The book Eating Fossil Fuels looks at agriculture and our food supply through the lens of energy and energy balance. When you add up the energy inputs of fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, irrigation, and tilling, the food produced on a typical acre of land today takes many more calories of energy to produce than the maximum energy that could possibly be generated from the sun through photosynthesis. Where does the extra energy come from? Mostly from fossil fuels. What does this mean? The current food system is unsustainable and in many more ways than most people realize. If you look at the energy content of the food we eat, we are literally eating fossil fuels.

A patent recently issued to Health Hero Network describes a simple but powerful idea that addresses the pandemic challenge by enabling near-real-time syndromic surveillance that can be adapted on the fly. Easy-to-navigate survey devices collect data from hospital waiting rooms, school nurses, and other points of care. The survey script can be changed and updated remotely by public health authorities based on the latest information. The devices report data to central computers that look for any unusual patterns and then alert public health authorities immediately so that they can investigate further.

Disease outbreaks that look like the flu at the beginning can be hard to detect early because flu-like symptoms are common and are not always reported. The first cases of an outbreak may be spread out over many different clinics, hospitals, and schools in a metropolitan area. Unusual patterns might emerge only when looking at a broader cross section of a region. The other challenge is that we may not know what data is relevant and important at the beginning stages of an outbreak. Where it might have been fever, rash, and working in a mail room for one threat, it might be diarrhea and travel to a specific region or eating a particular food in another threat.

While many efforts have been discussed and may even be underway to facilitate early detection of outbreaks by sifting through electronic medical records and pharmacy data, the most important information might be missed because no one knew to ask the right question. When we do figure out what question to ask, we won’t have time to add fields to medical records or change forms. Our public health authorities need the ability to change the script as soon as they learn new information.

Despite the simplicity of the approach, it is not easy to organize health systems around new ways of doing things. On the other hand, maybe we won’t need to. Public health surveys could be pushed to iPhone users, for example. There just might be enough iPhones out there by now to provide a statistically significant sample size enabling highly sensitive early detection of potential public health emergencies. If you want to read the patent, you can find the full text here.

Yes, We Can! - Si, Se Puede!

Song & video by Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. Inspired by Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ speech.

http://www.yeswecansong.com

http://www.barackobama.com

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics…they will only grow louder and more dissonant ……….. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea –

Yes. We. Can.

Featuring: Jesse Dylan, Will.i.am, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon

The images above came from a live Webcast of a gastric bypass surgery performed at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston by Dr. Scott Shikora, Chief of Bariatric Surgery at Tufts-NEMC, along with bariatric surgeons Dr. Michael Tarnoff and Dr. Julie Kim. Click on the images to watch the complete video on YouTube.

You also can watch Dr. Stan Hoehn perform a minimally invasive gastric bypass at Shawnee Mission Medical Center in Kansas by clicking on the image below.

A Consensus Panel convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates bariatric surgery for people with a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher, or people with a BMI of 35 or higher with one or more related comorbid conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.

Bariatric surgery is regarded by leading physicians on the panel as a lifesaving tool that enables, or in fact forces, the patient to change lifestyle and eating habits. Check out the BMI calculator below to see if you should be changing your behavior.

BMI Calculator (C) 2008 Brown2020.com

With 100 million Americans struggling with at least one chronic condition, and over 60 million Americans considered to be clinically obese, we can expect a lot of bariatric surgery ahead. Can we really address the issue of obesity by forcing ourselves to change behavior under the knife, or are there other ways to address this epidemic?

Stay tuned to this blog for an ongoing discussion of obesity and of new approaches to improving health behavior.

Much has been blogged about the ex-employee of video game company Midway and his purported plan to sue Nintendo for stealing the idea for the Nintendo Wii controller. Bloggers and commenters are raising two lines of questions: First, if accelerometers for detecting motion were around before 2000, how could Goschy claim to have invented the accelerometer-based game controller? Second, if Goschy did invent the video game motion controller over seven years ago, why did it take so long for this to come out?

Accelerometers may have been around for a while, but Pat Goschy’s video still looks like it could be full of inventive ideas given the fact that this was over seven years ago. It is not the invention of the accelerometer that is in question, and maybe not even the accelerometer as a game controller. The inventive steps may have been a series of innovations around design, coding, and calibration that would give game players the agility and speed to take on B. Knoximov in Ready 2 Rumble from the comfort of their living rooms.

Inventing is about taking that next creative step past the current frontier and making things a little better. The fact that Goschy was building motion-based controllers and hacking a Dreamcast interface in what looks like a very workable system seven years before the technology matured and became popular tells us there probably could have been some patentable material back in 2000.

There are two patents that list Goschy as a co-inventor: Patent 6,545,661, filed on June 21, 1999, entitled Video Game Systems Having A Control Unit With An Accelerometer For Controlling A Video Game, and patent 6,315,673, filed on October 5, 1999, entitled Motion Simulator For A Video Game. Both patents are assigned to Midway. These patents do not appear to claim the motion controller from the Goschy video. The 661 patent is the closest, but it is really about sensing light from the screen to know if you hit your target with a game controller gun.

The light sensor is required in all the claims. Here is the exact text of the first independent claim:

1. A video game system comprising:
a game controller;
a hand-held control unit coupled to the game controller and housing an accelerometer and a light sensor,
the accelerometer sensing tilt of the control unit with respect to an axis, the accelerometer producing an acceleration signal indicating the tilt of the control unit with respect to the axis,
the game controller processing the acceleration signal to control the movement of a game character on a video display coupled to the game controller and further processing the acceleration signal to control directional navigation of the game character through a game environment, said navigation corresponding to the tilt of the hand-held control unit,
the light sensor detecting one or more light pixels from the video display corresponding to a direction in which the hand-held control unit is pointing, the light sensor producing a detection signal to the game controller, the game controller determining from the detection signal the light pixels from the video display detected by the light sensor.

The question is not how did Goschy get a patent on this. He didn’t. The real question is why didn’t Midway patent the controller that Goschy is showing in the video? That would have been valuable, but then again, hindsight is always 20/20.

According to some of the blogs, Goschy circulated the video among Midway employees back in 1999 to show his idea, but the company obviously didn’t file patents and didn’t develop the technology either. This is a common fate of many great inventions. If you are early enough to have something truly new and innovative, and you are sufficiently ahead of the crowd to get great patents, chances are you are way ahead of the market and way ahead of the marketing people as well.

Great ideas and great patents need to be five to ten years too early, and they are usually only recognized in hindsight. Thank you, Pat Goschy, for reminding us of the many years of innovation and creative work that leads up to what most people see as an instant sensation when a product like the Nintendo Wii becomes a hit. We also shouldn’t forget that Nintendo has been a grandfather of the modern video game field, at it for the past two decades, and who knows what they also have in their labs that started many years ago.

The question is not why the video took so long to come out. The market has only just now emerged. If the video had come out earlier, we never would have found it.

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Slides 1-23: Obesity Trends* Among U.S. Adults BRFSS, 2006 (*BMI ?30, or ~ 30 lbs. overweight for 5’ 4” person) No Data <10% 10%–14% 15%–19% 20%–24% 25%–29% ?30% Source: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, CDC.

Slide 24: Citations • BRFSS, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System http: //www.cdc.gov/brfss/ • Mokdad AH, et al. The spread of the obesity epidemic in the United States, 1991—1998 JAMA 1999; 282:16:1519–1522. • Mokdad AH, et al. The continuing epidemics of obesity and diabetes in the United States. JAMA. 2001; 286:10:1519– 22. • Mokdad AH, et al. Prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and obesity-related health risk factors, 2001. JAMA 2003: 289:1: 76–79 • CDC. State-Specific Prevalence of Obesity Among Adults — United States, 2005; MMWR 2006; 55(36);985–988

Slide 25: Obesity Trends Among U.S. Adults between 1985 and 2006 Definitions: • Obesity: Having a very high amount of body fat in relation to lean body mass, or Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher. • Body Mass Index (BMI): A measure of an adult’s weight in relation to his or her height, specifically the adult’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of his or her height in meters.

Slide 26: Obesity Trends Among U.S. Adults between 1985 and 2006 Source of the data: • The data shown in these maps were collected through CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Each year, state health departments use standard procedures to collect data through a series of monthly telephone interviews with U.S. adults. • Prevalence estimates generated for the maps may vary slightly from those generated for the states by BRFSS (http://aps.nccd.cdc.gov/brfss) as slightly different analytic methods are used.

Slide 27: • In 1990, among states participating in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 10 states had a prevalence of obesity less than 10% and no states had prevalence equal to or greater than 15%. • By 1998, no state had prevalence less than 10%, seven states had a prevalence of obesity between 20- 24%, and no state had prevalence equal to or greater than 25%. • In 2006, only four states had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Twenty-two states had a prevalence equal or greater than 25%; Two of these states (Mississippi and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.

· Products in the health monitoring business

· All associates will become members of the Bosch team

Stuttgart – The Bosch Group has announced it has acquired a majority shareholding in Health Hero Network, a leading innovator in the remote health monitoring business. An agreement to this effect has been reached with the company’s shareholders. Terms of the agreement will not be disclosed.

Health Hero Network, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, develops and sells technology solutions that allow the remote monitoring and management of patient health data. “With the innovative products of Health Hero Network, the Bosch Group can help patients with chronic conditions achieve a better quality of life,” said project leader Sascha Henke. Since it was founded in 1992, Health Hero Network has been issued 63 patents. The company currently employs 44 associates, all of whom will be retained by Bosch.

The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. In the areas of automotive and industrial technology, consumer goods, and building technology, some 260,000 associates generated sales of 43.7 billion euros in fiscal 2006. The Bosch Group comprises Robert Bosch GmbH and its roughly 300 subsidiary and regional companies in over 50 countries. This worldwide development, manufacturing, and sales network is the foundation for further growth. Bosch spends more than three billion euros each year for research and development, and in 2006 applied for over 3,000 patents worldwide. The company was set up in Stuttgart in 1886 by Robert Bosch (1861-1942) as “Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering.”

The special ownership structure of Robert Bosch GmbH guarantees the entrepreneurial freedom of the Bosch Group, making it possible for the company to plan over the long term and to undertake significant up-front investments in the safeguarding of its future. Ninety-two percent of the share capital of Robert Bosch GmbH is held by Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH, a charitable foundation. The majority of voting rights are held by Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG, an industrial trust. The entrepreneurial ownership functions are carried out by the trust. The remaining shares are held by the Bosch family and by Robert Bosch GmbH.

Additional information can be accessed at www.bosch.com.