2017 Annual Conference will be held May 24-26 at The Osthoff Resort in Elkhart Lake. Registration is now open at https://wmgma.site-ym.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=908213.
Top of page (5/5/17)
WHA Offers Education on Newly Available Expedited Physician Licensure Process
With the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact's voluntary expedited licensure process recently becoming operational, WHA will offer a 45-minute webinar on how the new Compact process can help physicians more quickly receive a Wisconsin medical license or a license in another state if the physician already holds a medical license in a Compact state.
WHA General Counsel Matthew Stanford will present information on eligibility, which states are participating in the Compact; completing the application process, applicable fees, how to maintain a Compact expedited license and considerations for utilizing the Compact expedited process versus the traditional licensure process.
The webinar, scheduled May 23 from 12:00-12:45 pm, is being offered via a partnership between WHA and the Wisconsin Medical Group Management Association (WMGMA). There is no fee to participate in this webinar, but pre-registration is required. Registration is now open at: www.cvent.com/d/z5qq0r.
Top of page (5/5/17)
Fast Facts from the WHA Information Center: May is National Stroke Awareness Month
Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States*, killing nearly 130,000 Americans each year—that's 1 of every 20 deaths. Recognition of stroke and calling 9-1-1 will determine how quickly someone will receive help and treatment. Getting to a hospital rapidly will more likely lead to a better recovery.
According to the WHA Information Center, in calendar year 2016, there were 9,945 inpatient admissions, 2,817 emergency room visits (treated and released), 924 observation care visits and 10,777 hospital visits that required imaging, lab work or other medical services where primary or secondary treatment was for stroke.
Every four minutes, someone in the United States dies of stroke. Every year, more than 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke. About 610,000 of these are first or new strokes; 185,000 are recurrent strokes. Stroke is an important cause of disability and reduces mobility in more than half of stroke survivors age 65 and over. Stroke costs the nation $33 billion annually, including the cost of health care services, medications and lost productivity.
WHA's CheckPoint program has data related to Wisconsin hospitals' mortality and readmission rates for stroke. You can access that information here: https://www.wicheckpoint.org/report_topic_Stroke.aspx?tab=2&mode=Star
*Centers for Disease Control
Data provided by the WHA Information Center (WHAIC). WHAIC (www.whainfocenter.com) is dedicated to collecting, analyzing and disseminating complete, accurate and timely data and reports about charges, utilization, quality and efficiency provided by Wisconsin hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers and other health care providers.
Top of page (5/5/17)
WHA Advocacy Day 2017: Photos now on Facebook
When over 1,000 hospital supporters converge on Madison to attend WHA's Advocacy Day, it is truly a sight to behold. Keynote speakers Governor Walker and Amy Walter, an outstanding legislative panel discussion, presentations of the Legislator of the Year and Advocacy All-Star awards as well as 600 attendees going on legislative visits…it all makes for an outstanding event! And all of this was captured in literally hundreds of photographs which you can view at WHA's Facebook Album at:
http://bit.ly/WHA2017AdvocacyDay. Be sure to "like" us and share!
Top of page (5/5/17)
Give Your Physicians the Foundation to Successfully Lead Quality Improvement
WHA Physician Quality Academy – registration open for fall cohort
Great leaders give their team members the tools and resources needed to be successful. The WHA Physician Quality Academy is your opportunity to give your physicians the foundation they need to be successful in leading quality improvement projects and initiatives in your organization. Give your physicians the training and resources needed today by registering them for the fall cohort of the WHA Physician Quality Academy.
The Academy includes two non-consecutive days of in-person training and access to supporting resources both between and after the live sessions. Participants will learn to design and conduct quality improvement projects utilizing proven improvement models; interpret data correctly; facilitate physician colleague engagement in quality improvement and measurement; and, discuss quality requirements, medical staff functions and their link to quality improvement.
Registration is open for the fall cohort of the Academy, scheduled September 29 and November 3 in Wisconsin Dells. Attendance is limited, so register your physicians as soon as possible at www.cvent.com/d/wvq5nm.
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Preparing for Bankruptcy: What You Need to Know
Interviewer: What should people do to prepare to file bankruptcy? What paperwork would they need to get together? Please go over anything that they would need to prepare for the bankruptcy.
You Will Need to Compile Recent Tax Returns and Your Payroll Stubs
Adam: There's a standard worksheet that I have them fill out so they know what paperwork will be necessary. They'll also need together three of their most recent tax returns. Also, it is good to get together their payroll stubs; typically they want two months of those.
It Is Necessary to Take a Credit Counseling Class Prior to Filing for Bankruptcy
One step that is required to a mandatory credit counseling class which comes with a certificate once attendance is completed. That's necessary to do in order to start filing.
Do You Need to Have Copies of Past Due Bills?
Interviewer: Do they need to provide any past due bills or any statements showing that, yes, they actually are behind on making payments to certain companies?
Adam: Not necessarily, as long as they provide an address or some way to contact and provide that creditor with notice of a bankruptcy. They could put that on the worksheet as opposed to dropping off a pile of bills.
By Adam Hunt


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MIDLOTHIAN — Change and construction are evident throughout Midlothian, as construction crews work to build the future of residential and retail in the DFW's Southern Star.
This year alone the city has issued 443 residential building permits that have a valuation of more than $79 million. On the commercial side, the City of Midlothian has issued 11 building permits that carry valuations of more than $31 million.
For historical reference, the city had 473 residential and 18 commercial building permits issued in 2016.
Midlothian City Manager Chris Dick stated that he believes the draw for newcomers to the community is a combination of factors.
"One is the school district. That is a big driver. I think that second is our location to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. We are 25 miles from Fort Worth and 20 miles from Dallas. When you start looking at those commutes and compare that to some of our northern communities, the commute time is shorter," Dick said. "Thirdly is just the number of people that are moving into Texas in general. You have a lot of people moving into the state. All over the state and the Metroplex is reaping the benefits of that influx of population."
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's website, Midlothian's population was about 18,690 as of April 1, 2010. As of July 1, 2016, the census bureau estimated that number to be closer to 23,689.
However, Dick stated that the city's current population is roughly 26,000.
Residential Development
According to projections, Midlothian is on track to build around 600-700 homes this year and is looking to continue that trend next year. Currently, the city has 8,626 total single-family residential lots. Of those lots, 1,663 are ready to be built upon by developers.
"The average square foot builders are building is 3,269. That is the average square foot that we are building. Some are 4,000 some are 4,500. The smallest permits that we are seeing come through are in the 2,200-square-foot range," Midlothian Assistant City Manager Kristine Day stated. "The average home price for construction value is $260,000. That is not sale value. Sale value is not too much more above that."
Homebuilders in the city include John Houston Custom Homes, Bloomfield, Lillian Custom Homes and D.R. Horton and Dick estimates that a home with the average square footage of 3,269 is around $100 per square foot.
In anticipation of the growth, the Midlothian City Council has plans in its budget for the upcoming fiscal year to upgrade its streets and infrastructure. Of those projects, the city has identified 11-12 streets to rehabilitate and the work is mainly resurfacing projects that will not include the replacement of water and sewer lines. The cost of the projects is estimated at $1 million.
A few of the roadway improvement projects include signal lights at FM 663 and Harvest Hill and FM 663 and McAlpin, a deceleration and right turn lane at FM 663 and Tower Road, shoulders for FM 1387 from Midlothian Parkway to Kensington Area and a grade separation at U.S. Highway 287 and Walnut Grove.
In addition to the street work, the city is looking to do $480,000 worth of water sewer line work in the next fiscal year.
Commercial Development
One of Midlothian's noticeable commercial developments is the 53-acre Midlothian Towne Crossing, which broke ground 16 months ago. The development is located along U.S. Highway 287 and 9th Street. Businesses that the city has confirmed for the development include Kroger, Petco, Ulta Cosmetics, Ross, Chick-fil-A, Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts, Famous Footwear, Burkes and Panda Express.
"They are doing great and anticipate to be open by Thanksgiving to get that big Black Friday crowd. We have not been given firm dates, but we understand that Kroger should open sometime in October or November," Day stated. "Several of the others would like to open sometime this year or early next year."
Other commercial developments that have been confirmed around the city include Jack-in-the-Box, McCoy's Building Supply, 7-Eleven, Quik Trip, Anytime Fitness and a senior living development.
"The McCoy's is out going towards Waxahachie right there at Walnut Grove and (U.S. Highway) 287. It is a home improvement type of store and lumber. We were their number one site," Day noted. "They are looking to catch everyone before they get to Waxahachie. This (store) will give our builders in town another option to bid material."
Industrial Development
Development activity has also taken place in Railport Business Park, the city's industrial base, as well.
According to the Midlothian Economic Development's website, Railport is a 1,600-acre development that is zoned heavy industrial to light commercial. It is located off of Railport Parkway and U.S. Highway 67 in Midlothian.
"Certainly, because of the residential growth and the commercial growth, we are diversifying. That does not mean we have not seen industrial clients come in. There was a large purchase of 375 acres that changed hands out there at Railport. The company that did the (purchase) is a company by the name of Jet Stream. We don't know what they are manufacturing. That has been kept very confidential," Dick explained. "Even though we are diversifying our tax base with the number of residential and commercial there is still an industrial component."
Dick added that the land purchased at Railport closed at the end of May.
He also noted there is a new business park on U.S Highway 67 and Miller Road that economic development is looking at filling with manufacturing and distribution type of uses.
Downtown Midlothian
Dick explained development should not have a huge effect on the downtown business district.
"Certainly we want our downtown to thrive. We do not want our downtown going away or drying up. I think that we will do what ever we can to keep this downtown thriving and keep it what it is today because it is such an important part of our community," Dick stated. "It has been talked about at the council level through some meetings about the importance of our downtown. We certainly don't want to see anything jeopardize that."
Dick added that it is a hectic but exciting time for the City of Midlothian and its residents — both new and old.
"We are looking forward to the sustainability and the good quality growth in our community," he said.


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E Safety
ICT in the 21st Century is seen as an essential resource to support learning and teaching, as well as playing an important role in the everyday lives of children.
Information and Communications Technology covers a wide range of resources including; web-based and mobile learning. It is also important to recognise the constant and fast paced evolution of ICT within our society as a whole. Currently the internet technologies children and young people are using include:
- Websites
- Apps
- E-mail, Instant Messaging and chat rooms
- Social Media, including Facebook and Twitter
- Mobile/ Smart phones with text, video and/ or web functionality
- Other mobile devices including tablets and gaming devices
- Online Games
- Learning Platforms and Virtual Learning Environments
- Blogs and Wikis
- Podcasting
- Video sharing
- Downloading
- On demand TV and video, movies and radio / Smart TVs
At Just For fun, we understand the responsibility to educate our pupils on eSafety Issues; teaching them the appropriate behaviours and critical thinking skills to enable them to remain both safe and legal when using the internet and related technologies.
We believe it is essential for eSafety guidance to be given to the pupils on a regular and meaningful basis.
- All children are advised to be cautious about the information given by others on such websites, for example users not being who they say they are
- Children are taught to avoid placing images of themselves (or details within images that could give background details) on such websites and to consider the appropriateness of any images they post due to the difficulty of removing an image once online
- Children are always reminded to avoid giving out personal details on websites which may identify them or where they are (full name, address, mobile/ home phone numbers, school details, IM/ email address, specific hobbies/ interests)
- All children are advised to set and maintain their online profiles to maximum privacy and deny access to unknown individuals
- Childrenare encouraged to be wary about publishing specific and detailed private thoughts and information online
- Our Children are asked to report any incidents of Cyberbullying to the school
- Children are aware of the impact of Cyberbullying and know how to seek help if they are affected by any form of online bullying. Pupils are also aware of where to seek advice or help if they experience problems when using the internet and related technologies; i.e. parent/ carer, teacher/ trusted staff member, or an organisation such as Cybermentors, Childline or CEOP report abuse button.


text: If there was ever a product that richly deserved its own chapter, it's Tiger's amazing Spotlight search feature. That's because we spend a ton of our time searching for things on our Macs. Why? Because we don't know where anything is. Ever. Take my car keys for example. You might as well take them, because I generally have no idea where they are. For some reason I can clearly remember undocumented keyboard shortcuts from Mac OS 7.1, but I have no idea where I laid my car keys last night. You know what I need? I need Spotlight outside my Mac, in my regular life. I would just type in "car keys" and it would say "in the kitchen, just to the left of the bowl of fruit," or more likely, "they're still in the ignition." So, how does the name of this chapter "Spotlight on Sam & Dave" fit in? Well, that's the hook from the classic oldie "Sweet Soul Music" from an artist named Arthur Conley. In the song, he "spotlights" other singers, like James Brown and Otis Redding.


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NCS and ASOS – The #NCStshirt Competition Finalists!
For those of you who don't know, NCS has teamed up with ASOS for our very first #NCSTSHIRT design competition. One lucky NCSer will get the chance to inform the design of the official 2017 NCS Tee that'll be worn by thousands of young people on-programme next summer. And we're excited to announce that we're now down to just two designs!
The lucky finalists are… (drum roll)... Micky and Ruby! We've had hundreds of amazing entries come in and to pick just two was no mean feat, but we loved the creativity behind Micky's cool artwork and Ruby's eye-catching designs. We saw some great potential for them to get designed into t-shirts that can be worn by both males and females on NCS Summer 2017!
Last week, the NCS team and finalists took a trip to the stylish ASOS office, which is exactly what you'd imagine it to be like – overflowing with amazing clothing and glamorous catwalk rooms! The finalists got a tour and then worked with the pros (ASOS designers Asya and Lucy) to develop and transform their designs into digital images that can be printed on t-shirts. Oh, and YouTubers Joe Sugg and Caspar Lee were there to lend a hand as well!
So what's behind each design?
Micky, who had recently come back from NCS, teamed up with Caspar Lee and Lucy. They added a black background to her design to make it more unisex but tried to keep as much of the original artwork as possible. They moved the design to the back of the t-shirt and created a small logo version to be used on the front.
Meanwhile, Ruby teamed up with Joe Sugg and Asya. Ruby took elements from both the designs she'd entered to create a striking back image. The letters are filled with the word 'yes' in different languages, and the colours were taken from the NCS logo which helped the phrase really stand out!
Now we want YOU to choose the next NCS Tee! You can now vote on the @NCSYes Instagram feed and all you gotta do is like your fave design. A big congrats – and good luck – to the finalists, Ruby and Micky!
And finally, a big thanks to all the talented teens who sent in some great entries!


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Trooper Nearly Collides with Intoxicated Wrong Way Driver
NEW PORT RICHEY (PASCO) – Last Night, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Nick Dolan was patrolling the southbound lanes of U.S. 19, when he observed a Silver Dodge pickup truck traveling northbound in the southbound lanes. Trooper Dolan was nearly struck by the vehicle, in the area of Marine Parkway, so he conducted a traffic stop. During his investigation, it was determined that the driver, 48-year-old Wade Monroe McKinney, of Brooksville, was intoxicated and subsequently charged with DUI. McKinney was also cited with traveling in the wrong direction on a divided highway. McKinney was transported to the Pasco County Jail, where he was released this morning on a $500 bond.
McKinney is no stranger to law enforcement; in 2007, McKinney was released from prison, after serving over 15 years, for charges ranging from Grand Theft, Forgery and even Armed Burglary. McKinney's most recent charge was from 2011, after he was arrested for driving on a suspended license and violating probation.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ™2013 – 2015 Real News Real Fast, Inc.


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19 Nov 2015
New game plan for home buyers
The longstanding ritual of weekend display home visits for new homebuyers is set to be a thing of the past thanks to the vision of an Adelaide-based bespoke home builder and the skills of a local gamer. Using leading edge computer gaming technology, exclusive architectural and building company Chasecrown and an Adelaide designer and keen amateur gamer have developed a world leading software program which allows buyers to 'live' in their home before they build. "We've adapted 3D technology designed to make computer games more lifelike; linked it to our sophisticated design and building management systems; and developed a platform which allows our customers to spend time in their new home and adjust their plans before we even break ground on-site," says Chasecrown director, Louis Kanellos. "Putting on the Chasecrown head-set turns our big screen TV into the front door of our clients' new home. "Every way viewers turn their head, they see their plans turning into (virtual) reality. The entire home reveals itself room by room in a virtual walk-through controlled entirely by the viewer's head and hand movements; dimensions only guessed at in plans become real; and we can even install our clients' favourite furniture and art work so they can see how it will fit within planned spaces. "Then, having experienced their planned home first hand, buyers can change walls, windows, lighting, colours, decorating styles, flooring types and even appliances to create the environment they want." Mr Kanellos believes the technology will eventually replace bricks and mortar display homes which are costly for builders to construct, time consuming and inconvenient to visit, and inflexible and out-dated even when they open their doors for the first time. "This will change the face of the housing industry within a decade," Mr Kanellos said. "Display homes will disappear; the design process will be increasingly interactive; and in the not too distant future we will probably see many of the furnishings and fixtures 3D printed from our specifications and delivered ready for installation." The new technology, which has taken Chasecrown more than a year and several hundred thousand dollars to develop, has already been licensed to local property development company Starfish, which will use the system technology to allow buyers at its $105 million, 220 apartment inner-city Bohem development to "try before they buy". Mr Kanellos said he had also been approached by potential licensees interstate and overseas. Experience the technology first-hand at Chasecrown's Archer Street, North Adelaide office by appointment.


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Sorry for the lack of lovely photo image to make this blog post look all lovely but blogger is not behaving and will not let me upload one – gggggrrrrrrr!
Time is flying and it is nearly time for our next Melb 3000 Brown Owls gathering – woot woot! hoorah!
Here are the details:
when: Wednesday 3rd August 2011
at: 6.30 – 9pm
where: The Parlour, Madame Brussels, level 3, 59-63 Bourke St, Melbourne 3000
why: because we love it!
bring: BYO craft project or notify me in the RSVP below if you need some ideas
cost: no fee for attendance but you may like to purchase a drink or a delight from the Madame Brussels menu, by way of a thankyou for room usage
RSVP: essential! asap! indicate your want to attend by submitting a comment to this blog entry, in your response please include your name eg. Sue H (but dont use that one unless you are me!)
I have been putting some ideas together for future meets, which I'd like to share with you at our August meet. I'd love to have your feedback and input on some of my thoughts, which are not necessarily tutorial nights, moreso themes to have a bit of fun with – here are a couple to get your tastebuds tingling – Raspberry Ripple, Jumpertastic, Hang On! etc etc etc (confused? well so you might be, but all will be revealed on the 6th!). I actually really like a BYO night, which is what we've been doing so far, but I'd be happy to assist anyone wanting to organise a specific 'how-to' night for one of our future meets.
You can also keep up to date with things in our facebook group, why not join us.
Look forward to seeing you on the 6th, dont forget to RSVP below.
Sue x


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Status: Open
Know more about this business than we do? Cool! Please submit any corrections or missing details you may have.Help us make it right
It was the summer of 1969: Man took his first walk on the moon. Nearly 450,000 people gathered in up.. read morestate New York to witness the historic Woodstock concert. And Doris and Don Fisher opened the first Gap store in San Francisco.
Today, Gap Inc. is one of the world's largest specialty retailers, with more than 3,100 stores and fiscal 2008 revenues of $14.5 billion. We operate four of...
Old Navy brings fashion fun to the whole family: from trendy threads to trusty basics, for newborns through adults, all at prices that are oh-so-right.
Operational since 1994, Old Navy is a chain of clothing stores that is owned by Gap, which is one of the largest specialty retailers in the world. The company operates more than 1,000 stores in the United States and Canada. It offers a selection of women s clothing, including T-shirts, camis, tanks, shirts, sweaters, jeans, pants, capris, shorts, skirts, bras and panties. Old Navy also provides...
Be the first NOLA.com user to add photos or videos of Old Navy
I love to shop there for hours just to find the clearance item for my kids and love the latest style too, very chicks and quite reasonable. Such a hussle though too find some good stuff as it was too many clothes on the shelves and on the…
Old Navy can be found at Tucker Dr 119. The following is offered: T-Shirts, Children's Clothing, Clothing Accessories, Women's Clothing, Clothing Stores, Men's Clothing. The entry is present with us since Sep 10, 2010 and was last updated on Nov 24, 2014. In Lafayette there are 45 other Clothing Stores. An overview can be found here.
Old Navy is located at 119 Tucker Dr, Lafayette, LA. This business specializes in Children's Clothing, Women's Clothing, Men's Clothing, Clothing Stores, Clothing Retailers and Clothing Accessories.


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Home > Back to Search Results > Battle at Wilmington: attack on Fort Fisher...
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Battle at Wilmington: attack on Fort Fisher...
Item # 643393
December 30, 1864
NEW YORK TIMES, Dec. 30, 1864
* Fort Fisher attacked
* David Dixon Porter
* Wilmington NC North Carolina
* Final months of the Civil War
Among the first column Civil War heads are: "WILMINGTON" "The Attack On Fort Fisher" "Official Report from Admiral Porter" which is quite lengthy & detailed & signed by him in type: David D. Porter, Rear Admiral; "The Terrific Fire of the Fleet" "The Guns of the Fort Completely Silenced" and more (see).
Eight pages, nice condition.
Category: Yankee


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Quality and depth of experience are far more valuable than a quantity of superficial activities.
Exceptional scholarship candidates have also pursued active leadership and service engagement. Like undergraduate research, activities such as volunteering, service-learning, etc. are exceedingly important because they suggest that you have pushed yourself and started to consider bigger problems in the world. Give yourself permission, especially as you move into your second year, to focus in on co- and extracurricular activities that are meaningful and not simply meant to 'pad' the resume. Often, national competitive scholarship review committees' care as much about your potential contributions as a leader and in service, as they do about your academic history. Be mindful and intentional about the activities that you choose to engage with while an undergraduate. Make sure your activities make sense for you, are in keeping with your long term ambitions and that they provide you with possible opportunities to develop as a leader. Your development as a leader and your service to your campus and the greater community indicate that you are becoming a socially engaged global citizen.
Note: It is no longer sufficient to remain 'local' in your service and leadership activities, at least not when it comes to developing your portfolio for nationally competitive scholarship and fellowship opportunities. Of course, you need to start somewhere: your home institution and campus communities are good places to begin. But, remember that you will be competing at the national level and committees expect to see students who have taken the lead and sought out opportunities that challenge them to think outside the box and outside their own zip-code.
Finally, multiple internships at various places do not necessarily constitute leadership or service.
To learn more about engagement in service and leadership on campus and beyond, visit UChicago's:


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Montreal at Winnipeg
This is one of those games that you figure the home team will win. Montreal did beat Calgary so they are capable of playing well. Winnipeg is Winnipeg so who knows what will happen. I'll pick Winnipeg, but I'm sure they'll disappoint me.
Blue Bombers 29 Alouettes 27
BC at Edmonton
A 4 and 1 team against a 4 and 0 team. Edmonton is at home but BC has Travis Lulay. Edmonton is at home and Mike Reilly is healthy so go Eskimos.
Eskimos 28 Lions 21
Toronto at Saskatchewan
The Riders are at home, but Toronto is coming off a Monday win against the REDBLACKS. Of course this game is Saturday, which is pretty short rest. The Riders will probably get their second win.
Roughriders 23 Argonauts 19
Hamilton at Calgary
Sure the Ticats will get their first win on the road in Calgary. Stranger things have happened in the CFL.
Stampeders 39 Tiger-Cats 28


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Online fraud is a reality. The only way to fully avoid it is to not be doing any business online. To be effective in dealing with affiliate fraud, you must learn how to effectively detect and prevent it at the early stages. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and methods that can help affiliate program managers with this task.
However, before we dive into the tools and techniques to employ, let's define terms. "Fraud" is generally defined as "criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain". Obviously, most of the things we'll be looking out for while monitoring unwanted affiliate activity won't be "criminal".
In fact, some argue that a better word for such activity is "abuse", or unethical behavior. Whatever you call it, we all know we're talking about the same thing – unethical affiliate activity intended to result in financial gain.
Now, to be "unethical", it has to violate something, or go against some rules. So, to begin with, you want make sure you have an affiliate program agreement in place. Not to be confused with the affiliate network agreement, it is basically the contract between you and your affiliates.
You can review a sample affiliate program agreement at amnavigator.com/TOS.html.
Just having that affiliate program agreement in place doesn't safeguard you. It gives you grounds to enforce the rules. I'd like to offer you seven ways that can help you detect and prevent affiliate fraud. These are:
1. Whatever anyone may tell you, don't buy into auto-approval of affiliate applications. Review every application manually.
2. Always conduct research on a new affiliate (or a marketing method they use) before approving them into the program. (Do they have an active website? What marketing methods are they employing? Are these methods a good match to what you are doing?)
3. Watch out for sudden traffic surges, as well as quick increases in affiliate-referred transactions (sales, leads, or whatever else you may be paying them for)
4. Keep an eye on fraudulent transactions (stolen credit card numbers, fake leads, cancellations of self-referred transactions when commission has already locked, etc) — two such transactions from the same affiliate should raise a red flag, any three should result in a ban from the program.
5. Employ tools. To catch any cyber- or typo-squatters check out CitizenHawk. And for violations of your paid search policies, consider using PoachMark, TheSearchMonitor, or AdGooroo.
6. Monitor your brand reputation online to see what customers are saying about it and to catch any spamming affiliates.
7. Educate yourself on parasitic and cookie-stuffing affiliates (to keep them out of your program). When in doubt, ask in affiliate forums or consult with AffiliateFairPlay.com.
There will never be a way to make policing and enforcement look sexy. However, it is an integral component of affiliate program management. If you're not doing it, you're losing money.
Geno Prussakov is the Founder of AM Navigator.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 15 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/61379014/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-15
FeedFront issue 15 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2011/09