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More labor interventions don’t guarantee better outcomes
Hospitals vary considerably in the frequency with which they induce labor and perform Caesarean sections. But a new study finds that these differences do not seem to affect how newborns fare in these facilities.
Dr. J. Christopher Glantz, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Rochester, reviewed records of almost 30,000 births from 10 upstate New York community hospitals without specialized neonatal intensive care units. Some hospitals relied heavily on induced labor and Caesarean sections, while others performed the procedures much less often.
[From C-Sections and Induced Labor Don’t Mean Better Outcomes for Infants, Study Finds - NYTimes.com]
This would seem to challenge the practice of interventions like c-sections and induced labor. Moms are recommended to discuss these procedures with their OB/GYN and incorporate their wishes in a birth plan. Hospitals that rely on these procedure as a matter of course don’t have a higher safety rate, and aren’t necessarily choosing the safer route for mom and baby.
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Screen time and heart disease for kids
It’s hard to determine from this whether new findings on the effect of increased amount of screen time for kids and constricted blood vessels are a link to heart disease.
Children who spend more time in front of television and computer screens and less in outdoor physical activity have narrower blood vessels in their eyes, a new study has found.
In adults, constricted blood vessels in the eyes have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
[From Screen-Watching Children Have Narrow Blood Vessels in Eyes, Study Finds - NYTimes.com]
I’m not a doctor, but in adults, the constricted blood vessels are likely an effect of the heart disease, not necessarily a predictor of it. For kids, it’s hard to say that constrictions mean heart disease, though it would seem to follow common sense that it’s best to keep kids active at least an hour a day and limit kids’ screen time, computer or TV, to a small amount.
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Wii update scheduled in 2012 FINALLY!
It’s a very vague launch date given that they plan to have a working prototype to show at the E3 Expo in LA in June 2011.
The update, though still a long way off, is none to soon, with the xBox Kinect fast on the Wii’s on the Wii’s heels. Wii still owns the mindshare for interactive, family-friendly games, but Kinect looks like it still has a year before Nintendo can come back with a response.
We love the Wii, and it’s still a hit in our house for games we can play together and for Wii Fit, but technology moves so fast that’s it’s surprising that an update is still so far away, not too mention, apparently after the holiday season.
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New Google Panda search will help Google more than searchers
We’ve always agreed that Google search results are, to put it crassly, crap. And, having worked at Yahoo! for three years, I always questioned the wisdom of doing away with a directory model, at least for major categories where human beings can find good sites, big and small, that provide real information presented in a compelling fashion. GreatDad even tinkered with an early filtered vertical search technology that we thought would provide personalized results from only trusted sites in the parenting space.
This latest move from Google, much demanded by anyone fed up with garbage search results, may help Google in the short term, but will likely only provide the “safest” results from big media companies, who may not be that close to the searchers intention. At GreatDad.com, we’ve already seen our traffic fall by 40%. I can’t imagine Google has done a lot of research into who they are penalizing since GreatDad actually syndicates our news to Google News, a service that is actually filtered by human beings. And given that our 16 contributing writers are all published authors, it’s not as if we have a dozen monkeys locked in a room typing randomly from dawn to dusk.
Our hope is that this latest “Google dance,” as they have been knows since Google started periodically shuffling its algorithm, has a short-term effect, not only for GreatDad’s sake, but for all smaller publishers, as well as people who count on independent voices to provide a sometimes different take on things artistic, political, and even parental.
“This change is about more than just cleaning up content farms,” said Chris Copeland, chief executive of GroupM Search, a search marketing firm that is part of the advertising company WPP Group. “Google has a relevancy problem, and they are trying to do something about it.”
Google made the change after technology bloggers, industry analysts and everyday users complained that its search results had useless pages. The response may help Google’s reputation, Mr. Sullivan said.
“The change may not necessarily improve the results — hopefully it will — but it will definitely improve the perception of Google,” he said.
[From New Google Search System Seeks to Weed Out Useless Results - NYTimes.com]
For one egregious example of the new Google search at work, search on “Dad.” GreatDad.com used to be #1 for this search term. We are now #5. However, ahead of us is not some other dad site, or even a general parenting site like Babycenter or Pregnancy360.com, but a wikipedia entry for some Danish rock band named D.A.D. and the Dad movie. Though they may also be searched on, I would expect most people searching on “dad” are looking for something about fathers.Yep, I’m mad, but consumers should be as well. You may get results that “protect” you from content farms, but many will be watered down or completely off-track.
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Almost all of US kids now have digital footprint online
There is a very thought provoking study out of internet security firm AVG showing what we all know to be true. Kids’ names, images, and history are going up on the internet, and forever public long before they can approve of it:
- 34% of children have their sonograms uploaded to the internet
- The average age at which a child acquires an online presence is six months
- By the age of two, 92% of children in the U.S. have some sort of digital footprint
While, of course, the survey is a tad self-serving since AVG is in this business, the results are interesting if only because they force you to pause a minute and realize how early in our lives (pre-birth) we are online. Check out the results of the digital footprint study of 2200 mothers from September 2010.
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