THE DRUG THAT WAS VIOXX

Want a new cure for your illness? Think again. We have enough drugs to give us more than just headaches. Some drugs will not reveal its true and long term effect until you start to feel it more often.We all know that drugs have side effects. How can it cure one part of your body without affecting the other parts? Drugs that are swallowed do not target only the part they are intended to cure. They are transported by our blood so they can go anywhere inside our body. We should be more aware of the drugs that relieve us of certain ailments but can cause us a more complicated disease in the future.Are you familiar with Vioxx? It has been on the headlines for days. This controversial drug was used by about two million people worldwide.Vioxx is prescribed to relieve osteoarthritis, rheumatic arthritis and acute pain. Produced by Merck & Co., it comes in a liquid and pill form. It is a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). NSAIDs refer to drugs with analgesic, antipyretic and anti-inflammatory effects, which reduce pain, fever and inflammation, such as muscle strain or sprain. They are sometimes called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents or NSAIAs. Examples of which are aspirin and ibuprofen.Vioxx also belongs to a class of drugs called COX-2 (cyclooxygenase) inhibitors. Cyclooxygenase is an enzyme that controls inflammation. The Vioxx works by blocking COX-2 enzymes in the body that trigger pain and inflammation. COX-2 has been a major source of relief from arthritis pain, which afflicts tens of millions of people in the world.In 2002, the company received complaints regarding their product. Market studies confirmed that Vioxx raises the risks of serious cardiovascular events including heart attacks and strokes, as well as other life-threatening side effects, such as, blood clots, angina and nonbacterial meningitis, severe intestinal damage, ulcerations and bleeding, and kidney damage. Other minor side effects include flu symptoms, weakness, loss of appetite, rash or pail skin, swelling of hand feet and other extremities.It was not until September 30, 2004 that Merck officially announced of voluntary recall of Vioxx from all markets worldwide.So, here is a lesson we have to learn. We can not trust any drug, even if it is produced by leading companies. You will never know what it is going to cause you. Always ask for a doctor’s prescription. Learn from experience and do not just go for new things that come your way. It’s very risky, especially if it concerns your health.

What's the latest in vioxx

Are you a Vioxx victim? Here’s something you have to know.Many people from all over the world were victimized by this drug. The Vioxx was produced by Merck and Pharmacia. It comes in liquid and pill form. It is a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) that is used to relieve osteoarthritis, rheumatic arthritis and acute pain. NSAID is referred to as drug with analgesic, antipyretic and anti-inflammatory effects. It reduces pain, fever and inflammation, such as muscle strain or sprain. NSAID is sometimes called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent or NSAIA. Aspirin and ibuprofen belongs to this class.The Vioxx also contains cyclooxygenase, an enzyme that controls inflammation. It belongs to the COX-2 inhibitors. COX-2 has been good cure for arthritis pain, which afflicts tens of millions of people in the world. The Vioxx works by blocking COX-2 enzymes in the body that trigger pain and inflammation.However, very relieving as it may sound, this arthritis drug rofecoxib was proven to cause and doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke.Class action suits filed against Merck begun in 2002. Doctors told their patients about the bad effects this drug cause. In October 5, 2004, a worldwide class action lawsuit against Merck and Co. was filed.In September 30, 2004, Merck officially announced of voluntary recall of Vioxx from all markets worldwide. A warning was issued to prevent people from taking the Vioxx and to return all unused pills. It also causes other life-threatening diseases, such as, blood clots, angina and nonbacterial meningitis, severe intestinal damage, ulcerations and bleeding, and kidney damage. Other minor side effects include flu symptoms, weakness, loss of appetite, rash or pail skin, swelling of hand feet and other extremities.Many blamed the Food and Drug Administration or the FDA, because it is its duty to assure people of harmless foods and drugs. Also, the FDA was blamed for giving Merck a fast-track, 6-month approval process. Vioxx was distributed in the United States in 1999. They want FDA to push drug companies to conduct longer tests before they can sell it so that people are given the right warning.In January 27, 2005, the consolidation of all Vioxx cases was argued in front of federal judges in Florida by the attorneys. A preliminary hearing will be held before the judge after the decision is made public. Now, there are web sites that offer free consultations for Vioxx victims.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management is a term that's going to start cropping up here more often, but I need to try to define it.
First of all, it's related to information management, but is not the same thing simply because knowledge and information are not identical. Information is atomic and static, but knowledge is associative, rich, multi-layered, multi-faceted, contextual, accessible, and dynamic.
Information is what you get when you run a web search on Google. Knowledge is what you would get -- or at least get closer to -- if all of the results that came back from that search were relevant to what you actually wanted, and were presented consistently. That's still not quite knowledge, but it's closer.
Do a search for KM on Google, and you'll find (currently) 866 entries. The first is to Brint, apparently considered the best KM site on the net. Personally, I think it's a nightmarish site, but there's one important thing you can see at this site: Knowledge Management is is a topic for organizations, not for individuals.
In fact, it's a heavily commercialized term... there are a number of companies with software that specialize in KM, and they all define the term in a way that best suits their applications. Forget them.
Knowledge management is an attempt to do with the collective knowledge of an organization -- the individuals within the organization -- what an individual does with his own knowledge. That includes storing, cross-linking, categorizing, contextualizing, retrieving, and of course presenting.
KM requires computer technology, because it can't be done any other way. Remember, this isn't the knowledge of a single individual being available to that individual whenver its needed, we're talking about the knowledge of at least one individual being usable by at least one.
Consider a mailing address. Is it information, or knowledge? It's information. In fact, it's pretty useless information, because it's out of context.
Now let's put that address into a database. (Still useless!) Add to that address a million other addresses. (Now it's useless, times one million!) Now, though, attach some other information to each of those addresses, to make them usefull. Who lives or works there? How many people are there? What's the average income at that address? What was the organization's last interaction with this address? How many times have we dealt with this address? What department has had the most dealings with it? (You get the idea.)
Now you still have information, but at least you have a lot of it, right!? That information is useless, unless it's accessible to any individual in the organization that might need it.
Think of the organization as a single individual, or a single brain. All the different parts of your brain have different kinds of information, but most of your brain can use inforatmion from most of the rest of your brain to get its work done. For example, you don't have to try repeatedly to figure out how far to lift your foot for the first step in a flight of stairs, constantly misjudging and trying again. Why? Because one part of your brain sees how high the step is, and tells another part of your brain "how high" to lift the foot, which then works the levers and pushes the buttons to raise the foot to the right height.
What if you saw how high the step was, but didn't have any way to tell the rest of your brain? That would make the height of the stair just "information", because you couldn't do anything with it.
Knowledge Management isn't just about businesses, although as I said it is a heavily commercialized phrase. Online learning systems like Blackboard are also forms of KM. Think of a classroom as a sort of organization with the goal of increasing the knowledge of the organization and the individuals within it.
In a perfect class, using a perfect KM system, all of the knowledge and information generated by everyone (students and teacher) would be distributed, shared, catalogued, and available, all the time. One student finds something interesting, and looks into it a little further to learn more, and then stores what he's learned in the KM system. That doesn't mean just typing up some notes, though, it means adding keywords, categories, and links to other related information.
Hypertext has been a hot topic among Knowledge workers for many years -- since long before "the web" -- because hyperlinks are an example of what turns information into knowledge. It associates one bit of information with another, giving it context and value.
Valuable hyperlinks must be created by people. A person has to weigh the relativity of another piece of information, and create the link between the two. (It doesn't have to be as difficult as writing HTML A tags, mind you, but in the real world if you're not using hypertext then your organization must be small and be wililng to pick from a small set of tools.)
Hyperlinks are just one way to begin building associative data sets, the first stages of knowledge. Another is categorization and keywords...
Stay tuned, this is an important subject. I'll pick up where I left off, sometime this weekend.

Knowledge Management, Meta Data, and the Organization

Knowledge Management, Meta Data, and the Organization

My last piece on this subject tried to cover the whole topic of knowledge management in a single page. We'll call that the overview, or the introduction, but it's time to explain a few things in a little more detail.
KM is a hot topic in some circles, but unfortunately it's a phrase that most people misunderstand instinctively. What does the word "knowledge" mean to you? You probably answered with something like "whatever you know", which is true... and that's the problem. When discussing KM, knowledge changes from "something you know" to "something your organization knows".
The goal of a KM system (KMS) is to make the information gathered/produced by each individual (in the organization) available to any and every other part of the organization that might need it, and only when they need it.
For an example we'll again look to our own minds. The human brain is filled with a massive amount of knowledge: the interrelationships of people, places, things, and ideas. All of that knowledge is available to the individual whenever it's needed... or almost so, anyway. Barring damage of some sort, the brain can recall virtually anything, and those things recalled the most often are also recalled quickest.
Just as important as knowledge recall, though, is knowledge blocking, or filters. How could we function if all of our knowledge was "at the front of our minds" all the time? If every thought, experience and task reminded us of everything we know, we'd be paralyzed. That's what the filters do: they keep the unrelated stuff out, and let the relevant knowledge through. (Of course, it's not perfect... the stray thought does zoom through occasionally, but then it's hard to say exactly how "perfect filters" would work.)
Now, back to the organization. All of the different parts of the organization are producing information and developing knowledge, all the time. Think of this organization as an individual brain: the knowledge that's developed by one member or department must be available to other parts of the organization when they need it.
Those who specialize in KM (those who write software specifically for managing an organization's knowledge) would like nothing more than to develop a "hive mind" at the organization. Literally, if such a thing were possible, each member of the organization would be able to share his knowledge with anyone else who needs it, in real time, exactly like a brain cell.
Unfortunately that's not possible, so computers must take the place of the hive mind. When someone in the organization needs to know about something, the computer must be used to translate the request for knowledge from the person's input to something the computer can work with (one or more database queries, usually), gather the information, filter out the irrelevant bits, and present the filtered, contextual knowledge back to the person.
That's the idea, anyway. Try that on the web, and you'll probably be swamped with information. (When's the last time you did a search on the web where most of the results contained what you wanted to find?) Most organizational networks are as useful (useless) as the web, in this regard. There are two reasons: a lack of meta information (information that describes the information), and poorly written searches.
The hypothetical "perfect KM system" will do this as efficiently and effectively as the best human mind. Such a system will probably never exist, but what's amazing is the dramatic improvements that can be made to existing systems with very minor changes. (Even more amazing is how very few organizations take advantage of these things.)
Consider the first of the two reasons that most intranets are so useless: lack of meta information. If an organization has an intranet, then it's probably just full of useless bulletins and other information that's carefully filtered through an editorial department. Those few that actually allow (almost) anyone to post their knowledge have the opposite problem: too much is available, and searching through it involves simple word searches. That's the problem with the web: too much information, and no good way to filter it!
The solution is to add meta data. Even a tiny bit of meta data can make a huge difference! Want proof? Compare Google's search engine with WebCrawler's. Google is much more likely to show relevant links at the beginning of the list because it gives a lot of weight to two pieces of meta data: the page title, and the number of other pages that link to that page.
The page title is meta data. Really! It's not the content of the page, it's a short bit of text that the author has written to describe the contents of that document. So when you search for your name on the web, which page is more likely to contain information about you: a page that's been titled with your name, or a page that mentions your name somewhere in the text? Obviously, the former. Google figured that out better than anyone else, and uses that (along with lots of other things) to make their search engine better.
So to make the information on an intranet useful as knowledge, meta data must be added, indexed, and used. Unfortunately, this is the point where you step out of the theory of KM, and into the hard light of implementation reality: people are lazy.
There are two ways to deal with that fact. First, you can make meta data a required part of the information submission process (remember that in the database it's just info: it's not knowledge until someone uses it) and to do that you must make it very easy to specify meta data. Second, you can let the computer specify the meta data. There's a lot of R&D going into this area right now, everybody with a "high-end" KMS is hoping to use Artificial Intelligence to apply the meta data, freeing the individuals from a task they usually won't (and don't) do if given the choice.
This is a frustrating problem, because meta data is usually easier to write than the data itself. For example, a keywords field on this article would probably contain "organization knowledge management km kms meta data meta data artificial intelligence". That only took about 30 seconds, compared with hours to write this article, and typing it into a special "keywords field" is just as easy as typing it into the article itself. Unfortunately making it easy isn't enough: people need to believe it's important, and know that it's required. Buy-in and enforcement.
What type of meta data is needed? What's the best KMS (or at least the best type of KMS) for the organization? These and other questions wil have to wait for my next article.

American Express credit cards

American Express began as a freight forwarding company over 150 years ago and soon began to offer financial services. Within five years of issuing its first charge card in 1958, American Express had issued over a million others. Today, American Express is a leading provider of credit cards and charge cards to consumers and businesses alike. The company also provides the American Express loan. Between them, the American Express Foundation and the American Express Philanthropic Program give millions of dollars each year in grants and endowments to various community and environmental causes. American Express is also the world’s largest travel agency and a leading financial planning company. Compare American Express credit cards on the uSwitch credit cards comparison service. Highlights of American Express credit cards American Express is one of the most established and reputable names in the business, offering both credit cards and charge cards, and backing them up with its famous cashback and rewards schemes. Charge cards are similar to credit cards, except that the balance must be paid off in full each billing cycle. Things to consider about American Express credit cards Although an American Express card can bestow upon its holder a certain level of prestige, the cards are not universally accepted and are fairly expensive. With American Express charge cards, there is also the matter of having to pay off your balance each month, which many people feel limits their flexibility. How can I compare American Express credit cards with other UK cards? The only way to get the best credit card deal available to you is to compare all the options. The credit card comparison service compares all credit cards available in the UK, and all you have to do is enter a few details about your financial circumstances. Does American Express offer the best credit card for you? Use the credit card comparison service to find out.