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Everyone loves a small scrappy startup.
But what happens when a startup goes from being an underdog to just a part of a much larger corporation? Salesforce.com acquired cloud computing startup Heroku for $212 million in 2010, and since then, two of Heroku's three founders have left the company, along with the former CEO.
Now, Tod ...     An infant’s sudden weakness confounds pediatricians.    Miami Heat win 15 games in a row; the San Antonio Spurs must keep pace without Tony Parker; the Philadelphia 76ers are a

mess and other things we learned in the NBAYou know it's been a strange time in the NBA when the biggest basketball game of the week took place in North Korea, didn't count in any standings and ended in a tie. Of course, maybe it's just best to focus outside the NBA for the moment because it's looking like the league is still all about LeBron James and the possibly unbeatable Miami Heat. You may especially want to focus on anything other than the NBA, if you're a Philadelphia 76ers fan.The Miami Heat won 15 straight gamesBefore Sunday afternoon's game, the New York Knicks, who won their last two meetings against Miami, could at least pretend that they had the advantage over the Heat in a seven game series.
Despite the fact that the Knicks were able to take several leads during the game, it never felt like the Heat were in any danger of losing. In the end, Miami won their franchise-tying 14th game in a row, beating the Knicks 99-93. They broke that franchise record the next day with an easy 97-81 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves.This
year's Miami Heat team are reaching a level where hyperbole might not be enough to describe what they are doing.
They are 44-14, seven games ahead of the Indiana Pacers on top of the Eastern Conference standings. Despite the potential Hall of Famers on their roster (Dwyane Wade, Ray Allen, Chris Bosh), Miami's success is still all about LeBron James. The difference between this year's Miami Heat team and last year's championship team is that LeBron James is playing better than he ever has before. In fact, we may not have seen a player playing at this high of level since Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls days.This was why there was a momentary shock when LeBron James landed awkwardly on his knee during Sunday afternoon's contest.
At this point, it's starting to seem like the one thing preventing, at the very least, another NBA Finals appearance for the Heat would be a significant injury to LeBron James. After an examination, James was cleared to play against the Timberwolves, and in fact ended up playing 35 minutes, with Chris

Bosh remarking "His leg would have to fall off for him to miss a game".
At this point could you blame James for wanting to spend as much time as possible on the court this year, just to see what exactly his limits are? He does have limits, right?The Spurs will have to stay on top without Tony ParkerThe San Antonio Spurs are so well-respected that even the loss of their best player, a MVP candidate in a season where LeBron James hadn't essentially won the trophy in February, has not really changed people's expectations.
Yes, losing star point guard Tony Parker for a month with a Grade 2 ankle sprain will make it more difficult for the Spurs to maintain their position on top of the Western Conference, especially as the Oklahoma City Thunder

and Los Angeles Clippers continue to play great basketball.
Still, nobody is willing to completely count this Spurs team out.If this were any other team losing their best player for a month, it would be easy to say that they would have very

little chance of staying on top of the highly competitive conference. These, however, are Gregg Popovich's San Antonio Spurs, a team so deep that the head coach rested nearly all of his starters in a game

against the Miami Heat earlier this season, just to make David Stern mad, and the team still almost managed to come away with the upset victory.
Even if the Spurs are not currently dominating the opposition in the same way that the Miami Heat are, at 47-14 the Spurs still have their Eastern Conference counterparts beat as far as the best overall record in basketball.Can that last without Parker? Well, let's just say that if the Thunder (currently 2 1/2 games behind the Spurs) or the Clippers (4 1/2 games back) want to take hold of the

top spot in the Western Conference, these next few weeks provide them with their best opportunity. The Spurs might have the deepest roster in basketball, but losing a player like Parker, a

legitimate MVP candidate if this were a year where there was any legitimate debate, will be an interesting challenge especially since the other two best players in the Western

Conference, Kevin Durant and Chris Paul, are on their biggest rivals. One thing is for certain, if the Spurs still are hanging on to their top seed by the start of the playoffs, despite losing Parker for a month, Popovich will have to make space on his mantel for another Coach of the Year trophy.Stephen Curry scored 54 points, but the Warriors still lostStephen Curry had the best game of his professional career last Wednesday night, but it wasn't enough to save

his team from losing.
Curry scored 54 points at Madison Square Garden, including a 11-for-13 performance from the three point line, but his Golden State Warriors team lost to the New York Knicks 109-105. In fact it was the most points scored by a player in a game where his team lost since 2006, when Kobe forex-growth-bot 58 points against Charlotte.Curry's 54 points are the most scored so far this season by any player, and they came in a prime time network television game against one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference. Still, Curry's offensive explosion, coming as it did during a loss, did little to raise the stature of the Golden State Warriors.
After all the Warriors, despite being in the playoff mix in the Western Conference, are still fighting against a long-held reputation as a team that effortlessly puts up points while struggling to win games. In fact, the night before his 54 point explosion against the Knicks, Curry scored 38 points in a 108-97 loss to the Indiana Pacers. That's 92 points scored by a single individual in two days, an impressive feat which only translated into back-to-back losses for the team. Now no one could sanely blame Curry's offense for these losses, but these results do suggest that the Warriors are still too much of an offensively minded team to really compete.Steph Curry's run of beyond inspired basketball came to an end on Friday night against the Boston Celtics, where the C's defense limited Curry to 25 points in yet another Golden State loss. Despite the Warriors struggles, Curry has officially established himself as one of the most dangerous shooters in the league.
Warriors fans ran an ultimately failed campaign to have Curry named an

All-Star this season, but after Wednesday night's performance it's looking like he could be in the running again next year with a somewhat higher name recognition factor. Bynum may never join the slumping Philadelphia 76ersThe Twitter parody account @FanSince09

has been mocking the Philadelphia sports scene for the last few years, pausing only to RT tweets that expose their writers' bad spelling, ignorance or racism. Over the last two weeks, however, @FanSince09 has gotten rather serious, going after Philadelphia 76ers CEO Adam Aron's Twitter account and blaming the team's disappointing season on him while mocking his often out-of-touch attempts to appeal to the fans, such as tweeting about Bradley Cooper's 76ers allegiance on Oscar night or offering free tickets to fans tweeting back to him and then using this to "show Sixers fans care". @FanSince09's response to this particular publicity stunt is pointed:Philadelphia's season ticket holders are probably very unhappy about

this

season, especially now that the Philadelphia 76ers are falling out of the playoff race.
Acquiring Andrew

Bynum in the multi-team Dwight Howard trade during the offseason was supposed to be the move that turned the 76ers into a real

threat to make it to the Eastern Conference Finals (as one misguided writer predicted before the season began). In order to get Bynum the 76ers traded away All-Star Andre Iguodala to the Denver Nuggets, with the thought that the franchise had gotten as far as it could with the talented but overpaid forward. Plus, the 76ers

parted ways with two younger players in Nikola Vucevic and Moe Harkless, who were sent to the Orlando Magic as the package they received for trading

Dwight Howard.
At the time the trade made sense, the 76ers took the Celtics to seven games in the second round of last year's playoffs, so adding a player who was one of the 2-3 best centers in the league when healthy could have been enough to put them over the top.The
key phrase in that thought was "when healthy" and Bynum has been anything but.
After something close to a career year with the

Los Angeles Lakers last season, the oft-injured Bynum has had a season of nothing but setbacks in Philadelphia, including an incident where he injured himself further while bowling. There's a good chance that Bynum will not play a single game with Philadelphia. In fact, reports surfaced on Monday that Bynum may soon decide to

have season-ending surgery.Even without Bynum, this Philadelphia 76ers team should have enough talent to make the playoffs, especially with point guard Jrue Holiday having an All-Star season.
However, after a 109-101 loss to the Boston Celtics on Tuesday, the 76ers' record fell to 23-36, seven games behind the Milwaukee Bucks who are currently the eighth and final seed in the Eastern Conference.
The current conversation around Philadelphia is becoming less about this year and more about the off-season, about whether or not the 76ers should look to re-sign Bynum or if they should just admit that this trade was a mistake and move on. Either way, it's going to take

a lot more than Twitter giveaways to repair the team's image.Other
things we've learned• Here's a summary of the strangest sports story of the year: Dennis Rodman's newfound

role as a very, very unofficial ambassador to North Korea. First the former Chicago Bulls star announces that he's headed

a group of Harlem Globetrotters and journalists from Vice media group to North Korea.
Then, Dennis Rodman actually meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and claims that they are "friends for life".
Facing criticism upon arriving back home in the United States, Rodman goes on

ABC's "This Week" and defends North Korea's prison camps by saying "we do the same thing here".
Meanwhile commentators wrap up Rodman's "basketball diplomacy" by noting that "There is nobody at the CIA who can tell you more personally about Kim Jong Un

than Dennis Rodman, and that in itself is scary".
The White House meanwhile has stated that Rodman's trip was "inappropriate", which is just one word among many it could have used

to described this whole bizarre thing.• Okay since that whole Rodman-to-Korea affair went from "news of the weird" wacky to "more than a little disturbing", here's an amusing story less likely to bring up harrowing stories of brutal human rights violations: the Washington Wizards fat burning furnace accidentally called an airball thinking it was a game winning three. (Note: This story still might be disturbing to any Wizards fans.)• Oh, and if you want to witness an actual game-winning buzzer beater, Milwaukee Bucks' Monta Ellis unleashed this one against the Houston Rockets right around the same time that former teammate Steph Curry was going off on the Knicks.•
Oklahoma City Thunder's Serge Ibaka was fined, but not suspended over this hit to Los Angeles Clippers' Blake Griffin in a "very uncomfortable place" as the broadcasters so delicately put it. As one could imagine, Griffin was not entirely happy with this ruling.• In other Oklahoma City news, as the NBA attempts to expand the brand to non-North Korean parts of the world, the Thunder will be playing

a preseason game against the Philadelphia 76ers later this year in Manchester.• This GIF of Lakers guard Kobe Bryant high-fiving "Entourage" star Jeremy Piven effectively encapsulates what some people love, and what many more people hate, about 21st century Hollywood within just a single slideshow of images.• SB Nation's Paul Flannery went to the Sloan Conference, a yearly gathering about the growing intersection between sports and statistics, and came up with this fantastic piece that's a worthwhile read for anyone on either side of the numbers vs.

narrative debate in basketball.
• And, finally, The Kevin Durant Insane Layup Of The WeekNBA StandingsNBA ScheduleNBAUS sportsBasketballGolden State WarriorsPhiladelphia 76ersDennis RodmanMiami HeatSan Antonio SpursNew York KnicksHunter Feltguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or

its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds The Catholic delegation wants the governor to abandon efforts to rewrite state law to guarantee expansive abortion rights, even if Roe v.
Wade is overturned at the federal level.
// In the last 10 years, it’s become far more common for physicians to keep records electronically. Those records could contain a wealth of medically useful data: hidden correlations between symptoms,

treatments and outcomes,

for instance, or indications that patients are promising candidates for trials of new drugs.Much of that data, however, is buried in physicians’ freeform notes.
One of the difficulties in extracting data from unstructured text is what computer scientists call word-sense disambiguation.
In a physician’s notes, the word “discharge,” for instance, could refer to a bodily secretion — but it could also refer to release from a hospital. The ability to infer words’ intended meanings makes it much easier for computers to find useful patterns in mountains of data.At the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) annual symposium next week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present a new system for disambiguating the senses of words used in doctors’ clinical notes. On average, the system is 75 percent accurate in disambiguating words with two senses, a marked improvement over previous methods. But more important, says Anna Rumshisky, an MIT postdoc who helped lead the new research, it represents a fundamentally new approach to word disambiguation that could lead to much more accurate systems while drastically reducing the amount of human effort required to develop them.Indeed,
Rumshisky says, the paper that was initially accepted to the AMIA symposium described a system that used a more conventional approach to word disambiguation, with an average

accuracy of only about 63 percent.
“In our opinion, that wasn’t enough to actually be usable,” Rumshisky says.
“So what we tried instead was something that’s been tried before in the general domain but never in the biomedical or clinical domains.”Topical applicationIn particular, Rumshisky explains, she and her co-authors

— graduate student Rachel Chasin, whose master's thesis is the basis for the new paper; Peter

Szolovits, an MIT professor of computer science and engineering and health science and technology; and research affiliate Özlem Uzuner, who

got her PhD at MIT and is now an assistant

professor at the University at Albany — adapted algorithms from a research area known as topic modeling.

Topic modeling seeks to automatically identify the topics of documents by inferring relationships among prominently featured words.“The
twist on it that we’re trying to transpose from the general domain is to treat occurrences of a target word as documents and to treat senses as hidden topics that we’re trying to infer,” Rumshisky says.Where
an ordinary topic-modeling algorithm will search through huge bodies of text to identify clusters of words that tend to occur in close proximity to each other, Rumshisky and her colleagues’ algorithm identifies correlations not only between words but between words and other textual “features” — such as the words’ syntactic roles.
If the word “discharge” is preceded by an adjective, for instance, it’s much more likely to refer to a bodily secretion than to an administrative event.Ordinarily, topic-modeling algorithms assign different weights to different topics: A single news article, for instance, might be 50 percent about politics, 30 percent about the economy, and 20 percent about foreign affairs. Similarly, the MIT researchers’ new algorithm assigns different weights to the different possible meanings of ambiguous words.One advantage of topic-modeling algorithms is that they’re “unsupervised”: They can be deployed on huge bodies of text without human oversight.
As a consequence, the researchers can keep revising their algorithm so that it incorporates more features, then set it loose on unannotated medical papers to draw its own inferences.
And the more features it incorporates, the more accurate it should be, Rumshisky says.Featured attractionsAmong the features that the researchers plan to incorporate into the algorithm are listings in a huge thesaurus of medical terms, compiled by the National Institutes of Health, called the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Indeed, word associations in the UMLS were the basis of the researchers’ original algorithm — the one that achieved 63 percent micro niche finder the problem was

that the length and structure of the paths from one word to another in the UMLS didn’t always correspond to the semantic difference between the words. But the new system intrinsically identifies only those correspondences that recur with enough frequency that they’re likely

to be useful.“The parts of the [UMLS] that are relevant for distinguishing the senses would basically float to the top by themselves,”

Rumshisky says.
“It kind of gives you, for free, this association, if it’s valid. If it’s not valid, it just won’t matter.”The
researchers are also experimenting with additional syntactic and semantic features that could help with word

disambiguation and with word associations established by NIH’s Medical Subject Headings paper-classification scheme. “It’s still not perfect, because we haven’t integrated all the linguistic features that we want to,” Rumshisky says.
“But my hunch is that this is the way to go.”“About 80 percent of clinical information is buried in clinical notes,” says Hongfang Liu, an associate professor of medical informatics at the Mayo Clinic.
“A lot of words or phrases are ambiguous there.
So in order to get the correct interpretation, you need to go through the word-disambiguation phase.”Liu
says that while some computational linguists have applied topic-modeling algorithms to the problem of word-sense disambiguation, “My feeling is that they work on kind of toy problems. And here, I think, it can actually be used in production-scale natural-language-processing systems.” If you’re a fan of the cookbook “Jerusalem,” by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, tell us which recipe you’d like to see featured in this month’s Recipe Lab.    
G.A.
Campbell.
Incentive Competitions as a Policy Tool for Technological Innovation.
SM thesis, MIT Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program. 2011. Some professions have tendencies as a group that can benefit from being managed,

for example, oil and gas

and professional sports.
U.S. stocks fell for a third straight week, sending the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index to its longest losing weekly streak since February, as a record decline in home sales raised concerns that the economy may fall back into recession. Sonic Youth co-founder Kim

Gordon will release a double-album with her Body/Head project with free-n[...] Jason Palmer is a science and technology reporter with BBC

News, based in London. Richard Nelson’s new play, “Nikolai and the Others,” dramatizes the artists behind the Balanchine-Stravinsky ballet classic “Orpheus.”     Two revived soaps, “All My Children”

and “One Life to Live,” now seen on the Internet, offer little in the way of guidance for newbies.    
A frustrated Andy Pettitte is allowing runs and giving away easy outs, but he does not think he is making bad pitches.    
An excerpt from the book “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” by Zev Chafets published on Vanity Fair’s Web site reveals little about the Fox News Channel, but includes a number of pointed one-liners uttered by Mr. Ailes, whose conservative politics appeal to many Fox viewers but infuriate his critics.
Enrollment in Medicaid helps lower-income Americans overcome depression, get proper treatment for diabetes, and avoid catastrophic medical bills, but does not appear to reduce the prevalence of diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, according to a new study with a unique approach to analyzing one of America’s major health-insurance programs.The
study, a randomized evaluation comparing health outcomes among more than 12,000 people in Oregon, employs the same research approach as a clinical trial, but applies it in a way that provides a window into the health outcomes of poor Americans who have been given the opportunity to get health insurance.“What we found was that Medicaid significantly increased the probability of being diagnosed with diabetes, and being on diabetes medication,” says Amy Finkelstein, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and, along with Katherine Baicker of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, the principal investigator for the study.
“We find decreases in rates of depression, and we continue to find reduced financial hardship.
However, we were unable to detect a decline in the incidence of diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol.”A
paper based on the study, “The Oregon Experiment — Medicaid’s Effects on Clinical Outcomes,” is being published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The findings bear on the expansion of the federal government’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), currently being phased in across

the nation. The ACA provides funding for states to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income adults who are currently not part of the program.Winning the lotteryThe researchers analyzed the impact that Medicaid had on people over a two-year span. Among other things, they found about a 30 percent decline in the rate of depression among people on Medicaid; an increase in people being diagnosed with, and treated for, diabetes; and increases in doctor visits, use of preventative care, and prescription drugs.
They also found that Medicaid reduced, by about 80 percent, the chance of a person having catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenses, defined as spending 30 percent of one’s annual income on health care. “That’s important, because from an economics point of view, the purpose of health insurance is to … protect you financially,” Finkelstein says.
The researchers did not find any change in three other health measures: blood pressure, cholesterol, or a blood test for diabetes. But the data does provide important indicators about the ways newly-insured people are using medical services.
“There was a big increase in the use of preventative medicine,” says Baicker, noting that Medicaid increased the use of services such as mammograms and cholesterol screening, as well as increasing doctor's office visits and prescription drugs.Other health researchers say these findings correspond

with a developing picture of how increased medical care addresses different kinds of problems over different spans of time. “I would expect a more immediate impact

when it comes to measures google sniper download health and emotional well-being, including depression,” says Thomas McDade, an anthropologist at Northwestern University and director of its Laboratory of Human Biology Research, who studies public-health issues.
“Things like risk for cardiovascular disease, your lipid concentrations, your blood pressure, these are things that are really established over a lifetime

of exposure to diet, physical activity, and psychosocial environment, so we don’t expect them to move as quickly.” The study uses data from a unique program the state of Oregon founded in 2008, after officials realized they had Medicaid funds for about 10,000 additional uninsured residents. The state created

a lottery system to fill those 10,000 slots; about 90,000 residents applied.That lottery thus generated a group of residents gaining Medicaid coverage who were

otherwise similar to the applicants still

lacking coverage. Using this divide, the researchers compared to a control group of 6,387 people who signed up for the lottery and were selected to 5,842 people who applied for Medicaid but were

not selected to enroll.
“We recognized the lottery as a literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring the rigors of a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard in medical and scientific research, to one of the most pressing social policy questions of our day, namely, the consequences of covering the uninsured,” Finkelstein says.Or as Baicker puts it, “We would never accept a medical trial that didn’t have a control group.”
In particular, this kind of study, by matching two like groups of people, eliminates one longstanding problem in studying health insurance: that people in worse health may seek out health insurance more often than those in good health do, thus making it appear, at a glance, that having health insurance does not help improve medical outcomes.
“The whole tension with studying the effects of insurance is, you have to wonder why some people have insurance and other people don’t, and whether those reasons could be related to the outcomes you’re studying,” Finkelstein explains, “like the possibility that people who are sicker seek out insurance more. So you can get perverse results [on the surface], indicating that health insurance makes you sicker, not because it actually does, but because of the kinds of people who are seeking it out.”As McDade also notes, “It’s a true experiment, and these kinds of opportunities do not come along very often.”Growing body of evidenceMedicaid is the program, administered jointly by the federal government and the states, that provides health insurance for (mostly) low-income U.S.
citizens; it is not to be confused with Medicare, the federal health insurance program for senior citizens, although both were initiated in 1965. Eligibility for Medicaid varies slightly from state to state; in Oregon, adults below the federal poverty guidelines established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (in 2013, an annual income of $11,490 per person, and $23,550 for a family of four) while meeting other requirements were eligible to apply for the insurance lottery. In 2011, researchers released results from an initial related study, which found that after about one year of coverage, the lottery enrollees in Oregon’s Medicaid program did, in fact, use more medical care, suffer from less financial strain,

and report themselves to be in better health.
The current study augments that one by analyzing a longer time period and adding clinical health data to the self-reported information. Finkelstein says she hopes the current study will gain public attention and consideration by policymakers.
“Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I believe that rigorous scientific evidence finds an important voice in our policy discussions,” Finkelstein says. In addition to Baicker and Finkelstein, co-authors of the paper are Heidi Allen of Columbia University; Mira Bernstein of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist specializing in health-care issues; Joseph P.
Newhouse, a health-care economist at Harvard who helped pioneer the idea of randomized trials about health insurance; Eric C. Schneider of RAND; Sarah L. Taubman of the NBER; Bill J. Wright of the Providence Center for Outcomes

Research on Education; and Alan Zaslavsky of Harvard. The research was also conducted with the Oregon Health Study Group, which includes Matt Carlson of Portland State University, Tina Edlund of the Oregon Health Authority, Charles Gallia of the Oregon Department of Human Services, and Jeanene Smith of the Office for Oregon Health Policy and Research.  The project received funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the California HealthCare Foundation, the John D.
and Catherine T.
MacArthur

Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Social Security

Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
THE QUESTION Might the pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia be relieved by tai chi, the mind-body exercise of Chinese origin that combines

gentle, graceful, continuous movements with deep breathing and relaxation techniques? Elsevier says U.S. editors can't handle papers by authors who work for Iranian government The federal government is exploring the possibility of using a credit rating giant like Equifax to verify the identity of American workers. Over

a century old, this recipe came from Norway. Traditional German bakers shape Berlinerkranze into wreaths. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who went from a young conspiratorial soldier who dreamed of revolution to the fiery anti-U.S.
leader of one of the world’s great oil powers, died March 5 in Caracas of complications from an unspecified cancer in his pelvic area. Read full article >> To celebrate next week's Baftas we've brought together the biggest stars from the small screen     Samsung has pushed back the launch of its Knox security software for Galaxy Android smartphones until summer, according to a New York Times report that claims more testing is needed before Knox finds its way into people's