Source:
http://article.wn.com/view/2011/05/27/How_ETFs_Fit_Into_the_New_Investment_Landscape/
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Sunday, May 29, 2011
How ETFs Fit Into the New Investment Landscape
By Samuel Lee The case for low-cost investing is stronger in a world of low expected returns and increasing sophistication, and index funds and exchange-traded funds are a great way to keep expenses to a minimum. The financial crisis and its echoes have led many investors to revise their investment strategies. The two major thrusts among institutional investors have been either to search harder for funds that may outperform or to hold more low-cost index funds. Most investors and advisors will be better off adopting the low-cost approach as the quest for a shrinking market-beating pie becomes more brutal and the penalty for mistakes becomes even steeper. ETFs and other passive vehicles are...
Cancer patients denied last wish to die at home because of shortage of nurses
70,000 cancer patients in England and Wales die in a hospital bed every year, despite wanting to be at home
Tens of thousands of cancer patients are dying in hospital, despite wishing to end their lives at home, because of a "shameful" lack of NHS nurses, campaigners say.
Only 56% of primary care trusts (PCTs) in England offer around-the-clock community nursing care, which helps those approaching the end of their lives remain among family and friends.
Macmillan Cancer Support has found that 73% of the 157,000 cancer patients who die every year in England and Wales would prefer to spend their last days at home.
But data from the Office of National Statistics shows that 51% of these patients (80,070) die in hospital and another 17% (26,690) in a hospice, with only 27% (42,390) dying in their own surroundings. Care homes account for the remaining 5%.
The mismatch between patients' wishes and their eventual place of death affects 72,220 people. Some of those who die in hospital do so because their illness means that they cannot remain at home, but campaigners say that many or most of them could have ended their days there with loved ones if there was sufficient nursing support.
"It is a tragedy that, each year, tens of thousands of cancer patients are not able to get their dying wish ? to die in their own home, surrounded by their loved ones ? because they do not have the support they need. We know that with the right support, 73% of cancer patients would prefer to die at home, but only 27% actually do," said Mike Hobday, Macmillan's head of policy.
"It also costs the NHS more money to have them in hospital, where they don't want to be, showing how badly needed around-the-clock community nursing is. Twenty-four/seven nursing care can significantly reduce emergency admissions and allow patients the end-of-life care that they want, yet it is only available in just over half of England's PCTs."
Conservative MP John Baron, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on cancer, said: "It is shameful that so many people with cancer cannot die where they wish ? in their own homes ? because of a lack of community nursing provision. Those areas that currently do not provide out-of-hours community nursing should make plans to address this issue."
Their calls for action came as research revealed how much time many cancer patients spend in hospital as they near the end of their life.
The study, in the European Journal of Cancer, found that in 2006 in England, 58% of 147,000 people with the disease in the last year of their lives had been admitted to hospital during that time, and 25% had spent more than 10% of their time as an inpatient.
"This research shows that a considerable number of cancer patients are spending significant amounts of time in hospital in the last year of life, despite many patients telling us that they want to die at home" said Ciar�n Devane, the chief executive of Macmillan. "It is wrong to deny people the choice about where they die."
Health minister Paul Burstow accepted that existing provision was inadequate. "People deserve care at the end of life that is compassionate and gives them the choice over where they die and how they are cared for. Progress is being made in improving end-of-life care, but I know more needs to be done. We want to make sure everyone gets the highest quality of care, in the place of their choice," he said.
More is being done to improve training, promote best practice and ensure that proper end-of-life care exists across NHS and social care services, he added. "The government believes that people should be given a choice about where they receive end-of-life care. I am determined to increase the pace of change to make this choice a reality," he said.
Joe Levenson of the National Council for Palliative Care said: "Every minute someone dies in the UK, but many people each year, including tens of thousands with cancer, are still not receiving the type of end-of-life care they want and need. Much more needs to be done to improve access to 24/7 palliative care, including in people's own homes, where so many people would prefer to die."
Sue Brooks, a retired health and safety officer in Berkshire, lost her husband, David, to cancer. She has called for better round-the-clock NHS nursing care so that terminally ill people can die at home: "David was diagnosed with lung cancer in July 2005 and by that December he was very, very ill. We agreed with the doctor that he would spend some time in a hospice to give me a break and let me get out and buy Christmas presents for our three children. But by the time he was ready to come home, he was too sick to be moved.
"The hospice was wonderful, and I was with him when he died. But we weren't at home, and he strongly wanted to die at home. He had even drawn a sketch of how he wanted the room at home to look when he died.
"If we'd been able to get 24/7 nursing cover, maybe he wouldn't have had to go into the hospice at all. Sadly, it's a postcode lottery as to who gets that. But that's actually costing the NHS more money, as it's cheaper to nurse someone at home than keep them in hospital.
"Most terminally ill people want to die at home, but the majority don't get the chance. Do you not deserve some respect at that time of your life, when you have given everything? It's a tragedy that people who are sick and know they are dying can't have their very last wish."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/28/cancer-patients-nurses-shortage
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Andrew Lansley forced to make U-turn on public health campaign cuts
Health secretary attacked after calls to smoking, drugs and lifestyle helplines plunged following spending freeze
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has been forced into a major U-turn on funding for public health campaigns, after evidence emerged that the spending freeze had cost lives.
An extra �15m has now been set aside for promoting the government's anti-smoking website and �14m will be made available for a campaign promoting healthy living.
The decision has come in response to a damning Department of Health (DoH) report on the consequences of the government's decision to "all but cease" publicly-funded advertising last year.
The DoH found that the number of people ringing the drug abuse support helpline, Frank, had fallen by 22%, that visits to the Smokefree website had fallen by 50% and that the number of people joining the government's lifestyle website was down by two-thirds.
Most worryingly, the report said, there was evidence that "the cessation of marketing activity [had] resulted in declining quit attempts, and subsequent loss of life from smoking-related illness".
It added: "Following the coalition government's freeze on non-essential marketing expenditure, all social marketing programmes were reduced and expenditure on advertising all but ceased.
"We have now had the opportunity to learn from the freeze and to assess where the loss of mass communications had a negative impact... We now recommend that some advertising, and other forms of mass communication such as sponsorship, paid media partnerships and PR, be resumed."
The revelation follows savage criticism of the DoH decision last year to axe the �1.5m awareness campaign for flu vaccinations. Figures released this month showed there had been a rise in deaths from 474 in 2009/10 to 535 in 2010/11 and that a disproportionate number had been among the young.
Lansley justified the freeze on marketing spending last year as a departure from the "lecturing" attitude, which he said characterised some previous government's interventions.
But shadow health secretary John Healey said Lansley needed to publicly apologise for his mistakes: "Mass publicity must play a part in good public health. This report shows that Andrew Lansley made the wrong judgment in axing anti-smoking promotions, just like he did on the flu-jab adverts last autumn.
"The health secretary needs to tell people that he's learnt the lessons and won't make the same mistake again."
Key evidence for the loss of life caused by the government's policy was provided in a submission to the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health by Professor Robert West, director of Tobacco Studies at Cancer Research UK.
West told the group: "Evidence shows that total spending on government mass media campaigns in a given quarter is associated with smoking cessation activity in that quarter. If, as seems likely, this association is causal, the recent suspension of mass media campaigns will lead to significant loss of life, and with every month that passes without further activity the death toll will grow."
West told the Observer that the most recent figures on giving up smoking confirmed his fears: "For smoking, most of the population are in a state of motivational tension, they are a bit dissonant about it and what the marketing does is tip them over the edge into activity. So if you stop doing that they carry on being dissonant.
"We looked at a number of objectives ? markers of cessation activity, attendance at clinics, hits on the website and the quit line ? and the correlation is very striking. The association between marketing activity and spend was very strong.
"It [lack of marketing] will have cost lives. For every year that someone over the age of 35 carries on smoking they lose three months of life expectancy. So if you just lose a year of significant activity you have already lost lives. That is the inescapable logic of it."
Research by the DoH suggests smokers' motivation to quit is in decline, with the number of people saying they do not want to quit at all at 30%, its highest level since tracking began in 2007. Over recent years, there has also been a year-on-year decline in people trying to stop smoking, from 43.5% in 2007 to 35.8% in 2010.
On top of the spending on anti-smoking and the healthier living campaign, Change4Life, a further �4m will be spent on marketing targeted at young people, and �11m on advertising issues related to older people.
Professor Geof Rayner, an adviser to the Change4Life programme, said he was delighted: "I am pleased the civil service has put this in front of the politicians and that the politicians have seen some sense. They should be pragmatic, not ideological, about public health."
However, the total spending is still less than half the �93m spent by the Labour government in 2009/2010.
A DoH spokesman denied the decision to start spending again was a U-turn but claimed that the freeze had been an opportunity to test the efficacy of previous spending.
"Our campaigns have a high impact," he added. "A study found that two-thirds of the public think advertising is vital to the success of government campaigns."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/28/andrew-lansley-u-turn-public-health-cuts
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Saturday, May 28, 2011
Apple orders iCab iOS browser to cripple JavaScript modules
Presumably it's not the fact that iCab can execute JavaScript that's causing Apple to apoplectically puff and splutter, but rather its ability to download modules. Both Apple and Google frown upon apps that contain market-like functionality, and someone at Apple probably thought that iCab's JavaScript modules looked like a bit too much like discrete apps.
Alexander Clauss, iCab's developer, has rather a lot to say on the matter. "Maybe if I would have called the modules 'smart bookmarks' and would have made installing them much more complicated, Apple would have never asked to remove the ability to download them from the internet. The great user experience of installing modules has probably created a suspicion that these modules are more than just a piece of JavaScript code. From a pure technical point of view, if Apple does not allow to download modules (JavaScript code), Apple would also have to disallow to load web pages in general, because these do also contain JavaScript code."
In conclusion, to circumvent Apple's draconian decree, iCab Mobile now simply comes bundled with some 20 JavaScript modules. The ability to download modules made by third-party developers has been disabled, however -- but even then, Clauss says that you can simply contact him and ask for your module to be bundled with the next version of iCab.
Download iCab Mobile for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch ($1.99)
Apple orders iCab iOS browser to cripple JavaScript modules originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Balancing Acts - Meg Cadoux Hirshberg
Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is the wife of Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg. In these videos she describes the ups and downs of having the line between business and family disappear.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/inc/headlines/~3/-ONcWzfAbzw/balancing-acts.html
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'The Tree Of Life': A Creation Trip Worth Taking
Terrence Malick's film, part creation epic and part Oedipal family drama, recently won the Palme d'Or ? the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Critic David Edelstein says reaction to the film has been mixed, but he "recommends the experience unreservedly."
Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/27/136646293/the-tree-of-life-a-creation-trip-worth-taking?ft=1&f=1057
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How to Build an Empire
David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim stuck to a positive message, and made Uglydolls into a household name.
The story of Pretty Ugly begins with two people who never wanted to work at a toy company.
When David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim met at Parsons School of Design in 2001, the pair quickly bonded over their love for design and their hope to create toys with a meaningful message. They also fell in love. But just as their relationship began, Kim's student visa expired, and she moved back to Korea.
But the couple decided to stay together. "I sent her a letter after she went back and signed it with a doodle of a little lumpy monster at the bottom," says Horvath. "She sewed a replica of the little drawing and sent it back to me as a gift. And I realized, that the toy we had always talked about making was in my hand. I thought, 'This is it.'" And so the Pretty Ugly empire was born.
Before he even called Kim to thank her, he showed the doll to a friend. This friend happened to own a small knick-knack store called Giant Robot, and immediately asked Horvath for 20 of the dolls. Horvath broke the news to Kim. "She made and sent me 20 more," he says. "I dropped them off at Giant Robot, and, by the time I got home, I had a message from my friend saying they had sold out."
Over the next 18 months, Kim sewed 1,800 dolls. She sent each batch to Horvath, who would then take them to a growing list of small stores, which included hip furniture stores, card shops, and kid stores.
"We realized that these dolls had huge reach. They're for the 8-year-old girl who wants to play and the 34-year-old woman who wants something funny on her modern furniture," says Horvath.
But it was about this time, in early 2003, that Kim put her foot down. "She said that her fingers were turning purple," laughs Horvath. "This was the turning point, the moment we decided to take this business to the next level."
The first step: Kim came back to the United States for the business—and to marry Horvath.
That February, the couple got a booth at the International Toy Fair, an annual toy-ganza held in New York City. The response was immediate and positive, Horvath says the MoMA, Barney's, and "like Frank's store in Indiana" were all charmed by the Uglydolls.
The formula for success, according to Horvath, is that the dolls tell a story. For example, there's three-eyed Peaco, who's coy and friendly, and floppy-eared Ox, whose name means hugs and kisses. "To us, ugly means unique and different. It's about celebrating what makes you, you," he says. "I think that's an important message for everyone."
And it's the message and story that is pushing the business forward. Already this year, Pretty Ugly has sold twice the number of Uglydolls as it did last year. (Though Horvath won't reveal any numbers, he says "millions upon millions" of dolls have sold.) There are Uglydoll calendars, books, lunch boxes, and action figures. A trip to the website is a portal into an animated world of funny little creatures, and serves as another community-building and retail platform. Horvath says they are even branching out into the entertainment world in the near future.
"After 10 years in business, it's crazy to think that now there are people that have grown up with our dolls," says Horvath. "It's been so meaningful for us to know that the original idea has endured and made an impact."
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