{ Monthly Archives }
8月 2007
Should you define your own death?
Robert Veatch weighs his words carefully when he talks about how people pass away. Most simply die. Some “become dead”. Others are “made dead”.
Some end-of-life cases are so unclear, he thinks, that people should be able to choose in advance the definition of death they want to be used to declare them deceased.
“Most ordinary people, including most physicians, assume whether you’re dead or alive is a science question,” Veatch, a Georgetown University medical ethics professor who has lectured about death and dying for over three decades, told Reuters.
“In my view, it’s a philosophical and religious issue and different people have different views on the matter,” he said at a bioethics seminar at Georgetown’s Kennedy School of Ethics.
Thanks to medical progress, terminally ill patients or victims of severe accidents can be kept on life support far beyond the point where they would have died naturally.
Veatch asked if being permanently unconscious and dependent on feeding and hydration tubes is still really life. If not, then people taken off that support are not killed, he argued, but are “made dead” or they “become dead”.
The traditional view is that death occurs when the heart and lungs stop. Since the 1970s, Western countries have defined it as the irreversible loss of the entire brain’s functions.
But the brain stem can keep basic functions going - such as breathing - even in a permanent vegetative or comatose state.
So since 1973 Veatch has been advocating a third definition saying that death sets in when the higher brain functions - the thinking and feeling that make us human - are lost.
This means death comes when consciousness is permanently lost, he said: “If you’ve got the substratum in your brain for consciousness, you’re alive. If that’s gone, you’re dead.”
Veatch suggests the law set a default definition, most likely whole brain death, and let individuals opt out and sign a statement saying they want to be declared deceased either by cardio-respiratory death or higher brain death.
Only two places on Earth allow anything near this. The U.S. state of New Jersey lets orthodox Jews opt out of the whole brain-death idea and use cardio-respiratory death because they traditionally see breath as the key to life.
Japan uses the heart and lung criteria as a default, but lets people opt for whole brain death so they can donate organs.
“It’s not an accident that we did the first heart transplant in 1968 and in 1970, we began adopting laws that change the definition of death,” Veatch said. “As soon as we figured out a way to do heart transplants, we had to figure out a way to get somebody dead without their heart stopping.”
Lingerie show at Cape Town Fashion Week
A model poses on the ramp during the lingerie show at the Cape Town Fashion Week, August 10, 2007. [Reuters] Continue Reading »
Cashews worse than peanuts for allergies
Peanuts may be more notorious, but cashews seem to trigger more severe allergic reactions in children.
In a study of 141 children with allergies to cashews or peanuts, British researchers found that cashew reactions were generally more serious.
For the study, led by Dr Andrew Clark of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, 47 children with cashew allergy were matched up one-to-two with 94 children with peanut allergy.
Children with cashew reactions were eight times more likely to suffer wheezing, and nearly 14 times more likely to have potentially severe cardiovascular symptoms, like heartbeat disturbances or a drop in blood pressure.
Overall, 10 of the children with cashew allergies had what the researchers defined as a severe reaction — extreme difficulty breathing and/or loss of consciousness.
That compared with just one child with peanut allergy.
The findings appear in the current issue of the journal Allergy.
It’s known that tree nuts, such as cashews and walnuts, can trigger serious allergic reactions. However, this is the first study to show that children’s allergies to cashews may be more severe than peanut allergies, according to Clark’s team.
What’s more, studies suggest that cashew allergies are becoming more common, possibly because consumption is on the rise.
Besides being eaten as whole cashews, the nuts are also found in a range of desserts and candies, in many Asian dishes and in commercially prepared pesto sauces, Clark and his colleagues note.
Other potential sources include cereals, granola bars, dressings and sauces, and even shampoos and lotions.
In general, people with an allergy to any tree nut are advised to avoid all tree nuts and peanuts as a precaution.
Some people are prescribed injectable epinephrine that they can administer themselves in an emergency.
The current findings, Clark and his colleagues write, suggest that children with cashew allergies are at particular risk of severe reactions requiring epinephrine.
They advise doctors to consider this when deciding whether to prescribe the emergency treatment.
Seo tips for your wordpress blog
There is a big bunch of resources on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have tried to collect the best tips and plugins in this article.
These tips won’t flood your blog with visitors - no SEO tips will. Use these tips to improve your site, and fight for a lot of backlinks and visitors by writing quality content and putting a lot of work into it. It has never been easy to run a website, and it for sure isn’t getting easier.
Permalinks
Use a permalink structure and be sure that the post title is in it. In the WordPress administration go to Options>Permalinks and select a permalink structure, or make your own. I use /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ on this site.
Page titles
The title tag should show the title of the current post or page you are currently visitng. Eg. this page will have the title »WordPress and SEO | The undersigned«. In your themes header.php file you can do this by making sure that the title tag looks like this:
-
<title><?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(‘ ‘, false)) { ?> | <?php } ?><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
Headers
Search engines weigh headers (h1, h2, h3 …) higher than other content (p, li …), so it is important that you write good titles that also contains keywords that matches the content. The best thing is to only have 1-2 h1 tags on each page, eg. the blog title and newest blog post.
Alt tags
Use alt tags for your images, and be sure that they match what the image shows - this helps google image search and other image search engines.
Tags
The internet is evolving, and in this process tags is the next »big thing« - using tags makes sure to keep a lot of cross-linking from posts to posts, which eventually will let search engines dig deeper into your site.
Related posts
If you read an article on this site, you will notice the recent posts list in the end of each article. This also helps search engines digging deeper into your site.
Landing sites
When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, they are definitely looking for something specific - often they just roughly check the page they land on and then closes the window if what they are looking for isn’t there. Why not help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog.
Google sitemaps
Google has a feature for webmasters, called Sitemaps. This helps google index your site, and lets you weigh what content on your site, you find most important.
Pinging aggregators
Use the feed feature! Set up your WordPress to ping a list of aggregators automatically in Options>Writing. A great list of ping services can be found here.
Valid markup
Be sure that your your site validates, this might not be the most critical point from a SEO point of view, but it might weigh some.
Avoid this
Google says you should avoid this:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
- Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- Tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
Get backlinks
Write to your friends, to other bloggers, and trade links with them. Get a linking-network established, and make sure that some people link back to your site, using your blogs title or primary keywords as anchor-text. Amount of links and especially links from quality sites, helps you being placed better in search engines search results. When writing an article, be sure to link back to your sources (if these are blogs, in most cases, a trackback link to your blog will be shown on their site). Be sure to link to your blog in forum signatures, mail signatures etc. as well.
Update your blog
Be sure to keep your blog updated - no one visits a dead site. Eventually you can let del.icio.us post your daily bookmarked links to your blog - this helps making your site look active.
How to automatically post daily links.
Stick with it
Stick with the same domain name, blog title, permalink structure etc.
Write quality content
Write quality content, it is the most important. Write quality content that people want to read. Stick to a few topics, and write mainly about those. Quality content might bring you to del.icio.us and digg.com as well.
Involve the reader
Encourage your visitors to comment on your posts and join the discussion. Involve the reader by writing to them. »You should«, »We could« and less using »I have«, »I did« etc.
Sexy David Beckham and Victoria
So hot photos by David Beckham and Victoria
BED BED BED…
Nice underwear right?
mmm,’Sexy Victoria’
GOOD SHAPE, NICE BODY!
