Source: ALS Sufferer Used Legs To Contribute Last Patch
Back in June of 2009, then-new CEO Tim Armstrong made two acquisitions to move AOL into the local space: Patch and Going. While the verdict is still very much out on Patch, it’s clear that AOL is at least committed to it. Going? Not so much.
Going will “going away” (they made the joke, not me) on May 1, 2011. The reason? “AOL’s refocusing”, the team explains in an email sent to users today.
We’ve previously covered Going a number of times over the years. More recently, AOL had turned it into a new-style check-in service that focused on events (odd given that earlier today, Facebook unveiled an app update that does the same basic thing). At the time, Foursquare was starting to get some buzz, but it was far from clear who the winner in the space would be. We can definitely say now that it will not be Going.
You’ll be able to grab you information off of Going before the May deadline. After that, going.com will apparently be part of both Moviefone and Patch somehow.
Below, find the email sent out:
First off, we’d like to thank you and the Going community for your support and your feedback over the years. With your contributions we built a very special site that has helped make the city a place to live in to the fullest and has gotten the word out about thousands of great local happenings, artists, and places. We can’t thank you enough!
As part of AOL’s refocusing, Going will be going away as of Sunday, May 1st, 2011.
We wanted to give you as much notice as possible so that you can grab anything you’ve contributed ahead of that date. Please save out any of your messages, events, photos, profile information and other personal content you’d like before May 1st.
After that date, Going.com will have a new home in Moviefone and Patch which have movie and event listings at a national level.
Hopefully that will ease the transition and help you continue to discover great things to do around town!
Please note that the Going mobile site and iPhone and Facebook applications will be discontinued as well.
Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions, and thanks again.
Sincerely, Roy Rodenstein, Going co-Founder, and the Going Team
Source: Bought By AOL Alongside Patch, Going Will Soon Be Gone
AOL’s Patch has acquired hyperlocal news aggregator Outside.In, we’ve confirmed with Patch’s president Warren Webster. It’s unclear what the terms of the deal are but Business Insider reported earlier that the acquisition is valued at less than $10 million. Outside.In has raised $14.4 million in funding to date.
Webster tells us that Outside.In, which has a previous relationship with AOL, will be integrated with Patch, the company’s hyperlocal news platform. The New York-based Outside.In is a local news aggregator aimed at bringing together all the hyperlocal news around a given location. Via its search portal, you simply enter your zipcode, neighborhood or address and the site will surface the most relevant news in your particular area. Outside.In focuses on sourcing information and news from local bloggers as opposed to large publications.
The startup has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, the New York City Investment Fund, Marc Andreesen, Esther Dyson, John Seeley Brown, and George Crowley and others.
Considering Patch’s hyperlocal focus, the integration of Outside.In’s it makes sense from a technology standpoint. Outside.In’s traffic has been declining over the past six months and only saw 317,000 unique visitors in January, according to comScore. In addition to the coverage that Patch reporters provide in a given area, Outside.In will be able to supplement news with its search platform, and scale coverage. It’s no secret that AOL has been aggressively looking to expand Patch’s coverage and reach.
This isn’t the first exit for a hyperlocal news aggregator. Chicago-based EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC back in 2009. And of course, AOL bought Patch in 2009 as well.
Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch.
Source: Confirmed: AOL’s Patch Buys Hyperlocal News Site Outside.In
Source: Security Patch Breaks VMware Users’ Windows Desktops
climenole writes “Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a mailing list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file.”
Source: Alternative To the 200-Line Linux Kernel Patch
An anonymous reader writes “There is a relatively miniscule patch to the Linux kernel scheduler being queued up for Linux 2.6.38 that is proving to have dramatic results for those multi-tasking on the desktop. Phoronix is reporting the ~200 line Linux kernel patch that does wonders with before and after videos demonstrating the much-improved responsiveness and interactivity of the Linux desktop. While compiling the Linux kernel with 64 parallel jobs, 1080p video playback was still smooth, windows could be moved fluidly, and there was not nearly as much of a slowdown compared to when this patch was applied. Linus Torvalds has shared his thoughts on this patch: So I think this is firmly one of those “real improvement” patches. Good job. Group scheduling goes from “useful for some specific server loads” to “that’s a killer feature”.“
Source: The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders
Trailrunner7 writes “Adobe has moved up the release date for the patch for the critical bug in Adobe Flash Player revealed last week, and now plans to have an emergency fix ready on Thursday. The company still plans to patch Reader two weeks from now. The vulnerability in Flash also exists in Reader and researchers said last week that attackers had already begun exploiting the bug in Reader by the time that Adobe acknowledged the problem and published an advisory. At the time of the initial advisory, Adobe officials said they planned to release a patch for Flash on Nov. 9 and for Reader on Nov. 15.”
Source: Adobe To Push Emergency Fix For Flash Bug
Trailrunner7 writes “Microsoft on Tuesday will release an emergency out-of-band patch for the ASP.NET padding oracle attack that was disclosed earlier this month. The patch will only be available on the company’s Download Center for the time being, however. The company is taking the step of releasing an emergency fix for the bug because of the seriousness of the vulnerability — which potentially affects millions of Web applications — and the fact that there are attacks ongoing against it already. The patch will fix the flaw in all versions of the .NET framework. Although Microsoft issued guidance about workarounds to defend against attacks on the ASP.NET bug shortly after it was publicly disclosed, the researchers, Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, said that the workarounds did not fully protect users against their attack.”
Source: Microsoft To Release Emergency Fix For ASP.NET Bug
Earlier today we reported on scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution trying to answer the question, “Where’d all the oil in the Gulf go?” (At least some of it is floating around in giant plumes.) In the same issue of the journal Science released this afternoon, another team from Woods Hole tried to answer another pressing ocean question: “Where’d all the plastic in the Atlantic go?”
We’re referring to the great patch of plastic in the North Atlantic Gyre. You might have read the stories in DISCOVER and elsewhere about the more famous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a Texas-sized soup of tiny plastic pieces in the middle of that ocean. Circulating ocean currents create these gyres in several places around the world, and ocean-borne plastic gets trapped. The Woods Hole paper is the result of a two-decade study of the Atlantic patch that produced a surprising result: The amount in total plastic appears to have leveled off—at least according to the data.
Humans haven’t stopped putting plastic into the ocean, so what gives?
“We know that global production of plastics has increased substantially over the time period” and disposal also has increased, said Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass. “If there is more plastic trash it’s hard to believe more is not making it into the ocean. There is missing plastic out there,” she said [AP].
One possible answer, the scientists say, is that their methods of capturing and sampling the plastic miss the smaller pieces. And there are lots of smaller pieces: The garbage patches aren’t just dumps that happen to be out at sea. The thrash of the ocean water and the sun’s UV rays wear down the plastic bottles and bags into ever-smaller pieces, which now causes great concern about marine animals eating them.
Another possibility for the team’s finding is that algae or other sea life coat some plastic pieces and make them heavy enough to sink.
One thing is not in doubt: the North Atlantic patch covers an enormous area, just like its Pacific counterpart.
In their first publication of these data since the late 1980s, the SEA team reports that it found plastic in more than 60% of 6136 tows over 22 years. The levels are low close to shore but rise hundreds of kilometers off the coast between 22 and 38 degrees latitude (roughly from the Bahamas to Baltimore). “When you expect to see zero plastic hundreds of miles from shore, it’s shocking,” says lead author and SEA oceanographer Kara Lavender Law. But the plastic is “relatively dilute,” she adds—up to 1000 tiny pieces filtered from the equivalent of 2000 bathtubs of water [ScienceNOW].
Image: SEA / Science (trajectories of drifting buoys near the gyre)
Source: The Mystery of the Missing Plastic in the Atlantic Garbage Patch
Replacing a traditional needle with a fingernail-sized patch may one day make some immunizations painless and possibly more effective. A study published in Nature earlier this week shows that a patch–a square of “microneedles” that are too short to register a typical shot’s sting and that dissolve in the skin–effectively immunized mice against a strain of the flu virus.
The researchers have yet to test the patch on humans, and that next step could take a few years; the move from a successful animal trial to a human trial isn’t a small feat. Still, many see this patch’s promise. As Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says:
“The caveat is, this needs to be extended to humans…. It’s not uncommon for vaccines or vaccine delivery systems to look very promising in experimental animals, then fail in humans. But there is every reason to believe this kind of technology could be applicable to children and adults.” [HealthDay News]
If the patch proves successful in human studies, here are some reasons it might quickly catch on.
Less Packaging
Traditional flu immunization shots deliver vaccines via metal, hypodermic needles. The leftover? A contaminated needle that goes straight to the biohazard bin. Researchers have designed this patch’s microneedles to disappear after application. They are made from a “bicompatible polymer” that holds the vaccine directly. After immunization, the needles dissolve into the skin itself as they deliver the vaccine, leaving only a watersoluble backing. Explains study coauthor Richard Compans:
“With respect to [the previous] vaccine delivery, we worked with solid metal needles…. The current technology is different because the vaccine is contained in the needle itself, and there is no needle left after the process.” [Tech News Daily]
Less Pain
As their name implies, microneedles are short–shorter than .03 inches each. That’s too short to trigger the pain associated with a traditional shot. The patch has a grid of 100 of the tiny needles as opposed to one large metal one.
Each microneedle is 650 microns long, about as tall as 10 human hairs stacked on top of each other…. They are arrayed in a grid-like pattern on a patch that’s easy to stick on your arm. [Los Angeles Times]
More Protection
There may be other benefits from a shot not going as deep. The study tested three groups of mice: one given no flu vaccine, one given a flu vaccine in the traditional way, and one given the vaccine via the microneedle patch.
Infecting the mice with the flu virus thirty days after immunization, both the mice vaccinated traditionally and with the patch successfully fought off the virus. To test how long the vaccine worked, the researchers then vaccinated a different three sets of mice. Three months later, the mice vaccinated with the patch actually performed better than the needle-immunized mice–more easily clearing the virus from their lungs.
Researchers suspect that the reason may be skin cells’ different immune reaction to virus attackers, which they encounter more often than muscle cells do (where traditional flu shots deliver the vaccine).
Skin, it seems, may trigger the immune system better than muscle, according to Richard Compans, professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory University School of Medicine: “The skin is a particularly attractive site for immunization because it contains an abundance of the types of cells that are important in generating immune responses to vaccines.” [CNET]
Less Postage?
Although traditional delivery systems for standard vaccines are working in many places, the researchers think that a patch vaccine might allow a more rapid and effective response to unexpected outbreaks. Instead of asking people at risk to go to a central location like a flu clinic, doctors could mail them a do-it-yourself patch.
[Coauthor Mark R.] Prausnitz says it’d be much easier if people could either vaccinate themselves or have someone less skilled vaccinate them instead of requiring a doctor or nurse. If the patches are one day approved by the FDA, Prausnitz envisions people ordering patches through the mail or at their local pharmacies.”The technology is ready to take the next step into humans,” says Prausnitz. “Our main barrier is getting funding.” [NPR]
Image: flickr / El Alvi
Source: Hope for the Needle-Phobic: A Painless Vaccine “Patch”
