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2013年5月28日星期二

Pricing Models in Marketing Research



Introduction of Pricing Models and their advantages and disadvantages
Pricing a product is "probably the toughest thing there is to do," according to an expert.How to price your product?There are all kinds of methods. Marketing research has developed several different approaches to price optimization.What advantages and disadvantages do these approaches have?A research published in Intelligent Information Management  describes and compares several main of these approaches.You can learn at < Pricing Models in Marketing Research>.


2013年5月27日星期一

8 Ridiculous Nutrition Myths



There is a lot of incompetence in the area of nutrition and health. Even health professionals seem to constantly contradict each other. Here are 8 ridiculous nutrition myths, thoroughly debunked.
1. A Calorie is a Calorie
It is a common myth that all that matters for weight loss is calories in, calories out.
Of course, calories matter. But the types of foods we eat are also important.
Here are 3 examples of how “a calorie is NOT a calorie.”
-Fructose vs. Glucose: Fructose is more likely to stimulate hunger, increase abdominal obesity and insulin resistance, compared to the same amount of calories from glucose.
-Protein: Eating protein can raise the metabolic rate and reduce hunger compared to fat and carbs.
-Medium vs. long-chain fatty acids: Fatty acids that are of medium length (such as from coconut oil) raise metabolism and reduce hunger compared to longer chain fatty acids.
Bottom Line: A calorie is not a calorie. Different foods affect our bodies, hunger and hormones in different ways.
2. Eating a Lot of Protein is Bad For You
Some people think that a high-protein diet will harm your kidneys and cause osteoporosis.
It is true that eating protein can make you excrete more calcium in the short term.
However, long-term studies show that protein intake is associated with improved bone health and a lower risk of fractures, not the other way around.
Studies don’t find any association with kidney disease either.
The two most important risk factors for kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure. Eating adequate protein helps with both, which should reduce your risk of kidney disease later in life.
Unless you have a medical condition, there’s no reason to be afraid of having more protein in your diet. It’s a good thing.
Bottom Line: Eating a high protein diet may be protective against bone fractures and reduce the two most important risk factors for kidney failure.
3. The Healthiest Diet is a Balanced Low-Fat Diet
The low-fat guidelines first came out in the year 1977, at almost the exact same time the obesity epidemic started.
This diet was never actually proven to work. It was merely based on observations.
The National Institute of Health decided to test this diet and funded the Women’s Health Initiative, which is the largest randomized controlled trial ever conducted on diet.
In this study, tens of thousands of women were placed on either a low-fat diet, or continued to eat the standard western diet like before.
The study went on for 7.5 years and the conclusions were very clear:
-The diet did NOT prevent weight gain. The low-fat group weighed only 0.4kg less than the control group after 7.5 years.
-The diet did NOT prevent heart disease either. There was no difference between groups after 7.5 years.
-The low-fat diet got tested. It didn’t work, period.
Bottom Line: There is no evidence that low-fat diets lead to better outcomes. The largest randomized controlled trial ever conucted on diet proves that the low-fat diet is completely ineffective.
4. Everyone Should be Cutting Back on Sodium
Sodium is a crucial electrolyte in the body and our cells need to keep it within a very tight range, or we’ll die.
For a long time, sodium has been thought to elevate blood pressure and therefore raise your risk of disease.
It is true that it can mildly elevate blood pressure in the short term.
However, studies do not support the idea that lowering sodium helps improve actual hard outcomes like heart attacks.
Randomized controlled trials on sodium restriction show that there is no effect on cardiovascular disease or death. They also show that sodium restriction may increase triglycerides and cholesterol levels.
Unless you have elevated blood pressure, there is no reason to avoid adding salt to your foods to make them more palatable.
Bottom Line: Sodium restriction has been thoroughly tested. None of these studies have found any evidence that it actually leads to better outcomes.
5. Saturated Fat Raises The Bad Cholesterol and Gives You Heart Disease
The myth that saturated fat raises cholesterol and causes heart disease is still alive today.
This ideas was based on some flawed observational studies conducted in the 60s and 70s.
Since then, many studies have re-examined this relationship and discovered that:
-There is literally no association between saturated fat consumption and cardiovascular disease.
-Saturated fat raises HDL (the good) cholesterol and changes the LDL from small, dense (bad) to Large LDL, which is benign.
-There is no reason to avoid natural foods that are rich in saturated fats. Meat, coconut oil and butter are perfectly healthy foods.
Bottom Line: Despite decades of anti-fat propaganda, saturated fat has never been proven to cause heart disease. New studies prove that there is literally no association.
6. Coffee is Bad For You


Coffee has gotten a bad reputation in the past.
It is true that caffeine, the active stimulant compound in coffee, can slightly raise blood pressure in the short term.
Despite these mild adverse effects, long term observational studies actually show that coffee lowers the risk of many diseases. Coffee can:
-Improve brain function.
-Help you burn more fat.
-Lower your risk of diabetes… in some studies as much as 67%.
-Lower your risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
-Protect your liver against cirrhosis and cancer.
Coffee is also loaded with antioxidants. It is actually the biggest source of antioxidants in the western diet and outranks both fruits and vegetables, combined.
Bottom Line: Despite coffee being able to mildly elevate blood pressure, observational studies show a strong and consistent reduction in many serious diseases like Alzheimer’s and type II diabetes.
7. Eggs Are Rich in Cholesterol And Can Give You Heart Disease
Eggs have been unfairly demonized because they contain large amounts of cholesterol.
However, dietary cholesterol doesn’t necessarily raise blood cholesterol and eggs have never been proven to cause harm.
If anything, eggs are among the most nutritious and healthiest foods you can eat.
They’re loaded with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
Studies show that egg consumption actually improves the blood lipid profile. They raise the HDL (good) cholesterol and change the LDL from small, dense to Large, which is benign.
Observational studies show no association between egg consumption and risk of heart disease.
Additionally, some studies show that eggs for breakfast can help you lose weight… at least compared to a breakfast of bagels.
Bottom Line: Eggs are one of the healthiest and most nutritious foods you can eat and there is no association between egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease.
8. Low-Carb Diets Are Ineffective or Dangerous
Low-carb diets have been considered dangerous because of their high amount of saturated fat.
For this reason, they have been thought to raise your risk of heart disease and other chronic illness.
However, since the year 2002, more than 20 randomized controlled trials have been conducted and compared low-carb against the standard of care, the low-fat diet.
In almost every one of these studies, low-carb diets:
-Cause significantly more weight loss than low-fat diets.
-Drastically lower triglycerides, an important risk factors for heart disease
-Raise HDL (the good) cholesterol.
-Improve blood sugar and insulin levels, especially in diabetics.
-Change the LDL cholesterol from small, dense (bad) to Large (benign) – which should lower the risk of heart disease.
-Lower blood pressure significantly.
Low-carb diets are also easier to follow and have an outstanding safety profile. There is no evidence of any adverse effects, despite the scare tactics.
They are certainly a much better choice than a low-fat, calorie restricted diet… which many mainstream organizations still push despite zero evidence of effectiveness.


(source:mailonline/Health)

2013年5月25日星期六

A project about managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era



Social security data management is an important topic both in application of information management and in social security management. A research from scientific research publishing claims to  introduce the basic ideas of designing i-SSIS and describe the architecture and major components of the system:
Social security data management is an important topic both in application of information management and in social security management. In the Web 2.0 era, more and more human information and healthcare information is released to the Internet through various approaches. This abundance makes managing social security data go beyond managing conventional social security database records. How to organize the conventional records together with the related information gathered from the Web is an interesting problem to solve to provide more convenient and powerful social security information service. In this paper, we introduce our initial work on building a Web-oriented social security information system named i-SSIS. I-SSIS is a database system which adopts a new object-role data model named INM model and deploys INM database system as its core. With the assistance of auxiliary tools to carry out social security information extraction, analyzing and query, i-SSIS can properly provide social security-related information gathered from the Web. We introduce the basic ideas of designing i-SSIS and describe the architecture and major components of the system.
Let’s discuss how about this method?


2013年5月23日星期四

The usage of distal anterolateral thigh flap- two Cases



Case:
1.   A 53-year-old man with a skin ulcer over the anterior surface of the left tibia secondary to plate fixation for an open fracture. The perforator marked with preoperative Doppler was located 8 cm proximal to the superior border of the patella. Without thinning, the flap was 10 × 4 cm in size and 5 mm thick.
2.   A 46-year-old man with necrosis of the right index finger after replantation. The flap was 5 × 3 cm in size and 3 mm in thickness. This “distal” anterolateral thigh flap can be raised as a quite thin flap with a long pedicle and, therefore, is considered useful in the reconstruction of various soft tissue defects.

Conclusion:
This “distal” anterolateral thigh flap can be raised as a quite thin flap with a long pedicle and, therefore, is considered useful in the reconstruction of various soft tissue defects.

Full article:Download PDF

The different phenotypic and molecular characterization of phaseolus vulgaris plants from seeds frozen and non- frozen



What is the better way to save seed? High temperature,low temperature or room temperature? What is the effect of different preservation pattern on vegetation?A research from Scientific Research Publishing found that cryostorage is an efficient and reliable technique to conserve P. vulgaris seeds and regenerate true-to-type plants:
The objective of this work was to evaluate if cryostorage of Phaseolus vulgaris L. seeds induced variations in regenerated plants at the phenotypic and molecular levels. A series of agricultural traits was measured on plants grown from control, non-cryopreserved and cryopreserved seeds, and the genetic stability of plants of the second generation was analysed at selected microsatellite loci. The phenotype of the second generation plants was evaluated as well. No statistically significant phenotypic differences were observed for the parameters measured, neither in the first nor in the second generations. Averaging both treatments, about 76% of the seeds had germinated 10 days after sowing. At harvest we recorded plants with about 73 cm in height, 13 stem internodes, 25 fruits, 103 grains and 4 grains per fruit. One hundred seeds weighted about 26 g. The genetic analyses performed on the second generation plants using six nuclear Simple Sequences Repeats (SSR) markers revealed no changes in microsatellite length between control and cryopreserved samples, implying that there was no effect of seed liquid nitrogen exposure on genome integrity. The phenotypic and molecular results reported here confirm that cryostorage is an efficient and reliable technique to conserve P. vulgaris seeds and regenerate true-to-type plants.

(source:SCIRP/ Plant Sciences)


2013年5月21日星期二

Ant inspired the design of search and rescue robots



A study showing how ants tunnel their way through confined spaces could aid the design of search-and-rescue robots, according to US scientists.
A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology found fire ants can use their antennae as "extra limbs" to catch themselves when they fall, and can build stable tunnels in loose sand.
Researchers used high speed cameras to record in detail this behaviour.
The findings are published in the journal PNAS.
Dr Nick Gravish, who led the research, designed "scientific grade ant farms" - allowing the ants to dig through sand trapped between two plates of glass, so every tunnel and every movement could be viewed and filmed.
"These ants would move at very high speeds," he explained, "and if you slowed down the motion, (you could see) it wasn't graceful movement - they have many slips and falls."
Crucially, the insects were able to gather themselves almost imperceptibly quickly after each fall.
To see how they managed this, the team set up a second experiment where, to move from their nest to their food source, the ants had to pass through a labyrinth of smooth glass tunnels.
"We could watch these glass tunnels and really see what all the body parts were doing when the ants were climbing and slipping and falling," said Dr Gravish.

Tune the environment
Finally, the researchers wanted to look inside the hidden labyrinths that the ants constructed underground, so they put ants into containers full of sand or soil and allowed them to dig.
They then built a "homemade X-Ray CT scanner", just like a medical scanner, to take 3D snapshots of the tunnels that the ants dug in different types of soil.
"We found that ant groups all dug tunnels of the same diameter, [no matter what the] soil conditions were," said Dr Gravish.
"This suggested to us that fire ants are actively controlling their excavation to create tunnels of a fixed size."
Keeping their tunnels at approximately one body length in diameter seemed to ensure that the ants could catch themselves when they slipped and allowed the creatures to continue to dig.
Prof Dan Goldman, who was also involved in the study, explained that these remarkably successful insects were able to manipulate their environment - using it to control their movement.
His overall aim, he explained, was to distil "the principles by which ants and other animals manipulate complex environments" and bring them to bear in the design of search-and-rescue robotics.
"The state of the art search-and-rescue robotics is actually quite limited," he told the BBC.
"Lots of the materials in disaster sites - landslides, rubble piles - are loose materials, which you're going to potentially have to create structures out of.
"You might want, for example, to create a temporary structure for people buried down beneath."
Fire ants, he explained, could build stable tunnels in sand or soil with almost no moisture to bind it together, so learning from them might enable designers to build and programme robots that solve these same engineering problems.

(source:bbc)

2013年5月20日星期一

94% of UK adults would rather live without sex than their mobile phone



The vast majority of us would prefer to go without sex than live without our mobile phones, a survey suggests.
Two thirds of young Britons claim that they ‘couldn’t live without their phone’ and nine per cent of people polled said they'd rather go without their own children than part with their gadgets.
More than 2,570 adults across the UK, aged between 18 and 30, took part in the survey by Mobileinsurance.co.uk.
It found that 94 per cent of people in the UK would rather live without sex than their mobile phones.
All of those questioned owned mobile phones and were in a relationship.
When asked to describe how they felt about their mobile phone, 65 per cent claimed they ‘couldn’t live without it’.
Almost a quarter, 22 per cent, said they were ‘very dependent’ on their handset, while 10 per cent felt they could ‘take or leave’ their mobile phone.
Just one per cent said they only needed their handsets occasionally and a further 2 per cent said they could ‘easily live without it’.
And despite the reliance most of the people studied put on their phones, just 12 per cent said they have mobile phone insurance to protect their must-have gadget.
The research also asked the participants what they would rather live without for a week, than give up their mobile phone.
The poll also found that 45 per cent of those questioned would rather live without ‘basic meals’, 71 per cent said that they would be willing to forgo their car and 9 per cent would rather live without their own children than be parted from their handset.
Sex and mobile phone,which would you choose in case of alternative?