We've had a lot of Gina Carano coverage lately, as the onetime Strikeforce title contender has been making the rounds to promote her movie "Haywire." This might be considered piling on, but during her appearance on Conan O'Brien's show, she talked about why she got into MMA and how fighting is like sex. It's not quite NSFW, but definitely PG.
[Yahoo! speaks with Gina Carano about Haywire]
Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/gina-carano-compares-sex-mma-conan-180940511.html
FRIDAY, Jan. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Rapid growth during the first three months of life is associated with an increased risk of asthma symptoms in preschool children, a new study indicates.
The findings suggest that early infancy might be a critical period for the development of asthma, said the researchers at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands.
They examined data collected from 5,125 children who were followed from the fetal stage until they were 4 years old.
The researchers found no link between fetal growth and asthma symptoms. But in children with normal fetal growth, accelerated weight gain from birth to 3 months of age was associated with increased risk of asthma symptoms, such as wheezing, shortness of breath, dry cough and persistent phlegm.
The study appears online ahead of print in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Previous research has shown an association between low birth weight and increased risk of asthma symptoms in children. This is the first study to examine specific fetal and infant growth patterns on asthma risk.
"Our results suggest that the relationship between infant weight gain and asthma symptoms is not due to the accelerated growth of fetal growth-restricted infants only," researcher Dr. Liesbeth Duijts said in a journal news release. "While the mechanisms underlying this relationship are unclear, accelerated weight growth in early life might adversely affect lung growth and might be associated with adverse changes in the immune system."
She added: "Further research is needed to replicate our findings and explore the mechanisms that contribute to the effects of growth acceleration in infancy on respiratory health. The effects of infant growth patterns on asthma phenotypes [observable characteristics] in later life should also be examined."
More information
The American Lung Association has more about children and asthma.
Electionism is an HTML5 web-app currently optimised for iPad and Android tablets
This year's presidential election in the US is already spawning some interesting mobile apps. We've covered the NYTimes Election 2012 app from the New York Times, but The Economist has its own app available: Electionism.
It's a different beast from the NYTimes native iPhone app. Electionism is aimed at tablets, and is a free HTML5 web-app accessed via the browsers of Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle Fire and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, with other devices to follow.
The Economist worked with Canadian technology firm Pressly on the app, although the project was run by The Economist Group Media Lab, an internal team within the publisher.
"It's not that we're down on native apps," says Ron Diorio, vice president of business development and innovation for The Economist Online.
"I produced our The World in 2012 iPad app, and we're just finishing off The World in Figures iPad app too. Electionism is just another opportunity for us to explore what we're seeing in our data both internally and externally: that browser use on tablets is pretty high."
In other words, Electionism is more about exploring the potential (and current limits) of HTML5 publishing for tablets, rather than any dogmatic positioning in the native-vs-HTML5 debate.
"Instead of saying what's going to win or what's not going to win, we should all be focusing on the reader being the winner," he says.
"If we can produce something that 98% of people can access ??and I'm aware there are a lot of combinations of software and tablet we haven't got to yet ??if we can make it open, the better we can be."
The app will serve up content from The Economist and its sister intelligence service CQ Roll Call, while the company's journalists will also share their favourite links from other sites in a Noted Elsewhere section.
Tweets from political candidates, commentators, publishers and other experts will also be aggregated. More content modules will be added to Electionism in the coming months.
"This is an experimental place for the group itself, aggregating the content from CQ Roll Call and The Economist, mixed with Twitter feeds and some custom curation," says Diorio. "It's a great platform to test things out that we might not be able to do in our more traditional brands."
Diorio accepts that by going down the HTML5 route, Electionism can't benefit from the "huge audience" frequenting the various app stores for iOS, Android and other platforms. However, he suggests that Electionism may yet become a native app, if there is sufficient demand.
Electionism isn't a subscription-based service like the Financial Times' HTML5 offering. Diorio says The Economist's sales team is "optimistic" about the role advertisers will play, with potential to take on sponsors for specific sections of the app, or to sign up regional sponsors for the whole thing. Different ad formats will also be explored.
"What we have here is the opportunity to be flexible," he says. "There's nothing to say we couldn't run full-page interstitials similar to what you see in app-magazine experiences. We have the best of both worlds, so the commercial people will ??given the opportunity and some data about usage ??push that forward."
Electionism is an interesting first shot from the group's Media Lab team, which Diorio says is being funded partly by The Economist's North American operation, and partly by The Economist Online.
The aim: to rapidly prototype new ideas, based on taking a step back to think about changing opportunities for digital publishing over the next 12-18 months, rather than just in the short-term. The team is part of wider efforts across The Economist Group to grapple with these issues.
"There are 1,000 flowers blooming, but my role is to take that process that's been encouraged for rapid prototyping, and tie that into a large group of entrepreneurial startups here in New York," says Diorio.
"I'm constantly meeting new companies, presenting our problems to them and trying to understand what we can do together. Pressly is one of 6-7 relationships we have established, and the Group has been very supportive in making this happen."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2012/jan/18/economist-electionism-html5-tablet-app
Ron Paul campaigns in South Carolina (AP)
Though a majority of American Muslims say they lean Democratic?as many as 70 percent in a survey released last year by the Pew Forum?the population also includes social conservatives, whose religious values lead them to side with Republicans on moral issues.
But it?s not always easy to find a Muslim-friendly Republican candidate. Hopefuls like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have expressed their concern over Muslim populations in America and the institution of shariah law in a way that offends and alienates Muslim voters.
Omar Shaukat, a doctorate candidate in religious studies at the University of Virginia, speculated that Ron Paul might be the best pick for Muslims, since he presents a (very) conservative approach to government without the Muslim fear-mongering. He wrote in an essay for Policy Mic:
I assume most Muslim-Americans will support Paul because of his foreign policy views on Iran, Afghanistan and war. But more crucially, I am attracted to his paleo-conservative tendencies, even if his radical libertarianism might give me some pause. Not guilty of Islamophobia, a non-interventionist, defending civil liberties, consistently pro-life, not willing to subsidize abortion, and uninterested in regulating sexual behavior without abandoning a traditional view of marriage, I think Paul?s nuanced message on the relation between law and morality should resonate with many Muslim-Americans.
In sum, most versions of conservatism, because they are not hostile to religiosity, are, in my opinion, compatible with the ethical worldview of many religious Muslim-Americans. The only obstacles that personally keep me from becoming an enthusiastic Republican are the party?s idolatrous and jingoistic tendency to turn interventionist and Islamophobic. Whether Paul gets nominated or not, I hope the Republicans are able to return to their original paleo-conservative roots.
Last year, Paul criticized opponents Santorum and Michele Bachmann for ?hating Muslims,? and during a debate, he defended Muslim-Americans by saying the Muslim world as a whole was not responsible for 9/11. His remarks got him booed by the Tea Party audience.
(Reuters) ? Bank of New York Mellon (BK.N) said on Wednesday that fourth-quarter earnings fell 26 percent after the world's No. 1 custody bank reported lower forex volume and took a restructuring charge as part of a large-scale plan to make its operations more efficient.
BNY Mellon reported net income of $505 million, or 42 cents a share, compared with $679 million, or 54 cents a share, a year earlier. The results included a $107 million restructuring charge that reduced net income by 6 cents a share.
Chief Executive Officer Gerald Hassell said in a press release that general financial uncertainty in Europe and other parts of the globe depressed client activity, pressuring revenue.
Investment management and performance fees, for example, were $730 million, a decrease of 9 percent from a year earlier. BNY Mellon laid some of the blame on money market funds, whose miniscule yields have forced the company to waive fees to keep investors.
In the fourth quarter, foreign exchange revenue totaled $183 million. That was a decline of 11 percent from the year-ago period because of lower volume.
(Reporting By Tim McLaughlin; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
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