Gadgets « Silver Buzz Cafe

The Internet and the World Wide Web – Part 4 – Planning Ahead

In today’s article we’ll take a look at issues being discussed in the web community: core Internet values; open standards; child online safety; freedom of expression and freedom of the media on the Internet; multi-language issues; Internet rights and principles; the global localization platform and social media and legal issues. [...]

The Internet and the World Wide Web – Part 3 – Current Issues

In previous articles in this series we explained the history and mechanics of the Internet and web and how they are governed. In this one we’ll start looking at the issues concerning people directly involved with the running of the Internet and web, governments, companies and users. [...]

The Internet and the World Wide Web – Part 2 – Who’s In Charge?

In the first part of this series we looked at the technology that underlies the Internet and the web. As we noted, there is no single organization responsible for governing either of them, so today we’ll look at the roles of the many organizations involved. To do that we need to understand a little about the history of the Internet and the web. [...]

The Internet and the World Wide Web – Part 1 – Introduction

As the debate on the net neutrality issue continues, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at the state of the Internet and the web and the many issues that the people who engineer, run and use them are grappling with. We’ll start by explaining the main components of the Internet and the web, then we’ll look at the many organizations that oversee various aspects of their operation before looking at the issues involved, particularly the ones that potentially affect us all. [...]

Waterborne Infections Cost the United States Over Half a Billion Dollars Annually

A study conducted in 13 US states in 2008 forced the closure of one in eight public pools for public health and safety code violations. Approximately 13,500 of the 112,000 pools inspected were found to be in serious violation of health and safety codes and were immediately closed down. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC) released a report that estimates the cost of waterborne infections to the United States health care system at around $539 million a year. [...]

How To Cut Your Phone Bills

Telephones are essential, especially for seniors. They provide a lifeline in terms of emergency and they help us keep in touch with relatives and friends. They can also be used for an Internet connection, which has become an essential part of modern life for those who have taken the plunge and learned how to use it. However, unlike the old days, there is a huge, sometimes bewildering and often unnecessary range of services available via that thin connection that comes into our homes. There are also alternatives. [...]

iPhone/iPad Apps For Seniors – Part 5 – Productivity Aids

In earlier articles in this series we’ve looked at iPhone/iPod/iPad Apps related to health, travel, news and weather. Today we’ll look at productivity aids that seniors should find particularly helpful. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 22 – Implant Technology

All of the equipment that we have looked at in previous articles in this series, ranging from scalpels to Positron Emission Tomography ( PET) machines, are normally used in medical facilities, laboratories, home care or emergency situations. Today we’ll look at devices, current, experimental and envisioned, that are designed to be permanently or temporarily implanted in a patient. [...]

iPhone/iPad Apps For Seniors – Part 4 – Weather Tools

In earlier articles in this series we’ve looked at health, travel and news Apps for the iPhone and iPad. Both devices come with a standard, but rather limited Weather tool. It’s adequate, but it only provides minimum and maximum temperatures and an icon for rain, cloud, sunshine etc. for the list of cities that the user selects. There are many other tools that provide better local or wide area information. [...]

Proposed Device Could Reduce Deaths On Rural Roads

There were over 2300 road traffic accidents that resulted in fatalities in the United Kingdom in 2008 and 60% of them occurred on rural roads. The proportion is approximately the same in the United States, where 57% of road fatalities occur in rural areas, even though only 27% of the overall population live there. The first people to arrive at the accident scene will probably not be trained in triage, so a team of clinicians, computing scientists and physiologists from the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, is developing a device that would provide medical advice and support for injured persons. [...]

iPhone/iPad Apps For Seniors - Part 3 - News Tools

In previous articles in this series we described iPhone/iPad Apps that are related to health issues and that travelers will find useful. Today we’ll look at news Apps. The browser on the iPhone is perfectly usable for reading newspaper and other media web sites, but there are also Apps supplied by media companies and news enthusiasts. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite news Apps. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 21 – Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

With the exception of medical laboratory equipment, most of the devices we’ve looked at so far in this series are things that patients may have seen, or are likely to see, at a medical facility. In today’s article we’ll take a look at key pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment and how the finished products find their way to the pharmacy or retailer. [...]

iPhone/iPad Apps For Seniors – Part 2 – Traveling

In the first part of this series on iPhone Apps for seniors we looked at tools related to health and fitness. In this article we’ll look at Apps that are useful for planning, booking and enjoying trips. [...]

iPhone Apps For Seniors - Part 1 - Health Related

There are now tens of thousands of application (“Apps”) in the iPhone/iTunes store, many of them free and hardly any costing more than a few Dollars. Most Apps also run on the iPad, which has a much larger screen. In this series of articles we’ll look at ones that seniors will find useful, starting with health related ones. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 20 – Therapy Equipment

We started this series by looking at the equipment that you’d expect to encounter in your physician’s office or a medical clinic. Then we looked at medical monitors, laboratory equipment and many kinds of advanced diagnostic techniques before moving on to look at surgical instruments and systems. We then covered a range of life support equipment. In this article we’ll start looking at equipment used in therapies, ranging from simple devices that can be used at home to advanced systems that can help nurse a patient back to a comfortable recovery. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 19 – Dialysis Equipment

In the latest in this series on medical equipment, we look at the dialysis machine. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 18 – Anaesthetic Equipment

In the most recent of this group of articles on medical equipment we started looking at life support equipment, including defibrillators. Today we’ll look at anaesthetic equipment, which is used to temporarily remove the sensation of pain and touch. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 17 – More Life Support Devices

So far in this series we’ve covered: the basic equipment that you would expect to see in a physician’s office or a medical clinic; monitoring devices; laboratory equipment; advanced diagnostic and surgical equipment. In the previous article we started looking at life support devices, focusing on various kinds of machine to help patients breath, or to keep their blood oxygenated and circulating while their lungs or hearts recover. In this article we’ll look at defibrillators, devices designed to start or stabilize the signals that make our hearts beat. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 16 – Life Support Devices

In this article (part of a series on medical equipment) we’ll start looking at the many forms of life support equipment. Some of it is portable, used in emergency situations, while others have become a standard part of surgical operations, recovery and life sustainment. [...]

Battling Hospital Acquired Infections

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC) estimates that 1.7 million people contract Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs), and 99,000 patients die from HAIs annually in the United States. Many people believe that the problem is under-reported, so the real figures may be several times higher. [...]

Everyone's Guide to Medical Equipment - Part 14 - Advanced Surgical Instruments

If you ask a layman which instrument they associate with surgery they will most likely think of the scalpel, a sharp bladed instrument used for cutting tissue. There is a surprisingly wide variety of scalpels, so we’ll look at conventional ones before covering more advanced instruments that use heat, lasers or particle beams. Some of these instruments are computer controlled and a whole new field of robotic surgery has opened up in the past twenty five years, starting with very simple procedures and leading to recently successful kidney transplant operations. [...]

Migraine Relief Device Undergoing Trials

If we’d seen this device advertised in the back pages of Popular Science magazine we’d have immediately discounted it as quackery, but it’s based on solid research1 done at the highly regarded Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The inventors claim that it relieves pain, for at least two hours and sometimes as long as two days, in 40% of migraine patients without serious side effects. [...]

Everyone's Guide to Medical Equipment - Part 13 - Basic Surgical Instruments

Every doctor’s bag has a few basic surgical instruments in it, but today we’ll look at the mainstays of any operating theater. We’ll cover more advanced equipment in a second episode. We’ll start by looking back at some of the earliest known surgical instruments. [...]

Everyone's Guide to Medical Equipment - Part 12 - More Diagnostic Equipment

In this series of articles we’ve looked at: the simple and advanced instruments that you would expect your physician or clinic to have on hand; medical monitors, such as electrocardiograms; and laboratory equipment. Tomography (combining sectional images to produce 2d or 3D images) is used in MRI and PET scanners. It’s also applied in a wide range of other instruments that use light, sound, heat, electricity, or combinations of them, to generate the individual images. [...]

Everyone's Guide to Medical Equipment - Part 11 - PET Scans

We started this series by looking at the equipment you’d expect to find a doctor’s bag or a typical clinic. Then we looked at medical monitors, such as electrocardiograms, and laboratory equipment before starting to look at modern diagnostic equipment. In Part 10 we looked at the technique that many imaging devices use – tomography, where images of slices of the body are combined into 2D or 3D visualizations. Today we’ll continue our look at another advanced imaging technique, Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Even the name sounds exotic, as well it might, because it involves the stuff that science fiction writers love… anti-matter! [...]

Playgrounds For Seniors

There’s an old joke that revolves around the observation that, in some ways, adults become more like children as they age. The Brits seem to have noticed the similarities. A new London playground, which is due to be built by this spring in Hyde Park, will have six pieces of equipment built in Denmark, including a stationary bicycle, a cross-trainer and a sit-up bench. That wouldn’t be unusual, except that the playground is for seniors! [...]

Everyone's Guide to Medical Equipment - Part 10 - Tomography & MRI

We started this series by looking at the equipment that you would expect to find in a doctor’s bag or a clinic. We then looked at the laboratory equipment that’s used, generally behind the scenes, to analyze blood and other samples and medical monitors. Modern diagnostic equipment plays a very large part in narrowing down the possibilities when a patient shows signs of a disease, often being able to pinpoint problems, such as cancerous tumors, extremely accurately. Today we’ll look at tomography and MRI equipment. In this article we’ll look at a technique, tomography, that advanced scanning equipment uses to produce and process data into two or three-dimensional images that are easier for a human to interpret. [...]

Auto Safety Features For Senior Drivers

One day last week we set off for San Francisco in the pouring rain. We have to drive a winding, single lane road to reach the nearest freeway. A few hundred yards from home we came up behind a senior lady driving at 35 MPH in a zone with a 55 MPH limit. This road is deadly. It’s nicknamed “Blood Alley” by the locals for good cause. She was putting on her makeup! This article is about modern auto safety features, all of which can be particularly useful to seniors. [...]

Everyone's Guide to Medical Equipment - Part 8 - More Laboratory Equipment

So far in this series we’ve looked at the equipment that you could expect to find in your physician’s bag and office and the medical monitors that you’re most likely to encounter in clinics and hospitals. Some of them are simply measuring instruments, adapted to work safely in a clinical environment. Others are complex, often computer driven, pieces of electromechanical machinery. In the previous article we started looking at what happens after you hand over those samples for analysis, or have blood drawn. We covered blood tests and the equipment, such as clinical chemical, electrolyte and blood gas analyzers, used to perform the analysis. Today we’ll look at the tests that are performed on bodily wastes (urine and solids) and the equipment involved. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 7 – Laboratory Equipment

In articles 1 through 6 of this series we looked at the equipment that you could expect to find in your physician’s bag and office and the medical monitors that you’re most likely to encounter in clinics and hospitals. Have you ever wondered what happens after you hand over those samples for analysis, or have blood drawn? Find out in this article on medical laboratory equipment. [...]

President Obama signed the second part (reconciliation) of the health care reform bill on March 30, 2010. That's great, but the provisions that will cover the uninsured haven't clicked in yet.

Our elected officials started work on the proposed health insurance reform bill on July 30, 2009. Harvard researchers estimate that 122 Americans die every day as a result of not having health insurance.

So, the estimated number of uninsured Americans who have died while the politicians in the Senate and Congress played politics and delayed new benefits for the sake of the health care insurers is

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