Marriage: A powerful heart drug in short supply

WASHINGTON, DC, March 6, 2012 — Married adults who undergo heart surgery are more than three times as likely as single people who have the same surgery to survive the next three months, a new study finds.

"That's a dramatic difference in survival rates for single people, during the most critical post-operative recovery period," says Ellen Idler, a sociologist at Emory University and lead author of the study, which appears in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. "We found that marriage boosted survival whether the patient was a man or a woman."

While the most striking difference in outcomes occurred during the first three months, the study showed that the strong protective effect of marriage continues for up to five years following coronary artery bypass surgery. Overall, the hazard of mortality is nearly twice as great for unmarried as it is for married patients about to undergo the surgery.

"The findings underscore the important role of spouses as caregivers during health crises," Idler says. "And husbands were apparently just as good at caregiving as wives."

Tying the knot has been associated with longer life since 1858, when William Farr observed that marriage protected against early mortality in France. The evidence keeps accumulating that the widowed, never married, and divorced have higher risks of mortality. Much of the research, however, has looked broadly across populations during an entire lifespan, or relies only on medical records.

"We wanted to zero in on a particular window of time: a major health crisis," Idler says, "and we wanted to add the in-person element of patient interviews, in addition to the full record of their medical history and hospitalization."

The major study involved more than 500 patients undergoing either emergency or elective coronary bypass surgery. All of the study subjects were interviewed prior to surgery. Data on survival status of the patients were obtained from the National Death Index.

While the data are inconclusive for what caused the striking difference in the three-month survival rate, the interviews provided some possible clues.

"The married patients had a more positive outlook going into the surgery, compared with the single patients," Idler says. "When asked whether they would be able to manage the pain and discomfort, or their worries about the surgery, those who had spouses were more likely to say, yes."

Patients who survived more than three months were approximately 70 percent more likely to die during the next five years if they were single. An analysis of the data showed that smoking history accounted for the lower survival rates in the single patients over this longer term.

"The lower likelihood that married persons were smokers suggests that spousal control over smoking behavior produces long-term health benefits," Idler says.

When it comes to healing hearts, marriage may be powerful medicine, but it's in increasingly short supply, Idler says, which does not bode well for aging baby boomers.

Barely half of U.S. adults are currently married, the lowest percentage ever, according to the Pew Research Center.

By Daniel Fowler, 2012/03/06
Text extracted from://http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/asa-map030612.php

'Big data' creating big career opportunities for IT pros

New job opportunities are emerging for IT professionals in the field of "big data," the term used to describe how corporations gather vast amounts of real-time data about their customers and analyze that data to drive decision making and increase profitability.

A new job title -- data scientist -- is all the rage. A data scientist typically has a background in computer science or mathematics as well as the analytical skills necessary to find the proverbial needle in a haystack of data gathered by the corporation.

"A data scientist is somebody who is inquisitive, who can stare at data and spot trends," says Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of Big Data Products at IBM. "It's almost like a Renaissance individual who really wants to learn and bring change to an organization."

Unheard of 18 months ago, "data scientist" has exploded in popularity as a Google search term. The number of Google searches of "data scientist" hit peaks 20 times higher than normal in the last quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. It's a popular search term in high-tech hotspots such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Among the U.S. companies looking to hire data scientists are PayPal, Amazon and HP. Indeed, the term "data scientist" is mentioned in 195 job listings on the Dice.com website for IT professionals.

IT departments also are adding data-centric developers and system administrators who specialize in tools such as the open source Apache Hadoop software. Hadoop is designed for data-intensive, distributed applications and used by such popular websites as Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay.

MORE: Hadoop wins over enterprises, spawns talent crunch

Hadoop is mentioned in 612 of 83,122 job listings on Dice.com. Among the companies looking to hire Hadoop software engineers and developers are AT&T Interactive, Sears, PayPal, AOL and Deloitte.

Hadoop "is an emerging skill," says Alice Hill, managing director of Dice.com. "Companies need to manage large-scale data operations, and the whole idea of Hadoop is that you can do it inexpensively. That works really well with what we're seeing in terms of the movement to the cloud."

Hill sees opportunities related to Hadoop for both entry-level and experienced IT staff, as well as for hardware and software specialists.

"Traditional hardware people need to figure out how to cluster in different environments. It's not just about buying a database and hooking it up to a hard drive. Now you have distributed databases that are hooked up to multiple servers and multiple hard drives," Hill says. Hadoop "is inexpensive, but it require somebody who really knows how to scale hardware."

Hill says Hadoop is also a good skill for IT professionals with relational database management experience to pursue. "If you really understand data structure and queries, there's going to be a lot of job opportunities," she adds.

Job opportunities for data scientists and Hadoop specialists are emerging across industries, from Web companies and e-retailers to financial services, healthcare, energy, utilities and media.

"There are so many directions you can go in with these [data management] skills," Hill says. "It's very fertile ground for experienced IT professionals, but also for people coming out with computer science degrees. It's a great area to specialize in."

Bhambhri says IT departments will be looking to hire new people in the area of big data as well as to retrain some of their existing staff to add data analysis and Hadoop-related programming and administrative skills. For example, IBM retrained 2,400 IT professionals at Big Data Bootcamps that it held for its customers and partners last year.

RELATED: Get Hadoop certified ... fast

"The IT departments really have to expand their data platforms and not be restricted to structured data repositories," Bhambhri says. "They have to bring in new sources of unstructured data in their platforms to answer the questions that C-level executives are asking for their decision-making processes. From an IT perspective, it's very important for the IT folks to not only identify these data sources but to work with their business counterparts to discover what other sources of data need to be seamlessly integrated into their platforms."

IBM has a new initiative called Big Data University aimed at training undergraduate and graduate students in the area of big data and exposing them to Hadoop. Launched last October, Big Data University has already attracted more than 14,000 students to register for its online courses. IBM offers six online courses related to Hadoop and big data.

"We are trying to get the students to really see the potential of big data and what the business outcomes can be from these new sources of data," Bhambhri says. "We're giving them use cases from retail, healthcare and telecommunications companies. We're showing them what was not possible before is possible now because of the work we have done with different customers in these different industries."

Bhambhri is optimistic about the career prospects for IT professionals with data management and Hadoop skills.

"In every industry, there is a lot of data that is getting captured, whether it is sensor data or log data or data coming from social media like Facebook and Twitter," Bhambhri says. "The volumes of the data are huge. So what has been happening is that a lot of our customers are capturing the data, but until now there was no technology that was available that they could use to analyze this data quickly in a cost-effective manner. That was a huge bottleneck. Now we read what Yahoo and Google are doing around Hadoop and MapReduce, and it certainly looks like these open source tools will solve that bottleneck."

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan (Network World), 2012/03/07 

Text extracted from: http://www.techworld.com.au/article/417612/_big_data_creating_big_career_opportunities_it_pros/

Why You Need Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service is that part of cloud computing that allows you to lease and manage computing infrastructure for your business needs. Computing infrastructure includes virtual machines (VMs), operating systems, middleware, runtime components, network, storage, data and applications. Cloud computing vendors provide the necessary underlying physical hardware (servers, network, storage) that they own and manage transparently in the background. The two worlds have little crossover. The cloud vendor and customer have a non-intrusive relationship with one another just as you currently do with your web hosting provider. They’re there when you need help but their direct involvement in your business is zero.

The cloud vendor also supplies you with a management interface in which you work with your infrastructure. You’re responsible for license management for your operating systems and software. You pay for compute resources per CPU, per hour, per gigabyte of bandwidth, per gigabyte of storage or a combination.

The Three Faces of IaaS

IaaS isn’t as simple as a single offering but the boundaries between types are well-drawn. First, you have the Private Cloud. Private IaaS is exactly what you think it is—a dedicated, private infrastructure. Think of your own data center setup as a Private Cloud IaaS. Of course, unless you have cloud infrastructure (virtualization, storage, extreme redundancy, etc.), it isn’t officially a cloud but you get the idea.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Public Cloud. A Public Cloud is a 100 percent hosted solution. You own no hardware. It is the Public Cloud that is the focus of this article.
If you combine the two cloud concepts, you have what’s known as a Hybrid Cloud. A Hybrid Cloud can be any percentage mixture of Private and Public infrastructures for your company. Most companies will evolve into this type of cloud from a traditional, private hardware infrastructure to a cloud-based one.

A Hybrid Cloud is the solution that cloud vendors recommend to their customers who’ve grown their own data centers and that are comfortable with that model. Mix your Private Cloud with the Public Cloud for a solid and complete solution for you and your customers. A Hybrid Cloud mixes the security and control of a traditional data center with hosted cloud infrastructure. Typically, companies will transition their disaster recovery efforts to the Public Cloud while retaining production operations in-house in a Private Cloud.

Industry experts view Hybrid Clouds as a transitional step to a full Private Cloud. They see this process as a stepwise migration. As leases and service contracts expire, companies will move their computing workloads from private data center architecture and Private Clouds to virtualized architecture in the Public Cloud.

Analysts predict that by the end of 2012, as many as 20% of businesses will exist completely in the Public Cloud.

Cost Savings But Not Where You Think

Cost tops the advantages of IaaS cloud computing. To purchase the same amount of physical computing power, to manage that computing power and to house that computing power costs many times more than bulk pricing from a cloud vendor. IaaS is basically hardware outsourcing. You don’t own the hardware. You don’t manage the hardware. You use the hardware but its care and feeding are not your problem.

Put whatever moniker on cloud computing’s IaaS that you want but it’s really no different than what you probably do now in your current data center. Unless you own your data center, pay its staff, maintain the facility and physically service your own hardware, then you’re already using hardware (infrastructure) as a service. The primary difference in a standard data center space lease and IaaS is that you don’t have to deal with any hardware.

IaaS frees you from purchasing or leasing hardware, having it shipped to the data center, paying someone to deploy it into a rack, paying for that rack space, managing the hardware throughout its life cycle and taking care of its disposal. That’s why traditional data center infrastructure management is expensive. You have to pay for the hardware, you have to pay for maintenance, you have to pay for management and you have to pay for the business services that required all of this expense in the first place.

On the other side of the argument, cloud opponents state that your TCO is no lower with IaaS than with traditional data center service. This might be true from a pure hardware point-of-view. After all, the IaaS vendor has to pay for the data center infrastructure and pass his costs on to you. However, the savings is in the form of labor costs.

Count the number of full-time employees (FTEs) you have on hand right now to manage your infrastructure. Now, count the number of FTEs you’ll require by not managing any hardware. Is there a significant difference between the two numbers? Add up the total cost of those FTEs who you won’t need anymore and multiply that number by three years (standard hardware lease length). That number is your savings.

Since your new virtual infrastructure comes with online management tools for creating new servers, installing operating systems, presenting storage and configuring network, you’ll need fewer FTEs to handle the job.

Lower Entry Barriers and Rapid Innovation

IaaS also lowers the financial and logistical barriers for startup businesses to enter the market and push their products and services to customers in a fraction of the standard timeframe. The IaaS model allows startups to start small and grow to any size on the pay-as-you-go plan. There’s not a huge outlay of capital on hardware and FTEs that traditionally built businesses have experienced.

Another advantage of IaaS is rapid innovation. For example, if you have an idea for a new service today, you could spin up a virtual test infrastructure for a few hundred dollars, test your service, demo your service and deploy a working business model in a matter of days instead of months. In a time when windows of opportunity are often very small, IaaS makes sense for who need a quick service build-out to show investors or potential customers.

Embrace the Elastic and Mobile Cloud

IaaS also makes your company mobile, elastic and global. You can manage your systems from anywhere, you can shrink and grow your computing infrastructure as needed and you can keep your global customers happy with zero downtime. And, since you’re not tied to a server room or data center, your office location is irrelevant. You can work from home and your employees can be spread across the globe.

Have you ever had to move systems, network and storage from one location to another? If you have, you know about expense, outage and failure. Most cloud vendors maintain geographically disparate data center locations to ensure zero downtime for your infrastructure. Sure, there’s an additional cost for the service but how much is your current disaster recovery solution costing you?

Summary

You need IaaS because you need mobility, agility, stability, availability, elasticity and frugality in your business. You can save money. You can beat the competition to market. And, you can do it with the peace of mind that someone else is minding the hardware foundation under your business.

Where to Go from Here

If you’re considering moving to an IaaS solution or you’re part of a startup, contact a cloud vendor and discuss your needs. Remember that not all cloud vendors can or will give you good advice. Look for experience, longevity, availability, customer service and customer satisfaction in your quest to migrate to the cloud. Remember that your partnership with a cloud vendor is an important one. It’s more than a simple landlord-tenant relationship; it’s a cohabitation. You’re domestic partners and you have to select wisely. So, you need to find a partner who can help you make a smooth transition to your desired level of cloud adoption, since you’re going to be there a very long time.

By Ken Hess, 2012/01/07
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.


Text extracted from: http://frugalnetworker.com/2012/01/07/why-you-need-infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas/

Tech That Should Be on Your Company's Radar for 2012

There are a variety of new technologies advancing in 2012 that you should investigate, if you aren’t already doing so, to give your small business a leg up on the competition. These recent technologies are beginning to be widely adopted and will continue to drive business forward.

Tablets

Tablets are highly visible, and many users want them, if only to read books and consume media. However, from a business perspective, replacing notebook computers with much lower-cost tablets may have a double benefit of reducing capital expenditures as well as increasing user satisfaction. Security can be an issue, both protecting company data and keeping malware and other threats out. Fortunately, both encryption providers and antivirus vendors are busily creating business-focused products that can help ensure security.

Windows 8

Like previous versions of Windows, Windows 8 will probably not be widely adopted in any great hurry. However, the intriguing capabilities of Windows 8, especially in conjunction with Windows Mobile 8 and Windows Server 8 to create an easy-to-use, fully capable unified communications environment could mean rapid adoption for highly-mobile organizations that can benefit from the access-anywhere models.

Big Data

The company that can best serve its customers will be the most likely to succeed--and that entails knowing as much as possible about your customers. Hadoop is a system designed by the Apache Foundation to process large amounts of data. As organizations accumulate terabytes of data about customers, business processes, partners and more, the model of a single database running on a single server becomes less useful. Hadoop runs across multiple systems at once, allowing bigger data sets as well as separate search engines for different purposes.

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization allows for many useful features in storage area network systems. Putting a layer of virtualization between the servers allows for thin provisioning, automatic tiering of storage, instant snapshots, and deduplication. Since there is no direct correlation between the volume a server mounts and the physical storage being used, a volume may actually be spread across multiple systems. This allows for the most-used files to be stored on the fastest drives (auto-tiering), for volumes to be expanded as needed (thin provisioning), for a system to store only one copy of each unique file (deduplication), and for instant copies of volumes to be made for backups, system recovery, and other uses (snapshots).

Network Virtualization

Server virtualization software, such as VMware and Hyper-V, is only the beginning of a truly virtual environment. To create a useful private cloud, you need to be able to create multiple separate networks, each running different virtual applications. This enables networks for customers, internal users, software developers, HR and so forth, without requiring different hardware for each. Combined with server and storage virtualization, network virtualization facilitates a fluid and responsive data center, where you can move resources from one network to another without having to reconfigure hardware. And with network virtualization, each virtual server can have its own gigabit Ethernet connection.

Cloud Backups

Experienced systems administrators may be leery about outsourcing critical applications, but with backups this can make a lot of sense. Since the backups are a secondary or tertiary copy of your data, cloud backups can more affordably fulfill archiving or disaster recovery than with moving tapes around. Since the cloud services are typically disk-based, recovering is speedier than finding, mounting, and reading tapes, and capacity can grow as needed without new equipment.

SSDs

Solid State Disks (SSDs) have been around for years but, two things may move SSDs to a more central role in IT. The first is the capability of a number of systems to use SSDs as cache, effectively giving an entire storage system the performance of SSDs while retaining the low cost of hard-disk based storage. The second factor is the destruction of hard-disk manufacturing facilities from flooding in Thailand in 2011. Hard0disk prices will probably remain high throughout 2012. At the same time, SSD prices are dropping and capabilities are improving.

IPv6

The Internet Protocol version 6 numbering system replaces decades-old IPv4. Address blocks for new domains are no longer available for IPv4. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get an IPv4 address any longer. However, IPv6 is beginning to be adopted more widely, and it can yield substantial advantages--such as unified communications or remote access using Windows 2008r2, where a user can easily access corporate resources from anywhere in the world.

Linux

Linux is nothing new, and has been used for many years in specialized roles such as Web servers and application servers. Now, however, the open source OS is making inroads into production environments, with database servers, file and print servers, and even workstations running on Linux. Its great customizability, capability to run on much less expensive hardware than Windows can, and the availability of mature open-source applications for nearly any enterprise application mean that it can be much less expensive to run than competing operating systems.

Cloud Applications

Cloud services have expanded in the last few years from specialized applications, such as payroll or ERP, to general office suites such as Office 365 or Google Apps for Business, to IT fundamentals such as storage or servers. While service outages and loss of data have been widely publicized, they have in reality affected relatively few customers for relatively short periods of time. The real trick is to use the cloud effectively while retaining data security and availability--no easy task.

By Logan G. Harbaugh, PCWorld.

Text extracted from: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/246918/tech_that_should_be_on_your_companys_radar_for_2012.html