Fetal Cell Therapy for Humans

Wired:

University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher said he would ask federal regulators Friday to approve the first clinical trial injecting special stem cells into the spinal cords of people with the degenerative nerve ailment called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The trial would test whether a technique anatomy professor Clive Svendsen has pioneered on rats afflicted with the disease is safe to use on people. If successful, Svendsen said a much larger clinical trial aimed at treating the disease could be under way in two or three years.
…..
The research does not involve human embryonic stem cells, the blank-slate cells derived from human embryos that can be molded into any type of tissue cell in the body.

Unread & Unsubscribing

George Will:

The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper “yesterday” are ominous:

  • 65 and older — 60 percent.
  • 50-64 — 52 percent.
  • 30-49 — 39 percent.
  • 18-29 — 23 percent

Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.

The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls “a post-journalism age.”

Weinberger Dumps a Mainstream Media TV Gig

David Weinberger (activist blogger):

It’s an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It’s possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They’re nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But…

They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — “Nothing out of the mainstream,” the producer told me yesterday — say about a “major” topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere’s reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn’t a job I’m comfortable with.

New Local Site: www.urbanmadison.org

www.urbanmadison.org:

This is the Urban Madison web site. It is a home for informations and discussions about preserving the unique urban environment that we have in Madison.

It is for people that live in, work in, shop in, or do just about anything in urban Madison.

Our efforts to Save the Woman’s Building is what brought us together to discuss issues like this. We look forward to your participation in our neighborhoods and discussions.

Losing Patience, Not Weight

Great article by Bruce Weber on the President of the Cooper Institute, a non-profit organization in Dallas dedicated to research on the relationship between living habits and health:

“I’m a short, fat guy who runs every day,” Dr. Blair said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve run tens of thousands of miles over the past 40 years, and in that time I’ve gained 30 pounds.”

This doesn’t exactly please Dr. Blair. (People who are skinny and never exercise “are going straight to hell,” he said, “because they’re living in paradise now.”) But he was using himself, he said, to illustrate why the federal government’s new physical activity recommendations, which are clearly aimed at the alarming rise in obesity in America, are misleading. Even though he has been doing what the guidelines advise for decades, it hasn’t controlled his weight.

The Death of a Salesman

Frank Hayes offers some useful comments on the perils of CEM (Customer Elimination Management using CRM – Customer Relationship Management Software):

Siebel was built, inside and out, on CRM. Siebel was all about automating CRM as a business process.
Trouble is, customer relationship management isn’t primarily a business process that can be automated. Real management of customer relationships is a culture, a strategy, a way of doing business.
And too many organizations use CRM in a way that marketing guru Herschell Gordon Lewis has dubbed CEM — customer elimination management.
They don’t use CRM software to help good salesmen do a great job. Instead, they feed customers into the CRM sausage machine, a mechanical data-grinder that combines a phony familiarity — strangers in a call center who know everything about the customer — with a relentless, robotized drive to sell, sell, sell.