Now when people cut themselves and search for a bandage they can dab their blood with a cotton swab, place it in the pre-packaged envelope, and mail it into the lab. After mailing in the kit, people fill out a brief form online and are instantly added to the United States national bone marrow registry, called Be the Match.

“The magic of this idea is that it just feels like it’s part of the process,” said Nathan Frank, co-founder and creative director of Help Remedies. “You cut yourself, you dip it [the test] in blood. You don’t step out of what you’re doing physically or mentally.”

According to the National Marrow Donor Program, more than 10,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with diseases every year, the only cure being a bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor. Patients need donors who are a close genetic match, and ethnicity/heritage are key in making that match.

The Be the Match Registry has more than 9.5 million donors (300,000 of whom are associated with DKMS), but only one in 540 will be matched with a patient in need. Help Remedies and DKMS are hoping to improve those statistics.

Part of this product’s appeal is that customers can purchase Help: I Want to Save a Life and satisfy their altruistic side without paying extra. Customers pay $4, the cost of the bandages.

“It is basically an add-on and people can have the benefit of the kit without paying extra,” Frank said. “They shouldn’t have to pay extra to do something good. We wanted to give this as a gift to people.”

While Help: I Want to Save a Life is produced by Help Remedies, the idea comes from an outside source. Graham Douglas thought of the idea after watching his brother Britton battle leukemia and struggle to find a bone marrow donor.

“During the whole process of finding a donor we realized it’s really a glorified lottery, and the odds aren’t in your favor,” said Douglas. “That never really sat well with me.”

For the last 10 years, Douglas has been working to simplify the registration process. Before Help: I Want to Save a Life, potential donors had to go out of their way to make a doctor’s appointment, attend a donor center event or make the conscious decision to search for a kit online.

“Another reason I did this was to show how stupidly simple it can be,” Douglas said. “To get your name on a list it just takes a couple drops of blood. You don’t even have to bloody yourself; we wanted to catch people while they were already bleeding.”

Once listed as a donor, a person’s tissue type and identification number are anonymously stored in the registry. Doctors can then search through the registry for donors who match their patients’ tissue types. Donors may be asked to participate in a transplant but have the right to decline or change their minds.

Once a donor backs outs, his or her name is removed from the registry so as not to give false hope to other ailing patients. A donor’s name is also removed after his/her 61st birthday, because the risks associated with anesthesia increase with age.

“When a donor backs out, it is devastating news for the family,” said Alina Suprunova, director of special projects of DKMS Americas. “We ask that when registering that our donors consider the commitment they are making to the patients.”

During a bone marrow transplant a donor’s blood-forming stem cells are directly transfused into a patient’s bloodstream. The patient’s new stem cells later multiply to create healthy bone marrow.

There are two methods of donation.

Peripheral blood stem cell donation is a nonsurgical procedure in which stem cells are collected from a donors’ bloodstream. Four days before the donation, as well as the day of stem cell collection, a donor receives daily injections of a synthetic protein to increase the number of stem cells in the blood.

On the day of collection, blood is taken from one arm and passed through an apheresis machine to separate stem cells from the blood. The remaining blood is then returned to the donor intravenously through the other arm. The whole process takes about four to six hours over the course of a day, and it takes a few weeks for the donor to completely regenerate the lost cells.

In a bone marrow donation, actual marrow cells are taken from the back of the donor’s pelvic bone with a syringe. The donor receives general anesthesia to eliminate pain during the one- to two-hour surgical procedure and their marrow is restored within a few weeks.

“I want to get rid of this storm of misconception around registering and donating,” Graham said. “I want to make sure people know marrow is just a numbers game, and we’re losing but we don’t have to be.”

Initially released online on February 27, Help: I Want to Save a Life has since been picked up by Target and Walgreens, which promises to expand the product’s audience by thousands. People interested in becoming marrow donors can also go to the DKMS website, register online and request a free bone marrow test kit.

]]> http://etengteam.com/get-a-paper-cut-save-a-life/feed 0 http://etengteam.com/dave-arnold-cocktail-wiz http://etengteam.com/dave-arnold-cocktail-wiz#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 11:08:50 +0000 BobRenquist http://etengteam.com/dave-arnold-cocktail-wiz

Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

LIQUID LIGHTNING | Dave Arnold in his kitchen

ORDER A GIN AND JUICE at Booker and Dax, the new bar at the back of David Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, and you’ll receive what looks like a wine glass filled with water. Inside it is a mixture of Tanqueray and clarified fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice that is carbonated directly (to achieve fizz without any seltzer). Dave Arnold, 40, who is Mr. Chang’s business partner at the bar, is also the drink’s “inventor.” His Son of a Peach cocktail is made with clarified canned peaches, tweaked for optimum sugar content by adding cane syrup with an electronic refractometer. Lady of the Night, a bloody mary riff, calls for horseradish distilled in a rotary evaporator. Mr. Arnold is currently the French Culinary Institute’s director of culinary technology, teaching students how to cook with sous vide machines and transglutaminase, aka “meat glue.” He grew up in Englewood, N.J., tinkering in the garage with his father, an electrical engineer, and earned his MFA in sculpture at Columbia before turning his talents to the culinary realm. Sunday afternoons find him at his New York home making dinner for his sons, the original Booker and Dax (10 and 7, respectively), and his wife, architect Jennifer Carpenter.

Mixologist and owner of David Chang’s Booker + Dax, Dave Arnold, demonstrates how he uses Bombay Sapphire East and liquid nitrogen to make his signature drink that will be featured at the upcoming Lucky Rice Festival.

I completely redid this kitchen myself. I did all the electricity, all the plumbing, all the cabinetry. My vents may or may not be illegal. And the BTUs coming out of here? Also probably illegal. I modified my Blodgett stove so the output is 40,000 BTUs, the fryer is 90,000 and the crêpe maker is 30,000. My total combined output when everything is screaming? It’s absurd.

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Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Arnold eating with his wife Jennifer

The main problem with cooking in urban environments is a lack of adequate ventilation. In the future, I’m pretty sure more and more studies are going to say that cooking fumes are bad for you.

I built a six-foot sink with sliding cutting boards and foot pedals to control the sink. My stepfather’s hobby is surf-casting [fishing from shore], and he used to bring me really large stripers. I wanted a sink big enough that I could clean them. As for the foot pedals: Why would you ever want to touch the faucet of a sink?

We use leftovers throughout the week. I typically over-make on Sundays. It would be horrific to run out of food—basically that’s the equivalent of punching your guest in the face. Last week I cooked five chickens at Sunday dinner, then took the bones and backs and made a quick stock in my pressure cooker. With that, I made a favorite leftover dish of mine, a pasta with puréed broccoli cooked in stock. The angel hair pasta soaks up all the sauce and it becomes really creamy.

Travis Huggett

hHs Lady of the Night cocktail

My fried chicken recipe is our go-to for family dinners. Even before I started using the circulator [a temperature-controlled water bath], which I brought into the apartment five years ago, it was always a little more difficult than standard recipes. There’s something about gnawing on a bone that Jen doesn’t enjoy, so a long time ago I started completely deboning the chickens. The main problem with standard recipes is that you have to fry the chicken at a lower temperature than you fry all the other things you’re serving that day—like onion rings or french fries. Now I cook the chicken in an immersion circulator in Ziploc bags before deep-frying it at a high temperature.

In the future, the circulator is going to be a lot more prevalent in home kitchens. The issue is that we’re not used to having big troughs of water sitting about, but eventually maybe it’ll be built into sinks or cabinetry so it can be easily stored and drained.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Bubbies sauerkraut

In my fridge, I always have lots of eggs. I go through boatloads of them. I have Bubbies sauerkraut, which is a great brand, if you’re keeping track. Also a can of Surströmming, this crazy Swedish fermented fish. We snack on wine while we are cooking.

Even though I’m inherently a disorganized person, my kitchen used to be organized and my knives sharp. Now—because of the kids, the babysitter, my schedule—I don’t know where anything is.

I detest nested things that aren’t identical. I only want like-size things stacked on top of like-size things. There are different-size glass bowls in the cabinet that I never use because they are nested.

My seltzer maker was one of the first things I built in this space. I used to use a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide to carbonate—nitrous makes creamier tasting bubbles—but my main nitrous tank ran out so now I just use carbon dioxide. I used to have a keg too, but since Dax was born, I haven’t had time to home brew. That was seven years ago.

During my MFA program at Columbia, I recreated St. George and the dragon—I built a kerosene-spitting machine—and the idea was that I’d fight it. Well, I miscalculated. During a test, the thing totally torched my back. I can’t take my shirt off in the sun now. It starts to itch.

I use my Krampouz French crêpe maker for pancakes, which we make two times a week. I got it at a restaurant supply store outside of Paris. That trip, Jen was sick, I was sick, we lost our wallets, it was a total nightmare—but I did bring my crêpe maker back. The surface gets up to 650 degrees quickly, so you have to put it on the lowest setting for pancakes to cook them through without burning. I like a thicker pancake.

Neil Setchfield/Alamy

Surströmming

My KitchenAid broke a long time ago because it’s poorly designed—a piece of plastic sheared off. When I was fixing it, I accidentally epoxied the cheese grater attachment onto it. I can’t get it off. So now I use it as a cheese grater.

If I could have anything else in this kitchen, I’d like a vacuum machine. I just don’t have the space.

The biggest problem with my kitchen is power management. I can’t run the air conditioner and the coffee machine at the same time.

I installed a six-gallon deep-fryer under the counter. I’ve been deep-frying a long time, since I was 10. The first thing I ever deep-fried on my own was a beignet.

As a kid, I used to make toaster-oven preparations like garlic bread with white bread and garlic powder. One time I dumped a container of garlic powder on the bread and ate it. My dad made me sit in the very back of our Gran Torino station wagon because I smelled so bad.

—Edited from an interview by Sophie Brickman

Dave’s Angel Hair Pasta With Broccoli Purée

Total Time: 20 minutes

Serves: 4-6

Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

Angel hair pasta with broccoli purée

Ingredients

3 cups chicken stock

1 head broccoli, including stalk, roughly chopped (about 3 loosely packed cups)

½ cup grated Parmesan, plus more for garnish

1 clove garlic

2 egg yolks

Salt and black pepper, to taste

1 pound angel hair pasta

What To Do

1. In a small saucepan over high heat, bring stock to a boil. Add broccoli and cook until stalks are fork-tender, 8-10 minutes.

2. Transfer stock and broccoli to a blender and add cheese and garlic. Pulse until combined. Adding one egg yolk at a time, pulse until mixture is slightly thickened. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer back to a medium-size saucepan and bring to a simmer.

3. Meanwhile, cook pasta in a large pot of salted water until just pliant—about 30 seconds—then transfer immediately to the simmering sauce.

4. Finish cooking pasta in sauce over medium heat until the pasta is al dente and sauce has thickened, about 3 minutes. The resulting dish should be more creamy than brothy. Serve with extra Parmesan.

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Dave Arnold, Cocktail Wiz.

The growing adoption of smartphones and mobile applications is changing the way enterprises create value and drive competitive differentiation.

In fact, the economic survival of enterprises now depends on their ability to respond to customer and citizen demands, generated through enterprise applications as well as social applications such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The expanded HP Applications Transformation solutions portfolio enables clients to design, build and manage applications that drive interaction between people and enterprises while optimizing traditional application environments to deliver an improved user experience.

“Modern enterprise applications require a different approach to design and testing than traditional applications,” said Eyad Shihabi, Managing Director, HP Middle East. “HP ensures that enterprise applications provide the highest level of quality, availability and scalability while elevating the user experience to an entirely new level.”

New software products for IT management and social collaboration

The enhanced HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI) improves collaboration among delivery teams and reduces cycle times by offering real-time visibility and traceability of activities across the application life cycle.

As part of HP’s IT Performance Suite, HP and Perfecto Mobile, a provider of cloud-based testing and automation solutions, have extended HP Unified Functional Testing to offer multifunctional applications by allowing developers to emulate and test the user experience of mobile applications across devices and networks.

Additionally, new software offerings from HP complement the agile development of mobile applications and drive social collaboration:

— HP Anywhere increases productivity and facilitates faster decision making by enabling clients to manage IT on the go. New mobile-based applications perform operations such as portfolio request management, defect tracking, service health monitoring and the composition of an Executive Scorecard.

— HP Enterprise Collaboration enhances knowledge sharing and accelerates application development through a social collaboration environment that enables real-time, context-based conversations traced back to actions and work items.

New services to design, deploy and manage mobile applications

The HP Application Transformation solutions portfolio of software products is complemented by new services to meet the quality demands of enterprise applications. The HP Mobile Application Services portfolio now includes:

— HP Testing for Mobility Services accelerate time to market of mobile applications by reducing test cycles and automating testing across multiple devices with market-leading solutions from HP Software and Perfecto Mobile.

— HP Enterprise Mobility Services for SAP Applications improves employee efficiency by allowing mobile users to obtain data from mission-critical SAP applications. By extending its mobile solutions to the SAP NetWeaver technology platform and the Sybase Unwired Platform, HP now offers an end-to-end enterprise mobile solution that enables clients to access key enterprise information A fundamental component in the development of an application strategy, the HP Applications Transformation Experience workshop offers enhanced capabilities to exploit new enterprise mobile applications and cloud computing technologies.

HP’s premier client event, HP Discover, takes place June 4-7 in Las Vegas.

Kyrgyzstan's democratic credentials were regarded as relatively strong in the immediate post-Soviet era, but this reputation was lost when corruption and nepotism took hold during President Akayev's years in office. Parliamentary and presidential elections were flawed, opposition figures faced harassment and imprisonment, and opposition newspapers were closed.

His successor after the 2005 revolt, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, failed to restore full confidence in state institutions at home or abroad. His time in office was marred by political instability and an almost constant struggle with parliament over the constitutional balance of power.

Elections held under Mr Bakiyev were criticised as being undemocratic, and human rights groups expressed concern over the curtailing of civil liberties and attacks on the media.

Civil tensions again came to a head in April 2010, when Mr Bakiyev himself was toppled and an interim government was set up under the leadership of former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva.

The Kyrgyz make up nearly 70% of the population, with Uzbeks accounting for about 15% and concentrated in the Ferghana Valley in the south. Russians have a significant presence in the north and in the capital, Bishkek.

There is tension between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities in the south over land and housing, and relations with Uzbekistan were strained following the flight of refugees into Kyrgyzstan after clashes in the Uzbek city Andijan in 2005.

There have been several serious outbreaks of Kyrgyz-Uzbek interethnic violence in the southern city of Osh, notably in 1990 – when hundreds were killed – and again in June 2010 following the overthrow of Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Osh had been a Bakiyev stronghold.

Most of the population of Kyrgyzstan is nominally Muslim, and there has been a growing interest in Islam among those seeking a new ethnic or national identity.

The government is worried about inroads by jihadist groups like Hizb-ut Tahrir, and there have been periodic outbreaks of fighting in the south.

Kyrgyzstan also features in the US-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia, as both powers have military air bases in the country.

The US established an air base at the Manas international airport near Bishkek in late 2001 to support military operations in Afghanistan. President Bakiyev threatened to close it in October 2008 after agreeing to a Russian loan. He reversed the decision when the US agreed to more than triple its annual rent for the base.

Weeks later Kyrgyzstan tentatively agreed to allow Russia to open a second military base on its territory, apparently expanding Moscow's military reach to balance the US presence.

Tractor equipped with the Kinze Autonomy Project Planting System planting a field.

In the Star Wars movies, moisture farmers on dry planets like Tattoine use droids to help with the repetitive, back-breaking labor, but that’s in a galaxy far, far away. There’s no doubt that robots are cool, but are robots on farms far off in our future?

Actually, the future is already here, with highly advanced milking machines on some dairy farms and a fully automated robot planting tractor set to hit the market this fall.

To be sure, today’s farmers already rely on advanced technology, like GPS systems to help with planting and automatic milkers. That makes the jump to robotics pretty easy, says Jeremy Brown, president of Jaybridge Robotics. His Massachusetts-based company makes software that helps turn regular machinery into robotic machinery for commercial use.

“Robotics and autonomy become appropriate where you have a situation which is dull, which is dirty or which is dangerous,” Brown says.

Sounds like farming. Jaybridge and tractor manufacturer Kinze have developed a mass-market robotic planting system. It will be in limited release this fall.

A few dairy farmers are already on the cutting edge. They face two or three milkings a day and maintain hundreds of cows, just to stay in the black. Many dairies have turned to some form of automatic milking for years to help out.

But some dairies are trying out new milking technology. It goes beyond just a little attachment to a cow’s udder that squeezes the milk out. This takes it a step further, using a robotic arm to prepare and clean the udders, attach the milking equipment, and monitor the cow’s health. (Check out the cool video here)

Brent Ware, a member of the robotics team at Kansas State, stands next to a planting robot that won a national competition.

Robot technologies like these can buy farmers a little more time off.

“Just this past Christmas we had a customer of ours that had started up two of our (robotic milkers) with their herd,” says Mark Futcher, product manager for an automatic milking machine made by DeLaval. “That Christmas morning was the first time that gentleman had ever been witness to his children finding their Christmas stockings.”

Robots are creeping into everyday life, but could we see robots replacing farmers anytime soon?

Not likely. Today’s modern farmer is a CEO — making decisions about when to buy and sell and managing an ever-changing workforce. For now, robots are there to help.

“There’s very much a human element in all of the business decisions and all of the equipment selection and maintenance and fleet decisions,” Brown says. “I don’t think you’re going to eliminate the farmer with automation.”

Want to learn more about farming in the future? Check out Harvest Public Media’s Farmer of the Future series running this week. There are stories on the changing demographics of midwestern farm towns, the blurring lines of what defines a “corporate” farmer, and more.

The blogosphere’s response was swift: Business and tech commentators across the nation rushed to the billionaire’s defense, explaining that the hooded sweatshirt was a symbol of his independent-mindedness, his youth, his authenticity, his loyalty to the culture of Silicon Valley. They argued his business acumen is reflected in Facebook’s numbers, not in his fashion choices.

Now that the firestorm has cooled, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the complex significance of the hoodie for someone like Zuckerberg.

In one respect, both the anti-hoodie and pro-hoodie factions are correct. When Zuckerberg wears a hoodie at a high-profile meeting, he’s saying: I am an artist, not a salesman. Salesmen wear suits because their job is to persuade, seduce, cajole; appearance is all-important. And the salesman’s first priority is profit, which, if you’re a Facebook shareholder, is the ethos you might wish to see in the CEO of the company you’re investing in.

But Zuckerberg has said explicitly he is devoted above all to his beautiful creation: Facebook. This, presumably, is why he turned down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion for the company back in its early years and chose to keep running the company himself. He’s first and foremost an inventor, a tinkerer in a workshop, a monk in hooded robes. Sales, the bottom line, these are not the things that define me, the hoodie says.

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To a tech geek, indifference to dress is a badge of pride because any creative endeavor, whether it’s coding software or writing novels, goes better if you can forget about yourself entirely, forget about how you look, what you’re wearing, how people perceive you. Your must immerse yourself in your art. It must become the only thing on your mind.

The nerd’s spastic movements, childlike laugh, checked-out eyes as she codes or writes or thinks are the symptoms of a person obsessed with work, a person unconscious of herself and the impression she’s making. That’s why Bill Gates used to dress like a homeless guy, and Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck, why Zuckerberg wears the hoodie. It’s about taking pride in being an artist.

Hoodie’s evolution from fashion mainstay to symbol of injustice

So the analyst who said the hoodie shows I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude was right in one sense, but he was wrong to suggest Zuckerberg’s hoodie was bad news for Facebook investors. Because showing the world that you’re an artist instead of a salesman can be a great sales tactic.

As a cub reporter, I had the privilege of watching Steve Jobs pitch the Pixar movie “Monsters, Inc.” to a handful of journalists in a small room. It was the best sales presentation I’ve ever seen. While it was happening, I wanted to do anything Jobs asked, because he was able to seem like he didn’t care what we thought of him. He was unshaven, wearing his cat-burglar ensemble. He never tried to kiss up to any of us, like movie people often did. There were no visual aids, no refreshments. He just fulminated about what a good movie it was, how major its advances in animation technology, almost as if we weren’t there.

Are you living without Facebook?

He was a brilliant salesman because he didn’t act much like a salesman. You believed him because he didn’t seem like he cared that much whether you believed him or not. He was a good-looking, confident person, but his conduct in many respects was that of somebody so passionate about his work that it made him just a little socially unacceptable. This guy is a nerd, you thought — the real thing, so he must know what he’s talking about.

Zuckerberg has learned much, I suspect, from Jobs. He knows the impression he makes is important, so, like Jobs, he acts like he doesn’t think it’s important. The hoodie is both who he really is — a big nerd — and a thoughtful executive’s performance of who he really is.

He isn’t being immature or youthful at all. He’s striving to earn the confidence of investors by presenting himself as a scruffy genius who doesn’t care about earning their confidence. And that’s good business.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Benjamin Nugent.