New thinking on addiction treatments

Just as things have got better with the gadetry we use, like this here internet, so too have we made progress medically in all sorts of things. Diabetes is now a chronic disease, not a short term death sentence, many cancers are treatable these days: but perhaps the greatest changes have come in our knowledge about drug treatment. Treatment for addictions in general in fact.

It wasn't all that long ago, certainly no more than a few decades, when addiction was regarded simply as a form of moral turpitude. Those who were addicted simply lacked fibre and should be punished out of their behavior. Thankfully we now recognise that addiction is a disease and thus look for things like drug treatment, alcohol treatment, addiction treatment, rather than moral exhortation.

We've also made great strides in exactly what that drug treatment might be. For we now recognise that there is not one single or simple thing that we can do to break addiction: we need to treat the patient holistically and there are a variety of treatments which work differently with different patients. For example, some respond best to therapy based treatments: others to interventions more medically orientated. And yes, the group work of things like the 12 step program does indeed work for some. So what we now do, or at least the more advanced treatment centers are doing, is what the Pat Moore Foundation does: offers all the applicable treatments from the one site. Click through any of the links for more information.

Ticker Tape Parade 2009

Yes, there will indeed be a ticker tape parade in 2009 to welcome the victorious Yankees back into the heart of their home city.

The ticker tape parade 2009 will follow the traditional route: it all starts at 11 am Friday around Battery Park and then moves up Broadway and ends at City Hall. The route fot the ticker tape parade 2009 is as with other ticker tape parades over the years: up and through what is known as the Canyon of Heroes.

This is where traditionally New Yorkers have welcomed heroes to their city: whether it be one of the local teams victorious or returning astronauts or troops coming back from war.

There is of course one slight problem with the name: ticker tape parade. For no one on Wall Street still actually uses ticker tape (the original meaning was a way of getting stock market tradfes reported. This is of course all now done by computer) so in more recent years people have been shredding telephone books to throw out the windows.

Actually, that sounds like a business opportunity in these difficult times in 2009: get an industrial grade paper shredder, put it on a cart and ask whether anyone would like their phone book shredded to make ticker tape for the parade? You could probably get away with asking $10 a pop. And it would be an entrepreneurial way of bringing the ticker tape parade right up to date in 2009.

Excellent News Site About Katie

If you're interested in news about celebrities like Katie Holmes then you'll want to have a look at this site dedicated to news about her.

It might be that Katie Holmes' marriage to Tom Cruise fascinates, or the connections with Scientology, or maybe it's the baby, Suri?

But whatever your needs for celebrity news about Katie Holmes you'll want to ckick through and see what the site has to offer.

Al Gore's Live Earth

I'm really rather looking forward to Al Gore's upcoming Live Earth series of concerts.

for one thing I want to see the band from the British Antarctic Survey base, Nunatak.

The other is that I want to see if he uses this huge global audience to announce that he's running for President of the United States.

So, two things to look out for. Nunatak and naked politics.

Give us a Push Love!

So what would you do if the train driver said you had to get out and push?

Hundreds of Indian rail passengers got more than they had bargained for when the driver of their train asked them to get out and push.

It took more than half an hour to move the stalled electric train 12 feet so that it touched live overhead wires and was able to resume its journey, officials said on Wednesday.

The incident occurred in the eastern state of Bihar on Tuesday after a passenger pulled the train's emergency chain and it halted in a "neutral zone," a short length of track where there is no power in the overhead wires.

"In so many years of service in the railways, I have never come across such a bizarre incident," said Deepak Kumar Jha, a spokesman for Indian Railways.

Weird indeed.

Ringtones Links

"Everybody loves ringtones. So i decided to have a search for the best ringtones sites. Maybe everyone knows Ringophone.com or Ultrasonic-ringtones.com but to tell the truth the best site for free ringtones to download is GoldRingtone.com. Download the best Ringtones for free! Doesn't it sound attractive? The site has a weekly update (as they inform me with their press release) so you can continuously find the best new free ringtones.

The site is simple. The users can download free mp3 ringtones from any carrier. Besides, there are sections for all carriers. You can get free Sprint Ringtones, or free Cingular Ringtones.

More Google Tools for Webmasters

Google has made some changes to it's reporting tools making life a lot easier for webmasters:

Google has enhanced the reporting capabilities in its Webmaster Tools to show full phrases being used in anchor text, instead of just keywords within the anchor text of links to a site, the company said on its Webmaster Central Blog last night.

Webmaster Tools previously had reports showing the top terms were included in the anchor text other sites are using to link to them. So the list would include the terms "Search," "Engine," and "Watch" when it assesed this link: Search Engine Watch.

With the new reports, the entire phrase will be shown on the list, so the previous link would show up in reports as "Search Engine Watch," which is a much more useful bit of information.

The report is available to verified webmasters who have logged into Google's Webmaster Tools, under the "Statistics" tab, in the "Page Analysis" section. The list of top 100 anchor text phrases can be viewed as a table or downloaded as a csv file.

It's useful to see what anchor text is being used to link to your site, as it provides some insight into what people think of your site, or why they are linking. The anchor text also affects Google's ranking algorithm, so since lots of other sites link to our blog with the term "SEW blog" as anchor text, that affects results for a search on [SEW blog], causing this site to show up at the top of those results.

Now, if only I understood what any of that meant.

Sinbad Not Dead!

Another hoax in Wikipedia:

Wikipedia was again the victim of a prankster, who this time vandalized the profile of US entertainer Sinbad. He posted a entry according to which Sinbad had died of a heart attack on the morning of March 14.

"Somebody vandalized the page," Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez said Friday, quoted by Reuters. "Whoever did this was obviously a prankster. I don't think they did this because they thought he [was dead]." The false entry was caught, and removed, by a volunteer administrator about 30 minutes later, Ordonez said.

Sinbad, whose daughter called him about it, was amused and brushed it off as a "commonplace" occurrence on the easily accessible Internet. "Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again," the Los Angeles-based entertainer told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Sinbad's page on the free online research tool now carries the message: "This page has been temporarily protected from editing to deal with vandalism."

Wikipedia, which was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, has grown into one of the biggest virtual communities in the world, with faithful and enthusiastic members, all driven by the noble purpose of making information accessible freely to any one at any time.

Still a better joke than Recess Monkey's though, isn't it?