have you ever tried to take a picture in a closet...that's what i felt like i was doing!!  our house was built in 1950 and so our bathrooms are tiny!!  i have no idea how photographers take pictures in bathrooms....it's impossible.  but you get the idea.  before my bathroom was just a painted box.  there wasn't anything wrong w/ it....it just wasn't me.  so over thanksgiving, i convinced my dad to stay a week and help make my bathroom pretty.  now, i can officially say "it's me".  we added wainscoting and that made a huge difference.  it made the bathroom feel taller and brighter.  it was a quick, inexpensive way to get a big impact...dad had the wood up in about 2 hours....then it was just painting (3 coats of white) that made it official.  the next step was wallpapering.  dad has wallpapered numerous times so i was just the assistant.  it's kind of fussy work but wallpapering is one of my favorite things to add to a space!  and b/c we used the wainscoting, it cut down on how much wallpaper i actually needed.  the wainscoting was $115 for all the materials and then it was just the cost of the wallpaper....we used about 3 single rolls.  the wallpaper is quadrille/china seas java java in navy on white.   and i love her.  thanks for y'alls sweet comments and a huge thanks to my dad for being the best handyman a girl could have!!

The Work of Strength and Conditioning in Improving a Boxers Performance

Joe Hewitt, Strength and Conditioning Coach at the Sport Wales Institute, the elite performance function of Sport Wales, explains the vital role of strength and conditioning in developing the boxing stars of tomorrow.

Incorporated into a wider programme of work with the Welsh Amateur Boxing Association, I’ve spent the last few days working to identify talent and assess the levels of physical ability amongst some of Wales’ most promising boxers.

Built into an assessment camp which has seen boxers from all over Wales put through their paces, mock strength and conditioning sessions have been giving them a taster of what could become a regular part of their boxing training and routine.

Working with up to eight boxers at a time, I’ve been putting on short, simple sessions which allow me to assess their body weight exercise techniques and feedback the physical ability of each boxer to the National Coach and Performance Director.

Once boxers with that raw talent and potential have been identified it will be my job to then help them perfect and clean up their body weight techniques before introducing external loading to their sessions; the kind of work that I do with Commonwealth Games gold medallist, Sean Mcgoldrick.

Boxing is all about repeated explosive effort, effectively the length of time that a boxer can sustain a level of force and so the sessions will expose them to the level of strength that they will need for nine minutes in the ring.

We’ll introduce the type of exercise techniques typically associated with strong man competitions, so carries, drags and lifting weight to develop their structural strength. The ultimate goal is for them to be able to deal with the physical demands of their sport as well in the third round as they do in the first; to take a hit and to not be rocked by it.

We can often move on to the external loading work relatively quickly so once we’ve held next weekend’s camp in North Wales, a couple more in Cardiff and one with our female boxers, we’ll be able to start getting our future boxers into the Sport Wales National Centre and put these techniques into practice.

Another Simple Food Weight Loss Experience

Whole Health Source reader Sarah Pugh recently went on a six-week simple food (low reward) diet to test its effectiveness as a weight loss strategy, and she was kind enough to describe her experience for me, and provide a link to her blog where she discussed it in more detail (1). 

Consistent with the scientific literature and a number of previous reader anecdotes (2), Sarah experienced a reduction in appetite on the simple food diet, losing 15 pounds in 6 weeks without hunger.  In contrast to her prior experiences with typical calorie restriction, her energy level and mood remained high over this period.  Here's a quote from her blog:

Well, it looks like the theory that in the absence of nice palatable food, the body will turn quite readily to fat stores and start munching them up, is holding up. At the moment, the majority of the energy I use is coming from my insides, and my body is using it without such quibbles as the increased hunger, low energy, crappy thermo-regulation or bitchiness normally associated with severe calorie restriction.

I can't promise that everyone will experience results like this, but this is basically what the food reward hypothesis suggests should be possible, and it seems to work this way for many people.  That's one of the reasons why this idea interests me so much.

Read more »

Boss Bagi Para Internet Marketing

Siapa bilang menjadi internet marketer itu tidak mempunyai boss? Padahal menjadi berkerja dibidang internet marketing justru jauh lebih susah karena kita menjadi pegawai dan boss bagi diri kita sendiri. Adapun susahnya kita harus melawan nafsu diri sendiri tuk terus bersemangat mengeruk dollar dengan penuh ketidakpastian padahal di dunia internet banyak sekali cobaan-cobaan hehehe...

Mungkin kalo jenuh kok earning ga naik-naik... trus traffic koq menurun... trus ada situs yang masuk sandbox ga tertutup kemungkinan rasa jenuh bakalan menyelimuti diri trus mencari pelampiasan entah main game online, berlama-lama chatting atau lebih parah lagi buka situs yang engga-engga... Huuuh.... Naudzubillah min dzalik...

Mangkanya selalu niati diri kita dengan niat yang baik. Mulai sebuah hari dengan yang baik... contoh pas pagi hari selalu menghijibkan (membiasakan) Sholat Dhuha bagi yang muslim (tentunya sudah Sholat Subuh dong... en syukur-syukur sudah membaca Alquran). Setelah melakukan semua itu niati bahwa kita berkerja, berwirausaha semata-mata untuk mencari rizki untuk bisa menafkahkan baik itu diri sendiri dan keluarga. Yakin dengan mengawali seperti itu akan tercipta pribadi pegawai dan boss yang baik.

Will the Citigroup Ruling Challenge Health Care Leaders' Impunity?

A federal judge's refusal to approve yet another cozy settlement that was supposed to resolve allegations of wrong-doing by a giant corporation has left the financial world atwitter.  It may be that this ruling will also affect the coziness between giant health care corporations and government regulators. 

Summary of the Citigroup Case

We first discussed this case twp weeks ago here.  Here is a summary of the government's (in this case, the Securities and Exchange Commision's) original allegations from the New York Times.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Citigroup stuffed a $1 billion mortgage fund that it sold to investors in 2007 with securities that it believed would fail so that it could bet against its customers and profit when values declined. The fraud, the agency said, was in Citigroup’s falsely telling investors that an independent party was choosing the portfolio’s investments. Citigroup made $160 million from the deal and investors lost $700 million.

The Problems with the Proposed Settlement
Judge Jed Rakoff refused to approve the settlement because of a series of problems, listed below as summarized by the Schumpeter columnist in the Economist.

Mr Rakoff faulted the SEC for prosecuting Citigroup for negligence when a fraud prosecution was warranted; for failing to provide the court with 'any proven or admitted facts upon which to exercise even a modest degree of independent judgment'; for erroneously contending that 'public interest…is not part of [the] applicable standard of judicial review'; and for wrongly arguing that 'if the public interest must be taken into account, the SEC is the sole determiner'.

Furthermore,

Mr Rakoff also attacked a second condition of the settlement. Citigroup had agreed to operate under a court injunction if it ever violated the deal, which could lead to contempt charges. Whatever threat this carried, Mr Rackoff wrote, it was mitigated because Citigroup, as other financial firms, had been cited similarly over the past decade—and never faced any consequences.

The Parallels with Legal Settlements Made by Health Care Organizations

Several of the features of the settlement that the Judge found so objectionable are commonly also features of the settlements we have seen involving health care organizations. Government regulators often seem to make much milder charges that were warranted by the apparent facts. They make the organizations party to corporate integrity or deferred prosecution agreements, even though sometimes the same corporations were already subject to such agreements when they appeared to misbehave again. The agreements often allow the organizations to neither admit to or deny any charges, leaving the facts of the case forever in doubt.

Matt Taibi in the Rolling Stone provided some pithy comments on these commonly seen features of legal settlements.

By accepting hundred-million-dollar fines without a full public venting of the facts, the SEC is leveling seemingly significant punishments without telling the public what the defendant is being punished for. This has essentially created a parallel or secret criminal justice system, in which both crime and punishment are adjudicated behind closed doors.

This system allows for ugly consequences in both directions. Imagine if normal criminal defendants were treated this way. Say a prosecutor and street criminal come into a judge’s chamber and explain they’ve cooked up a deal, that the criminal doesn’t have to admit to anything or plead to any crime, but has to spend 18 months in house arrest nonetheless.

What sane judge would sign off on a deal like that without knowing exactly what the facts are? Did the criminal shoot up a nightclub and paralyze someone, or did he just sell a dimebag on the street? Is 18 months a tough sentence or a slap on the wrist? And how is it legally possible for someone to deserve an 18-month sentence without being guilty of anything?

Such deals are logical and legal absurdities, but judges have been signing off on settlements like this with Wall Street defendants for years.

As we have said numerous times before, (starting here in 2008) the current manner of regulation, in which organizations pay fines (and sometimes submit to corporate integrity or deferred prosecution agreements), rarely admit any guilt, but in which individuals who directed, authorized or implemented the alleged misbehavior almost never suffer any negative consequences, fails to deter future bad behavior. We have noted that the costs of the settlements are paid by the organization as a whole, and thus simply regarded as costs of doing business by executives. The leaders' impunity will allow the bad behavior to be repeated again and again.

Here is how Taibbi and Rakoff put it:

these crappy settlements have evolved into a kind of cheap payoff system, in which crimes may be committed over and over again, and the SEC’s only role is to take a bribe each time the offenders slip up and get caught.

If you never have to worry about serious punishments, or court findings of criminal guilt (which would leave you exposed to crippling lawsuits), then there’s simply no incentive to stop committing fraud. These SEC settlements simply become part of the cost of doing business, as Rakoff notes:

As for common experience, a consent judgment that does not involve any admissions and that results in only very modest penalties is just as frequently viewed, particularly in the business community, as a cost of doing business imposed by having to maintain a working relationship with a regulatory agency, rather than as any indication of where the real truth lies. This, indeed, is Citigroup's position in this very case.

That line, 'a cost of doing business imposed by having to maintain a working relationship with a regulatory agency,' is one of the more brutally damning things you’ll ever see a judge write. Rakoff is essentially saying that these fines are payoffs to keep the SEC off the banks’ backs. They’re like the pad that numbers-runners or drug dealers pay to urban precinct-houses every month to keep cops from making real arrests. That's what he means when he refers to 'maintaning a working relationship.' It's heavy stuff.

What the Judge appears to be saying is that the whole system stinks of regulatory capture, and that the settlements paid by the organizations are the moral equivalent of bribes paid to government officials. That is indeed "heavy stuff."

Now that Occupy Wall Street has made it socially acceptable to discuss the economic dysfunction that lead to the great recession or global financial collapse, I can only hope that this discussion will lead to a parallel discussion about health care dysfunction. It certainly seems that the regulatory capture that seems to be part of the dismantling of regulation of finance is similar to regulatory capture affecting health care. But I await someone beyond us few lonely bloggers to take up this topic.

I might as well end with this sentiment from 2009 regarding another case over which Judge Rakoff presided:
Again, in my humble opinion, until the people responsible for the bad behavior experience negative consequences from that behavior, they will continue to perform, direct, and condone bad behavior. We will not achieve real health care reform in the US until we effectively deter unethical, self-serving behavior by leaders of health care organizations.

Sarah's Kenya blog - day 2

AFRICAN ADVENTURE DAY 2: MONDAY 28^TH NOVEMBER   19.49 GMT (22.49 Kenya time)

Jambo (as they say in Kenyan Swahili) or hi…..

Day 2 started with Breakfast at 7.30am and just a plate of fruit for me!

8am we met Mary from the British Council in Kenya who took us to meet her colleagues in the British Council offices just down the road from our Hotel. Lots of London 2012 posters and banners on display!!

After a meeting with British Council staff  to finalise the programme it was a short walk across to The Upper Hill School to meet the delegates on the training. The Upper Hills school is a Government funded school that happens to be a boarding school in the business district of Nairobi (which does have boarders – whom are on school holidays at the moment, however staff are in marking exams!!)

At 10am we started to meet the 25 course delegates who were more than welcoming. At 11am we started the course (having had to adapt our plan straight away as our equipment was “STILL” in customs.

Our day covered, “getting to know you and what you’d like from the training sessions” which I led, followed by how to organise leagues, festivals and competitions. We then covered a session on the Cardiff City Supporters Trust followed by a football match!

The football match was amazing! We played on a VERY VERY wet, boggy and marshland rugby pitch (with no cones or equipment available to mark out a playing area) and no bibs available to determine the teams. It was soon sorted out that those in black and blue shirts would play those in bright colours. A lady delegate on the course - who happens to be a referee - took to the field, donning a lovely pink skirt. She managed the game very well – even if she did call me off side a number of times!

The match was hilarious, especially as people hadn’t brought practical kit or clothing so were playing in their trousers and shoes! It was like playing on a skating rink, so slippy and slidy. It really was just what was needed after a heavy day in the classroom! The mud wouldn’t even come off with a good scrub in the shower!

It’s been a good day, the delegates on the course are very welcoming and engaging and it really does feel like I have known them for more than a day already! I am looking forward to tomorrow.

It’s now 11pm so I am off to bed ready for my 7am breakfast and our meeting with one of the Ministry departments tomorrow at 8am.

SPORT WALES SUPPORTS KENYA'S NEW GENERATION OF COMMUNITY LEADERS

Blog by Sport Wales' Sarah Roberts...

Countdown = 1 day to go:

When our Chief Executive Huw Jones initially sent round the email late in September asking if any staff would be interested in supporting the British Council on a project in Kenya, I immediately jumped at the chance and put my name forward. A week later I was asked by Huw if “I had a minute? And could I see him in his office?” after my initial fear of “oh my god, what have I done wrong!” I walked out chuffed that I’d been given such an opportunity to embark on.

Now with only 1 day to go, I am both excited and apprehensive and desperately trying to sort out what clothes to take!! Typical girl thing I know!! Who will we be meeting? What will the weather be like? Will we join in with any sporting activity? Do I need to be smart and formal or relaxed and casual? Oh the dilemma!

Whilst in Nairobi, we will launch a “Football for All” project which has been developed by the British Council in partnership with Cardiff City Supporters Trust and is supported by the Welsh Football Trust, Urdd Gobaith Cymru, Cardiff City Football in the Community & Sport Wales.

The partnership is looking to achieve:

·         A more cohesive, peaceful Kenya that will in turn translate to improved quality of life for communities involved

·         Greater appreciation of sustainable development and interdependency of people and communities

·         Increased power and decision making in the hands of the people

·         And gender mainstreaming from grass roots levels.

All of which are fairly similar to what we are also trying to achieve in Wales!

The partners involved in the programme are:

·         British Council – (organising party) creating international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries.

·         Kenyan National Steering Committee – with a mandate to co-ordinate all peace initiatives in the country and across borders.

·         Kenyan National Cohesion & integration Commission who promote the elimination of all forms of discrimination and promote tolerance and understanding amongst Kenyans.

·         Kenyan Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sport who work on Youth empowerment and engagement.

·         Grassroots community based organisations – Active Citizen Programme.

There are 21 delegates that will be taking part in the week-long programme (7 female and 14 male) with ages ranging from 21 to 48, and roles ranging from Community Volunteers, sports liaison officers, Civic Educators, Community mobilizers / peace builders,  football coaches and referees.

Central to the success of the project will be training young Kenyans in how to communicate with their own communities and how to influence local and national authorities to ensure sustainable, positive change, eventually establishing their first youth Parliament in Kenya, thus making their voice heard in decision making not just locally but on a country wide level. I am sure they will be very interested in the work that we are doing with Young Ambassadors in Wales.

                                                                   

my dad and i gave my bathroom a little makeover over thanksgiving.....here's a sneak peek.

Will the Freeze of the Global Fund Finally Put Health Care Corruption on the Agenda?

In February, 2011, we posted about problems with corruption affecting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. At the time, the Fund promised to better detect fraud and corruption affecting its grants programs. We later posted about how after an internal debate, the Fund promised to make more information public about any losses to fraud and corruption.

Now it has made more such information public, but it also appears that further problems with corruption have lead to the freezing of the Fund.

The New Findings of Corruption

First, as reported by Bloomberg on 1 November,

A $22 billion disease-fighting fund backed by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) founder Bill Gates found that money intended for people with life-threatening illnesses was used for home renovations in India and diverted to a person linked with money laundering and so-called blood diamonds in Nigeria.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is seeking to recover as much as $19.2 million from grants in eight countries, the Geneva-based organization said in a set of reports today. As much as $1.3 million was misused by the head of a non-governmental AIDS organization in India to buy a car and renovate his apartment, one report said. In Nigeria, money was siphoned to a person arrested in 2003 for money-laundering and smuggling diamonds that are mined and sold to support war.

This amount was in addition to previous amounts disclosed before:

The organization said last year it was seeking the recovery of $44.2 million in four nations for 'grave misuse of funds.'

It is not clear how much money the Fund has lost to corruption in total. According to an AP report, via CBS News,

Earlier probes by the fund's internal watchdog, the inspector general's office, had detected about $53 million in losses, according to fund documents, some unpublished, provided by senior officials.

The fund's board chairman Simon Bland told The Associated Press it has now reviewed about one-seventh of $14 billion in grants disbursed.

Whether similar amounts of corruption affected the other six sevenths of grants is unclear.

The Freeze on Grants

This week, several reports that the Fund would stop funding new grants appeared in the media. As reported by BusinessWeek,

The world’s biggest disease-fighting fund canceled its next round of grants as the global financial crisis crimps donations and threatens its ability to curb the spread of the world’s deadliest infections.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has spent or committed to spending $22 billion since 2002 on preventing and treating disease, will only have enough money to pay for essential services for existing programs through the end of 2013, the Geneva-based fund said in a statement today. It will not make new grants until 2014,...

The reason for this freeze on grant making was,

The fund faces 'accelerating deterioration' in its finances for the next three years because of economic distress in donor nations, combined with corruption in some of the poor countries it helps,...

A NY Times article implied that one reason for the financial shortfall was that some donor nations withheld money due to their concerns about corruption:

Several countries, including Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania and Zambia, lost their grants or had new safeguards put in place after officials were accused of stealing. The Global Fund’s own inspector general exposed the fraud and earlier this month was trying to recover about $20 million that had been stolen; that amount is less than 1 percent of the $13 billion that has been disbursed.

There have been reports of friction between Dr. Kazatchkine and the inspector general, John Parsons. They each report separately to the board.

Some major donors, including Germany and Sweden, expressed their dismay by freezing their donations.

Also, CBS News reported,

Germany, the European Commission and Denmark withheld hundreds of millions of euros in funding pending reviews of the fund's internal controls. Germany — the fund's fourth-largest donor- has since restored its funding.

Summary and Comment
In summary, the uncovering of specific instances of corruption that wasted the assets of the Global Fund, and the concerns of international donors about the effects of corruption on the Fund have been some of the causes of a freeze in funding that will preclude new initiatives at least until 2014. This is a dramatic illustration of how corruption can undermine health care.

We wondered previously whether the realization that corruption was subverting the Fund's activities would lead the Fund to actively address corruption.  In fact, the Fund seems to have investigated previous corruption affecting its work more aggressively than have many other health care organizations.  However, the Fund did not appear to have instituted any initiatives to prevent, forestall, or challenge corruption.  In that, it is typical of nearly every health care organization in the world.

Transparency International defines corruption as "abuse of entrusted power for private gain."  By that definition, many of the cases discussed on Health Care Renewal are about corruption.  For example, if a pharmaceutical company pays physicians as part of a deceptive marketing campaign that exaggerates the benefits or minimizes the harms of a drug, and that campaign increases sales and hence executive compensation, one could argue that the case involves corruption of both of physicians and of company management.  We have discussed many such cases on Health Care Renewal.  One striking example was the stealth marketing campaign for Neurontin as described in posts here, here, here and here.

Thus, there are many examples of corruption affecting health care professionals and academics, and all sorts of health care organizations, hospitals, health care insurers, pharmaceutical and device companies, health care information technology companies, medical education and communication companies, contract research organizations, etc, etc, etc  In 2006, Transparency International's Global Corruption Report asserted in its executive summary, " the scale of corruption is vast in both rich and poor countries."  As we summarized here, the report discussed the scale and diversity of health care corruption, and the severity of its adverse effects.

However, at least for a generation, there has been almost no opposition to such corruption.  In fact, as we have noted, health care corruption, and the problems and leadership and governance that lead to it, have been nearly anechoic.  Specifically, there is almost no teaching or research on corruption in health care academics (including medical and public health schools, and programs in health care research and policy.)  There is almost no mention of corruption by health care professional associations.  There are almost no initiatives to fight corruption on the part of health care charities and donors.  There is almost no interest in corruption among patient advocacy organizations.  (See previous discussion here.)

Why do they all ignore such a huge problem?  Most likely it is because of institutional and individual conflicts of interests.  Most of the these organizations are substantially funded by health care corporations, including corporations most involved in corruption, (and parenthetically, by financial firms whose corruption was likely a major cause of the global financial collapse / great recession, the other ostensible cause of the freeze of Global Fund grants.)  Many prominent health professionals and academics, and health care organizational leaders themselves have individual financial relationships with such companies.  For example, a majority of US medical school department chairs have significant financial relationships with health care corporations (see post here).  We have shown how top medical school leaders may simultaneously serve on the boards of directors of health care corporations (see post here).  People who are personally profiting from relationships with health care corporations are unlikely to question such relationships.  The leaders of organizations which depend on funding from such corporations are unlikely to question whether conflicts of interest might lead to corruption.  People whose colleagues, friends, family members, or supervisors are personally benefiting from conflicts of interest may hesitate to challenge such relationships.

So will the freeze of new grants at the Global Fund at least get health care corruption on the agenda?  One can only hope.  I personally hope that there are enough honest and unconflicted people remaining who will raise their voices above a murmur, even if that might discomfit those around them.

Of course, one reason we started Health Care Renewal was to make these issues less anechoic. So hear we go again.


PS - If anyone in our vast audience does know about any additional anti-corruption or conflict of interest, or pro-accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics initiatives, courses, meetings relevant to health care, please let me know and I will do my best to disseminate the information.

Sport Wales pay tribute to Gary Speed

Professor Laura McAllister, Chair of Sport Wales, Welsh Football Trust Board Member and former Wales Women's international, has today paid tribute to Gary Speed:
 
"Everyone at Sport Wales' thoughts are with Gary's family and friends at this hugely difficult time. Gary was a truly fantastic role model for everyone in the world of football.

"The way he conducted himself as a player, coach and most recently as national manager was exemplary. His recent success as Wales manager was complemented by a unique commitment to developing the game at all levels, from grassroots to the national team, ensuring that football was truly a game for everyone.

We are deeply saddened by the news today and know he will be missed by everyone involved in sport in Wales."

A Brief Response to Taubes's Food Reward Critique, and a Little Something Extra

It appears Gary Taubes has completed his series critiquing the food reward hypothesis of obesity (1).  I have to hand it to him, it takes some cojones to critique an entire field of research, particularly when you have no scientific background in it, and have evidently not read any of the scientific literature on it.  As of 2012, a Google Scholar search for the terms “food reward” and “obesity” turned up 2,790 papers.

The food reward hypothesis of obesity states that the reward and palatability value of food influence body fatness, and excess reward/palatability can promote body fat accumulation.  If we want to test the hypothesis, the most direct way is to find experiments in which 1) the nutritional qualities of the experimental diet groups are kept the same or at least very similar, 2) some aspect of diet reward/palatability differs, and 3) changes in body fat/weight are measured (for example, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).  In these experiments the hypothesis has both arms and one leg tied behind its back, because the most potent reward factors (energy density, sugar, fat) have nutritional value and therefore experiments that modify these cannot be tightly controlled for nutritional differences.  Yet even with this severe disadvantage, the hypothesis is consistently supported by the scientific evidence.  Taubes repeatedly stated in his series that controlled studies like these have not been conducted, apparently basing this belief on a 22-year-old review paper by Dr. Israel Ramirez and colleagues that does not contain the word 'reward' (10).

Another way to test the hypothesis is to see if people with higher food reward sensitivity (due to genetics or other factors) tend to gain more fat over time (for example, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16).  In addition, studies that have examined the effect of palatability/reward on food intake in a controlled manner are relevant (17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22), as are studies that have identified some of the mechanisms by which these effects occur (reviewed in 23).  Even if not all of the studies are perfect, at some point, one has to acknowledge that there are a lot of mutually buttressing lines of evidence here.  It is notable that virtually none of these studies appeared in Taubes's posts, and he appeared unaware of them. 
Read more »

Kinect Apps Challenge

Graphics & Media Lab and Microsoft Research Cambridge have announced a contest for applications that use Kinect sensor. The authors of the five brightest apps will be funded to attend the 2012 Microsoft Research PhD summer school. I blogged about the last year's event in my previous post. Details of the contest are here.

I guess there's no need to explain what Kinect is. It is extremely successful combined colour and depth sensor by Microsoft. It is being distributed for killer price (≈$150) as an add-on for Xbox, although it is hard to imagine the range of possible applications. Controlling a computer only by gestures is considered as a primer of natural user interface. To name some applications beyond gaming, this kind of NUI is useful to help surgeons to keep their hands clean:

Kinect helps blind people to navigate through buildings:

For more ideas look at the winners of OpenNI challenge.

OpenNI is an open-source alternative to Kinect SDK. Its strong point is it is integrated with PCL, but beware that you cannot use it for the contest. Only Kinect for Windows SDK is allowed.

Kinect is probably the most successful commercial outcome from the Microsoft Research lab. MSR is unique because they do a lot of theoretical research there, and it is unclear if it is profitable for Microsoft to fund it. But the projects like Kinect reveal the doubts. I will post about MSR organization in comparison to other industrial labs in one of the later posts.

Christmas is coming! 

How are you doing your shopping this year? 

Braving the high street, visiting your favourite department store or by making yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate and lounging in front of the computer browsing?

If you find that you don't know where to head for to grab that special gift, and like us need to plan the route through town to the nearest coffee shop, here is where you can expect to see Kit Heath jewellery.

The high street has many unique and wonderful independant jewellers, which go to great lengths to ensure your shopping experience with them is as pleasurable and knowledgeable as possible, so if your looking for that personal shopping experience and require some time and good advice on your purchase, then we highly recommend that you head for your nearest local stockist of Kit Heath.

You can locate your nearest Kit Heath stockists through our website, or just by using the link provided below:

Find my nearest Kit Heath stockist

If a department store is your preference so you can get all your presents under one roof, then Kit Heath is available in Debenhams, John Lewis and House of Fraser. You can go in store, browse and try on for size, and if your still not sure you can simply revisit the jewellery from the comfort of your own home as Kit Heath is available online with the department stores also. Or vice verse, have a look at the collection available, then see it in store and even try it on.

Or if going out to face the Christmas crowds fills you with fear, Kit Heath has various online shopping experiences for you! As mentioned above we are available through the major department stores, but we are also available through their online stores as well as via Amazon - every ones best friend at Christmas!

To  round up; depending on how you like to shop, for that personal touch - visit your local jewellery shop.Kill two birds with one stone - go to your department store or from the sofa visit us online!

We have a special Christmas and Party section for our selection of the newest and most suitable jewellery for the occasion to help make those difficult decisions. Happy Shopping!