Election night TV audience down from 2008: Nielsen data

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Tuesday’s presidential election may have been too close to call for weeks, but it didn’t pull in as many TV viewers as four years ago.

More than 66.8 million Americans watched coverage of the 2012 elections during prime time on Tuesday, according to final Nielsen data on Wednesday. That’s down from the 71.5 million who tuned in to see the United States elect Barack Obama as its first African-American president in November 2008.

Nielsen said 13 cable and broadcast television networks aired live coverage of the election results, which saw Obama defeat Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Americans aged 55 and older made up the biggest audience, according to the ratings data.

The viewers for election night were also slightly down on the 67.2 million people who watched October’s first presidential debate between Romney and Obama.

But activity on social media soared to a record level. More than 31 million, election-related tweets were sent on Tuesday night – including a couple from Obama proclaiming his victory – making the night “the most Tweeted about event in U.S. political history,” according to Twitter.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Paul Simao)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Death of the cassette tape much exaggerated

LONDON (Reuters) – The widening gap between the amount of data the world produces and our capacity to store it is giving a new lease of life to the humble cassette tape.

Although consumers have abandoned the audio cassette in favor of the ubiquitous iPod, organizations with large amounts of data, from patient records to capacity-hungry video archives, have continued to use tape as a cheap and secure storage medium.

Researchers at IBM are trying to keep this 60-year old technology relevant for at least the next decade and they are getting help from rising energy costs, which are forcing companies to look for cheaper alternatives to stacks of power-hungry hard drives.

Evangelos Eleftheriou and his colleagues at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, have developed a cassette just 10 cm by 10cm by 2cm that can hold about 35 terabytes of data, the equivalent of a library with 400 kilometers of bookshelves.

“It is really the greenest storage technology,” Eleftheriou told Reuters. “Tape at rest, consumes literally zero power.”

Unlike hard drive storage devices, which have to be on continuously, tape systems only consume power when data is being read or recorded, giving them a carbon footprint a fraction that of their disc-based counterparts.

Latency is the biggest disadvantage. Tapes have to be retrieved, usually by a robotic selector, and then loaded into a reading device.

But for much of the world’s archived data, access time is not critical. From legal archives and company records kept to comply with legislation like the Sarbanes Oxley Act in the United States, to data on traffic flow and weather patterns, keeping secure copies is more important than instant access.

“If you have big data then you have really big backups,” said Eleftheriou.

This is borne out by an estimate from consultancy Coughlin Associates that about 400 exabytes, equal to 20 million times the content of U.S. Library of Congress, is currently stored on tape.

The new IBM cassette, originally developed with Fuji Film, packs about 29.5 billion bits on a square inch of tape using a coating made from the chemical compound barium ferrite, which maximizes so-called linear density – the amount of data that can be squeezed onto a length of the tape.

The other limitation is the number of tracks that can be laid down and the researchers have developed novel nanopositioning technologies that can position the read and write heads with an accuracy of 10 to 15 billionths of a meter.

SERIOUSLY BIG DATA

Eleftheriou and his team believe they can increase the storage capacity to 100 billion bits per square inch and they hope this will make tape storage a contender for one of the world’s biggest data collection projects – the huge radio telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

In just over 10 years the SKA will start scanning the skies from two remote sites in South Africa and Australia, and it will generate 10 times the data traffic of the global internet.

“There’s going to be a lot of data pouring out of what is essentially a giant computer with a few bits of metal (the dishes and the antennae) on the ends,” said Andy Faulkner, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and one of the project engineers on the SKA.

Faulkner said there has been quite a shift towards using hard drives in astronomy in recent years because their capacity has grown so far and fast, but the SKA will be a different kettle of fish, not least because of the vast amount of data it will generate and the restrictions on power usage from its remote location.

“In truth, nobody knows just yet what we will be using given the 10-year time frame but tape storage is very interesting because you don’t necessarily need real time access to everything.”

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Organ on a chip? Scientists test drugs on tiny, artificial lung

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have begun testing drugs using a microchip lined with living cells that replicates many of the features of a human lung, a technology that may one day help improve drug testing and reduce researchers’ dependence on animal studies.

In 2010, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developed the so-called lung-on-a-chip technology that mimics the function of air sacs called alveoli, which transfer oxygen through a thin membrane from the lung to the blood.

For drug companies, the technology offers a way to better predict how drugs will work in people, ultimately reducing the cost of drug development by identifying problems before drugs are tested in clinical trials.

“Major pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of time and a huge amount of money on cell cultures and animal testing to develop new drugs, but these methods often fail to predict the effects of these agents when they reach humans,” Dr. Donald Ingber, whose study was published on Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, said in a statement.

Now the Wyss team is putting its artificial lung to the test, using the device to recreate pulmonary edema, a condition that causes fluid to leak into the air sacs of the lungs, and then treating it with an experimental drug from GlaxoSmithKline.

The device, which is about the size of a memory stick, is made of a flexible polymer that contains hollow channels.

These channels are divided by a thin, permeable membrane lined on one side with human lung cells and on the other with tiny blood vessel or capillary cells that are bathed in fluid to simulate blood flow. A vacuum is applied to recreate the way human tissue stretches during breathing.

For the study, the team treated the device with interleukin-2 or IL-2, a cancer drug that can cause pulmonary edema, a deadly condition in which the lungs fill with fluid and blood forms clots.

When injected into the blood channel of the device, the drug caused fluid to start leaking across the membrane, reducing the amount of volume of air in the other channel. Blood plasma crossed into the air channels and started to clot.

Dr. Geraldine Hamilton, co-author on the paper and the senior lead for the organs on chips program at Wyss, said the study is “providing us with a very exciting proof of concept for our ability to use organs on chips to create human disease models.”

When the team turned on the vacuum to simulate breathing, fluid leakage increased, suggesting that breathing may make the condition worse.

“We learned more about the mechanisms by which this happens. Than really wouldn’t have been possible through an animal model,” Hamilton said.

The team next used their model to test a new class of drug being developed by GlaxoSmithKline called a TRPV4 channel blocker. They found that treating the tissues in the device with the Glaxo drug before exposing it to IL-2 prevented blood vessel leakage in the device.

To confirm this finding, Kevin Thorneloe, a scientist at GlaxoSmithKline, did a parallel study in which he tested the drug in the lungs of rodents and dogs with pulmonary edema caused by heart failure and found the drug improved lung function and reduced leakage, consistent with the chip finding.

“These findings suggest that TRPV4 blockers could be used to limit pulmonary edema in patients with heart or lung disease, and were an important step toward validating the lung on a chip model,” said Thorneloe, whose companion study was published in the same journal.

“This technology is still in its early stages of development,” he said, noting that several additional studies will be needed to further validate the chip device.

Although initially, such devices will be used to support early research seeking to get a better understanding of disease at the molecular level, Thorneloe said over time, they could be used to quickly study the impact of several drugs on lung function.

In July, Wyss entered a $ 37 million agreement with the U.S. defense department to help develop 10 engineered organs, all linked into one system.

The idea is to replicate a human body on a chip, which could be used to rapidly assess responses to new drugs and potential chemical threats.

Donna Dambach, a pre-clinical safety scientist at Roche’s Genentech unit, said she thinks drug companies will be quick to adopt these technologies for their own internal decision-making.

But Dambach said it will likely take much longer for drug companies to replace animal models used for regulatory approval with these engineered organs.

“I think everyone would love that, but animals are complex, like human beings, and we really have to make certain that we’re at least predicting some level of that complexity in these systems.”

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Eric Walsh)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Euro growth forecast hits markets

7 November 2012 Last updated at 17:31 ET

Continue reading the main story

The European Commission has cut sharply its growth forecast for the eurozone, warning that the “difficult process of rebalancing will last for some time”.

It now projects the bloc will narrowly avoid recession next year, growing by 0.1%, compared with its previous estimate of 1% growth, and thinks the EU economy will shrink this year.

Unemployment would also continue to rise next year, the Commission said.

The revision helped push global stock markets lower.

The Paris and Frankfurt exchanges closed down 2%, while London’s FTSE 100 ended the day 1.6% lower. New York’s Dow Jones lost 313 points, or 2.4%, at 12,933, its lowest level since early August.

The euro also weakened against the dollar following the revision, falling by half a cent to $ 1.278. Against the pound, it fell by a fifth of a pence to 79.93p.

Figures released earlier on Wednesday showing the biggest monthly fall in German manufacturing output since April, also weighed on markets.

As did concerns about the upcoming so-called fiscal cliff in the US, now that the US election has been won by Barack Obama.

“Having been fixated on the US election and the preferred market outcome of an Obama victory, the initial morning feel good bounce [has fizzled out], as markets quickly moved on to the next potential banana skin,” said Michael Hewson at CMC Markets.

“In this case there are several, starting with today’s Greek parliamentary vote on austerity, not to mention concerns about how the newly elected president will deal with the US fiscal cliff concerns.”

Under current plans, $ 600bn (£375bn) of tax rises and spending cuts will kick in in January, with many analysts saying this will push the US economy back into recession.

Weak demand

In the spring, the Commission forecast that the 27 members of the EU would collectively produce no economic growth in 2012. It now forecasts the EU economy will shrink by 0.3%. It also downgraded its forecast for the eurozone economy this year, from a contraction of 0.3% to 0.4%.

The revisions to next year’s forecasts were more stark. While the eurozone is barely expected to grow at all, the EU is now forecast to grow by 0.4% compared with the previous estimate of 1.3%.

The Commission made a number of drastic cuts in its forecasts for growth for 2013, and none more so than Greece, which it now expects to contract by 4.2%, having forecast flat growth in the spring. It expects Greece and Spain to return to growth in 2014.

The UK is now expected to grow by 0.9% next year, and Germany 0.8%, having both been forecast to grow 1.7% previously.

The Commission also said it expects the UK government’s budget deficit – the amount by which its annual spending exceeds its income – to grow to 7.2% in 2013 from 6.2% this year, making it the highest in the EU apart from the Republic of Ireland.

Unemployment in the eurozone currently stands at 11.6%, and the Commission said it would peak at 12% next year. Domestic demand, it said, would remain weak next year before picking up in 2014.

“Major policy decisions have laid the foundation for strengthening confidence,” said the Commission’s vice-president for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn.

“Market stress has been reduced, but there is no room for complacency.”

	Q3 2011	Q4 2011	Q1 2012	Q2 2012
Source: Eurostat figures showing % change compared with previous quarter
Eurozone	0.1	-0.3	0	-0.2
Germany	0.4	-0.1	0.5	0.3
France	0.2	0.0	0.0	0.0
Italy	-0.2	-0.7	-0.8	-0.8
Spain	0	-0.5	-0.3	-0.4
Netherlands	-0.3	-0.6	0.2	0.2
Portugal	-0.6	-1.4	-0.1	-1.2
Cyprus	-1.0	-0.3	-0.4	-0.7

BBC News – Business

Read More..

Officials: New mass graves found in Ivory Coast

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — Up to 10 new mass graves have been discovered near the site of a July attack on a camp for displaced people, officials said Tuesday, amid allegations that initial casualty totals were downplayed to mask killings carried out by the national army.

Rights groups claim summary executions were carried out by the Republican Forces of Ivory Coast, known by its French acronym of FRCI. Last month, officials found six bodies in a well close to the former campsite in the western town of Duekoue.

Government, army and U.N. officials toured 10 more graves in the same area on Saturday, said Paul Mondouho, vice-mayor of Duekoue. He said the graves had first been identified by civilians, and that officials did not know the number of bodies they contained because they had not yet been properly exhumed.

“People were suspecting the presence of bodies in these graves because of the smell coming out of them and because of the shoes we saw nearby,” Mondouho said.

Prosecutor Noel Dje Enrike Yahau, who is based in the commercial capital of Abidjan, confirmed that multiple new graves had been discovered but could not provide details. U.N. officials and the local prosecutor in charge of investigating the suspected killings could not be reached Tuesday.

U.N. spokeswoman Sylvie van den Wildenberg confirmed that U.N. forces helped Ivorian authorities secure a perimeter around 10 wells “similar to the one in which six bodies were found,” and that “some of those wells are suspected mass graves.”

She stressed that Ivorian authorities were leading the investigation but that the U.N. was able to provide assistance.

Army spokesmen could not be reached Tuesday. The Justice Ministry has previously vowed to investigate the discovery of the initial grave.

On the morning of July 20, a mob descended on the U.N.-guarded Nahibly camp, which housed 4,500 people displaced by violence in Ivory Coast, burning most of the camp to the ground. Officials said at the time that six people were killed.

The attack was prompted by the shooting deaths of four men and one woman on the night of July 19, according to local officials and residents. In response a mob of some 300 people overran the camp on the morning of July 20 after the perpetrators of the shootings reportedly fled there.

The victims in the July 19 attack lived in a district dominated by the Malinke ethnic group, which largely supported President Alassane Ouattara in the disputed November 2010 election. The camp primarily housed members of the Guere ethnic group, which largely supported former President Laurent Gbagbo.

Gbagbo’s refusal to cede office despite losing the election to Ouattara sparked months of violence that claimed at least 3,000 lives.

Albert Koenders, the top U.N. envoy to Ivory Coast, said one week after the attack that U.N. security forces had been inside and outside the camp at the time but that no Ivorian security forces were present. He said the U.N. forces decided not to fire at a large group of people that were attacking the camp in order to avoid “a massacre.”

Several witnesses have said soldiers and traditional hunters, known as dozos, participated in the attack on the camp. Both military and dozo leaders have denied the claims, saying they had tried to protect the camp.

In a statement released Friday, the International Federation for Human Rights, known by its French acronym of FIDH, said it had information — including the preliminary results of autopsies — confirming that the six bodies found in October were men who had been summarily executed by the army.

“The disappearance of dozens of displaced persons after the attack, as well as confirmation of cases of summary and extra-judicial executions, suggest a much higher victim rate than the official figures report,” said the organization, which counts Ivorian civil society groups among its members.

Duekoue was one of the hardest-hit towns during the post-election violence. The U.N. has established that at least 505 people were killed in and around the town, including during a notorious March 2011 massacre that claimed hundreds of lives and was allegedly carried out by fighters loyal to Ouattara.

Duekoue residents belonging to ethnic groups that supported Gbagbo have long complained about abuses carried out by the FRCI, with some pointing to the direct involvement of the local commander, Kone Daouda. FIDH said in its statement that Daouda had been transferred following the discovery of the grave in October, and called for him to be interrogated over the matter.

The group also said two FRCI members were being “actively sought” after failing to return to their barracks on Oct. 16, noting that they are believed to have fled to neighboring Burkina Faso.

Africa News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

HANNITY ON TWEET

“I learned a big civics lesson today.” — Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, who tweeted a picture of his filled-out ballot (for Mitt Romney, natch), only to learn that appeared to break the law in New York state.

— David Bauder — http://twitter.com/dbauder

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Election Watch shows you Election Day 2012 through the eyes of Associated Press journalists. Follow them on Twitter where available with the handles listed after each item.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Renowned special effects firm is “Star Wars” bonus for Disney

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Star Wars” was the force behind Walt Disney’s $ 4 billion purchase of producer George Lucas’s Lucasfilm entertainment holdings. Not so far, far away is Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, his award-winning special effects shop that will likely save Disney millions of dollars in costs for its big-budget movies.

ILM, started by Lucas in 1975 when he couldn’t find a special effects house he liked for “Star Wars,” has provided computer-generated dinosaurs, space ships and action characters for a roster of films that includes “Avatar,” “Mission Impossible” and the “Harry Potter” series.

As much as one-third of the cost of films with budgets of $ 200 million and more are for special effects, according to Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible, who estimates ILM last year generated at least $ 100 million in revenue. Disney uses ILM‘s computer animators for its “Pirates of the Caribbean” series of films and Marvel-inspired characters for films like “The Avengers.”

ILM is among the companies producing special effects for the Disney film “The Lone Ranger,” a 2013 release estimated to cost more than $ 200 million to produce.

By bringing ILM in-house, Disney can shave as much as $ 20 million a year from its films’ special effects budgets, a welcome savings at a time when all major studios are trying to rein in production spending, Wible said.

“It’s one of the underappreciated aspects of this deal,” he said, along with Skywalker Sound, a Lucas sound production company that will also become part of the Disney empire.

Disney executives, in a conference call with Wall Street analysts, scarcely mentioned ILM in explaining the company’s valuation of Lucasfilm, instead describing its estimate of the company’s rights to its consumer products and the declining value of DVD sales.

Chief Executive Bob Iger praised ILM’s work for Disney and other studios. “Our current thinking is that we would let it remain as-is. They do great work,” Iger said.

A Disney spokesman said the company could not comment further about ILM or the rest of the acquisition until it is cleared by regulators.

The effects house is headquartered in San Francisco at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, a Lucasfilm campus where a statue of Yoda perches atop an outdoor fountain. The effects company employs about 1,000 people between that location and sites in Singapore and Vancouver.

The studio provides effects for as many as 18 projects per year, working with all the major Hollywood studios that compete with Disney. That outside work beyond “Star Wars” will give Disney another revenue source from ILM.

“We can handle quite a slate of films,” Lucasfilm spokesman Miles Perkins said of ILM. “We look forward to continuing that.”

ILM also generates money by supplying effects for commercials by big-name brands Coca-Cola, Budweiser and others.

For Disney’s Iger, who prides his company as being among Hollywood’s most forward thinking on new technology, the Lucasfilm buy might also provide another front for the media giant. Its computer-wielding artists could work with Disney’s Imagineering unit, which creates many of the technologies the company uses at its theme parks.

Lucasfilm engineers created THX, which was designed to help theaters create the best sound for movies through a system that the Lucas company certifies meets its technical standards. THX, which was spun off from Lucasfilms in 2001, also certifies home entertainment systems, consumer electronic products and automobile sound systems.

Hollywood studios have a generally poor record owning effects companies, said Scott Ross, a former general manager of ILM and one of the founders of effects company Digital Domain.

Disney bought Dream Quest Images in 1996 and shuttered it five years later. Warner Bros. also has shut or sold off effects companies it acquired. Only Sony Corp has found success with its Imageworks effects unit.

Studios usually discover that running an effects business is costly and foreign competitors can do the job cheaper, Ross said. “They come to the conclusion that running a visual effects company is not a profitable business,” Ross said.

Iger, in announcing the deal to Wall Street analysts, praised ILM’s work and said he had no immediate plans to change it. “It’s been a decent business for Lucasfilm and one we have every intention of staying in,” he said.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine and Ronald Grover; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Human enhancements at work pose ethical dilemmas

LONDON (Reuters) – Retinal implants to help pilots see at night, stimulant drugs to keep surgeons alert and steady handed, cognitive enhancers to focus the minds of executives for a big speech or presentation.

Medical and scientific advances are bringing human enhancements into work but with them, according to a report by British experts, come not only the potential to help society and boost productivity, but also a range of ethical dilemmas.

“We’re not talking science fiction here, we’re talking about advances that could impact significantly on the way we work…in the near future,” said Genevra Richardson, a professor of law at Kings College London and one of the authors of the report.

The report was published after a joint workshop involving four major British scientific institutions which looked at emerging technologies like cognitive enhancing drugs, bionic limbs and retinal implants that have the potential to change workplaces dramatically in future.

Richardson said while such developments may benefit society in important ways, such as by boosting workforce productivity, their use also had “significant policy implications” to be considered by governments, employers, workers and trades unions.

“There are a range of technologies in development and in some cases already in use that have the potential to transform our workplaces – for better or for worse,” she said.

Human physical and cognitive enhancements are primarily developed with sick or disabled people in mind, as medicines or therapies to help them overcome mental or physical disorders.

But experts say drugs and other forms of enhancement are being used increasingly by healthy people who want to benefit from the boost they can give to performance.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at Cambridge University who contributed to the report, said for example that modafinil, a generic drug prescribed for sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, is often used by academics or business leaders travelling to conferences who need to be at the top of their game when delivering a speech.

“They take (sleep) medications on the plane to fall asleep, and take modafinil to wake up when they get there,” she said.

Other stimulants such as Novartis’s Ritalin and Shire’s Adderall, prescribed for conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, are also used by healthy people to increase focus.

One issue with this kind of use is the lack of long-term safety studies of such drugs in healthy people, the experts said, so there may be unknown risks ahead. Other problems include whether cognitive enhancers are fair. Is it cheating to go into a job interview or exam having taken a drug to boost your mental focus?

Research from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States has estimated that up to 16 percent of students in America also use cognitive enhancers to improve performance in exams or for particular essays or projects.

The report also pointed to visual enhancement technologies, such as retinal implants, that could be used by the military, by night watchmen, safety inspectors or gamekeepers.

Technologies to enhance night vision or extend of the range of human vision to include other wavelengths such as ultra-violet light could become a reality relatively soon, it said.

Sahakian suggested that for drivers or pilots, such enhancements could reduce fatigue and lower the risk of fatal accidents.

But she also raised the question of whether employers keen to squeeze more productivity out of a workforce might coerce workers into using enhancements against their will.

“Imagine you’re a bus driver bringing children back on a journey to the UK overnight and your boss says you have to take cognitive-enhancing drug because there are risks to the children if you don’t stay awake. Is that acceptable?,” she said. “These are the kinds of things we have to grapple with.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Gender pay gap ‘could worsen’

6 November 2012 Last updated at 19:04 ET

The pay gap between men and women is at risk of widening for the first time on record, a leading pay equality campaign group warns.

The Fawcett Society says that women still earn 14.9% less on average than men for the same job.

But it says this gap could widen as public sector cuts push women into the private sector, where the gap is wider.

The warning coincides with a survey which suggests that a woman can earn £423,000 less than a man in her career.

That average lifetime earnings figure comes from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) 2012 Gender Salary Survey, which also finds that the average pay gap stands at £10,060. This is a drop from 2011, when the difference was £10,546.

Women also lose out when it comes to bonuses, receiving less than half the average £7,496 that men receive, says the CMI.

Ceri Goddard, the Fawcett Society’s chief executive, said the CMI survey should serve as “a wake-up call to government – business as usual isn’t working”.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Far from slowly moving forward, we now face going into reverse”

End Quote Ceri Goddard The Fawcett Society

Minister for Women and Equalities Jo Swinson said: “Pay inequality remains a stubborn obstacle to real fairness in the workplace.

“We have implemented measures in the Equality Act to make pay secrecy clauses unlawful and we are taking through legislation which would give tribunals power to order that employers conduct a pay audit where they have been found to discriminate over pay.”

More still needed to be done, she added.

‘Into reverse’

The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender equality, is calling for a dedicated women’s employment strategy and for the government to bring more pressure to bear on the private sector to pay women equally for the same job as men.

It is concerned that the employment trend from public to private sector work is likely to push more women into insecure, low-paid, part-time jobs. The private sector pay gap, at 20.4%, is higher than in the public sector.

Who earns what (average salaries)
	2009	2010	2011	2012
Source: Chartered Management Institute
Male	£42,474	£41,337	£42,441	£40,325
Female	£31,268	£31,306	£31,895	£30,265
Difference	£11,206	£10,031	£10,546	£10,060

“Far from slowly moving forward, we now face going into reverse”, warned Ms Goddard.

Annual figures on pay from the Office for National Statistics to be published next week are expected to indicate that the gap is widening.

“In recent years, progress on closing the gap has slowed, but as the age of austerity bites, we now face the very real prospect of the gap actually widening for the first time since records began,” Ms Goddard said.

The warning comes on Equal Pay Day, marking the point in the year when women effectively start working for nothing compared to men.

As well as earning less for doing the same jobs, women still have to climb a much steeper slope than men to reach the top, the CMI figures show.

For while career women account for 57% of the professional workforce, just 40% are department heads and 25% are chief executives, says the CMI.

Ann Francke, CMI chief executive, said: “This lack of a strong talent pipeline has to change, and fast. Allowing these types of gender inequalities to continue is precisely the kind of bad management that we need to stamp out.”

She wants the government to “name and shame” companies “perpetuating inequality”.

Baroness Prosser, deputy chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, argues that if women are offered more career opportunities, it would help reduce the gender gap.

“The onus is squarely on employers to redress the balance, but female executives should also look to make the most of the practical support available to them,” she said.

The CMI’s National Management Salary Survey, conducted by XpertHR, collected data on 38,843 employees, from junior manager to board level, between August 2011 and August 2012.

BBC News – Business

Read More..

Donated stem cells may work best for heart patients

(Reuters) – Stem cells culled from the bone marrow of healthy donors work as well or even better as cells harvested from patients themselves as a treatment for damaged hearts and are more convenient to use, according to new research.

The 13-month trial was the first to compare the safety and effectiveness of so-called mesenchymal, or bone marrow-derived, stem cells taken from patients themselves versus those provided by donors.

Such adult stem cells that renew themselves and mature into specific cell types have been used for 40 years in bone marrow transplants.

Scientists are now exploring their use as treatments for ailments such as heart disease and inflammatory conditions, some of the biggest markets in medicine.

The rationale behind using patients’ own stem cells to treat disease is that they do not trigger an attack by the body’s immune system. Mesenchymal stem cells, however, are also not recognized as foreign tissue.

Researchers from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that previously prepared cells from a healthy donor were comparatively safe and may offer the most convenience since it takes up to eight weeks to grow the amount of stem cells needed for the treatment.

The study involved 30 patients whose hearts were damaged by an earlier heart attack. Half received heart-muscle injections of their own cells, while the other half received donor cells.

Scar tissue was reduced by 33 percent in both groups, a result researchers called “very, very significant.”

Improvements in heart function were seen in 28 percent of those receiving donor cells, and in 50 percent of patients receiving their own cells.

After a year, five patients in the donor cell group and eight who received their own cells suffered serious adverse events.

“The trials so far have very small patient numbers,” said Stefanie Dimmeler, director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Regeneration Center of Molecular Medicine at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. “I think this early work in cardiac stem cells look very promising.”

The trial results were presented here at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Companies working to develop off-the-shelf stem cell treatments include Celgene Corp, Pluristem Therapeutics Inc, Athersys Inc and Mesoblast Ltd.

(Editing by Bernard Orr)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..