Bon Secours Improves Senior Care in New Service Line for Patients ...

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Bon Secours Senior Services is a more coordinated approach for elderly and aging Baby Boomers

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Bon Secours Virginia Health System, anticipating an increasing population of patients 65 and older, has launched Bon Secours Senior Services, a new service line fostering a coordinated environment of care. Bon Secours Senior Services is designed to?make the senior patient?s experience as stress-free and comfortable as possible.

Bon Secours Senior Services will include designated Senior Emergency Departments, along with teams of physicians, nurse practitioners and other professionals who have been specially trained in geriatrics to treat acute and chronic conditions of senior patients. This includes geriatric?case workers, who can evaluate each senior patient and help them navigate their health care experience at Bon Secours. Featuring?adjustable lighting and color tones, non-slip floors and convenient hand rails, the Senior Emergency Departments are designed to?reduce anxiety and enhance safety.?Rooms will feature bed-side commodes, blanket warmers and warming gowns.

Offered at St. Mary?s Hospital, St. Francis Medical Center and St. Francis Watkins Centre, Bon Secours Senior Services is improving the delivery of the health system?s existing senior care services.

?Providing excellent care to the senior population is a top priority throughout Bon Secours?Virginia. As this aging?population continues to live longer, Bon Secours anticipates an increased need for senior services in the decades ahead,? said Toni Ardabell, CEO of Bon Secours St. Mary?s Hospital. ?Our specialized teams of physicians, nurses and case workers who are experienced in geriatrics will ensure a coordinated, patient-centered approach to help senior patients to navigate through a hospital stay.?

U.S. Census data shows a significant demographic shift whereby over 70 million Americans ? the Baby Boomers ? will be over age 65 by the year 2030. Baby Boomers also will have a life expectancy that is higher than that of any previous generation. According to the Administration on Aging, persons reaching age 65 have an average life expectancy of an additional 19 years. This will put an increased demand for senior care, which is expected to reach nearly $500 billion by 2030.

Bon Secours Senior Services includes:

• Senior Emergency Departments
• Geriatric Nurse Practitioner, Case Managers & Social Workers
• Senior Care Services, the medical home offering the management of acute and ongoing conditions
• Bon Secours Home Care Services
• Hospice and Palliative Care services
• Bedside RX program
• Support services for caregivers

In developing the clinical aspects of the senior service line, Bon Secours has been dedicated to achieving designation from?Nurses Improving Care for Health-system Elders (NICHE), a national nursing-led program designed to improve the care of hospitalized older adults. To date, five Bon Secours?Virginia?hospitals have received NICHE designation (St. Mary?s Hospital,?Memorial?Regional?Medical?Center, St. Francis Medical Center,?Richmond?Community?Hospital?and?Mary?Immaculate?Hospital); two additional Bon Secours hospitals (DePaul?Medical?Center?and?Maryview?Medical?Center) will seek designation upon completion of NICHE training later this year. Bon Secours Medical Group also is exploring the opportunities to incorporate NICHE resources in their practices.

?Bon Secours is dedicated to the clinical transformation of its patient care delivery system, and the addition of Bon Secours Senior Services is a great example of this commitment,? said Ardabell. ?We look forward to eventually implementing this service line at other Bon Secours facilities in?Richmond?and?Hampton Roads.?

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Source: http://www.thehealthjournals.com/2013/03/bon-secours-improves-senior-care-in-new-service-line-for-patients-65/

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Sniff, sniff: New form of animal communication discovered

Mar. 7, 2013 ? Sniffing, a common behavior in dogs, cats and other animals, has been observed to also serve as a method for rats to communicate -- a fundamental discovery that may help scientists identify brain regions critical for interpreting communications cues and what brain malfunctions may cause some complex social disorders.

Researchers have long observed how animals vigorously sniff when they interact, a habit usually passed off as simply smelling each other. But Daniel W. Wesson, PhD, of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, whose research is published today in Current Biology, found that rats sniff each other to signal a social hierarchy and prevent aggressive behavior.

Wesson, who drew upon previous work showing that, similar to humans, rodents naturally form complex social hierarchies, used wireless methods to record and observe rats as they interacted. He found that, when two rats approach each other, one communicates dominance by sniffing more frequently, while the subordinate signals its role by sniffing less. Wesson found that if the subordinate didn't do so, the dominant rat was more likely to become aggressive to the other.

Wesson theorized the dominant rat was displaying a "conflict avoidance signal," similar to a large monkey walking into a room and banging its chest. In response, the subordinate animal might cower and look away, or in the case of the rats, decrease its sniffing.

"These novel and exciting findings show that how one animal sniffs another greatly matters within their social network," said Wesson, an associate professor of neurosciences. "This sniffing behavior might reflect a common mechanism of communication behavior across many types of animals and in a variety of social contexts. It is highly likely that our pets use similar communication strategies in front of our eyes each day, but because we do not use this ourselves, it isn't recognizable as 'communication'."

Wesson's findings represent the first new form of communication behavior in rats since it was discovered in the 1970s that they communicate through vocal ultrasonic frequencies. The research provides a basis for understanding how neurological disorders might impact the brain's ability to conduct normal, appropriate social behaviors.

Wesson's laboratory will use these findings to better understand how certain behaviors go awry. Ultimately, the hope is to learn whether this new form of communication can help explain how the brain controls complex social behaviors and how these neural centers might inappropriately deal with social cues.

Wesson's research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, #IOS-1121471, the Mount Sinai Health Care Foundation and the University Hospitals Case Medical Center Spitz Brain Health Fund.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Case Western Reserve University, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Daniel W. Wesson. Sniffing Behavior Communicates Social Hierarchy. Current Biology, 07 March 2013 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.02.012

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/IV9DSD0Czqk/130307145105.htm

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NATO, European governments, hit by "MiniDuke" cyber attack

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Hackers targeted dozens of computer systems at government agencies across Europe through a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software, security researchers said on Wednesday, while NATO said it too had been attacked.

The alliance said its systems had not been compromised, although it was sharing the details of the attack with NATO member states and remained vigilant. Security experts say governments and organizations such as NATO are attacked on a daily basis - although the sophistication varies wildly.

These particular attacks appeared both widespread and innovative, the private computer security firms announcing the discovery said, with one expert saying he believed a nation-state might be responsible.

Russia's Kaspersky Lab and Hungary's Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, or CrySyS, said the targets of the campaign included government computers in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Portugal and Romania.

They also said a think tank, a research institute and a healthcare provider in the United States, a prominent research institute in Hungary and other entities in Belgium and Ukraine were among those targeted by the malicious software, which they have dubbed "MiniDuke".

The researchers suspect MiniDuke was designed for espionage, but were still trying to figure out the attack's ultimate goal.

"This is a unique, fresh and very different type of attack," said Kurt Baumgartner, a senior security researcher with Kaspersky Lab. "The technical indicators show this is a new type of threat actor that hasn't been reported on before."

He said he would not speculate on who the hackers might be.

The malware exploited a recently identified security flaw in Adobe's software. Adobe said a software patch issued last week should protect users from "MiniDuke" providing they downloaded it.

Boldizs?r Bencs?th, a cyber security expert who runs the malware research team at CrySyS, told Reuters that he had reported the incident to NATO, although it was not clear if that was what first alerted the alliance.

Bencs?th said he believed a nation-state was behind the attack because of the level of sophistication and the identity of the targets, adding that it was difficult to identify which country was involved.

Exactly how serious the attacks were was not immediately clear, nor who exactly the targets were or at what level European governments were alerted.

The Czech counterintelligence agency BIS said they were not aware of any massive hacking attacks on Czech institutions from abroad recently. The Czech National Security Bureau, responsible for government data, was not immediately available for comment. Neither were officials from other states said to be affected.

A NATO official in Brussels had earlier said the alliance was not directly hit, but he said later that he had been incorrect. He gave no further details.

The researchers, who declined to further elaborate on the targets' identities, released their findings as more than 20,000 security professionals gathered in San Francisco for the annual RSA conference.

USING ADOBE, TWITTER, GOOGLE

MiniDuke attacked by exploiting recently discovered security bugs in Adobe's Reader and Acrobat software, according to the researchers. The attackers sent their targets PDF documents tainted with malware, an approach that hackers have long used to infect personal computers.

The bugs were first identified two weeks ago by Silicon Valley security firm FireEye. The firm reported that hackers were infecting machines by circulating PDFs tainted with malicious software.

The MiniDuke operators used an unusual approach to communicate with infected machines, according to the researchers. The virus was programmed to search for Tweets from specific Twitter accounts that contained instructions for controlling those personal computers. In cases where they could not access those Tweets, the virus ran Google searches to receive its marching orders.

Officials with Twitter and Google could not immediately be reached.

Bencs?th said he believed the attackers installed "back doors" at dozens of organizations that would enable them to view information on those systems, then siphon off data they found interesting.

He said researchers had yet to uncover evidence that the operation had moved to the stage where operators had begun to exfiltrate data from their victims.

Privately, many Western government and private sector computer experts say China is the clear leader when it comes to state-sponsored cyber attacks to steal information - although they rarely say so publicly and Beijing angrily denies it.

According to cybersecurity expert Alexander Klimburg at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, however, the closest attack to this in style was a Trojan dubbed "TinBa" identified two months ago and used for banking fraud attacks. That was suspected to have been built by Russian hackers, he said, talking down the prospect of state involvement.

"There are some interesting aspects to the attacks," said Klimburg, pointing to the use of Twitter. "(But) most of the attack does not seem that new at all. Some of the... 'tricks', such as using pictures to hide data, are more reminiscent of proficient students rather than government agencies."

(Additional reporting by Peter Apps in London, Jan Lopatka in Prague and Adrian Croft in Brussels; Editing by Jeremy Laurence, Leslie Gevirtz and Mohammad Zargham)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hackers-target-european-governments-via-adobe-bug-researchers-141356498--sector.html

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Black Hole's Mystery 'Wave' Surprises Scientists

Astronomers studying an unusual black hole system have spotted a never-before-seen structure in the disk of matter encircling the system.

Swift J1357.2, an X-ray binary system that regularly emits outbursts of high energy, consists of a black hole slowly consuming its companion star. Matter from the doomed star falls into the accretion disk, which surrounds the black hole, feeding it dust and gas.

While observing the system, a team of scientists noticed an unusual vertical feature traveling through the material.

"It's the first time we can resolve such [a] structure in an accretion disk, and it might be ubiquitous in X-ray binaries during the outburst state," Jesus Corral-Santana, of the Astrophysical Institute of the Canary Islands in Spain, told SPACE.com by email. [The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]

A hidden structure

The black hole contained in Swift J1357.2 is one of the millions of stellar black holes that dot the Milky Way galaxy.

About three times as massive as the sun, the behemoth likely formed when a single star collapsed inward on itself. The resulting, city-sized body packed a great deal of mass into a tiny package, creating a strong gravitational pull on nearby dust and gas.

Located in the Virgo constellation, approximately 4,900 light-years from Earth, Swift J1357.2 also contains a small companion star, which has only a quarter the mass of the sun. This companion star orbits the pair's center of mass every 2.8 hours, one of the shortest known orbital periods for such systems.

The black hole pulls material from the companion star into its accretion disk, occasionally emitting the X-ray bursts that enabled scientists to find this otherwise hard-to-spot system, researchers said.

Corral-Santana and his team took hundreds of optical images of the system using the Isaac Newton and the William Herschel Telescopes, both of which are in the Canary Islands. Studying the light produced by the accretion disk, the researchers noticed a periodic dimming in the system, sometimes occurring over the course of only a few seconds.

"Since the orbital period of the system is 2.8 hours, those dips cannot be produced by eclipses of the companion star. They are much faster," Corral-Santana said. "Therefore, they must be produced by a hidden structure placed very close to the black hole, in the inner accretion disk."

The new find can only been seen in the outer, optical portion of the accretion disk, not on the inside, where X-ray bursts originate. The X-ray emission, which shows no periodic variation, unlike its optical counterpart, indicated a vertical structure was hiding the black hole, Corral-Santana said.

Rather than appearing at a set, predictable time, the structure shows up over a steadily increasing period, indicating a wave-like movement through the accretion disk.

"It is a wave produced in the accretion disk, moving outward," Corral-Santana said, "like the wave produced when a stone is dropped in calm water."

The missing population

The wave-like feature also provides information about the orientation of the black hole.

Objects in space face Earth at a variety of angles, or inclinations. They can be seen edge-on, face-on or somewhere in between. Swift J1357.2 is the only one of 50 suspected similar black-hole systems found with an edge-on accretion disk ? what scientists call a high inclination. However, astronomers think approximately 20 percent of these systems should provide such a perspective.

In order to see the wave-like structure in the accretion disk, scientists must have such an edge-on view of the disk, or one close to it. A view from a lower inclination, closer to face-on, would not reveal the sudden rises and falls in the total light coming from the system.

"Swift J1357.2 is the prototype of the hitherto missing population of high-inclination black holes in transient X-ray binaries," Corral-Santana said.

Because Swift J1357.2 is the first such system to allow such an edge-on view, the presence of the vertical structure takes on an added significance. No signs of such structures appear in other similar systems, but that could result simply from their unfortunate angles. Such structures could in fact exist in other, previously discovered transient X-ray binary systems, hidden only by their observational angles.

The findings were published online today (Feb 28) in the journal Science.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter?@Spacedotcom. We're also on?Facebook?&?Google+.?

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/black-holes-mystery-wave-surprises-scientists-191744309.html

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Canadian government warns BBM PIN-to-PIN messaging is ?most vulnerable method of communicating on a BlackBerry?

BlackBerry

Canadian government agency?Public Safety Canada, which is tasked with overseeing cyber-security across all federal departments,?has issued a memo warning government workers that communicating using BlackBerry Messenger PIN-to-PIN messaging?is ?the most vulnerable method of communicating on a BlackBerry.? Canada?s?Postmedia News obtained the memo this week, which repeatedly advises workers to avoid sending?PIN-to-PIN messages on their BlackBerry (BBRY) phones.

[More from BGR: Samsung picks Apple?s pocket, ends up with Wallet [video]]

BlackBerry did not immediately have a statement available.

[More from BGR: Why every rival tech company should be scared to death of Samsung]

UPDATE: A BlackBerry spokesperson provided BGR with the following statement via email: ?BlackBerry communications remain the most secure, preferred mobile communications used by governments worldwide. In fact, BlackBerry uniquely offers scalable, customizable security options for businesses and governments which allow them to apply their desired level of security.?

According to the memo,?PIN-to-PIN messages sent via BlackBerry Messenger could be intercepted and read by any BlackBerry user anywhere in the world. Because of this, the memo states that the service isn?t ?suitable for exchanging sensitive messages.?

?Although PIN-to-PIN messages are encrypted, they key used is a global cryptographic ?key? that is common to every BlackBerry device all over the world,? Public Safety Canada official stated in the memo. ?Any BlackBerry device can potentially decrypt all PIN-to-PIN messages sent by any other BlackBerry device.?

It should be noted that?Public Safety Canada has failed?to take into account the fact that organizations have the ability to change the encryption key to a unique one, ensuring that only BlackBerry devices using the same BES network can communicate with each other. There are also several ways to encode BBM messages such as?S/MIME, which adds another layer of security.

This isn?t a new position for the Canadian?government, which has warned workers of PIN-to-PIN security issues for nearly a decade. The timing of this new warning couldn?t be worse, however, as rival offerings from Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) continue to gain momentum in enterprise and government environments.

Postmedia News?states that nearly two-thirds of federal employees with government-issued mobile devices currently use BlackBerry phones.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/canadian-government-warns-bbm-pin-pin-messaging-most-150553379.html

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Keith Ellison and Sean Hannity Had an Epic Battle on Fox News Tuesday (Atlantic Politics Channel)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/287688624?client_source=feed&format=rss

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The Place of Review Filters in Local Search | We Build eCommerce ...

Posted by David Mihm

In its recent report on "Yelp's Rocky Relationship with Small Businesses," PBS Media Shift was the latest mainstream media outlet to cover one of the most controversial topics in all of local search: search engines' filtering of customer reviews.

The topic first came to prominence four years ago in Kathleen Richards' landmark piece on Yelp's aggressive sales pitches -- or extortion, depending on your perspective and whom you believe. While I was never fully convinced of corporate misbehavior on Yelp's part, the company hasn't done itself any favors by continuing to allow its field operatives to use?deceptive sales tactics. Despite?its best efforts to educate?both business owners and everyday users of the site,?the poor reputation of Yelp's salespeople continues to contribute to confusion around review filtering among the small business community. I hope to be able to clear up some of that confusion with this post and offer a few tactical tips to help avoid the frustration these filters can cause.

Why review filters exist

As local search usage among the general public has exploded over the last several years, more and more directories have (rightly) seen reviews as a way to:

• Gauge the offline popularity of a business in their algorithms
• Provide better insight to searchers into the experience at that business
• Increase the "stickiness" of their sites by increasing the sense of community
• Get out of Google's Panda/Farmer purgatory by adding unique user content

In many ways, Yelp was ahead of its time on all four of these bullet points, and as a result, it had to tackle the inevitable review spam that accompanied its popularity. ?

Its answer was arguably the first widespread local review filter: an algorithm for detecting and removing spam or suspicious-looking content. ?In Yelp's own words:?

For those of you who couldn't quite keep up with Yelp's version of Micro Machines man, the primary reasons are:

• To make sure reviews are left by actual people (not robots)
• To make sure reviews are left by customers?and not just hired third parties
• To make sure businesses don't leave reviews of themselves

Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, recently gave his own slower version of this rationale in a company-produced video:

How review filters work

While I don't have any detailed knowledge of Yelp's review filter specifically, many comparable filters seem to kick into action if any of the following is present in the content of the review:

• Use of extreme adjectives or profanity in the review
• Over-use of keywords in the review
• Inclusion of links in the review

Another criterion that also tends to trigger filtering is a sudden burst of reviews preceded by or followed by a long lull between them.

Some of the more sophisticated review filters, including Yelp's, take a look at user characteristics, too, including:

• Total number of reviews a user has left on the site
• Distribution of ratings across all of a user's reviews
• Distribution of business types among all of a user's reviews
• Frequency of reviews that a user has left on the site
• IP address(es) of the user when leaving reviews

The bottom line is that reviews written by active users have an astronomically-higher likelihood of "sticking" on a local search engine than those written by first-time or infrequent reviewers. And even beyond their stickiness, many local search experts (including myself) speculate that reviews left by active users also influence rankings to a much greater extent than those left by first-time or infrequent reviewers.

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Problems with review filters

?

?I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews?by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a?Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at?blumenthals.com

The algorithms behind review filters are far from perfect, as many readers probably know, and Yelp is far from the only local search engine with a review filter. In fact, Google+ has probably accrued more ire from business owners?as a result of its filter in 2012 and 2013 than any other site. ?

Unfortunately, these filters frequently:

• Lead to?less-informed consumer decisions?about the experience at a business
• Remove legitimate reviews, especially from less-sophisticated, less-active customers
• Discourage new users from leaving reviews

All of which leads to frustration from the standpoint of a small business owner.

Avoiding review filters

Yelp is probably the most aggressive of its peers at enforcing its business review guidelines, which also happen to be the most onerous guidelines of any local search engine. ?Yelp's filtering is so aggressive that one in five reviews written on Yelp never shows up on the site!

To sum up those guidelines:

• Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.

O ye business owner who disobeys those guidelines, beware! ?You run the risk of a public shaming. ?

Although Yelp's guidelines are considerably more onerous than its peers', Google+ is?not far behind in stringency. However, many local search engines are far less prickly about soliciting reviews from customers, or even incentivizing them, and some (including Google) have even engaged in this behavior themselves.

For those who have been caught in the Google+ review filter, Mike Blumenthal has covered your travails?par excellence?and has?authored a most reasonable response. Miriam Ellis and Joy Hawkins have also given excellent advice on this front. ?

Review guidelines at major local search engines

Here are direct links to those guidelines at a few of the biggest players:

The review filters of the future

While the search engines may throttle their level of filtering?from time to time, the review filter is a local search institution that is?here to stay. ?

The primary methods of these filters, though, I think will change pretty dramatically. Rather than judging a review by its content or looking at website behavior (e.g. how many reviews a user has left for other businesses), the explosion in smartphone adoption is enabling a couple of far less easily-manipulated criteria to judge the veracity of a review.

• Any local search platform operated by a handset maker (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, ...Amazon?) could register the device ID at the time of review and tie it to a bonafide human being.
• Any local search platform that has implemented mobile payment processing (Google, Apple, ...Amazon?, any Square/PayPalHere partner) could disable the ability for a user to leave a review of a retail-category business unless he/she had completed a transaction at the storefront.

And even for those platforms without the handset or payment-processing advantage, requiring location-awareness for users of mobile applications prior to leaving a review seems like a no-brainer (which Yelp has already implemented and Google may be well on its way to doing).

For those sites that are more desktop-dependent, widespread adoption of primary?social logins?(Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could lead to a baked-in layer of spam-fighting. ?

As Eric Schmidt?recently said:

?Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.?

In some industries (e.g., DUI law, plastic surgery, psychology), anonymity may be a pre-requisite for any user reviews and these local search platforms may need a Plan B. But for most industries, requiring some sort of verified social profile would solve a lot of problems.

Facebook, of course, has a huge leg up on everyone else based on its knowledge of a user's social connections. Google+, meanwhile, could look at a user's activity across Google's entire range of products (web search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) to stop spammers in their tracks. ?

While consumer privacy concerns around these mechanisms for review filtering may arise, many business owners would likely rejoice at a truer, less bug-ridden filtering algorithm and a more accurate and complete representation of their customers' experience.

Well, that's enough out of me for this week! How about you? What are some of your strategies for avoiding these dreaded review filters? What other methods of filtering do you see coming to Local Search?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Source: http://www.austinecommercewebsites.com/2013/02/26/the-place-of-review-filters-in-local-search/

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